skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Tee-hee - it's true that these NASA announcements are often a bit of an anticlimax, but I suppose that's the price of having so much science-fiction to enjoy.

Oddly enough,the first bicycles were actually made out of wood - they were called velocipedes and today we call them balance bikes. Like scooters, they were powered by pushing feet along the ground. I was going to link to an amusing site about these, but while looking it up I was surprised to discover that there are in fact modern bicycles mostly made from wood, although they're quite expensive: http://www.renovobikes.com/

...so I wasn't as well well-informed as I thought I was.
I guess I tend towards thinking of astrobiology as the subset of biology dealing with life beyond Earth--a convenient and arbitrary definition, perhaps. In any case, under this definition, with no validated extraterrestrial life, astrobiology would be a largely theoretical science or a line of philosophical inquiry. But if that's too narrow an interpretation, maybe this indeed is an example of experimental astrobiology. Hence, I may have overstated my position when I said this is not astrobiology.

At this point, however, I fear I'm drawn towards philosophical digression. It seems the motivation of the scientist comes into play because she could end up with the same results whether she is a) looking for insight into how life could exist elsewhere in the universe or b) studying life in extreme conditions on Earth. The impetus and interpretation become the categorizers (in practice, I don't think it's too cynical to link this to funding source). On the broader question, I should perhaps defer to the epistemologists--does the nature of knowledge change depending on why it was sought or what is made of it?

Back to the question, what would I consider astrobiology? Well, if life or its precursors were found on Mars or a comet, that might work for me. But what happens when it falls to Earth? I don't know; I've never been particularly comfortable with the blurry divisions between disciplines anyway, so if I consider the dividing line between, for example, psychology and sociology to be tenuous, how am I supposed to feel in this instance? The thing is, knowing what to call it doesn't really affect our ability to understand or use it, it just changes the way we talk about it--which may be important, I grant. But this brings me back to the communication aspect. And as far as that goes, I feel like I've gone through a lot of words without saying much. Therefore, let me summarize like so: I understand why they call this astrobiology; I probably wouldn't call it that myself; most importantly, I think many people will be expecting something else.
Groupon's brand + Google Places = $$$ x BILLIONS
More Joe Lieberman-Caused Internet Censorship
The Role of Distributed State
I'm using just a google doc.. toying with the idea of throwing a small app online for this
Agree with everything you typed. I was a huge Gran Turismo fan and thought GT2 was the paragon of what was really possible with the hardware at that time. But it all went downhill starting from GT3. The reason, I suspect, is that the makers of GT were too caught up in its own "The Real Driving Simulator" spiel. Specifically: the gamer has to take part in an actual 24 hour endurance race, similar to the 24 Hour Le Mans. Games are supposed to be fun, first and foremost. Going around the same circuit for 24 hours at a stretch is not only bad for the gamer's health, it's also bad for the environment (since you can't turn off the console and have to leave the game paused should you have other matters to attend to). It makes absolutely no sense since the game does not simulate the other aspects of actual endurance racing e.g. team strategy, unexpected mechanical failure etc.

Like you, I tried Forza and haven't looked back. Sure, there are far more realistic driving sims on Windows, but FM is really easy to get into and it is FUN. Which is what gaming is all about.
how they can know the vulnerability is limited to software downloaded within a certain timeframe.

It isn't. The bug has been in ProFTPd for years, here's the details:

http://bugs.proftpd.org/show_bug.cgi?id=3521

If anyone is running a ProFTPd version older than 1.3.3c then you should act now. Your host is open to remote code execution.
Standard police / prosecutor procedure: a witness up and "remembers" a damning detail immediately before trial. This isn't disclosed to the defense. The fact that the prosecutor felt comfortable acting this way even after the previous shitshow he put on is simply amazing, and I think goes to how far they're willing to break the law.
I think PZ provided a decent grain of salt, pointing out what about the research is important, what needs more work and most importantly what it isn't telling us.
17 Essential Web Apps for Computer Technicians
Technology has changed many things in the modern day workplace. This is especially true for those in the business of working with computers. Here are 17 web applications every computer technician needs.
In part because losing the case would be worse for the future. Ars Technica had a good writeup on the judge's frustrations. http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/news/2010/12/judge-in-xbo...
> As society begins to perform more calculations via computer, it will allow us to begin address more abstract and higher level mathematics, problems which would be near impossible to address had we been required to do the math with grease pencils.

