skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The comparison does not really hold: you would be hard pressed to find a single first point of contact between Goths and the Roman Empire or Mongolians and China.

In both cases, fighting had been going on for centuries before the empires were finally toppled. Thus even if overall less advanced, the "barbarians" had comparable warfare technology.

In most known cases where a true first encounter event occured - such as Columbus arrival in Hispaniola, Pizarro in Peru or Cook in Australia - the less advanced civilization was indeed overrun if not exterminated by the more advanced one.
Nothing worked until I started exercising. Quality of sleep greatly improved.
wow, I didnt get how 33 people blindly agree and upvote a one-word answer, offering no perspective at all , to a very valid question on how a successful outcome to SETI would influence an average guy's life!!
Surely, this is not a open-and-shut question.
Let me dampen some spirits who are gleefully waiting to see breaking news of extra-terrestrial life.
Think about the budget and investment into this grand objective.Think whether the money invested has/would have a respectable ROI-would it have been better spent on less-glamorous, but more useful ventures like funding projects with more "tangible benefits, and issues", like OLPC. Think of world hunger,lack of access to drinking water. Not glamorous-but plenty of scope to advance technology to change the world we live in. And then think of romanticizing on "Are we alone" , la Jodie Foster,Contact or NASA news conferences.
Despite being a re-submisssion, this one got noticed and therefore has the comments:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1952730
Show HN: Cyberspace - my new web browser for iOS
My new app Cyberspace has just been approved today - iTunes link: http://bit.ly/getcyberspaceapp. In one sentence, it is optimized specifically for the purpose of reading, discovering, and sharing. And it's pretty good at them.

Feature list: reading queue, access to Pinboard/Delicious bookmarks, DuckDuckGo as default search engine, ad blocking, Readability bookmarklet, text mode powered by Instapaper Mobilizer, share to different services, Pastebot & OmniFocus support, scratchpad with TextExpander support, etc.
And how many of them will read the dump ? Will it create the impact as it is doing now ? Doesn't this fails the purpose of existance of wikileaks or say any whistleblower site.
too funny
Having law firms in his blacklist is bound to have some blowback in the form of legal battles. IANAL but sounds like you risk getting close to the realm of slander, libel and/or blackmail.
They are still a minority in some of their markets, even if they are a highly profitable minority. This is where people get 'niche' from.
I will draw you a monster for $8
Yeah - except the cable thing has Wikileaks in the news on my rock music radio station. They've really gone mainstream with this one, and the next one will be heard.

Assange is a grandstander, true, but this is really starting to get interesting.
Speed up your site: Delay Loading The Print Stylesheet
DNS Tampering and Root Servers - The Great Firewall of China [pdf]
you don't get a 2nd chance to design an API

I think that is exactly the author's point, at least if you think that the best way to get to the Right API is to "think about it really hard" instead of "write a bunch of crappy prototypes".
Nice. If you were to use the placeholder attribute for the title box, and change the publish button to a "submit" type input, then it would work without requiring JavaScript...
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I'm not sure you necessarily disagree with the article. He argues against the "do the simplest thing that could possibly work" principle. He basically says, don't release code that isn't properly thought through if you do something that many others will depend on. You are saying something quite similar, but you stress the importance of running usability tests _before_ releasing code as thinking alone might not be enough. I agree with that, but it's not the same as saying ship the simplest thing that _could_ possibly work. Quite the contrary.
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Prepare to be surprised.
The point of these sorts of questions is not to find people who know how many piano tuners there are in the world, or even to arrive at a reasonable estimate (without good data you're going to be off by miles).

