skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Before we get all excited about this, I want to point out that part of the costs of any space mission, which are included in the budget figures you usually see are both the launch and the maintenance and post-launch operations for commanding the satellite and analyzing the data.

Just having two satellites sitting about isn't really that shocking, nor is the fact that the DOD has technology that is more advanced than Hubble, Hubble was originally funded in the 70s, slated for a launch in 1983, and finally launched in 1990.
Did Lewis work at Goldman? Have you read Liar's Poker? How are you qualified to comment on his career?
I figure it this way, I may or may not randomly succumb to a car accident, but if the next day I lost my hand I wouldn't give up on programming, I'd learn how to type faster with one hand. I bet the other one gets in the way anyways.

My point isn't that random isn't a big deal, or that people don't ever overestimate themselves, but that people shouldn't look at it like that anyways, it keeps you in control of your own life.
Maybe, but I'm talking about retrospection here, not prospection. People, even when talking about past successes, are very unlikely to admit their good fortune.

In other words you're more likely to hear, "I worked very hard" than "I worked very hard and was very lucky."

There are notable exceptions. Warren Buffet has openly talked about the role of luck in his success.
FB is already headed down this path. Today (6/4/12) is the 11th trading session for FB, and the stock is down ~ 27% from it's IPO price. That's an averaged ~2% decline per day. Get ready for a fun ride DOOWWWWWNNN!
How LulzSec's Sabu Became the Most Influential Hacker in the World
Amazon...and their P/E is around 175.
Since they were never launched, and (according to NASA) the satellite itself is the part that takes the longest to build, it's plausible that the instrumentation was never installed before the mission was scrapped for whatever reason.
That's part of the point, in a way. Not to prove to people how much they don't know in a negative way (but maybe it comes across that way), but to provide a hopefully fairly shocking number to get them to rethink some of their basic assumptions about development. Using even a moderately different toolset can yield dramatically different (and I'd argue usually better) results.
I said "other 'side'", not 'other side'! (dimensions are silly :) )
However, I'm not a physicist and really have no idea what I'm talking about :( reading about cosmology is only a hobby/daydream of mine.
What exactly was the motivation for this?

Was there actually a problem?
Developer Evangelism is only Two Years Old
Tagstand and the NFC Revolution
In a product design class, the prof asked us to draw the distribution of resistors in a bag of, say, 5-ohm resistors, bought from a local electronics shop.

It turned out that a normal distribution centered at 5 ohms was not quite right. It was a normal distribution, but with a deep notch taken out right at 5 ohms. All the resistors that tested to very close tolerance had been bagged separately, and sold at a higher price.

(The context was why you might want to put, say, four 5-ohn resistors in series, rather than just use one nominal 20-ohm resistor.)
Scaling  Flurry: Measure Twice, Plan Once
I have to be honest.. I follow and trade stocks and I hadn't heard that the Groupon IPO actually occurred. The last I had heard they were having to re-file and all that fun stuff because their financials were essentially one great big lie.

Due to all of this, I am not at all surprised the stock is at the level it is. IMHO the web-tech stocks released lately are all a big wash and pushing into Web 1.0 'bubble' territory, dangerously
Yep, austerity. See decrease in govt expenditures over time (http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/04/27/the-secret-of-ou...).

Also, NASA isn't mind-bogglingly inefficient. Citation needed, I guess. Besides, their budget is a puny 0.5% of the federal budget, compared to 1% back in 1990. The return on science spending is, as far as I know, typically pretty good in the US.

The NASA budget outline can be found here: http://www.nasa.gov/news/budget/index.html. And the complete 2012 budget report: http://www.nasa.gov/pdf/516675main_NASAFY12_Budget_Estimates...

It all looks pretty reasonable to me.
NIST Reports 23 “Open Issues” in Cloud Computing
Amazon IPO'd in the first dotcom bubble...
Export your Picplz photos to OpenPhoto before losing them on July 3rd
Just because something takes focus, passion, and effort doesn't mean there's not luck involved. Basically every major success story comes out of the intersection of those qualities; either one, on its own, typically just gives moderate "success" (e.g. comfortable middle class life), which is really not worth discussing in this context since it's more just the norm in life (at least in the modern western world).

