skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
OK, this news is very interesting, but it does not prove much about extraterrestrial life.

We know that organisms can adapt to their environment. Incorporating some fraction of arsenic into a cell's dna is an example of such adaptation.

The question that really matters is "has life originated more than once in the universe?" This experiment has no bearing on that: They took a standard terrestrial cell, with a carbon-based history, and simply subjected it to some new conditions. This is NOT a new life form that originated from a novel environment and using a different chemistry. However, NASA is getting awfully close to selling it as such in their press conference, which is misleading.
I think the first artificial, human directed production of antimatter was by CERN in 1995. I'm not sure what you mean by "two weeks ago", but antimatter has been around a lot longer than that.
No, they're not. Google isn't just buying Groupon; they're buying dominance in assurance contracts -- a Very Big Idea Indeed.
http://contexium.com -- Call analytics and mining.

In customer acquisition mode now.
What is the criteria for this list? Some questionable inclusions that stand out: Chatroulette and Diaspora. Shouldn't companies included in a top 10 of all startups of the year be profitable, or at least be on the path to making money?
Wow, snarky.

I had the same impression. This sounds really, really cool but it's still an organism that uses DNA, and we're still related to it. As a layperson, I don't see why this says a lot more about the potential for life elsewhere. If it's not a wholly new occurrence of life, then it's something that "did life" the same way we do until it happened to need this really cool adaptation.

I understand that my lack of biology training probably contributes to my not getting it, but that's where most people are coming from. A lot of time has been spent explaining the significance of Einstein's work and most people still don't "get it", we may need the same here.

So, instead of snarking...explain again/better/differently than others have.
I agree with you that other life structures seem quite possible. I don't see the problem. But I'm not a professional biologists.

Still, it seems there are a number of biochemists who believe (or believed) that the structure of earth life could be unique. These people knew a lot more than me. So I wouldn't credit this to arrogance so much as a very complex question, one that doesn't necessarily get easier to solve the most data you get (at least on our scale of data).
I think this policy goes agains human nature. Numbers are a great mnemonic aid.

I used to study for math tests in college and the last thing I would do is remember the number of properties in a definition of things, e.g. a field, which I think numbered eleven. That way if I was asked to check whether some structure was a field I would know if all the properties were exhausted or not without having to recall them all. You can call that a lowbrow way to study for a math test, but it worked great for me.

Why deny to the entrepreneur what you give willingly to the Platonist? Titles are intended to mainly to attract interest. You can't fit an argument in there any way you try. The Seven-Fold Path, the Ten Commandments, etc. were named so to command attention. Let a hundred flowers bloom under a thousand points of light.
FTC 'do not track' plan would be a Google killer
That's where we are--but the universe is 14 billion years old, and there are many, many planets out there much older than ours; some several times older. It should only take a few millenia for any truly successful life in our galaxy to colonize the whole thing: less than a cosmic eyeblink.
"First, realize - and I think you do already - that the days of the software tester are over."

That's not quite true. Outsourcing testing work is much safer for western companies than outsourcing more demanding work.
Guy builds his own instrument and does amazing things with it
Evidence != proof. But there IS lots of evidence.
"""The artists get 15 cents of every dollar? Fuck. That. I will continue not buying music until I'm able to pay the artists directly."""

I'm sure that's the exact motivation.
There is a difference between competing in a business environment and limiting what your customers can do with your product. Although competition may indirectly determine what customers can do (by destroying businesses that may have created software they wanted) it is different from directly controlling what customers can do the way Apple does.
I don't think it explictly comes down to such hubris. Certainly there are a lot of biases in this subject just like there are in any other ("rap isn't music," for instance), and human history is rife with analyzing the world in terms of the analyzer's perspective, the very definition of bias.

While replacing nitrogen in the air with, oh, sulfur, would likely have resulted in life forms (so the story goes) with an entirely different chain of evolutionary reactions and mutations, resulting in different body chemistry, yadda yadda yadda.