The point is instead to find people who have developed the ability and habit of "back of the envelope" calculation. Not everyone has developed this skill but it can very much elevate the level of many technical discussions. Simply being able to come up with a guess that is within a factor of 2, 10, or even 1,000 (depending on context) can be critically important and impact decisions. Such crude calculations can also serve as the skeleton from which to create more robust calculations with better data. Enrico Fermi was able to estimate the yield of the first ever nuclear bomb test using only his eyes and a few pieces of torn paper blown by the blast, he came within a factor of 2. Sometimes you don't have the most precise measuring instruments or complete data, being able to cope with that and yet come up with useful results is also important.
Oh yes, words have power. But they are not inherently right or wrong.

It is how they are used that makes them.
In other words: "Where's my flying car and personal robot assistant?"
No. Most probably they'll announce that some kind of geological formation in mars would be compatible and/or similar to some known life-bearing formations on Earth. Something along the lines of "the Mars Polar Cap hosts X amount of carbon" or "nitrogen concentration on soil sample could be compatible with vegetable life".

Don't get me wrong, I still think that, on their own, these discoveries are amazing and the fact that we do have a bunch of robots roaming Mars is quite encouraging. But perfectly good science is not as exciting as the news media would like it to be.
Jottit works without JavaScript and also has a HTTPS version:

https://jottit.com/

There is also a HTTPS-Everywhere ruleset for it in the current development branch.

For those reasons alone, I would always choose jottit over tidypub...
I'm not sure if I would agree with Markdown, depending on your audience. I'm of the opinion that trying to teach the concept of markup to ordinary people is always going to alienate some non-technical users.

I'd just suggest adding buttons for bold, italic & link. That way you can still keep it simple. I'm all for having a ruthless approach to unnecessary features.
It's called Innovation Works, the place is pretty cool but not comparable to SV offices =P
I also recently discovered it. It's a very interesting concept and pretty effective in hiding where something is hosted.
On the other hand, this only works well for digital-only services. As soon as you have to ship something or even accept money, there is a trail. Although you could use a fully digital currency like bitcoin to get around that...
So... any chance of making this into a desktop web browser at some point? :)
Ha, great. Ad-Blocking enabled by default and DuckDuckGo used for search. Good choices and good idea to differentiate your product from competition like that.
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Type Conversion Pedanticism in JavaScript
Btw. this reminds me of an idea me and a friend had over lunch on how to take down Google, Facebook etc. An evil hacker could theoretically write a virus, that only does one thing: Block Ads. Or install an Ad-Blocker.

This could SERIOUSLY disrupt online business as we know it. Same thing would happen if the Cyberspace browser became the market leader. The creator would probably be bought out for whatever money he wants just so that ads get re-enabled for that browser.
Heroku or EngineYard? Which RoR hosting provider is better for a B2B app?
We are working on a B2B application and need email processing in/out, sub-domain mapping for each customer account etc. etc. (basecamp type of app architecturally but for a completely different domain)
We like the simplicity of Heroku but when we looked at their customer list - could not find any serious B2B apps listed.
I've read nice things about Engine Yard and have setup a test account running but their documentation is not very clear.
I have read almost every post on HN comparing these two but still unable to decide which way to go. Any suggestions ? Thanks.
This is actually a common overstatement of the benefits of Emacs. The beauty of vim besides the modal editing approach is its lightweight footprint. While Emacs may be able to replicate the keybindings and modes, it cannot match the file load times or memory usage of vim. The reason I continue to use vim is because I edit dozens of files a day. I am in and out of my editor 50 times a day, Emacs just can not and does not support this approach.
Precision Gauge Blocks,Digital Block Gauges,Anyi Measuring Tools
Scatter - Ajax without coding, ideal for HTML prototyping
Pencil balancer in 2D, using very fast silicon retina cameras
In case anyone from Google Translate reads this: your URLs are highly resistant to shortening services.

Both is.gd and safe.mn mangled it, I think it's the pipe characters. Thankfully bit.ly works...
On Star Trek: it has, at every opportunity, asserted the ideal of "we are humans, exploring space, because that is the point—the terminal good of our utility function. If we automated everything, we would no longer be humans exploring space, so automate we don't."

