skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
"The Drake equation basically says what anybody who has looked up at the night sky knows intuitively: there are a lot of stars out there, and it's extremely unlikely that we're all by ourselves."

Further reinforcing your core point, it can also tell you that we are. You don't have to be that painfully conservative with the numbers to come with one or fewer per galaxy. For instance, 50% of stars having planets may be a brutal overestimate, a lot of stars are in multi-star systems or other situations in which there are no stable orbits, resulting in any initial planets getting ejected very quickly if they form at all. 2 Earth-like planets per star is a bold statement, depending on the exact definition of "Earth-like", we only have one in our system and if you read past the propaganda in the planet finding press releases they aren't coming up with all that many other "Earth like" planets yet. Yes, that's because they still can't see them, but the press releases convey a false sense of how the search is going when they do things like call a planet with a surface gravity of 3 or 4 G and a surface temperature beyond rock's liquification point a "Super-Earth". 10000 years is a bold estimate for how long a civ will be around and communicating, certainly. I actually am against the self-loathing that some circles find fashionable but 10,000 years is a long time. I consider these numbers generous and it still only comes up with 10.

It's missing some terms, too. Irregular galaxies [1], approximately 25% of the galaxies out there, are thought to be entirely unable to support complex life because basically all the stars in such galaxies will take a system through a region of the galaxy with too much radiation and sterilize the planets every few tens of millions of years. I mean this only as an example, you can go on naming more fairly reasonable criteria that eliminate half or more stars from contention for quite a while (star types, star galactic orbits, other galaxy attributes, even before we get to planets we can eliminate a lot).

To brutally abuse notation, the night sky is O(n^3) in size, if the probabilities of developing civilization are O(2^n)-type it doesn't matter how large the sky is. Big numbers fall fast when you multiply independent probabilities together, and it's not sophistication to just give up and declare there must be a lot of other civilizations out there; it's still a mathematical copout. We don't know.

[1]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Irregular_galaxy
Here are a few submissions:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2119122 <- No discussion (yet!?)

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2119104 <- Much, much discussion

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2119096 <- One comment (currently)

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2119079 <- No discussion (yet!?)

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2118778 <- Some discussion
That is the most terrifying device I've seen in a while.
Or even the straps of the harness restricting circulation to the pilots legs leaving them numb at landing. Ever try to walk with your foot "asleep".
There is a wonderful book edited by Carl Sagan called Communication With Extraterrestrial Intelligence (CETI), Proceedings of a conference held at the Byurakan Astrophysical Observatory, Yerevan, USSR, 5-11 September 1971.

The chief aims of the conference were, first, to estimate values for terms of the Drake equation, and second, to devise strategies for contact. So all these top American and Soviet scientists had to discuss a remarkable range of topics—everything from the chemical origins of life, to the anthropology of early civilizations, to the problem of encoding messages in a form comprehensible to intelligences vastly unlike ourselves.

It's possibly the most interesting thing I've ever read.
Twtbuck -A tool for Affiliate Marketing – Case Study
People normally ask for what businesses Twtbuck is most helpful. We have found that twtbuck can work wonders for businesses where online sales or lead generation or sign ups are core part of business like Affiliate marketing(sales), Jobs, Travel, Daily deals, Coupons etc
We are starting a case study series for all these industries/markets to explain the role of Twtbuck and results that came after experimenting Twtbuck in each individual case.

Lets start with affiliate marketing :
Affiliate marketing is nothing but selling stuff online and earning the commission associated with it. Huge number of affiliate marketers are doing this to earn decent amount of money from Affiliate marketing. Normally the process involved is :
1. Select an affiliate product network like commission junction or clickbank. We tried Clickbank.
2. Select couple of products you want to market and create sales
3. Create a microsite, blog and fill related content and insert the affiliate links.
4. Use PPC to get targeted hits and create sales

Alright, so we selected 5 products from clickbank with gravity score over 100. To begin with we started an advertiser account with $100 and created a total of 15 campaigns for those 5 products i.e. 3 tweet ad copies for each products. And set CPT ( cost per tweet) to a maximum of $0.10