I do think it's news when we find out what one of these parallel evolutions might consist of. I mean, I'm not even sure sulfur-air would be a gas, so it's one thing to guess and speculate (fun), it's quite another to be able to say, in scientific fashion, "OK, what else is possible on this arsenic branch?" Said another way: there are a lot of grant proposals being written right now to finance exploration of this new territory. Hey, it beats paying for research into animals who produce petrochemicals as blood.
And old, creaky computers are the most common use-case for old, creaky software. These fossils don't generally have any problem with programs written for archaic operating systems with CPU-specific quirks in mind, because they're the exact case the software was written for.

Everything works best in the environment where it's most commonly used. It's almost tautological. That doesn't mean the environment isn't unnecessarily limited.
I considered a maid but decided it wasn't for me. I was having a hard time finding someone I trusted to enter my house when I'm not there. Then if I did find someone, I figure the turnover for maids is pretty high so I'd be searching again a year later. A maid service is out. They are underpaid and being taken advantage of in too many cases for me to even consider it.

There is a Roomba that sanitizes floors exactly as you described it. It's called a Scooba. I'm getting one.

The bathroom you describe is pretty sweet. It's like the bat cave of bathrooms. I don't think my wife would go for it, plus we rent so that would likely tick off the landlord...but I have no idea why public bathrooms don't do this.
What Poison? Bacterium Uses Arsenic To Build DNA and Other Molecules
Official announcement: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1963296
So...basically the Eureka Phenomenon?
Is salary really that Important?
I get bits of work from

http://vworker.com/ it's worked out for me. Your favourable cost of living could see you do quite well esp. of you specialise in something.

there are other such sites http://www.elance.com/ is one. I haven't used it though I am told in IRC it is better than vworker
It has its own twitter account!
https://twitter.com/#!/ArsenicBacteria
OK, Thanks for the offer. I will e-mail you privately. I will explain plan my SQL and get a feel then time it in a browser when called from a PHP page and then again when I call it in the ajax box I am using...

I appreciate your thoughts.
From the list of winners, honorable mention went to: HN+Influence http://hnfluence.com/ - A Hacker News remix that accounts for bit.ly click counts and Backtweets data.
Is Groupon actually scalable? Their business model depends on being able to drive huge crowds to a merchant. That might work with one deal per day per market, but it might not work if they start pushing more deals.
Thanks, that's something along the lines of what I was thinking when I mentioned Learnivore should add tech talks.

Too bad Omnisio turned into Youtube annotations.
We're hoping to launch the new version of our comic creation website http://chogger.com before the holiday break. Lots to do in the next 3 weeks!
Three Y Combinator startups included - an impressive feat, even with the large number of YC companies. There's a lot of quality companies.

I have to wonder if Chatroulette belongs on the list as a "startup." It seems more like an internet fad of 2010, possibly the biggest one, but is it on the path to being a company with revenue?
> and at that price I feel that there are plenty of companies who would bite Google's hand off.

What does this expression mean? Does that mean that companies would think this is too expensive? or companies would jump at the chance to buy YouTube for 5 Billion?

It's not clear at all to me what you mean and I'm a native English speaker:)
I bought one last year, and I love it, although admittedly I don't do a whole lot with it - I use it mostly for remote SSH tunneling and as a file server with an external 1 TB drive. For these sorts of tasks where few resources are needed, these plugs are great, especially with their super-low power consumption.
.ram? As in Real Player? C'mon, NASA. Really?
Two weeks ago, CERN made the announcement that they had contained antimatter long enough (at LHC) to study it properly. First time it's ever been done that well. Pretty stunning accomplishment.
And frankly, I don't think there is much room for conversation with someone that feels raising taxes is an acceptable solution.

Glad to see you've got an open mind.

