skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Also, this alien civilization needs to be broadcasting a signal we have a likely chance of detecting, something we're apparently not doing:

http://www.seti.org/faq

Are we also sending any signals?

We conduct a passive experiment, designed only to look for signals, not to send them. However, humankind has been unintentionally transmitting signals into space – primarily high-frequency radio, television, and radar – for more than fifty years. Our earliest TV broadcasts have reached about one thousand nearby stars, although any alien viewers would have to build a very large antenna to detect them.

SETI researchers have not been very interested in broadcasting because of the long time one has to wait for a reply. If the nearest civilization is 100 light-years away, we would have to sit around for 200 years for a reply to a deliberate broadcast.

...

If an extraterrestrial civilization has a SETI project similar to Project Phoenix, could they hear Earth?

In general, no. Most earthly transmitters are too weak to be detectable by Phoenix-type equipment at the distance of even the nearest star. The exceptions are some high-powered radars and the Arecibo broadcast of 1974 (which lasted for only three minutes). To detect "leakage" radiation similar to our own will require instruments that are many times more sensitive than what we now have.

I never thought of the SETI guys as being particularly crackpot, but these answers make little sense to me. They're admitting that even if there's another roughly equivalent SETI project on an Earth-like planet 25 ly away, neither of us will hear each other because we're too impatient (!!) to continuously send a transmission and wait for a response?

I know very little about the propagation of microwaves, but my guess is that SETI doesn't want to admit that real interstellar communication would require vastly more signal power or vastly better detection capabilities than our civilization is capable of mustering.
AppFog does not currently support persistent file systems, but we're working hard on adding this feature. In the meantime, we strongly recommend Amazon S3 as a persistent file store.
The power of compound interest isn't what it used to be. When you walk into your bank and see a sign proudly advertising 3-year CDs at 1%, that's when you know it's time to start taking chances. Even crazy ones.
Iraq Veterans Launch RallyPoint: A LinkedIn For The Military (And Life After)
I don't understand this logic :(

These workers have no other way to earn money. I am not saying Foxconn is an angel, but it is the only option these workers have. The other options are to work in agriculture, or educate/train themselves in some other trade/profession. We know how difficult agriculture is. Re-training takes time, effort and money, and I am not sure if the workers can afford any of the three.

It would be wonderful if all the shitty/boring/junk/monotonous work is left to robots. But that has to happen gradually. While we improve robots technology, we should also solve the problem of finding enough work for the workforce that the robots will replace. These two needs to go hand in hand. Otherwise we'll have some serious trouble in our hands. We are at 7 billion people today, and we are on track for 9 billion in the next few decades. How are we going to keep this many people busy?
That only works when you are able to control for all other factors.
If you want to follow the brand directly, bookmark their site or read their rss feed. It's their playground, we're just using it.

The sense of entitlement is overwhelming.
Too cute by half. Sorry.
WebGL is not supported in IE because of some important reasons, it's just not secure enough.. yet.

Most succesful games are not using it anyways.
The argument for full-automation is and cannot be that simple. By just pretending that we just need more of something else you are over-going a lot of real world problems. Most of the people that are being put out of jobs now are not being given a reasonable transition route into those (promised) jobs. And they are also not equipped to take it by themselves, in a lot of circumstances.

If we truly want full-automation of boring and dangerous jobs to become a viable alternative we need a society that is ready for it. You need appropriate living and working conditions, even geographic-spread of those jobs across, education facilities, re-education facilities and so on.

The same as you don't just jump from Capitalist to post-scarcity in the blink of an eye.
High Performance Cloud
The article said that the passing rates were scaled by race. This is a horrible idea.
I submitted a story last week I was a little disappointed got no comments or upvotes, but if this (http://thenextweb.com/shareables/2012/11/06/evil-high-speed-...) is what robots in labs can do no, then things will continue to be exciting and interesting as these technologies get commercialized, become hackable and find new uses.... what COULDN'T robotics like this be used for? (that link was the one I submitted if that wasn't clear)
Why Online Education Works
How would you rate Learndot based on that scale?
You're right. I think people need to give AppFog a chance.

Once they do something like, for example, cloning an app in Singapore and re-deploying it in Ireland in less than a minute, they'll see the value in what we've built.
I like the new title. Much better.
Microsoft hit by second Office 365 email outage in five days
Authenticated Encryption
I remember a quote from some presentation:

"If it fits on an iPod, it's not big data."
Thanks for the heads up on the date shift, much appreciated.
People are always asking what is a good HN article, I'd say this is, great links to research that backs up many of the assertions.