All the accounts were active and publishers started tweeting those ads. We continued this experiment for around 3 weeks and 3 days, spent almost $350 in ads and generated a total revenue of around $3600
Yeah, but the attacker needs access to the magnetic sensor in order to install a ripping device. Physical security prevents it in most cases. In the case of a phone, how could you prevent playback attacks? Say I walk up to a Coke machine and authorize a $1.00 payment, and someone nearby is able to capture that protocol stream. All they'd have to do is play it back to the Coke machine after I leave, and at that point they are welcome to unlimited corn syrup swill. I'm no cryptographer, but I can't think of any way to mitigate it. Something like SecurID, whereby you are given a new token code every minute, might work, but the intervals for new codes would have to be tighter, unless you plan to stand around and monitor everyone else's purchases for the entire interval. This is one for the really smart guys to figure out, and I expect that someday, it will become reality. Can't wait.
What? Who told you that? H.264 baseline is definitely superior to VP8. The 8x8 transform block basically ensures that.
I bounced off findmybuzz immediately because you asked for an e-mail address before I had any idea what I was going to get in return. The screenshots help, but not enough -- I want to put in some business I care about, get sample results back, and then give you my e-mail address if I want to subscribe. Basically, show me your value proposition before you ask me to give you something of value in return.
Yahoo's entire BSD kernel team report to filo still.

Last time I had lunch with him we talked about the minutia of DNS server implementations because I was working on some optimization tricks and he was really interested in seeing them get implemented.

filo is a really amazing guy. He's the most down to earth billionaire I know. He talks way more about his family and hacking more than 'stuff'. If he isn't hacking on code as much as he used to it's because he cares about his company and is doing an important job looking after technical stuff that needs doing, even if it isn't interesting.
I suspect your comment on the fashion industry is correct. But, I find this article is well-reasoned. It's lacking in sources and concrete arguments, but is well-reasoned nevertheless.

In particular, I suspect the author's comment on software thriving in spite of software patents is correct. Unfortunately, it's a difficult thing to prove or disprove.
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2110106
Best Buy To Talk You Out Of Verizon iPhone (Which They Won’t Have)
IMHO, despite your disclaimer, I still think your post is racist because it's blacks and hispanics who are skewing the statistics, rather than the other way round. There's an assumed perspective -- the white one -- as the default, or proper, perspective.
Confirmation bias, really. Most of the stuff not predicted on is fairly hum-drum. (Nobody's excited about cinema display forecasts.)

However, I'll admit to laughing at Morris and Gruber when they estimated 8, 9 million as incredibly overblow predictions. (Both my parents and I will be buying one come revision 2.)
An new era in financial analysis is dawning « asymco
Would have to be a rolling-key, I'm guessing...but as I mentioned in another comment, the interval would be the kicker. Maybe it's simpler, now that I think of it. A rolling-key system with 2-way authentication, a one-time key becoming invalid after a transaction is made.
TVNZ's new social television, should we be excited?
Computing America’s Public School System
I stand corrected. Sorry for the argumentative tone of my comment and thank you for your polite responses.
Some say that Google is not a search company rather an advertising company. So this wouldn't change that much
Why do large technology companies have so much cash?
FWIW -- Even Fortune thinks the analysts don't have it together with Apple: http://tech.fortune.cnn.com/2011/01/19/apples-blow-out-quart...
HTML5 <video> may be in its infancy, but H264 is a huge established technology, and tossing it out will be painful for a lot of people.

The best possible outcome of this exercise (and to its credit perhaps this is Google's intention) is for MPEG-LA to make H264 royalty free in perpetuity, which would eliminate the need to switch to WebM. Otherwise we're forced to make a whole bunch of currently useful devices a whole lot less useful in the interest of one day making a (by then) obsolete codec into a universal standard.
Previous discussing of the same link: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1350343
Sure: the animation speed itself wasn't very smooth... probably more of an opinion, but the feeling was like "yeah yeah, this is going to require too much effort to watch/grok". It was a tl;dr moment, right when you had me ripe to learn more or be directed elsewhere.

And the circular tick marks above the house just scream "something's loading" as they are just too similar visually to every throbber/ajax wait symbol users are used to seeing. Hope that helps!
Yes, I can imagine that quite clearly. It wouldn't be the most repressive clause in that license agreement.
So is this debate about what's best for the future of open standards on the web, or is it about what's best for iOS?

Neither.

The debate is about what's best for the web, period. Some people consider open standards to be a priori superior. Others (like Gruber) do not. (I'm taking your usage of "open standard" to include freedom from patent encumbrance.)

Your last statement is a critical point in this debate: You assert that Chrome dropping H.264 support "could help HTML5 <video> see better adoption." This is not an uncontroversial statement, to put it mildly.

I frankly don't see how this move will aid adoption of the <video> element. Yesterday, sites could encode to H.264 and provide a <video> element to some browsers and a Flash container to others. Today, the same is true. Yesterday, sites could encode to both H.264 and WebM. Today, the same is true. The only thing that has changed is that the number of browsers that require a Flash wrapper to play H.264 content has increased.

