skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Fascinating question and fantastic answer.

That being said, as Edgar added to Vintage's answer, if you put a mirror 13.5 light years away, and watched your reflection from earth, that would be the same as being 27 light years away.

So if I doubled the number of mirrors (2 in orbit, 2 on earth) and halved the distance to 6.75 light years I could accomplish the same thing.

If you take that example to it's conclusion, could I construct an (expensive/complicated/etc.) device here on earth that had so many mirrors it could let me look into the past at all?

The physics-answer seems "yes" so my question is "Why haven't we tried that?" and one obvious limitation, I suppose, would be just how many mirrors you would need.

Light travels 5,878,499,562,554 miles (5.78 trillion) a year[1].

Given that, if I just wanted to see an hour into the past, I think that means I would need to observe earth from:
5,878,499,562,554 / 365 days / 24 hours = 671,061,594 miles away.

Or I could stick a mirror in space 335,530,797 miles away (~ 540,000,000 km) from earth and stare at it.

Mars, at the widest distance from Earth, is 401,000,000 km away[2], which is close enough for my purposes (I'm not picky)... so I guess if I stuck a mirror on Mars and looked at the reflection of earth I could see something like 45 minutes in the past.

The Moon is almost exactly 1000x closer to the earth than Mars[3], so I wonder if I used it for my mirror array instead if I could just put a station with 500 mirrors on it to accomplish the same thing.

Or build something on earth with millions of mirrors in it to accomplish the same thing.

I would normally think something like this impossible, but I just watched a docu on the LHC and now I wonder if even at a micro-second scale, if we have tried building something like this and observed two points in space using a computer and seeing if the visual data coming in is micro-seconds apart from each other?

For example (assume I have a camera and visual-diff software sufficient for this and that my "mirrors" have sufficient magnification capabilities to make this seem like an easy setup), if I pointed one camera at a monitor drawing a unique pattern 2' away from me, then point another camera at a mirror that has bounced the image 10 miles before being displayed... I imagine, like sound, there would be a lag in that image if we bounced it enough times.

(DOH)

It suddenly dawns on me that using this method to look into the past is effectively the same thing as recording something with a video camera and playing it back later... you are literally capturing the light for review at a later date.

So as cool as this idea is, I think I just answered my own question as to why we haven't tried to build a million-mirror-array before... cause I can buy a video camera for $300 instead :)

[1] http://www.universetoday.com/45047/how-far-does-light-travel...

[2] http://www.universetoday.com/14824/distance-from-earth-to-ma...

[3] http://www.enotes.com/science-fact-finder/space/how-far-moon...
Some common ground for content-oriented PHP apps
Could this be implemented by a third party (e.g., Google) with a browser plugin? In fact, e.g. http://www.siteadvisor.com/
Just don't use it. Did someone break into your house and force you to sign up at gun point? No. It's voluntary. Stop crying about a free service.
It doesn't matter whether women are at actual risk; it's about the perception of risk.

And what proportion of 'em perceive this risk when filling out a little box on the internet?

You don't start a social network by alienating people, regardless of whether they're 'right' or 'wrong' to feel the way they do.

Hang on, let me rephrase that for you:

You don't start a social network by alienating people, regardless of whether they're right or wrong to feel the way they do.

There, much better without the scare quotes around right and wrong, don't you think? Sounds less like you're trying to have and simultaneously skip a debate about epistemology in the middle of a sentence.

Aaaaanyway, what proportion of customers are alienated by this? Surely for every person who complains, ninety-nine women don't see an issue with it?
What’s In a Facebook “Like”?
The Value of Online Company Biographies
Chaos-Mincemeat Season 1 Episode 12 
This is the Summary Chaos Episode 12 Mincemeat : The CHAOS agents head to the Middle East to influence a dictator's choice in naming his successor. With the current dictator on his deathbed, their goal is to keep his violent son from assuming power.
The agents go undercover to visit a Middle Eastern dictator on his deathbed to persuade him not to choose his violent son as his successor
It's possible enough idiots will fall for it to make a nice payday.
When it Comes to Data Breaches…Size Doesn’t Matter
For parsing HTML, I'd recommend using a purpose-built HTML-parsing library instead of bothering with regular expressions. (Though, like the author of that answer wrote, regex's can work just fine for parsing small snippets.)