"Erlang matters today because it demonstrates how these semantics can be elegantly packaged in one language, execution model and virtual machine." I think yes, in a theoretical sense this is absolutely true. The question is why is it not a language in widespread practical use?
A genuine question based on the requirement you gave for something to be scientific: how is Darwinian natural selection and the theory of macro (inter-species) evolution disprovable?
Looking closely at the main screenshot, I only see one tweet related to product support. Look forward to future posts discussing their filtering methods. Raw word list? Bayesian learning? 440+ tweets is not insignificant, but experience tells me this takes about 3 or 4 hours per day just to manually identify/categorize using a sane level of effort.
Do like.
I don't think it will be possible to pick a name from a list. The name has to resonate with you guys, it has to have the passion that you have - a soul..aka a story that you can get behind.

Hmm..why don't you go back(metaphorically) to Holden, the town, and look at things that inspire you, things that stand for Holden, things that remind you of your time there.

Thats what I would do :)

Edit: if you want to hash out ideas along this type of thinking, feel free to reach out. I love this type of stuff!
Well, if you want to read things by some of the top contributing users, a good place to start would be the "leaderboard" [1]. Click on one of the users names, and click "comments". These are usually pretty fun to read (especially from those with high "avg" karma).

Also, to answer a couple questions you will inevitably have while browsing through their comments or old posts:

1) There is a karma threshold for down-voting (currently 500).

2) The "expired link" page you see is a known issue and is unlikely to be fixed any time soon.

As for guidelines:

Always try to add to the discussion. Be nice. This isn't reddit (humor is fine, but stupid jokes are not). Upvote on quality of content, not appeal of content.

[1] http://news.ycombinator.com/leaders
Here's something I wrote about Erlang a while back, and why I don't think it'll ever go mainstream:

http://journal.dedasys.com/2007/09/22/erlang
I don't think anybody is saying that you shouldn't strive to understand crypto. I think the overall message is don't build systems with crypto unless you understand it, or have someone in your employ who does. If you don't understand crypto, you will likely implement it incorrectly. It's as simple as that.
>but I really hate the term, "data scientist."

I think most people do, but I've never heard a good term for the job. It's like "we want someone who can take large amounts of data and do something awesome with it". What do you call that?

>Unless you're hiring someone really junior, you want the "data scientist" to have a specialty -- anyone good will have one.

Not sure I agree with this, I want people who are well-rounded. I think it's great to find someone who specialized at something, but I'd want that person to be able to grow the rest of his abilities up to par. Example: let's say you specialized in machine learning. If you don't understand building scalable systems, you can't take a holistic view of a project; how will you know if your algorithms can scale to a production environment? Or, if you can't program well, you can't write code to actually get your algorithms into place. Or if you can't understand the business side of things, you won't be able to build trust with the rest of the company, and hence you won't be able to contribute.
Again, why? I presume you could design to prevent these pitfalls. Or at the very least change insecure default values!
Just a heads up, it's not sold out, I got mine just now which is 3 hours after people are saying it's sold out. The sales keep going up and down I'm not sure if it's due to server issues or they are adding more stock here and there as they get them but you can still get one if you try.
But think about it - if the cost of labor plummets, and material costs plummet because the labor required to gather and refine materials plummets, the cost of pretty much every need and most wants are ridiculously low to non-existant. It's quite similar to the discussions about the economic impact of a molecular assembler.
Breaks when your content gets lengthy, as your position in the editor and the preview don't match up.
This is now two years old, but still a pretty awesome resource:

http://www.gabrielweinberg.com/startupswiki/Ask_YC_Archive

Also if you want to search with more control than Google provides, check out:

http://www.hnsearch.com
Typical HN Top-poster - up in arms about one point they care about, misses entire point of article. The issue is not that there is pricing, the issue is with how the pricing is presented and handled verses how most business people view the concept of likes/follows/subscribers.

> The right price is to charge an upfront fee for brands. In the current system there is complete uncertainty on the cost. And even worse, at least for our size brands, you have to deal with the pricing for each posting, which is a time waster."

> "I'm just suggesting that a single upfront fee or a monthly fee where there is certainty of cost would allow brands to focus on bringing in consumers to like the brands knowing that they can always reach everyone that likes them. I don't know what that number should be."

He's voting with his feet - like any of us would tell others to do - and saying without more sane pricing, he's looking elsewhere. Good riddance is a bad strategy for long term customer growth, methinks... but I'm not a business person.
It's Holden, ME, to be fair.

Holbrook Pond is right there, wonder if that's still sentimental to the foudners.