This is quite likely true, especially for scientists and mathematicians. An interesting question for me though is whether the average citizenry is becoming better or worse at mathematics over generations.
I have found that between firebug and chrome you can generally nail down most bugs. What one does not catch the other does. IE is a whole different beast you have to have visual studio to do any decent level of debugging and it is still painfull. That said sticking to a toolkit eliminates a good deal of the cross platform cross browser issues. 9 times out of 10 when we do have an issue it is css rather than javascript hat bites us. We use Dojo or jQuery for projects depending on size and both are good at smoothing out the inconsistancies as long as you color in the lines.
A real hacker can live for a month on food stored in his keyboard.

Seriously though, my keyboard's pretty clean. I wash my hands, so there's no grime, and I make sure that any crumbs end up in the trash can. It's not that hard.
What the new Facebook Promotion Policy Changes Mean?
Carl Sagan Explains the Drake Equation
It's worth noting that MIT didn't really become an academically prestigious institution until the 1940-50's. Before the second world war it was largely a Engineering and technical college and certainly wasn't one of the top 10 institutions in the country.

More specifically, at the time of this exam the school was only ~8 years old and engineering wasn't considered the prestigious career it is today.

The round up of federal funding in the 1940's and 50's is really interesting to read about as it completely transformed the school and in a broader sense transformed higher education in the US as a whole.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_Massachusetts_In...
No matter who you vote for, the lobbyists and military/intel institutions run things from behind the scenes. Until the public at large realizes this, they'll retain false hopes.
I think the EFF is making a good argument here, but I'm wondering whether it really addresses the point at issue. The key sentence is the following:

> The domain seizure debacle, ... depend on (a) the traditional entertainment industry's yowling wail that "piracy" on the the Internet is injuring the livelihoods of artists and (b) the US government's chronically uncritical acceptance of those complaints.

Do they? Is the US govt. doing what it does based primarily on the belief that, in doing so, it is helping artists? Frankly, I doubt it. When Congress passes some draconian copyright law, I imagine they are thinking about industry campaign contributions, not helping struggling artists.

If I'm right, then the EFF's argument makes us all feel good, but doesn't actually help anyone. Of course, I could be wrong. Any thoughts?
That is cool - both the transcript, but more importantly the web site. Is that built on some kind of open source software, or did they roll their own?
Ah yes, good point. Luckily we have a regular rate of messages and we knew that 2 million would be enough to always have roughly 24 hours worth.
Do you actually use scipy?

I tried briefly and was awfully disappointed. For starters, the documentation was crap. Followed closely by the fact that I wanted to take the norm of a vector and had to try 3 different norm functions before one worked. Further, I had a sparse matrix and all the functions -- of course, this was mentioned nowhere -- magically desparsified my vectors. Apparently if you want to operate on sparse matrices/vectors, you need to pull in an entirely separate import and potentially change the name of all functions.

I was left completely underwhelmed.

Not to mention that installing matlab was a pain, but installing scipy was an order of magnitude worse. ports failed to work, the binary distributions wanted much older python than I had, etc.

It would be awesome to see them seriously take on matlab, but I have to conclude they have a very long way to go.

If their gpu implementation is anything like their sparse vector/matrix implementation, matlab will remain the language of choice for a long time.
Check out TiddlyWiki [http://www.tiddlywiki.com/] or some other wiki software?