For the first instance of this, see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Ultimate_Computer — but it proceeds pretty much like that, although a bit subtler, for every series after that.
Don't miss the silicon retina cameras by Tobi Delbruck, used for the pencil balancer:

http://siliconretina.ini.uzh.ch
Impatient Perl (free ebook)
Finding physical locations from IP addresses
There's no dilution with ETF. When ETF shares are created (via formation of Creation Unit), the ETF holdings increase by equal amount of underlying assets. You can create as many ETF shares as market demands (until you run out of possibility to buy underlying assets).
Downloading snapshots of iOS devices is standard around the world. No I am not Australian citizen, that was the problem.
This is similar to a client project I just finished -- http://customyarn.com/

Although I used only javascript for the yarn site -- Flash seemed to be overkill for this kind of UI (of course, some Flash developer over at Fine Cooking is probably thinking "Javascript would be way overkill for this kind of UI").
Sweet, now they are my internet service provider and my social network.

I kid I kid.
That’s the contrarianism you are going to pick? A bunch of scientists having a for the general public probably harmless but for the scientists in the field no doubt somewhat exciting announcement?

You are not the target audience. This is a press release. Before the existence of the web you would have never heard about the announcement unless you are a science journalist. (The vast majority of people will never hear about this announcement. Reading HN or other places where this announcement might conceivably pop up is clearly not normal.) You really shouldn’t be annoyed about something that is not even directed at you.
Blue Eyes - A Logic Puzzle
In a country in which people only want boys, every family
continues to have children until they have a boy. If they
have a girl, they have another child. If they have a boy,
they stop. What is the proportion of boys to girls in the
country?

Thoughts?
Haha, I for one would be more than happy to be infected with that 'virus'.

I'm not totally against advertising though. I think it's the execution that fails — I really love those ads by The Deck and Fusion Ads. If only the web is without ugly ad banners, Flash ads and the like.
One tip I don't see there is using supplments to aid sleep; I started taking zinc just before bedtime and found it helps me get to sleep better and feel more refreshed in the morning.

I take it as "ZMA", which is a blend of zinc/magnesium/vitamin B designed to help rest & recovery from physical activity, but the same sleep benefit comes from regular zinc tablets from the chemist.
Just went through the OS X speech synth voices and I recognized some being used in quite a few electronic music productions, for example: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EK2NG28vKNw
I don't know. I think it would be better to have ruby 1.8 and ruby 2.0 around and to state clearly that some code requires this or that version than having to deal with ruby 1.9 that is still close to 1.8 but not close enough not to break code.
[EDIT: this is nonsense, see Zak's comment.]

Why? If I privately write down "mkramlich is a thief", that's none of these things. If someone else then decides to publish it despite me marking it as private, well, that's hardly my fault is it? (Note: IANAL.)
In hindsight, sure. At the time of its acquisition by yahoo geocities was the 3rd most visited site on the web, and was publicly traded with a market cap very near what yahoo paid. At the time it looked like a sure bet to snag geocities, bring it under the Yahoo ad network umbrella and simply wait for the inevitable windfall from ad revenue tied to continued exponential traffic growth.

Unfortunately, Yahoo screwed up, they killed a lot of traffic by driving away users through unpopular terms of service changes and other silly changes. Meanwhile, the web was growing up and sprouting innumerable new free content hosting sites that were far better than geocities (blog hosting sites like blogspot being the prime example) while the cost of full service paid web-hosting was falling through the floor. At the same time the dot-com bubble burst and internet ad revenue dried up. Geocities found itself obsolete, unliked, and decidedly unprofitable.

In comparison, groupon looks positively questionable. It needs to grow not merely 100x but more like 1,000x in order to justify the huge investment that google will put into it.
Wig - Google Search
It would be interesting to read but I have to say it's just too infuriating what that Scribd crap does to the web. They ruin a perfectly good way of displaying documents just so they can "solve" the problem they created themselves.