"Holbrook" is not bad.
Also check out Dillinger.io: http://dillinger.io/

Dillinger can link and upload to Dropbox and Github as well. It's also open source: https://github.com/joemccann/dillinger
Teeny bit of traction — what next?
Am I a poker player?
Ask any smoker, and they will tell you that their best ideas came to them when they went out for a cigarette. That's why they love their breaks and even advocate for having them.

The myth about ideas striking people while taking shower is of the same nature.)

It has something to do with taking a fresh look, another perspective and just reducing the level of stress which accumulates after a 40-50 minutes of some boring activity.

It is an example how a change in the physical behavior can influence one's mental processes.
Holds usually only last for a week, tops.
The Most Engaging Sites on Hacker News
That's a good point that I didn't think of, and would certainly be worth using. As pointed out elsewhere in this thread, though, race affects test cores even more than socioeconomic status.
Just fixed it to use the page visibility API to do just that. Thanks for the idea!
If I knew where to get a risk free, consistent 4% return these days ...
And they can't do that with the limited-stock/item-sold-out system?
i believe the user agreed access to his tv channel, and not that he could be impersonated on tv. maybe that was in the fine print, but i'm pretty sure nobody would sign this agreement knowing such impersonation was an option
Does it make sense, given your architecture and business plans, to move in the direction of shipping/eval'ing the js for each type of app? I ask because we have considered doing this and would like to know any pros/cons that you're aware of.
You're not alone. I have grumbled about it for years. I know Hilary Rosen and others have advocated for the term and I am very sensitive to the hardships endured by working in such an interdisciplinary manner, but it really is a goofy name.

It has always seemed to me just an excuse to run away from the "Artificial Intelligence 2.0" moniker and all the negative connotations that would imply. I dislike the label "Data Science" because there is not really much "Science" with a capital-S being done by people who adopt the moniker and with whom I have had chance to meet.

I have always thought that "Knowledge Engineer" was a more descriptive and useful term for what they actually do. The more abstract you get it seems to fall into the field properly known as Computational Mathematics.
> but we've just gone and replaced their jobs without having solved scarcity

But surely automation, by robots or otherwise, is part of the solution to scarcity? By your definition, you couldn't have a post-scarcity society without them, for who would do the farming and the like in such a society?
> That's over $700 more out of pocket in a year if you go with the subsidized phone.

That's the same savings you get with an iphone on Virgin Mobile/Cricket though [1]. Very few people do this though because Sprint's network sucks and the upfront cost is a turn off. In addition many people do not pay the full plan rate. My monthly AT&T bill is around $59 including fees.

[1] http://news.cnet.com/8301-1035_3-57449345-94/why-a-prepaid-i...
Don't forget Firefox OS! :-)

This makes sense on many levels, Nokia is currently a niche player in smartphones and they have made and continues to make big investments in mapping. The best way to monetize that is obviously to step outside their own hardware and build a separate mapping brand. The upside is far greater than whatever incremental sales they would have got from having good mapping on their phones, if there even would have been any, maybe interest in an ubiquitous mapping solution helps to market the phones as well.
As this project is using Firebase, despite it using randomized keys (which makes it seem like something vaguely "secure", in that other people probably would be unable to guess the key of your document and start messing with you or reading what you wrote), it is trivial to iterate and find all of the other documents people are editing by dumping the database.

To demonstrate, open up a JavaScript Console (such as the Chrome inspector or something; I assume this won't be problematic in other browsers, but it does involve a callback to an anonymous function typed into the console, and I don't do much JavaScript to know if that will cause some weird protected scope error in some browsers) and plug in the following:

new Firebase(Socrates.firebaseUrl).once('value', function(snapshot) {
var val = snapshot.val();
for (var i in val.documents) {
var doc = val.documents[i];
console.log(doc.id + ': ' + doc.title + '\n' + doc.body);
}
})

The output will be the identifiers, titles, and contents of every document in the database (including one which seems to be the developers of Socrates.io trying to come up with a way to charge for people using the beta, including examinations of which payment processor to use, etc.; I'm now quite curious if they realized that was public... it's not bad or anything).
Yeah, I've actually heard people use the terms interchangeably. Although 'quant' is almost exclusively used in the finance world. I interviewed for a couple of those jobs and got caught up on stuff I've never heard of before, like pricing bonds and combining interest rates.
One of the huge hurdles for me personally was Erlang's heritage of Prolog syntax. I actually gave up once, and only cleared it second time around. Now I can see certain elegance and succinctness in the syntax.
This is an interesting problem for a number of startups. Revenue generation is a vexing problem and one that I assume you will iterate over numerous times.