There was a pretty good discussion about this kind of think on StackOverflow a while back: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/78756/what-do-you-use-to-...
Wonderful article. I still play Pacman occasionally thanks to Mame, even though I am much more of a Mr Do! fan (which I also play in Mame).
My girlfriend admits Chrome is faster and generally better, but still uses Firefox because it's friendlier and designed more to her tastes.
It would seem that this makes it significantly easier to stay under the radar -- simply set up your credit cards to suggest a very normal life and then use cash for any illicit activities.

And, if a group of people (such as a terrorist cell) wanted to, it would be easy to deliberately create a paper trail to mislead authorities.
We missed our November deadline. Better late than never
Remember though that the polyploidy in plants is a fundamentally different process from the way animals speciate. I don't want to mislead you on that point.
Engineering Shortage is Real: Fmr Digg Engineer Gets 7 Offers, Takes 1 for $150k
The geometry section looks like something I could have passed after taking high school geometry. i.e. an American or Canadian 14-15 year-old could probably do it easily.
The contrast in the combined graph makes it impossible to distinguish a single language.
I struggle with perfectionism, which is a major productivity killer for developers and a death knell for startups.

I've adopted a specific mindset in order to push my perfectionistic tendencies aside - I call it "ship shit" - which means the focus is on shipping something out the door even if it is complete and utter shit; ship it with the understanding that you can make it better later.
It took a long time to load and gave no indication that it was doing so, so when I realized I could scroll down, Ben wasn't actually there yet. I wondered why that guy was standing there talking on the phone.

Perplexed, I scrolled up a little and ... Ben was standing there, waiting for me. At which point the page became extremely cool. But I almost missed it.
Some of us actually enjoy creating and producing. It seems that you are suggesting an irreconcilable dichotomy between work and enjoyment of life with your phrase "turn your whole life over to it".

In point of fact, many people do this as part of living, and don't count it as work. Most children, when building novel( to them )structures with legos, lincoln logs, blocks, etc, are not "turning their whole lives over to it". They are living, and they are enjoying themselves.
Backpack + Journal app for Mac: http://transmissionapps.com/
The link is down for me, but I remember reading about this on another website; the coverage is probably of similar quality between the two.

http://home.comcast.net/~jpittman2/pacman/pacmandossier.html...
I think its becoming increasingly less necessary to learn something else. I think javascript is, after a decade or so, finally coming into its own. I agree that one should use a library that lets someone else deal with the inevitable bullshit of browser compatibility. The question is then, "what language should I use"? I used GWT for example, since I know Java, and I assume there are people who will find noloh easy to pick up because they already know the language. However, javascript is a high level language, so references to assembly and C are straw men. Noloh and GWT add yet another layer of abstraction on top of an already complex system. They offer little advantage beyond familiarity, and prevent comprehension of the system as it really is.
>But Chrome is not a beautiful app.

What would you consider a beautiful app? Chrome is the prettiest piece of desktop software I use, but I don't have a whole lot to compare it to.
Pro baseball scouts might claim there to be a shortage of promising recruits, but there are many young, ball-playing men in America who would say that an entry-level baseball "job" is hard to come by. Who's right?
This is an early preview of the tatical RPG game my team's developing for the final assignment of the Digital Game Programming subject at CEFET-MG. We're a team of 5 Computer Engineering undergraduate students from Brazil.

It is made purely with JavaScript + WebGL. Runs natively on the Web Browser, without the need for plugins. It uses an 100% custom game engine. The art and code are still works in progress.
Some questions have more than one answers right and all answers have to be marked to get credit =)
Agreed - that's why some of the interesting stuff is broken out further down (and data and code is available for download for data mungers).
I'm amazed that Python had about 20 times as many entries as either Perl or Ruby. I realize they each have their own niches and that Python tends to be the current language of choice for a lot of general-purpose weekend hacking, but I wouldn't have expected the difference to be that overwhelming.
What a horrid graph. I wish I could read that.
Chrome on OSX is fantastic, my only beef being that some options are in unintuitive places. For example, 'Extensions' is under 'Window'. Why? There's a perfectly good crescent wrench just sitting by its lonesome self over there there in the corner. I've found Chrome to be the only browser that broke away from the traditional browser format, and pulled it off beautifully. By contrast, FF 3.6 on OSX is hideous.
"It’s my belief that every single programmer should learn JavaScript."