That's just ridiculous and I will never ever again click on or upvote anything that has a scribd URL. Scribd truely shows the ugliest face of the ad funded web. It's innovation turned on its head. Ruin something just to extract some money from "fixing" it in a horrible way. It's pathetic and it's an intellectual disgrace.
Smart-ass, no-way-getting-an-offer answer: if we assume gender selection to be truly random, the answer may be anywhere between 0 and 1, period.
I'm a vim user, not an Emacs user (though I have dabbled with emacs before). If you still use vim on the console, you can do a lot better.

There's a reason why vim has support for multiple buffers. That you can keep multiple files open simultaneously. Read about vim remoting, and you can use a single gvim instance (which offers better performance and font rendering), and edit all files in just that.

Even in emacs, buffers are everything. Nobody opens a new instance of emacs for each file.
Thanks. I'm not trying to compete with browsers like iCab (icab.de) in terms of feature sets - I just can't keep up with them. Cyberspace is my attempt to be an 'opinionated' web browser that integrates well with the user's work flow.

It may never replace your main web browser of choice, but it's really good at some frequent tasks - like checking out your Tumblr dashboard, Hacker News, etc.
The "automated everything" approach is pretty much what the Culture do - starships are run by artificial Minds of near God-like intellect and power and they have humans along for pets/companions/passengers.

The ships themselves are fairly memorable characters from the Culture novels (e.g. the Grey Area, Xenophobe and the Falling Outside The Normal Moral Constraints).

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Culture
Not at this point, I think. Feature set in Cyberspace can easily replicated by using browsers' extensions, and it's hard to convince users to stay away from Firefox, Safari & Chrome.
> I am in and out of my editor 50 times a day, Emacs just can not and does not support this approach.

This is true. I think the typical approach with Emacs is to leave 1 instance open for a long period of time and just keep coming back to it. (This is what I do, anyway.) I don't think this is any worse in general than opening and closing the editor as needed, it's just different. Especially when you consider that you can run terminals/shells within Emacs, it's a completely inside-out workflow. Instead of:

1. do a bunch of stuff at the terminal

2. need to edit a file

3. open my editor

Once you've gotten to step 2 you're already in your editor!
For all germans here: repeat "Böse Katze" (bad cat) and you have an instant beatbox.
You could just send part of the text or you could just want a text with a cleaner look.
During 'regular' photosynthesis water (H2O) is broken down during Oxygen Evolving Complex to leave the individual atoms (H and O) along with protons and electrons which fuel photosynthesis.

The idea behind the arsenic theory is that arenate, which has 4 O atoms, could provide act as a suitable substrate during Oxygen Evolving Complex to provide the same protons and electron break down.

There is also a parallel chain of thought that arsenic is similar in its makeup to phosphorus, which is needed to create DNA and other genetic material, and so it could help cell division. However, I'm doubtful as arsenic is toxic in any real quantity and thus would be counterproductive to that.
Passwords don't work, because they will ask you for the passwords (for all the devices they find in your luggage as soon as you get the special treatment).
You don't have to tell it, but they also don't _have_ to let you in. Got the picture?

The best way to avoid getting singled out is to look like any other tourist with tourist clothes and a lot of luggage.

I made the mistake to mix tourist clothing with only a bag for my macbook for a short trip to Singapore while staying in Australia with a 3 month tourist/business visa.

Entering Australia with a tourist/business visa and without luggage looks suspicious. If you take a short trip to Singapore make sure you wear a business suit, or take a lot of luggage with you to look like a pissed of tourist. But nothing in between ;)
I haven't read the whole guide yet but on page 8 it mentions polyphasic sleep (with annotation that majority of people who try it fail). Isn't polyphasic considered a popular hoax? As far as I remember, mentioned in the presentation dr Wozniak actually believes it simply doesn't work. Also, I've read a few blogs of people who tried it and failed (some of them appeared on HN) and don't recall a single person that succeeded. Taking that into consideration it makes me feel sceptical towards this guide. Sure - some sleep patterns work for certain people and don't for other, but why include something that seems to work for noone?
To add to my earlier comment:

Jottit https://jottit.com has the same minimalist interface, but has a lot more features to offer.