Sites will potentially use the <video> element over a Flash container for several reasons:

* If they cannot use Flash. This is the case on iOS devices. iOS has done more to drive adoption of <video> than any other factor to date.

* For political reasons. Dropping H.264 support from Chrome will not change this; a site that avoids Flash because it is not free was presumably already encoding to WebM.

* Because the <video> element provides a better end-user experience.

For sites where this third case applies, dropping H.264 support may result in increased usage of WebM. However, note that this is not the same as increasing adoption of the <video> element--dropping H.264 may influence the codec choices of sites that have already chosen <video> over Flash, but it has no influence on sites that are willing to use Flash.

I would be interested to hear your arguments on how dropping H.264 could increase usage of the <video> element in the long term. I just don't see a case for it.

I do see a case that dropping H.264 might increase adoption of WebM. I am, however, dubious. So long as H.264 in a Flash wrapper is a viable fallback, I don't see any site choosing to encode to WebM as a result of this change. (Sites may choose to encode to WebM for other reasons--preference for freer standards or freedom from licensing fees--but in these cases, they would encode to WebM even if H.264 was available in Chrome.)

So, to summarize: You are trying to frame the debate in terms of freedom alone. It is entirely valid to prefer freer technologies and to make decisions based on freedom. This is not, however, the only possible debate, and it is not the debate John Gruber is engaging in. To accuse him of hypocrisy in supporting H.264 but not Flash is to misunderstand his argument.
Reverse proxies won't work for HN, because requests for the same resource from multiple users can't use the same results. Not only are certain bits of info customized for the user (like your name/link at the top), but even things like the comments and links are custom per user.

Things like users' showdead value, as well as whether the user is deaded, can drastically change the output of each page. Eg, comments by a deaded user won't show as dead to that user, but they will for everyone else...
I deleted my facebook Oct '09 and don't regret it nor have any desire whatsoever to go back.

I have to admit it is a rare pleasure to facebook stalk someone from a friend's account when I have idle minutes at a friend's computer.

My social life has been impacted undoubtedly. I sometimes miss parties I otherwise would have gone to, simply because they are only on facebook. For the most part though this isn't the case, as I maintain actual, close friendships with enough people that I generally find out about them anyway.

I quit due to a terrible case of procrastination on facebook; I stayed quit for the privacy.
In all honestly I don't think that is true, and would really like to see your product.

As a developer unless the utility provides a huge boost in productivity ( which is relative ), or is a tool that i've been looking for a long time.. its not really worth paying for. Also developers tend to be forgiving when it comes to tools and will accept free or open source alternatives more than an average user, again unless their is a perceived huge productivity boost. For example: Firebug was such a huge boost in doing web development, they could of easily charged for this and developers would of payed.
The parent post mentioned Italy, which has a large percentage of white people in it.
Right, they only re-invent wheels when they feel they can make a better one. I don't think they feel they can go through the effort of fabricating a better chip. Though I wouldn't put it past rtm to try.

The philosophy "Don't reinvent the wheel" however, is definitely inconsistent with their philosophy. They will reinvent the wheel whenever they feel they can make a better one. Just because they haven't reinvented every wheel does not mean "don't reinvent the wheel" applies to this group.

They chose to create the best solution they think they can. They don't seem to care whether or not that involves reinventing wheels. The original argument that they should seems pretty silly.
I must say, I’m really not familiar with this usage of “most”. It’s the first time that I hear anybody telling me that you shouldn’t use “most” if the majority is slim.

Where does your assumption come from that colloquially, “most” means “large majority”?
Yes, you'd have to somehow separate the dynamic content from the static content so they could be fetched in different requests and then combined (probably via ajax). If it's just your username and karma then it's simple enough, but if the comments are displayed differently for different people then it could be bear.
The one thing that really improved my productivity was actually really simple. First of all, eliminate objects in your neighborhood; physical as well as virtual objects. Next to this, you should plan ahead. Planning is essential to any organizing process. You will always know what you did and what you should do next, which will certainly improve productivity. As bartonfink notes, write things down on paper. Then make a plan out of it and subsequently extract specific tasks.

Of course, one main requirement is that you should be passionate about your work and focus on your core tasks. Then again, you should plan clearly and write down your short and long time goals. I reckon this works for almost everyone.
Check out http://www.varnish-cache.org/trac/wiki/ESIfeatures

There could be a private internal URL to just return username and karma to populate the user info header.
I agree about the reward / effort ratio, but it was unclear to me if that's purposeful (99 Designs) or if the intent is to spur innovation in certain areas (X Prize).
If it's just a porting issue, there is Pthreads-win32 which worked well enough the last time I used it few years ago.
Japanese Scientist Wants To Clone a Woolly Mammoth In The Next Five Years
Anybody want to weigh in on why Asians give their kids Western first names in the US? Why don't they use Chinese first names? Why don't they change their last names also? Serious question.
If you don't want your HTTP requests to be cached and/or stored, then you really must use the appropriate Cache-Control directives.