It's really even deeper than that, though. Even having the chance to apply yourself involves a lot of luck. Many people simply don't have the mental capacity to go to Princeton, through nothing they ever did except being born to parents with certain genetics. Many others are born with outstanding abilities that no one ever knows about because they had the misfortune to be born in sub-Saharan Africa.

By all means, be proud of the work you put in to your success. But acting like the rest of the world had nothing to do with it won't make you many friends.
College In Eighteen Years
Are you sure it was brute-forced? And the website owner had nothing in place to see that it was getting hit with brute-force password attack?
I'm always fascinated by downvoting on HN. I'm guessing you expressed what you felt "my success and failure in life had nothing to do with luck" and people are saying by downvoting that you are wrong!!! Why? You didn't say "people's success or failure" you said "my success or failure". In this case the downvoters are being parental and telling you to grow up and have a better understanding of the way the world works.

Or maybe it was this which they saw as factually incorrect: "Luck may have put Michael Lewis at Goldman Sachs, but luck didn't determine his level of success." but didn't want to take the time to correct you so others not as informed could learn.

Anyway, you said this: "I certainly find myself occasionally jealous of people who seemingly lucked into great success."

People normally refer to jealousy in a negative way. Personally I think it's a powerful motivator.
Font Awesome 2.0 - 70 new icons, desktop font, vectors, IE7 support
Remember when emacs used these as shortcuts?
I would agree, if you already understand the business problem. However the UI is often the only thing you can discuss with the client; few clients are going to be able to react to a data model but most can engage in a discussion based on a proposed UI design, which can then help you, the analyst, understand what you need to capture in your data model.
Probably not. The design of telescopes face different environmental challenges between Earth-based and space. On Earth, we have the benefits of accessibility but the downside of peering through the atmosphere. In space, there's no atmosphere but you have to deal with inaccessibility, extreme cold, micrometeorites and space debris, and radiation.

Also take into consideration mirror size. On Earth, we have built (and are building) giant mirrors many meters across. In relation, the mirrors on Hubble and other space telescopes are rather small in comparison. Its really the lack of atmosphere that provides most of the advantage to space-based installations.
i'm having a hard time understanding how you follow the market and stocks, and yet missed the Groupon IPO. Maybe you were on vacation??
Can someone convince me that password requirements add _any_ value to the matter?
Docopt creates beautiful command-line interfaces
Evident Code, at Scale - Stuart Halloway
Given the amount of focus the physics world is putting on string theory right now, and given that hidden dimensions offer us the possibility of a mathematical basis for warp drive, I wouldn't be shocked if a theoretical blueprint for an actual warp drive is created sometime this century. Even if that happens though, I doubt it will become viable technology this century simply because the energy requirements to bend space-time (at a macro level) via a hidden dimension are literally astronomical. I'd wager that coming up with an energy source for warp technology is actually a harder problem than warp technology itself.

As for transporter technology, I don't even think we have the beginning of the science behind that, so I think that's even more distant from today's science than warp drive engineering.
Notifying DNSChanger Victims
I know of a few online communities that have blown up and survived. The key was a set of sardonic admins and a site owner that paid for the hosting himself.

I think that an ad supported online community is incongruous with a quality online community.
Edn.com (Electronics Design Network)site relaunch
Oh?