Even if you think we can plug a hole this size without raising taxes (which suggests to me you don't know very much about the budget) -- cutting spending is still irrelevant. Let's say we cut the budget by the current deficit plus a little. Do you cut taxes on estates, or cut taxes on income/sales/whatever? It's still a choice about where to tax, when you're talking about revenue.
"""I can tell the difference, even with crummy earbuds."""

It's not enough to be able to "tell the difference". You also have to be able to tell the difference in random A/B tests.

If you are like 99.9 percent of the population, you will not be able.

A test is reproductible. Your anecdotal testimony means nothing at all.
Actually you've been given a very slight margin more freedom. It's like saying "make yourself at home" to your guests without unlocking the porch door. The limitations are no longer explicit but the limitations are largely the same being realistic.
Maybe I'm missing something, but this seems to be just:

+Take a static shot of room

+Record image of the actor via Kinect

+Overlay actor and apply a filter

Not exactly a hack, but just a relatively simple video trick. I'm not even sure what applications there are beyond this video effect.
I came up with the zooming desktop on my own about a year ago and thought it was the most original thing ever. I guess I underestimated the prescience of the hacker hive mind.

The end game is for applications themselves to use the expanded space. No windows, no scrolling. You open a document and it just opens right there, along with some UI to edit it. I'm sure it would need a lot of experimentation to get right. And it may or may not be possible to get existing apps to work this way.
It has to do with electronegativity and number of free electrons. Both phosphorous and arsenic can make three bonds, and arsenic is only very slightly less electronegative than phosphorous.
Not a new phenomenon in the respect that fans have wanted their stars/objects of their adoration to be "always on" 24/7.

Personally I find it interesting to see a different side of people known for one thing, be it comedy, science, politics, whatever. Sadly however this is the age when a tramp named Snooki is a celebrity for some reason and a flaky and unqualified egomaniac thinks she could be president in 2012 (with a fan base of the same mindset).
Sean McCarthy over at The Comic's Comic has a pretty good write up on what exactly happened.

http://www.thecomicscomic.com/2010/12/when-a-comedy-chat-goe...
The language used was only a small factor. I was the next Lisp entry ranked at #280. Programmer quality and experience are far more important.
See: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/North_American_video_game_crash...

Nintendo revived the industry in part by exerting quality control over every game released for the NES, and this has been standard practice for console manufacturers ever since.
And Windows Phone 7 Users... Well, never mind. :(
Your point is well-taken. I was reacting to the early hype that suggested these bugs may have originated completely independently of other life on earth. If the organism evolved to use arsenic as a replacement for phosphate in a DNA-like chemical, I'm not sure if the independent origins hypothesis is really warranted. The Nature summary I saw today did not mention anything like that. The nature of hype I guess.
What is ClickyTouch?
Getting into Open Source
Ah, right! Thanks
Haha. This makes this humorous topic even funnier: http://www.techi.com/2010/12/one-small-step-for-flash-one-de...
Requires a sign-in - does it add anything not already included here:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1962894 - go.com

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1962893 - nytimes.com

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1962846 - nature.com

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1962696 - longislandpress.com

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1962386 - gizmodo.com

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1962200 - gizmodo.com

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1962110 - google.com

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1957823 - skymania.com

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1953228 - kottke.org
I don’t find this kind of thing helpful.

The question on things like the TSA policies is one of degree and not absolutes. So his claim that we should “conquer our fears because they are the real problem” doesn’t hold a lot of weight with me. Fearing a terrorist attack is perfectly rational the question is how much liberty we’re willing to give up to prevent such attacks.

So painting this as a “living in fear” vs “not living in fear” question doesn’t really address the problem.

Beyond that there’s the issue of disagreeing respectfully. Though he couches his point in flowery language the purpose of this type of article is to demonize the people who disagree with him. “They are the fear mongers and I am the rational one” is the point he’s making. He’s just making it in a way that sounds nice. That type of statement doesn’t lead to productive discussion and it certainly doesn't do anything to convince people who disagree with him (people who I assume are the intended audience here)
I'm going to be negative, sorry.