You need to change that sentence then...
I know what the CBO is and I know how to read outlays. The economic impact is far more complex than the simplistic analysis that you have presented.

The Social Security Administration also projects that the situation will stabilize. They suggest that, instead of complete Social Security reform, the payroll tax simply go through a graduated increase ending in 2081. Krugman's main criticism with this math is that GDP growth projections are needlessly pessimistic, meaning that the revenue projections are also pessimistic.

Either way, he is not arguing against all change to Social Security, he is arguing against the loudest voices that are constantly screaming that Social Security is a giant disaster that will tear the govt down in flames.

When I asked for context I wasn't asking for what the CBO is, I was asking for what the economic assumptions (of which there must be many) the CBO made. I was also asking for the context of the outlay in respect to the rest of the government debt and budget.
Same here on regular consoles. We did use lua and once UnrealScript and the reduction in iteration time to seconds was worth any loss of speed in the short term (i.e. discover the game, then downcode what you need to later).

However, times have changed. The kind of games i'm interested in are ubiquitous in nature. I want to interact with it on the console, the iPhone, the PC, and on the web. I want to write tools that are cross platform. The browser is the ultimate cross platform.
No Prolog, how sad! I suspect there wouldn't be a particularly high frequency of developers using it anyway but it would be nice to know what proportion do given a larger study.
Absolutely, the big ones are health discoveries where a study has found such and such is good/bad for you. It hits the headlines and suddenly everyone is eating more/less of X or taking supplement Y. The follow up studies that discover procedural/statistical problems or just over reaching claims get far less press and the meme continues.

It is like the myth that you should drink 8 glasses of water a day. In this case the advice (from the WHO I think) was people needed 2 litres of water a day, which can be sourced from your normal food and beverage intake. This was altered to drinking 8 glasses of water a day and promoted by the bottled water industry. I get into discussions with people about it over and over but because it is all pervading I rarely make headway.

Another one is wheat grass . . though I find a more receptive audience for that one usually, except from the committed hippy types.
> the SO is unusually accommodating

This is what I consider a working relationship. It’s kind of like being poly, each partner has to accommodate the other’s external love (for work, as it is). I’ve seen this between pairs of artists, athletes, artist+programmers and musician+designers. It’s never people who have “just a day job” but rather those who view their trade as a superset of their life. The accommodation for the partner is really just understanding and accepting the need to create in another as a legitimate part of the relationship.

Since the writer did the same to her husband, I’m assuming this isn’t a big issue...
The most important things are not urgent
Assange Case: Evidence Destroyed Over and Over Again
We Don't Know Anything
...references to assembly and C are straw men.

Referencing C and assembly are not straw men, in the context of the web and the browser they serve equivalent purposes.

They offer little advantage beyond familiarity, and prevent comprehension of the system as it really is

Rather than respond with a long post, there are significant advantages to using something like NOLOH instead of JavaScript directly. Rather than going into it detail here, I will merely point to 2 issues of php|architect that go in-depth into the many significant advantages you gain, similarly the noloh.com website goes into some of the advantages in the 3 read-more home blocks:

NOLOH: The Comprehensive Framework - http://www.phparch.com/magazine/2010/may/

Lightweight, On-demand, and Beyond - http://www.phparch.com/magazine/2010/november/
Not really

1. Construct a triangle ABC. Construct a line parellel to AB through C. Alternate angles and angle sum of triangle shows it is 180 degrees

2. Use congruent triangles

3. A number of ways doing this. I would cut it into two triangles

4. 360/6 = 60 degrees. Thus each sector is a equilateral triangle.

