skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I don't think it's optimistic.

If a civilization, by the time it develops weapons of mass distruction, is overly agressive, it will likely destroy itself and not evolve into a space traveling civilization.

Any intelligent live that manages it to not destroy itself despite having very advanced form of weaponry, is likely not overly agressive or is able to control its natural agressivity by reasoning.

But then, the chances of Voyager ever being found by any intelligent life form is practically cero anyway.
Paper presentation topics
My hypothesis is that we are alone and the creation of sapient life is a very very rare thing.

The chance of life appearing, on top of the chance of the life being capable of getting more complex (multi-cellular), on top of the chance of life getting sapient, without counting the chances of the uncountable iterations between these steps...

...we can always uplift other Earth's animals.
In a word: Trust.

Microsoft wasn't late to the smartphone party, they were at the forefront. In 2005 if you wanted a smartphone the best option was probably one that ran Windows Mobile. But MS didn't take the market as seriously as they should have and didn't innovate aggressively. So they got caught with their pants down when Apple released a v1 product that was better than their nth generation offering.

MS's mobile division has since recovered in some ways with windows phone 7 but it's also had some missteps in the same time frame (zune, kin). Few people trust MS to consistently deliver a better experience and a better platform than the competition. And now they no longer have the network effect in their favor.

More savvy folks are likely to remember the debacle leading up to windows phone 7 and the severe trouble that entire team has seemed to have executing in the past. It will probably take years to erase that reputation but by then it may be too late given the pace the market moves at.

Windows Phone 7 seems to be quite solid in and of itself, but it needed to be not just incrementally better than the competition but unarguably better. As it stands the few areas where it did have an advantage are rapidly dwindling as the competition catches up.
Online Marketing Video:The Best Way To Make Your Product Noticed
The old saying goes ‘what you see is what you believe’. This has always proved right in case of human beings.
Yes, APL is an excellent language but suitable for prototyping only (imho). Here a sample for Conways game of life in APL:

http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=a9xAKttWgP4&fmt=18
Burn the Fat - The Liver Body Shape (1/4)
Have a conventional war against a concept? No.

Declaring "war" on an idea allows the state to permanently oppress anyone who can be associated with the idea.

This is a powerful totalitarian tool. [0]

[0]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perpetual_war
That's just usual chinese greeting. "Have you eten yet?" is what in english would be "How are you doing?"
Ask HN: What are the KPIs a startup should focus on and what priority?
This is a very general question, but I'd like to especially focus on the key performance indicators (KPIs) for e-commerce startups. Once an e-commerce startup gains a decent amount of traction, what macro level statistics should the founder religiously focus on? I'll list the questions I want answered from these KPIs:

Site Popularity

Customer acquisition cost and channels

Performance of online marketing and online social media campaigns

Customer satisfaction

Customer engagement level.

Also, bonus question: What KPIs do App developers/Social network sites/SaaS startups focus on?
"Willpower: Rediscovering the Greatest Human Strength" by Roy F. Baumeister and John Tierney.

Really good book about willpower, mental fatigue, dieting, working etc. Lots of nice examples and tips to improve different aspects of your life.
Now Free OCR Applications for Your iPhone, iPad
Mobile App Marketing
Just one left to go, I've been waiting for a very very very long time.
The Rabbit and the Mole: the Web Developer and the Data Scientist
It was obvious to us that we didn’t have enough capital to hire experienced developers and while searching for guys to help us with the R&D we realized that we could find great talented young geeks. These guys accumulated their experience by establishment of websites for their own purposes and habits such as movies, sports and dating sites. This always reminds me of the Facebook story which started with a super fast rabbit, Mr. Zuckerberg. At the start he actually created ”thefacebook” service using his own hands and keyboard spontaneously understanding the need to create a simple UI/UX, support operation scalability and demonstrate great value to the end user.
Tech: Code by Charles Petzold

Novel: Invisible by Paul Auster

Essay: Après la démocratie (French) by Emmanuel Todd
Internet Marketing For The New Year And 10 Ways To Promote It Online
I think it's more of an example of the difficulty of judging a "better" product objectively. The xbox 360 is seemingly an inferior product on paper to the ps3 but there are a myriad of other factors at play beyond superficial comparisons (development support, software quality, ecosystem, network effects, etc.)
Design for Hackers by David Kadavy. Besides being informative it was really really interesting to read. Really opened my eyes to a lot of the things designers do deliberately and not just because "its pretty".
It was just a matter of time before the "Number Posts" made it to Techcrunch. I am sure slide shows are not a far way off.
Microsoft has been building a phone OS for a decade. I had one before the original iPhone. At this point no one cares. Android is the other option. If they'd had built a better phone a decade ago, they would own the market by now.
I enjoyed James Gleick's The Information. Wonderful book from one of the best science writers around.
I believe they have quite some involvement with Toyota with regard to transmissions / battery packs or something along those lines. Commercially it seemed a successful deal for them.
Modelos de silenciador de GSM
O sólo sus oyentes poca atención. Además, en algunos países en sus escuelas, por ejemplo, es completamente legal para usar modelos de anuladores de GSM.
Perl Documentation in Terms of Tasks
But SOPA includes private rights of action -- you don't have to convince a government to prosecute anyone. You just need to get any private rightsholder whose content appears on a site to make the good faith claims and poof, their ad networks and payment processors have to sever ties if they want safe harbor.
The Art of Readable Code