I think your biggest difference from Patrick is that you are in a B2C situation where he's definitely in a B2B situation.

A teacher or event planner needs to make bingo cards to save time - which is money.

If I just want to type better, I have to justify this expense as a consumer. Is this something I will spend $9.95 on? No. I'll probably spend 20 minutes looking for a free typing tutor that will ultimately have me repeat type what I see on the screen until I get better at typing.
Reporters Sans Frontières - Proposed law on international cooperation
Three Dogpatch Labs companies included as well.

http://ryanspoon.com/blog/2010/12/02/3-dogpatch-companies-in...
In Google's Opinion... An Argument That Algorithms Are Subjective
Off-The-Grid Mobility
Any language you could get working on the official server and you wrote a starter pack for would be supported. That's one of the nice things I like about this challenge as opposed to other competitions which are generally restricted to Java, C# and / or Python.

That said there were quite some initial problems getting some languages working since they were running on a very old Ubuntu.
ClickyTouch is an iPhone and iPad app for Clicky Web Analytics : details http://clickytouch.com
I want him to write more about interesting security and less about America's reaction to 9/11. We non-politicians and non-Americans get it already; the response is disproportionate, knee-jerk and terrified (terror-ified?). But that's been the case for a long time now.
I think this finding deserves a bit more respect.

Of course it does not answer ALL of our questions, but it proves DNA does not need phosphorus! AMAZING!
How to present my idea/site to developers?
I am working on site for developers and IT-geeks.
It's kind of collaborative blog with special filter by tags. But it's not "another" blog or forum.
It provides for user two special features:
1) easily share his posts with other users who have same interests;
(On your own standalone blog you have to make some effort to became popular, even if you write interesting posts.
Idea of my site - provide for each user simple way for share his posts with other users and get comments/discussion from them)
2) filter posts by tags - user can configure what posts he will see and hide unwanted information.
(If you want see posts only with some tag (for example with tag "c++") - you just need to configure simple filter and get only posts with this tag.
And of course you have list of ignored tags and users.)

Also it has other useful features.

I've tried to send emails to several bloggers but almost nobody answered me. Probably they think that it was spam.
I think that my idea can be interested for developers but I don't know how to share it with people. I want to describe and discuss it with people who is really interested, because it is little bit differ from existing blogging platforms and forums. Or it's wrong way?

Anyway site will be launched soon. If you are interested in it - could you please send me email: vladimir.pankratiev at gmail
if you're watching the press conference, they're very adamant that it doesn't prove anything about extraterrestrial life and they aren't able to yet say if life evolved with the arsenic or if it adapted.

but they're pointing out that it does show that forms of life different from our current definitions can exist and therefore the possibility of extraterrestrial life in non-earthlike environments exist.
I hope that adorable real-life dog that they based their logo on is going to get some sort of diamond collar, or a dinosaur bone of some sort for this. It's rare that a cute pet makes a good logo. :)
I submitted stk8.co few days ago but it barely got the attention.

stk8.co allows you to stack several Links or Text and share them under one shortened url.

It embeds a preview of the link for common services like youtube, vimeo, amazon, cnn, scribd, etc...

Here are couple of examples:

http://stk8.co/gkbbbc

http://stk8.co/sample

It also has a bookmarklet for easy stacking. The bookmarklet is transparent, one click is all what it takes to stack a link.
Eliminate the branch and let me do everything online / by phone. Reduce costs for the bank and give me better interest rates.
Well, then it sounds like the malware writers got themselves a marketing department.
I don't think that driving huge crowds is actually their business model. The huge crowds overwhelm the merchant and wind up making the promotion a bad deal for the merchant. Groupon would do better to drive reasonably sized crowds, consistently to merchants.
Very nice application. I like the graphing of your progress over time. Maybe you could expand it to include DVORAK? I would have paid far more than $9.95/mo for DVORAK lessons when I was learning it. :)

One thing, though: http://i.imgur.com/rCTzE.png

I type between 130 and 140 WPM. The fastest I could get on your speed test was less than 100 WPM. Maybe some other fast typers can verify that this is a bug?