5. 100 pi

6. Basic algebra, let x be the length of the perpendicular. x = 12, solve for sides using Pythagoras. 20 and 15

7. x : x^2

Would expect to be year 7 or year 8 level.
PZ is a reliable place to get the truth on biology/medicine based stories.

For space stuff Bad Astronomy usually provides the lowdown on the latest space story flooding the main stream press. (http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/badastronomy/)
Great read -- Like ggchappell it's probably about keeping lobbyists happy hence campaign contributions coming. Very happy the individual artists are doing better however.
Makes you wonder how long before Joe Lieberman condemns the FOI act as treasonous.
https://github.com/spacelog/spacelog. -- looks like it's built with Django, Redis, Xapian, and a few other things.
Changed. Thank you.
This may be true for a subscription web app, maybe there is a bug and the customers can deal with not having a particular feature working correctly until Monday, you have a relationship with them and this is a mare annoyance.

Thinking in terms of an ecommerce or affiliate site, you have no relationship with those visiting your page. They're likely to close the browser or it the back button for the most inane reasons, you also have large adwords spend driving them to your site. Especially around Christmas time any issues could be a large potential revenue loss so yes I certainly would be dropping everything to fix any issues that arise.
This is ridiculous - I hope Tableau feels the error in their ways and customers vote with their feet.
I read the same article looking for alternatives. Did a little sleuthing and found something called ironspeed. Looks like a competitor. It builds everything in C# or VB from an existing database. I'm working with their trial now but there jury's still out...
Wouldnt it be faster to have the log_id in a variable so you don't have to do a select and an update? In fact wouldnt it be faster to just store 48 hours and delete the oldest 24? Is it going to kill you to have 47:59 hours of logs?
Am I the only one who thought the Bing maps were more "readable" than the Google maps? I do agree that the Yahoo maps were by far the worst, but to me the Bing maps were better designed (other than the color scheme) than the Google maps. Maybe it's just me?
The Design and Implementation of a Log-Structured File System
"Don't make me think" by Steve Krug is a must-read if you're new to ui design.
CSS image sprite easter egg from BankSimple's signup form
My girlfriend would never stand for this, there are 6 days of the week I can work whenever I need to, but when it comes to Sunday brunch its hands off. Thats our time. It got interrupted once with a work issue, and she still brings it up.
Rocinha: giving away disposable cameras in Rio de Janeiro [2004]
The argument "congress is corrupt!" could work in electing new congress members. It's unlikely to work in getting a current congress to change its behavior.
Engineering Team Culture - Embracing Diversity
Amazon speaks up about WikiLeaks decision
IE developer toolbar really helps with JavaScript and CSS debugging. It believe it is built into IE 8.
http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/en/details.aspx?FamilyID=...
Ask HN: Foreign startup collecting payments from US companies?
Hi hackers,

After years of lurking on HN I have my first serious startup idea, the big problem for me is that I am Australian. The target market is mobile and web game developers, most of whom are in the US, and I'm wondering how to set up payments. So there's really two questions:

1) If you're a US startup/developer, how would you prefer to pay a foreign partner - is PayPal appropriate for business-to-business transactions? Credit card? Bank transfer? Some other way?

2) If you're a foreign startup, how did you collect payments from US customers? Do I need to get an Australian merchant account to accept CC payments? Can I, as a non-US citizen, start an American company so that BrainTree can give me an American merchant account?

I'm not asking for legal advice here, just some indication of how others have solved this problem before me.
Actually I intended my comment to be taken in two ways -

a. really in appreciation of Hungary for all of its contributions to mathematics and the mathematical sciences.

b. I wished to hint that if the author wanted, the same article could've been about Hungary instead of lisp. Instead of asking "what makes lisp so great at this kind of stuff?" the question could've been "what makes Hungary so great at this kind of stuff?", with a badge saying "Made in Hungary". We always focus on the things we want to focus on as causes don't we?