An interesting fact: you can parse HTML/XHTML (correctly) with some of the popular regex implementations. (Note the word implementations.)
Google+ NSA, no thanks
Taiwan Tea Company uses Fake Steve Jobs to Sell Tea
For people who don't have admin on their own machines (i.e. many large organizations), that would suck.
Can anyone explain why ICANN is charging $185K? Where did they get this number from and why is it so high?

Something about paying so much for something that I feel should cost next to nothing to produce seems like a scam. I really can't wait for the day when the DNS is open and distrubuted so one central body (or Verisign) can't have a monopoly on a public good.
So... they're trying to make things intuitive? Eventually, folks have to come to term with the fact that these are analogies. I think you're making it worse. There is no substitute for understanding a directory tree, for example. Deal with it and quite gunking things up for everybody else.
Don't be embarrassed, great job on going ahead and shipping it! Some suggestions:

1. Make the call of action buttons larger. E.g. "subscribe now", "try for 30 days" etc. They should be larger.

2. I see that your layout is single column with images showing the app. But when I scroll down to the bottom, there is no call of action there! You should probably put a big button there saying "Begin your free 30 day trial today!"

[added more:]

3. The "Try Certician free for 30 days!" link goes to your FAQ page! This should go to your payment page.

4. Right now the different plans all lead to different payment pages. I suggest you make them all go to the same page but use a drop down select box to allow the user to change the plan if one wants.
OpenID Connect spec is now there
Tactile pixels let you ‘feel’ textures on touchscreens
I don't use screen locally so when I ssh into boxes and use screen I'm not screen in screen and have to double-a. So I like tabs.

A feature that would be awesome (if it doesn't exist, by default at least it doesn't) is being able to have tabs per split.

OSX's window manager is so poor in my opinion that I would love to be able to have a full screen iterm2 but I like to have one terminal on the left and one on the right which has many tabs -- just helps with the cluster I'm dealing with. So without being able to have tabs only on the right split I have to use two iterm2s.

Just a thought.
Is there a non-coders Hacker News website?  
I'm not talking about Reddit or Digg (which I frequent) - I'm looking for a similar website with intelligent conversation that isn't centered around software and startups. I'm thinking NY Times, New Yorker, Economist type articles. Can someone share a link?
Gold Trading,Trading Gold
in real life we don't walk around with our state sanctioned gender on ourselves and are free to project the gender we wish others to see

If you're being sarcastic, it's not obvious due to the fact that some people really do believe that.

If you're being non-sarcastic, you're crazy. First, gender isn't "state-sanctioned", it's genetically determined. And y'know what? On 99.9% of people it's pretty damn obvious. Even the folks who go to all the trouble of dressing up to look like the opposite sex are usually identifiable at a glance.

Some folks do have serious issues about their gender identity, but I think Google+ is a better place without them.
So, no implementation, just someone dreaming up something that could be done, maybe, who knows, and patenting it. This is ridiculous. Apple itself has proven that the devil is in the details, that getting the design right is the herd part. If thre's something that needs protection, it should be the myriad of little details involved in making this vague idea workable, not the vague idea.
In 1979, I watched the Enterprise+transporter fly in to Kennedy for the first time from the Indian River - that was a long time ago. Hell, it's even been 25 years since I turned on the TV to see Dan Rather using a model to explain the various external tanks and knew something bad had happened.

So while it is the passing of an era, with the ISS at the sharp point of manned space flight, I'm not about to let nostalgia cloud the objective fact that it doesn't matter whose hardware gets us off the ground and out toward the stars.