Best book on software engineering in a good while.
Mathematical Sculptures Made Out Of Office Supplies 
oops. here's the article: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/12/26/mathematical-sculptures-made-out-of-office-supplies_n_1170370.html
Idea for Twitter monetization: priority access to RegEx spaces for usernames
Twitter could enable users to pay for priority access to certain bounded regular expressions of twitter handles for a variable annual fee (based on their expected popularity) . For example paying for TED* would give you first access to claim all the unclaimed handles in that regex space, e.g. TED, TEDMed, TEDBirdLaw, etc.,. Naturally there would have to be some throttling on how many you can actually claim, and the allowed RegExs would have to be restricted to not be overly broad. Thoughts?
That's probably the best thing I read this year too. It's very good, but not amazing, which just means I haven't read anything amazing this year.
Oh god, don't talk about it.
Show HN: Sandboxing a Mac app that uses the PubSub Framework
I love my Kindle, but the Fire is... ok. Part of what irritates me about it is that with some software fixes it could be a lot more. Having the Google apps for instance, would be a huge improvement. Hardware wise, a microphone would have made it into a convenient device for making Skype type calls.

My guess is that the next generation will be a lot better.
Cloud management over the cloud
No, GNOME 3 includes GNOME shell. GNOME shell is not optional.

FWIW, I'm a GNOME release team member.
Hey Tawheed, I'm about to be in exactly the same situation. I've been dreaming of being able to have only my startup to focus on for so long, having just graduated I thought after Christmas it would be here. Everyone keeps telling me time away is important, but I haven't really learned to take it. I worry about burning my team out as well. Thanks for sharing. We'll see if I come to the same conclusions.
The table of contents looks very good. Do you know any other recent and worthy C++ books? I'm more interested in design-related and deeply technical ones.
I Would Love to See This in Ruby
28C3 Is Beginning Shortly: Watch the Streams
Schedule: http://events.ccc.de/congress/2011/Fahrplan/

Wiki: http://events.ccc.de/congress/2011/wiki/Welcome
Or they are in a "medieval" stage, and the message is interpreted as god speaking. And we become someone else's religion.
Indian student shot dead in Britain
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The formula is given without explanation. You can rederive it without too much trouble.

You can't use the common formula for compound interest because users are assumed to send invites only once. Compound interest would assume they were sending invites continuously over the cycles.

If you look at the number of users added each cycle (the top row) you can see that it doubles each time. It's given by c0 times K^i, where c0 is the initial number of customers, K is the virality coefficient (2 in this case), and i is the i-th cycle.

Adding each of the terms up to i to the original c0 gives the total number of customers after i cycles. So you get a sum:

sum over i from 0 to N of (c0 * K^i)

which using an exponential sum formula (http://mathworld.wolfram.com/ExponentialSumFormulas.html) gives:

c0 * ((1-K^(N+1)) / (1 - K))

Multiply by -1/-1

c0 * ((K^(N+1) - 1) / (K - 1))

and N is the number of cycles (given by t/ct in the slides)

c0 * ((K^(t/ct+1) - 1) / (K - 1))
Status Anxiety - Alain de Botton

It's about how we have come to live in a meritocracy, where your status depends on what you have achieved. Very insightful and readable work by the contemporary philosopher/writer.
I think he was referring to the fact that people talked about Amazon, even outside of geek circles. It was the first big online retailer - before that, people just didn't buy things online. Amazon changed that by generating suffcient word-of-mouth buzz. That buzz in return allowed Amazon an easier job negotiating with publishers to distribute their books, which made Amazon cheaper than bricks and mortar stores, which increased the buzz, which allowed them to negotiate even better prices.
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Show HN: Simply the best trivia game for android - King of Trivia
Elon Musk is my ultimate role model as an entrepreneur.

This article, for me, is somewhat bittersweet. I look up to Elon Musk and what he's doing, because it's really making a difference in the world. That's what I aspire to do someday. But my day to day job is as the first engineer of an advertising startup, where we make boatloads of money helping compagnies better monetize and promote crappy mobile games. Sometimes I wonder if I'm creating any value in the world.