When thinking of online services there seems to be a few ways in which to generate revenue. Advertising, Subscription, per-click or data selling are pretty much the main revenue generation mechanisms. If we break them down and assume that user experience is key above all else for your product and brand then Advertising take a back seat. It doesn't seem as though your product really allows in concept a good space for throwing an add or two in the mix. Doing so would create an annoying an ugly experience for users. I don't think that it is entirely out of the question, however, you have or will have a group of users who are using your product as a tool. There is a good possibility they might need other tools to help get the job done as well. Sending weekly emails with possible tools a particular user might need would help generate advertising revenue.

Charging Per click or per use would also be super annoying and I don't recommend it at all. A low priced subscription model which allows unlimited use gives the user the ability to interact with your product without the unpleasantness of ads or paying "per-click". The actual price for the service should be looked at closely and iterated over several times as adoption becomes higher.

The last item on the list is data selling. You can track what your customers are doing what they are interacting with and make some assumptions on why. I'm sure that there are a number of people who are super interested in that data and would be willing to pay for it.

I hope that helps answer your question.
Keep the idea of lightweight processes, crash at will, message passing, etc. and move these techniques into other languages so we don't have the awkward syntax.
> Sorry to sound cynical about this. Really, I wish the Federal government would get out of the local education business entirely, besides making sure civil rights aren't being violated. But if they're going to be involved, they should be pushing for exactly the kind of student-by-student accountability that NCLB (no doubt with many imperfections) tried to impose.

The reason the federal government is involved in local education is that states do a terrible job of delivering uniformity in educational quality. White flight in the 1960's left urban school districts like Chicago as 85%+ low income and 90%+ black/hispanic. These school districts just don't have the property taxing power that homogenous suburban school districts have, and the federal government comes in to make up the difference.
Target, Schedule, and Preview Notifications in the Parse Push Console
Although this may change in the future, our current goal is a uniform experience for our users, this includes some features not available to many or all mobile browsers, such as push notifications, photo upload, and an all around quality experience.
>f I'm starting a business mass-producing widgets and I fund the machinery, process development, and software to produce that

Its rare for there to be some kind of CEO mastermind that builds everything from scratch on day one. More than likely you started small and your staff built these systems. They came up with the ideas, managed the projects, etc. Their input and ideas created that efficiency.

> he pushes that red button

I think you're taking your manufacturing analogy too far. We're talking skilled labor here, even then you could just have wrote "when my nerd programmers type on their keyboards" and been just as wrong.
If you are looking for a domain to go with it, may I suggest: fixel, gothx, syndi, or vouge ? They are all free to use if you support open source. Contact me holden @ myusername dot org
Because school districts in the US are shockingly segregated by both race and income.
Great article, but in your Craigslist section, you could mention how AirBnB used Craigslist to get their first houses listed http://davegooden.com/2011/05/how-airbnb-became-a-billion-do...
Both of these comments are wrong and right. I think tomjen3's comment accurately conveys how some people feel about an article that starts off with "All the crypto code you’ve ever written is probably broken." "YOU did something WRONG" is a crappy way to educate people. But on the other hand, as engineers/developers we have to learn to separate the tone from the soundness of the advice, because we work with other engineers.

Meanwhile, tptacek makes the very good point that if you ignore this advice because you're offended by it, you're going to end up building insecure systems that will endanger other people's data and possibly worse. But it's an impatient answer and it actually does come off as pretty egotistical. Isn't there some room between "secure" and "incompetent?"

Sorry for being all third-persony. I think you both make valid points, despite the negative tone.
This video is about 3 years old. We should have advanced by now.
Was Sinofsky fired for Microsoft's sins?
Of course, if/when there is a SO-penalizing bug in Stack Overflow or Google code, no-one will be able to fix it since they can't Google for Stack Overflow answers! ;)
If I understand this correctly, they're not saying asian students have to score almost twice as highly than black students. Instead, they're saying, "Okay, a majority of asians are passing our standards and proportionally fewer of black students are, so let's set those as a baseline and seek to improve from there."

I find it questionable they would set the bar for what portion of students should pass state standards based on race, but if black students statistically struggle compared to asian students, I can see why they would do this.
I like the story, I like the website - it's pretty. You don't see so many long-form websites. And based on the principle that improvement happens in discernable, incremental steps forward - the new name is much better than the old one. But what do they do? They're selling the sizzle, but to get to the steak, you've got to sign up - estimate the number of 'learners' you might create, and so on. This sounds more critical than it's meant to be. But what do they do?
Commercial freedom
Great tip. And kudos on architecture done right.