[edit] But that's not to imply that shuttle launches aren't really cool.
> In fact, my educated guess is that far more women die from car accidents than from crazy murderers.

This has got to be one of the most overused and misappropriated statistics I've heard during a multitude of arguments. I can't even deduce what point is being made beyond X is greater than Y. You can't simply invalidate a problem, because you found a larger (scarier) number on Wikipedia. Have you considered the amount of time spent and km traveled in a car versus time spent in bars and social gathers? I hope not because it's a rabbit trail and a moot point.
Probably not such a likely outcome since the encounter took place at a very busy cafe in a busy big box shopping centre. Still, I would have wanted a couple of extra friends on hand for intimidation and maybe someone with a video camera with a really bright light.
Kickstarter refused to host it because the target was so high.
Mt. Gox beefs up security, adds support for Yubikey
He's the King Arthur of the White Knights of the Internet.
Can someone please explain this to me –
i can fully understand how a technical solution to do this could be patentable – but how can the very interaction design part be patentable?

It seems like this is an "idea patent" rather than an "i invented something and spent a long time developing it and now i need to be able to protect my investment patent".
I think im seeing the same vacuuming footage. Slightly off topic, but what's with all the people wearing baseball caps indoors. Wouldn't it obscure a large portion of your vision?
Unfortunately not, other than the links posted by dcheng and Eric Schmidt's comments I haven't seen anything else.
You cannot sacrifice partition tolerance. See a much more eloquently argued blog post than I could come up with by the ever excellent Coda Hale: http://codahale.com/you-cant-sacrifice-partition-tolerance. In fact, re-reading it now I realise it was originally a rebuttal to Stonebraker in a different article.

It's really common sense if you think about it. You cannot ever guarantee that any system with more than one node will not suffer a partition. You need a network between them, and your dog might chew it at any time. When (not if) that happens, what will your AC system do? It will either not be available, or it will not be consistent. It's impossible to have both.

I'd be interested to know what happens in VoltDB if I have two machines in a cluster and I pull the plug between them. Does anyone know?

Edit: more great stuff from the also ever excellent Henry Robinson: http://www.cloudera.com/blog/2010/04/cap-confusion-problems-.... Good links at the bottom, too.

Second edit: removed unnecessarily inflammatory first sentence.
Have you heard about "to dust"? It's like Black and White mixed with minecraft. Being produced by Ubisoft.
I can't believe Courtney Love wrote this. I had a low oppinion of her, but this seems really well written. Also, she's a fan of Neal Stephenson? That quote almost makes me wonder if this were written by some nerd and attributed to her...
Which is larger? The number of people who would object to "what is your gender" on weird-ass gender politics grounds, or the number of people who would object to "how do you wish to be identified?" on the grounds that it's ridiculous politically correct pandering to weirdoes? I don't just "wish to be identified" as a man... I am a man, and I have the external sexual organs, facial hair, Adam's apple and XY chromosomes to prove it.

Someone's always gonna complain, no matter what you do.
And I'm supposed to be against piracy? I have no problem giving money to people who deserve it but these people do not deserve a single penny from me. The other issue is that by paying for CD's, I'm directly funding the unethical legal bullying that these companies are undertaking.

Really, it's the same issue with the government. I, for one, do not want to fund operations which kill people in foreign countries. I don't care if it's a 'democracy', I don't care if there's a hierarchy and that I'm supposed to vote to make myself heard. I simply want to cut funds to things I don't agree with but the issue is that doing so results in an entity orders of magnitude bigger than me bullying me into submission.
Any illusions that artists had about the big record labels should have been extinguished in 1999, when they snuck through a bit of legislation that made all music recordings "works for hire", thus depriving musicians of the copyrights on their own music.

"work for hire" is what programmers do in the employ of a company, who then assumes ownership of the copyright on the code. The RIAA has always resented the fact that musicians retain ownership of their copyrights, and it defended the legislation vigorously. It was repealed in 2000 under pressure from a coalition of musicians.