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2009-07-27/bashing-goldman-sac...
Yes unfortunately the option to learn on your own and apply for a job in the US is your best bet. Immigration law in the US is very strict and confusing. Focus on getting a good job offer and once you are inside the US, you can try and get your employer to file for your permanent residency.
No. Google IPO'd in 2004.
I guess I must have been! I'm not trying to be hyperbolic or anything as well! Heh.
I was thinking more skin color or possibly changes in the eye (if I remember right eyes get swollen when blood sugar is high) Honestly, I don't know if there are enough outwardly visible changes for this to even be possible.
But there's a lot of money out there waiting on the person who can figure out a way to use a cell phone do something like this.
My fault for being ambiguous about the word "bigger", thanks for pointing this out. It's true that you're not looking for a large area per se. What you want is a large perimeter. The best starting click would be a whole lot of thin tentacles stretching out across the board, not a giant square-ish clump.

That is, you're trying to maximize information. A large rectangular area doesn't give you nearly as much information about the board as a tentacle-y one, because most of the squares don't tell you anything but their own value.
Yeah. On 'advanced' I got to the point where I'd click all four corners (and if that didn't work I'd try again) because it massively reduced the chances of coming to a '50/50 guess', which was the biggest difficulty of the game and most often happened near the corners...
True, they are not, but I recently came across this rather stunning plot:

http://www.mondaynote.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/05/Amazon-...

Does this look like a hugely profitable company to you?
Reasonable questions to ask about any technology
>"lets just wait until I can stop your financing"

It's not just my financing; it's your financing as well. I suppose you're more than welcome to have a stake in something worth nothing, of your own volition.

>"but let's not hassle with it now"

You're going to have a hell of time proving your case then, aren't you? Unless, of course, you can prove to the arbiter that you've done the work that is deemed sufficient for the stake you're claiming you deserve. In which case, I guess I shouldn't really have an issue giving you that share. Working as intended?

I'll throw one at you: we agree you take a "little equity", say, 2%. You do an assload of work for me, and I imply on occasion that I'll up your stake, but never actually do. Then I sell the company for billions. You're going to be pretty happy that you just might have a case that you deserve more than you got, in spite of our contract.
Indeed. I'd love to see it become more common for folks to draw a clearer distinction between "worth" and "valued at".
SEEKING FREELANCER - San Francisco, CA
Remote work is not a possibility.
Looking for an experienced Ruby on Rails developer who has built and deployed commercial RoR applications.
Location: Downtown San Francisco
Industry: Marketing/ PR
Project Duration: 1 month - Immediate Need
Pay: $34/hr
Job Qualifications:
•	CS degree or related
•	Experience with best practices in RoR development, including:
o	Test driven development with Rspec
o	Positive experiences and attitude regarding pair programming
o	An understanding of RESTful architecture
o	Good habits regarding clean, DRY code
o	Experience with MySQL, Java, PHP, Memcached, Solr, and/or Agile Development is highly desired
•	Additional Strengths:
o	Full stack experience including one or more of the following: CSS, jQuery, Prototype, AWS, Chef

If interested please email lkahn@atriumstaff.com
VCs are making money by bringing old ideas to new markets
To be fair, I don't think anyone missed the initial IPO, given that roughly half the stories on HN at the time were about how terrible an investment it would be.

I imagine that if they had to pull and re-file their IPO (not being a follower of stocks, I don't actually know that to be the case), their re-entry into the market was most likely a little more...quiet, shame-faced and chastised, as it were.
But we can't fly drones over China and Russia like we can Pakistan
Friction almost vanishes in microscale graphite
Basically every major success story comes out of the intersection of those qualities;

I just wanted to let you know, I'm going to quote that, poorly though since it's out of context as it is.

"Every major success story comes out of the intersection of luck and ability." - dan-k

Has a nice ring to it.
haha well it's probably a good thing! Unless you short stocks...
This has devolved into a semantic argument about wealth and pies. Part of the confusion isn't helped by one line in PG's essay:

People think that what a business does is make money. But money is just the intermediate stage-- just a shorthand-- for whatever people want. What most businesses really do is make wealth. They do something people want.

Besides this one confusing sentence PG gets wealth creation correctly: its about increasing the size of the pie, and that is what's important for the country as a whole.