Hopefully this'll be a stepping stone towards financing a startup that'll be a little more meaningful.
I'd prefer to have two logs, one for human reading and one for machine consumption.
I had a fantastic reading year, too much to choose from:

"Cosmos" - Carl Sagan

"Hyperion" + "Fall of Hyperion" - Dan Simmons

"Red Mars" - Kim Stanley Robinson

"The Prince" - Niccolo Machiavelli
How To Get Cheap Laser Eye Surgery
The Hormone Surge of Middle Childhood
Oh, when ever I get the longing for the last one, I go on a revision of my favorite parts in previous books.. Thank fully I started this in August and haven't heard of it before.. Now just one more year to go till the last book.. :)

I still wonder how BS is going to cover all loose ends in one book!
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This one seems OK though -- he's attempting a taxonomy and does a reasonable job. They just made the headline sound like it was a fill-in-the-blanks top ten list.
I am currently working on an app which uses Three20 and I have to say the way it integrates into ios projects is kinda crappy. You have to jump through a lot of hoops to get it to work. They should have made it a simple drag and drop lib/framework like the majority of iOS frameworks or even just have a project template.
Parashuram Kund - Holy Waters
Apple has been telling us the key to beating them all along: Think different.
Everyone complains about the poor documentation, but my biggest problem in the last six months has been the drunkenly uneven performance of https://graph.facebook.com/.

Our users want their avatars / profile pics, but they don't want 20 second page load times. Band-aiding the resulting UX into something tolerable is a large problem for us.
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SOPA bill victory Go Daddy folds. Blogs
How to Entertain Kids on Your Staycation
Boxee 1.5 released. Mac, PC, Linux development ending
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Ask HN: What sort of advice can you offer to a 20 year old?
Hey there guys, it's been a few years since I graduated and things haven't been working out too well for me, nor do I see them working very well in the future.

I'm very poor. I'd like to turn my life around. I want to become successful and have a good career.
RFC-5424 describes a format to log structured data via syslog, so why do we need JSON again? (five years ago, I bet this proposal would have used XML for encoding)
As someone who's made the transtion from muslim -> atheist, I was disappointed, confused and terrified when I first read a translation of the Koran. I'm genuinely curious as to what you've learned from it that's of any use, apart from perhaps, a deeper understanding of the thought-process and ethos of Islamic fundamentalists.
An experiment: Shared memory vs. files
Pradeep Koneru
Pradeep Koneru, managing director and CEO of Trimex Sands. Trimex Sands, established the heavy mineral sands division. Trimex’s India business has consistently grown in scale and profitability.
Protect against claims of pocket purchases? To stop media playing in your bag and draining the battery. Screens can work again skin though thin cotton trouser pockets.
Politics: The Gamble by Thomas E. Ricks

Economics: How Markets Fail by John Cassidy

Fiction: read through the works of Jo Nesbo, Dennis Lehane, Don Winslow and Stieg Larrsson - all of them recommendable
The first think I did was learning advanced features of google analytics. It captures a lot of data regarding sales and marketing. But I want a holistic view of all indicators and figure out what data is important and what is the best way to capture and monitor that data.
This is on my todo list. "Maths and stuff" is a big gaping whole in my intellectual toolbox and I've been meaning to get it sorted out for a while. I'll probably pick something like this up, right after I'm done with "Speech and Language Processing"
Oh look, someone who thinks he's important enough for two govs to want to kill...dream on.
Any civilization building simple space technology the aliens encounter might keep being harmless to them, or given some thousands of years to develop in peace it might both develop robust interstellar flight and go all genocidal on everything in the stellar neighborhood. If you destroy the weak alien technological civilizations you encounter right when you encounter them, you make sure that they won't be coming after you in the very long future you expect your civilization to keep sticking around. And assuming you are already thinking like this, you might also be more likely to think clever aliens will also think like this and be even more disposed to not let them stick around to develop to a level where they can actually pose a threat to you.

It also helps that if you still live on planets, anyone in space can lob really big rocks at the planet with little danger of retaliation to produce handy extinction events, so the game theory is more first strike wins than mutually assured destruction.
Even being very very rare, given the sheer numbers of stars and planets and natural satelites, rare will probably occur often.
Sandra Bullock Stuns in Sexy Suit celebrity popular
But they didn't, as they stated they didn't. At the end of the day, as Namecheap points out, it's against the ICANN rules to prevent whois's and frankly I wish ICANN had the teeth to trash GoDaddy's registrar status.
They did. Reading helps.
I was going to simply counter your "meh" with another "meh" regarding battery vaporware, but unless that site is straight up lying those are some impressive stats. I've always been more a fan of battery replacement stations instead of batter charging, but with a 20min charge and 150km range who cares.
Cloudability Closes $1.1 Million Investment Round
Cloudability, the easy way to manage and monitor all of your cloud costs in one place, today announced that it has closed a Seed investment round of $1.1 million, led by Trinity Ventures and Walden VC. The round also includes $255K in funding from a local consortium of Portland –based angel investors, or over half of the angel money in the round. Cloudability will use the Seed round to expand its engineering team, accelerate platform development and additional cloud-service integrations, and strengthen its position as the leading choice for businesses to manage their cloud costs and services.
- The 4 Hours Work Week (Tim Ferriss)
- The Lean Startup (Eric Ries)
Oakland's continuing trend as an up-and-coming alternative to the SF start-up scene will gain some recognition and tractable returns, exponentially fueling its viability.