The most offensive thing about the episode to me is the way it was done. A congressional staffer named Mitch Glazier snuck the change in at the last minute. Three months later, Mitch was hired by the RIAA. Afterwards, the RIAA coyly refused to admit anything had changed, but were plainly committed to enforcing the work-for-hire language.
Build it !
The HN community model is simple, elegant and effective. There's no stopping you from adopting this model and applying it to your own niche'.

Of course, a huge factor in HN's popularity is Paul Graham's endorsement / YC hosted arrangement. This is something you won't easily be able to emulate ;)
Alternative: http://www.ustream.tv/nasahdtv (parent's link doesn't work for me).
Should Apple Discontinue Safari or Double Down?
That might be true for your site, but for sites I have intimate knowledge of while freelancing in the analytics space, Compete has always been the closest. Except for their search analytics, that is so hilariously bad they should split test not showing it on the site.
Mars, at the widest distance from Earth, is 401,000,000 km away

A lot of the time, it's closer. And when it's the furthest away, both earth and mars are on different sides of the sun. A star between you and the mirror will make your mirror hard to use.
Inside Apple - the inner workings of the most beloved company in the world
Read how Steve Jobs rules his kingdom.
I prefer Better Tasks - https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/nbhddnkmimnokfjdlo...

Interesting, last time I looked into using Google Tasks I was put off by a few issues (I've sampled and discarded dozens of list services, so I forget what they were) but it looks like they've nailed the basics and opened it up to a nice app ecosystem.
Solution to Global Piracy Could Start in the Bay of Bengal
Serious question: how many times has Apple used a generic patent against their competition? It doesn't seem to happen often, which gives me the impression they're mainly defensive patents.
if your mom can get the amazon appstore to work on her iPhone you should consider hiring her skills to work on the next jailbreak.

seriously, what a comment!
There isn't any research, but only cuz it's damn impossible. The number of photons ever emitted by Earth in the distant past which are gonna ever come back to Earth is... very very small.
They are hours I'll have to eat because I did not properly estimate how long it would take to complete that portion of the project.

Why is this such an acceptable premise?
best part is in the answer just below this one:
"1. You can write a novel like tchrist did..."
Another Adelaidian here. Also Northeastern :S
Okay since you are so afraid the NSA will look at your G+, I hope you are not using GMail to receive your Facebook notifications... they might just READ EVERYTHING!! The horror.
This is true to a fault: for a while many people asked to be able to change the code font, or at least for it to respect browser defaults. They resisted because that went against what the designer thought was best - which I think is a case of form trumping function.
>Surely for every person who complains, ninety-nine women don't see an issue with it?

1% of Google's profits is more than you'll probably ever make in your entire life.
Here in safe, polite Toronto, there was an altercation a few years past on a street crowded with shoppers seeking Boxing Day deals. It ended in a running gun battle and a passerby was killed.

I agree that death is an unlikely outcome, but i beg of you, never bet your life on the rationality of petty criminals who engage their "fight or flight" reflex.
Since you'd need to put all this stuff in place before the event you want to see actually occurs, wouldn't it be easier to just break out a video camera and record it?
Title is way off on this one...

It boils down to:

> You've been warned repeatedly about the Bugzilla Etiquette rules, and you're still failing to respect them.
Seems hard to believe, but cool if true.
God says...

sleep perceived gay Here Amphitheatre mail deride goading
drop lawless averred flew imitating Oxford hear intercession
strictness recount catching walking bear falsehood hearken
Troy tumult
Yet, since there are not many similar atmospheres in the region, if there were any backscattered radiation it wouldn't be impossible to detect.
> In case you didn't get that, if you were to create a movie Wizard of Oz entirely based on the book, if one of the actors does pretty much anything that suggests a similarity to the movie version, rather than the book version, it could be infringing. At the very least, this completely rules out any attempt to make a nod or homage towards the original film.