Good work!
Very early stage launched a site called WannaDo with my buddy davidfraga.

It is an easy way to remember the things that you hear about on the go so you can check them out later (Books, Movies, Restaurants, etc). You send an email to things@wanna.do and it'll be sorted and stored for later. Lists are public by default so it can be used as a way to check out the things that your friends are interested in doing (working on proper user accounts so that there is a way to keep things private/actually discover your friends).

You can try it out at http://wanna.do or by sending an email to things@wanna.do with the list name you'd like to create in the subject line and the item you'd like to add to that list in the body of your email. We'll set up an account for you automoatically a-la-Posterous.
Google is profitable though. Does every property they have need to be profitable? Does every engineer need to directly add at least $250,000 to the bottom line?

If user-generated video is in any way tangentially important to the future of online advertising, then YouTube is worth more than their direct profit to Google.
Getting a Lite version out will probably help you tremendously.
Marcus Contextual Grammars, a framework outside of Chomsky hierarchy
Your wish is their command: http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2010/12/being-bad-to-your-cus...
Regulation: Pub culture and pub economy
From the article, it looks like Milo wanted to sell quickly before Google ate their lunch. I don't think Milo's leadership intended to sell the company at this stage of its existence. From an article the CEO did almost a year ago, I think it wanted to be like Ebay or Google, not be prematurely bought by one of them:

"About a year later, I saw 165 University Avenue for rent. I knew I had to have the space. It’s the same building that housed Google, PayPal, Danger, and Logitech. We moved in and have grown from 2 to 10 employees since then. Milo.com, which started out as an idea in an apartment, now has over 1 million unique visitors!"

http://under30ceo.com/jack-abraham-has-taken-milo-com-from-i...
The Supreme Court only has original jurisdiction for a few very rare types of cases (which are outlined in the US Constitution) and discretionary jurisdiction for everything else, so they have no obligation to grant a writ of certiorari and hear your case.

You have to start with one of the lower federal courts, instead.
I saw you post this on the Business of Software forum...

I purchased this game when you posted there and now it's my 2 year old's favorite game!!!

We absolutely love it, good job.
A great demo would be a bunch of links from Launch an App Month :)
It's the crowds that attract merchants to deal with Groupon. I think they tweak the mental association between bodies through the door and success that many small business owners have. Without the promise of traffic (and hope that some of them will come back) Groupon is just a very expensive way to distribute 50%-off coupons.
Ah yes, the TSA spreading germs & whatnot from passenger to passenger. If getting searched/patted down, demand they change gloves before conducting it. If they say they are out, hand them a pair.

I always travel with a couple of pair of gloves in my bag (useful travel kit item #17).
The original author appears to be using an iPhone for prototyping, and clearly states that it is the "tablet form factor" that is making things so interesting. Even if they were using an iPhone there would be no point to putting the software on the app store as it would be useless without the appropriate hardware. (Edit: Just noticed author's latest post that yes they will distribute through the app store and sell an accessory. I stand corrected.)

In general, yes it is a bad idea to use consumer technology for devices with the sort of lifetime you find in the medical industry (often up to 10 years). Because of the high levels of regulation and testing, its not cheap to swap out a component for something equivalent when a manufacturer stops producing the one you originally designed and tested your system with.
Snow in Dublin: TCD Engineers build Mayan Snow Pyramid
"you can see why the ‘everybody panic' headlines associated with this topic are a bit overblown."

Doesn't that apply to this headline as well?
Perhaps "aficionado" would be better, you know, for classy porn.