Your example of the realtor and the bank is not wealth creation, but money transfer. They didn't create new wealth. They made money from you, and your "wealth" is now decreased. The only wealth created in this instance is the wealth you add to the pie when you use that loan to complete your house. The realtor and bank add value in that they enable you to do your wealth-creating thing: build a house.
The simple act of lending you 100k is not wealth-creation because if you piss that money away or burn it, all you have done is give money to someone else. The world is not richer as a result.
Pulling A Lunduke: Holding Source Code Hostage
Get a Slim version, noise level is pretty much imperceptible compared to old one.
I was thinking the same thing and was baffled by all this wii-u talk. Air play is a really neat feature I've been jealous of with my Android devices. If they are able to provide a similar experience using the xbox i already own and my computers/ipad/android phone, i'm really excited. Waiting game for now i guess.
The point I take away is a little bit beyond just realizing that you're lucky. That's important, and the people I've met that I consider truly successful (ones I would consider as role models), generally realize this.

However, I think we can take this further...the only variable that we have under our control is effort. Since luck is an outside force, you might as well maximize this one variable that's still under your control so that you have the best odds.
Think of Scrabble for iPad, where the main board is displayed thereon and players can use iPhones for private game pieces.
To be fair, it is not a precise clone. While the play-to feature is the same, to my knowledge, Apple does not allow in-game and in-movie tie ins. Plus, it allows your phone to act as an extender of sorts. To me, this is the coolest feature.
There's growth investing, and there's pure speculation (which may or may not involve growth companies.) He seems to be talking about the latter - buying in the hope of a "greater fool". Growth investing is based upon the idea that the purchased business will grow and the stock price will rise over time as a result.
More proof that defense gets a lake of cash for every bucket that NASA gets.

Optically I'd think looking down at a relatively bright earth would be a much different task than looking up at a very dark universe. Also field of view is much less important.
Did you read the article? He talks about how he got his goldman job as a result of a series of events that started with him happening to be sat next to the wife of a goldman employee.

Yes, I did read Liars Poker. I think its kinda funny that you question whether I am qualified to comment on his career, but a little bit of research shows he worked at goldman for awhile, wrote the book and has been a writer ever since. In other words, his success is clearly in writing.
Universes created by Black Holes? Big Rebound rather than a Big Bang.
I don't know whether it's statistically more likely, but I do think I find the latter sentiment more often among scientists. Plenty of famous people in science will also refuse to admit luck had much to do with their success, of course, but many others will do so. A total guess as to why is that there's a recognition that "good science" is something you can control, but "science that gets famous" has much more of a sociological and good-timing component that's hard to control. Sometimes people know they're on the verge of a big breakthrough, but other times it's quite hard to know whether this interesting problem you're working on will turn out to be a solid but niche contribution, or a future 1000-citation paper. Sometimes you even have to wait 10 or 20 years to find out that what seemed like a minor contribution at the time was actually made retroactively important by a different advance.
For sure, that's part of it. But I think a bigger part is that the role newspapers play in society is changing and new media is filling roles that were once their exclusive domain.

Or, put another way, I think Craigslist obliterating the classified ad market has more to do with it than analytics suddenly enabling marketers to see their ad dollars were wasted at newspapers.

I might pay extra for newspapers or media with no ads

I probably would too, but that's a terrible deal for the advertiser: pay us money to broadcast your message to only the cheapest, least engaged segment of our audience.
Also - playing games like Madden - you can have a playbook on your tablet, and thus keep the other team from seeing the type of play you are picking. There are a ton of games that benefit from the 'second screen' without busting immersion.

I agree that Skyrim should skip the second screen, but imagine using the iPad as the map from CoD or BF3 - issuing commands to squads via the iPad while they control their characters with normal controllers.
I think part of the problem with realistically viewing one's life through this prism is the impossibility of determining what percentage of one's success is due to luck.

In a sense, literally everyone who is alive today is lucky. They are the product of an unbroken line of genetic material passed down for millions of years. Can you imagine? Not one of their thousands and thousands of ancestors managed to be killed before procreating!