IIRC, most browsers have cached HTTPS resources in memory (if not on disk) for a long time, so these kinds of side channel attacks have always been possible.

More generally, TLS is not good at handling side-channel (timing, caching, size measurement) attacks. If you want to mitigate side channel attacks then you need to do a lot of tedious work (that is practically impossible with current mainstream tools) at the application/HTTP layer on the server.
So he should try to sell this to their CIOs?
To make this work you could do all the per-user stuff with javascript and ajax calls in the browser. It would be quite a bit of revamping though.
I've realized another problem with the situation described in the article. Let's say I work at a company, and I have skills U, V, W, and X, and I know the company's systems in and out. I've been there for 10 years and am an excellent employee.

The company needs someone with skills Y and Z, for some new project. They hire some kid, and pay him 30 or 40% more than they are paying me. They tell me they have to pay that, because there is a lot of competition for people with Y and Z. OK, fine--although if management had done their job and figured out we would need Y and Z ahead of time, I would have been happy to learn Y and Z.

So what happens a year down the road, when that new project is done, and we no longer need Y and Z, and that kid is now doing the same work I do--but with a lot less knowledge of the company systems, a lot less experience in U, V, W, and X, and is still making 30% more than me?

Is the company going to cut his pay to match mine? That won't work--the kid will quit. Are they going to raise my pay (and everyone else in a similar situation) to match the kid's? Probably not financially viable.

They are going to have to find something to do for the prior workers at this point, or moral is going to be low, and they will probably have a lot of people leaving.

Alternatively, if Y and Z turn out to be something the company still needs a year after hiring the kid, then by that time the rest of us will probably have learned them, too, after seeing how lucrative such skills are. Do we all get raises up to the kid's level? If we are actually now doing Y and Z we'd certainly expect at least equal pay. If we aren't doing Y and Z, then we should be going to other companies that need Y and Z, and getting the big bucks.
Crowdsource HN: Resources for making your next website.
SwipeGood: Social Change Through Little Change at All
Bill and Steve talk money
It's pretty easy to make any company look terrible when you selectively list mostly bad things about its history interspersed with good things about its competitors.
We were actually going to launch with HN importer but didn't quite get there. If we find some time, it would be a bit of fun to implement.
Maybe, but I know how much developers have donated to Firebug, and, well, I hope this does better!
There is no such thing as a free lunch
Adeo Ressi’s incubator the Founder Institute is expanding to its fourth continent, South America, with new local chapters opening in Bogata, Colombia in April and Santiago, Chile in September. Closer to home, the Founder Institute is also opening a new chapter in San Francisco, due to increasing Bay Area demand. This will allow the incubator to run four semesters a year in Silicon Valley, graduating more than 100 local companies...
NO To Wiretapping the Internet: FBI Director Visits Silicon Valley
I'm actively developing a very large scale ExtJS project and this looks awesome. Have you thought about pitching it to Sencha themselves?

I just done a quick google to see if you can extend the Chrome developer tools (as this is what we use in work) and came straight across your posts asking the same question .. it's a shame you can't. But I could quite happily pick up firefox instead, if this extension works as well as it looks in the screencast.
History is written by the winners and their blind (for the most part) followers.
This page helped me understand the Minkowski sum visually: http://www.pfirth.co.uk/minkowski.html
"firms would have to design systems to intercept and unscramble encrypted messages. Services based overseas would have to route communications through a server on United States soil where they could be wiretapped.”

there are 100s of millions of non Americans who use facebook and Google they did not have a say in electing the government who will wiretap them. let alone most Americans refuse such government spying
I don't know the details. I suspect the answer is that the threading support was written when pthread support was less common, and the MzScheme developers haven't been sufficiently interested in rewriting it.
Just looked at the site.
It seems very functional and the fonts are large enough to clearly direct the user on what to do next.

Other than the previous suggestions, one aspect I didn't like was the hover message on the 3 pictures at the bottom. They are a bit too long, and I quickly lost interest in reading them. They should be short and to the point so the user know what to expect before viewing the content of the picture.

I feel the user today always want instant satisfaction and reading a large hover over message is not expected and not wanted.

Otherwise everything looks great, requested a report.

Best of luck to you and your team.
I've found myself wanting this, too - I sometimes get confused as to which features I can use between models and collections.i