I don't think that is true at all, and I believe that this blogger is misinterpreting the law here. If Sam Raimi were to digitally put Judy Garland in his remake, that would be copyright infringement. But "nods and homages" should be fine, as long as the movies (music, screenplay, acting) are stylistically different. This is kind of guaranteed, since the original was made over 70 years ago and the new one is being directed in Sam Raimi and will be in 3D..
With publishing at least there can be a high opportunity cost in partnering with a startup. Content providers might be losing access to exclusive publishing channels that bring a lower risk. If you get exclusive rights to my content for 18 months and don't make me any money with it then you might just have burned a bridge.
Ask HN: Please review my startup - LiveBite.com
Our site, www.livebite.com, is in beta and we'd like to hear any feedback regarding the idea, the user interface, or any other comments from the HN community.<p>Thanks!
There needs to be some disclosure regarding the team behind the initiative. Who am I trusting with my money? Put a list of team members on the site, links to their linkedin/twitter etc.
Robot Soccer Players Learning Fancy Human Skills
This case presents a bizarre confluence of elements that have caused courts and commentators to go all over the board with it: you have a copyright on the 1909 book that has long since expired, you have a 1939 film that remains under copyright, you have publicity stills from the 1939 film that depict characters from the film and that are not under copyright, and you have an alleged infringer who crops the images from the public domain publicity stills and puts them on t-shirts along with tag lines from the copyrighted movie ("there's no place like home") and sells them for commercial gain.

The holding here states that the qualities of the characters as distinctively depicted in the 1939 movie are in themselves protected by copyright even though the original characters as depicted in the book are not.

You are correct that this, then, is the "crux of the case" and this is indeed a dispute about what is or in not in the public domain rather than one about a literal taking back of elements of the public domain. Nonetheless, the practical effect of the ruling is to make it hazardous to use public domain characters from older works of literature in new films if such characters have previously been depicted in any film that remains under copyright (which obviously limits what one can do with certain public domain materials on penalty of being sued for infringement).
Robot Vacuum Sucks Up Radiation at Fukushima Plant
I understand what you are saying, and it sounds reasonable, but I disagree. Your basically suggesting that in every case of a banning, they need to publicly shine the light on every infraction. They also need to spell out an exhaustive list of "strikes," and beware if they forget to include CAPS-YELLING in the list.

No. This is an adult we are referring to here. We can reasonably expect that he knew exactly what he was doing, and was merely pushing the line as far as he could go, and just happened to cross it. This wasn't the first time; he was a repeated offender. This wasn't the start of the problem. It was the final straw (which, in my experience, is usually a minor straw when compared to the haystack beneath it).

Edit: Thank you for responding with a more clear comment than you original, btw. =)
Did you see how prevalent the doubleclick (Google) cookies were in the demo? Google also is refusing to implement Do-Not-Track, unlike all other major browsers. My faith in them improving in this particular area is weak.
It's unlikely that you'll find people this way... you should go meet people in your area and see if there's anyone interested.

What's your startup? Why aren't you the technical guy?
The Glee Project Season 1 Episode 5
The Glee Project Season 1 Episode 5
Isn't the theory that for a regular grammar you can use regexp, for a context-free grammar you need sth. with a stack (= parser).

HTML isn't regular, though, is it? So if there's not (even an implicit) stack in his example, this won't work for the general case.
No it's not. It's the same logic that by which women choose gender-neutral or masculine nicknames when interacting with strangers on the internet. I do this.
How Your Private Emails Can Be Used Against You in Court
Also quite difficult to get the same level of conversation.
> the fact that future adaptations of the Wizard of Oz have to ensure that they are not to similar to the 1939 version...

That's not a fact, that's just one blogger's misinterpretation of one lawyer's opinion.
Certainly a good suggestion, but I just laughed at the potential future-irony of him building it, and then suddenly being up to his neck in code, and being back here on HN posting stories about how to scale your startup on EC2 :)
Is the slot machine located in a back alley, in a windowless van, or a Starbucks?

I'd feel pretty safe pulling that lever in a Starbucks, as they did.