In another sense, everyone alive today is lucky they weren't stillborn. Lucky they weren't claimed by SIDS or whooping cough, or a cold, or any of the various childhood afflictions we've eradicated. Everyone who wakes up tomorrow is lucky they didn't get cleaned out by a bus crossing the street, or sideswiped by a drunk driver on their way home.

Almost all of the "rich" people in the U.S. did not start out rich. Unquestionably, luck played a role. But how much? Who's to say that, if Michael Lewis skipped that fateful dinner, he wouldn't have gone to a frat party, met a future ballplayer, and then gone on to break the MLB steroid scandal. Or sat next to a White House intern and broken the Clinton sex scandal? or, or or. If any one of these alternate scenarios happened, he would still claim to be "lucky" to be in the right place at the right time. And, in a sense, he'd be right. But that doesn't necessarily mean he was successful because he was luckier than millions of other people around the world.

Obviously someone born today in the U.S. is much "luckier" than someone born in Somalia. Someone born into an upper-class family in Germany is "luckier" than someone born into a nomadic tribe in Algeria. Does that make the "luckier" person's success more attributable to luck? (And, as a corollary, the "less lucky" person's success less attributable to luck?) Maybe, but to what extent?
that was satire. he only worked at Salomon.
PageRank = ThoughtCancer
Likely I'm just remembering the chain of events incorrectly then! But either way, yeah... that was a boat I saw along with the rest of the tech community that was trying to bail water as quickly as it was coming in.
>Ecquire evolved from Dropcard, even if it is an entirely different product now"

What does that even mean, really? If they have nothing in common (and they might in this case, I don't really know), then the evolution is irrelevant. You can't stake a claim on all my future ideas because we once shared an idea together.

>"If one contributes substantially in the founding stages of a company, I believe one should end up with something, even if it is a reduced stake."

This has to be determined case by case, which is why I think the early equity split is meaningless. What did they contribute? Money? Code that is still being used? Other ideas that got implemented? It's pretty easy to put a price on these things. If you can't point to tangible contributions to the new business you don't deserve anything. I think the courts would agree.
Perhaps those who "confuse" these two terms do so because they've taken an economics course and realize that there are no superior definitions of "worth" than "what someone values an item at".

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Value_(economics)
I like the part where austerity means your spending goes up substantially, and or stays similar.

NASA budget:

1987: $7.5b | 1990: $12.4b | 1993: $14.3b | 2001: $14.1b | 2006: $15.1b | 2007: $15.8b | 2008: $17.3b | 2009: $17.7b | 2010: $18.7b | 2011: $18.4b

They're doing just fine.
You're half right. I worked for NASA on Hubble. I guarantee you we were not living high on the hog. Holiday inn for 6 weeks at a time, cheapest flights for travel, cheapest everything. They balked at a $12 meal once when It was within an hour or so of a flight home once. We had trouble buying $300 hard drives at times (to run $100k software on). My engineer's salary was modest at best.

But yes, Congress makes all that "sacrifice" irrelevant due to the absurdity of their whims.

Another project I workded on: Al Gore literally had a dream one night, resulting in a colossal clusterfuck called Triana - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Triana_(satellite). That's $100 million, wasted on a politician's fantasy of being able to see the whole sunlit side of the Earth. What would Musk have done with that money?
I already answered on a previous post that I only work in big projects where we stay away of languages like JavaScript for application development.

For us the proper place for JavaScript is the browser, just to do some DHTML stuff.
Your parody detector is broken. Michael Lewis didn't go to Yale, either...

Seriously, did you read the commencement speech? Makes it pretty clear which school he attended and which bank he worked at.
Here's a length how-the-sausage-is-made article about the Washington Post and their struggle with being a national vs local paper. I think the tl;dr is that they're trying to refocus on the Washington, DC area but IMHO as a DC resident, I don't think they are yet succeeding.

http://www.vanityfair.com/business/2012/04/washington-post-w...
Lumping it all under "government spending" is burying the lede a bit.