* "WYSIWYG" editing with Markdown syntax.
* Custom subdomains
* Access control
* https
* Custom theming etc.,
Using a text-to-speech engine as a musical instrument is so on-topic in my book!

"On-Topic: Anything that good hackers would find interesting. That includes more than hacking and startups. If you had to reduce it to a sentence, the answer might be: anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity."
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DHH on simplicity
BTW, the New Scientist paper mentioned [1] in the kottke.com post, refers to Mono Lake [2] here in California as a location they are studying some of this. It's basically on the far side of Yosemete if you are driving from the Bay Area.

If you are at all a bio geek, you really must check it out - it's a low-oxygen, alkali-rich simple ecosystem that supports a clearly visible food chain of about just 5-6 spices. The place is weird, creepy and totally amazing.

What was supposed to be a romantic road trip planned by my girlfriend for my birthday became an unexpected biology field trip.

[1] http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn14537-arseniceating-ba...,
[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mono_Lake
I wonder why the 13th note is wrong compared to the original melody.
The question around the [ir]rationality of markets is irrelevant. Markets determine the cost of borrowing. If California wants to lower the cost of debt, or maintain the current (low) cost, it must value the opinion of the markets.

The calculation of the author, with state debt costing $6billion a year, assumes a constant cost of borrowing into the future! Investors have been selling municipal debt in the past two weeks, which will result in higher borrowing costs [1]. The same thing happened and is happening with the PIIGS, where those in power have been complacent about their ability to service debt because of the assumption of constant debt servicing costs.

[1] http://search.ft.com/search?queryText=muni&ftsearchType=...

November 25, 2010
US muni bond funds lose another $2.3bn
November 18, 2010
US muni bond funds see record outflows
November 16, 2010
US muni bonds see biggest drop since 2008
If groupon worth six billions, this domain name worth at least 10 millions
But dozens of journalists have gone through them and found nothing more interesting than what amounts to politics gossip.

How can you believe that journalists would only publish the boring stuff after having access to everything?
* which they don't even have to buy/manage/warehouse/distribute!)*

This really is key.

Coming from a traditional e-commerce background that includes all of the above, I am quietly envious of the groupon business model. You don't really understand until you've been in the industry, but the logistics aspect of e-commerce really is a massive part of the process. That Groupon have managed to circumvent that in a way that is profitable/scalable is quite an achievement.
I don't think that editable classes and modules will go away, since they allow to spread the definition of a class to multiple file and/or serve as namespaces.
OK, you're running a small non-profit organisation. You get a subset of the records of anglo irish bank, say a truck load's worth. (this is a example, not the current thing they are generating spin about). While most of these documents are in the public interest in Ireland and Europe (Anglo Irish bank have been on life support in Ireland for 2 years now, the money needed to keep it afloat has forced the IMF to bail out the Irish government) some aren't, for example records for customers. At this point, you need to get someone to read though millions of words and decide what to release. If you have money, you ring up the local temp agency and get a load of people to do it for you for minimum wage. However, wikileaks doesn't have money. They have to pick what piles of documents are worth reading though.

I agree that its sucky, and would much prefer a system in which wikileaks had the resources to leak more stuff and were not picking and choosing what to release. However, I understand why wikileaks does what it does.
page 6 presents the old idea that people have a roughly 25 hour day cycle.
This is proven false[1], early experiments did not consider room lights. And the fun thing is just a paragraph later the author itself points out that artificial light messes up the sleep cycle.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Circadian_rhythm#Enforced_longe...
Apple, pay attention. This thing rocks.

I love the integration with Readability and Instapaper.
You're being melodramatic.