Start-ups ending in .ly will reach critical mass and those further hoping to capitalize on this will be viewed as "old-hat" (if even only in name/branding). This will be revisited in late 2012 by a smashing.ly successful start-up that uses it for "ironic" purposes (if even only in name/branding).

Some sort of hybrid between Bitcoin and MMORPG will emerge. If you think people are jumping ship on Bitcoin in droves and that it will soon be "dead", consider that people still play Project Entropia (and even begin playing as new players) to this day, and then consider why.

20 to 30 new programming languages will be released, giving birth to the meta-polyglot, or a language whose purpose is to form a polyglot translation bridge.

Hundreds of articles will be written with titles like "n ways to foo your bars in 2012".

Thousands like me will make public their predictions for 2012 based on the biases and misinformation that have been brewing in their vacuous heads for more than just the past year.
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(a note to the HNer who systematically went and downvoted all of my responses in this thread instead of joining the dialog: Thank you. You missed a few. Also, you might want to go downvote me in unrelated threads as well, I'm sure it'll make you feel better)
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Amazon vs. The Rest of the Cloud
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Who cares about the reviews, building cheap ripoffs of Apple products is now a time-honored route to success, just ask Bill Gates.
* More solar energy startups go bankrupt or shutdown: http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/news/jamesdelingpole/100125720/...

* Bubble in American farmland continues growing: http://blog.mises.org/19970/farmland-is-bubbleland/

* More civil unrest in China as economic landing is closer to a crash: http://www.google.com/hostednews/afp/article/ALeqM5iWObIptHU...

* Ancestral/Paleo/Primal Lifestyle more popular, but still not mainstream.

* Gold at $2,500/oz.

* New season of Doctor Who is repetitive, derivative, but still just as popular and exciting.

* csomar builds a website to keep track of predictions, but his homepage will still say, "coming soon".
Amazon plays off its suggestions of what else to buy, that data is from the network, not your personal network, but the data is only valuable once you have enough users, or else the data is too spiky.

These suggestions to just throw one or two more targeted items into your basket is where they really excelled.
It's actually closer to a decade and a half. The first release of Windows Mobile was in 2000, if you figure they started work a year or 2 prior that works out to nearly 14 years MS has been developing such things.
Turn your Twitter followers into Customers with Airsee
http://www.airsee.com/blog/2011/12/10/turn-your-twitter-followers-into-customers-with-airsee-com/
When founding a startup it's important to avoid "burnouts". It's all about the balance between efficiency and long hours. Taking some time off is good to take a broader look at your business and being more creative. I always try to take 1 day off a week. So I can start the week with a fresh mind for critical problems.
Steve Jobs By Walter Isaacson - The Best Book of All Times
>>> print(1.2 - 1.1)
0.1
For work : Rework, from 37signals. Fresh, opinionated and funny.

For leisure : A Dance with Dragons, from Georges R.R. Martin "Game of Thrones" series (the HBO version is superb, but do not miss the books either).
I hope you're right. But consider also the possibility that any advanced race may have also developed/discovered religion. And trying to predict what their god(s) will think of humans is a hopeless exercise.
If the ability to switch map providers is critical, would it not be worth the time and effort to cleanly extend your abstraction layer to cover the missing pieces rather than give up and call the specific backend directly?
Sharing knowledge among developers
Kahneman's "Thinking, Fast and Slow". It's a great account of things we know about how the mind works, with amazing insights.
Anonymous Hacks Stratfor, Leaks Over 90,000 Credit Cards
Always on the lookout for a good read. Thanks for posting the question. Through HN I discovered:

"A Guide to the Good Life: The Ancient Art of Stoic Joy"

Which I enjoyed very much.
Which is not just incompetent and unprofessional, but obviously very bad for business.

Does anybody doubt at this point that Facebook is crumbling under its own weight? For all their money and hiring they still have a stagnant application and a trainwreck of a developer platform. Predictable I suppose when you grow too much, too fast. Well, hope they enjoy the ride until the next market disruption at which point, tell MySpace I said hello.
In addition to the (IMHO most likely) reason provided by rsaarelm, there is also the small matter of religion. We've seen on Earth what minor differences in religion can entail and there's no reason that such differences wouldn't cause war between galactic civilisations.
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"Anonymous did not attack Stratfor" http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3391895