skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
...our galaxy isn't one of the 'first' ones...

That would be a misconception on your part. Excepting galaxies created due to collisions between other galaxies, all galaxies are believed to have been formed around the same time, and then got separated by the expansion of the universe. So yes, we are one of the first galaxies..just like every other galaxy. Thus we had stars created at all points of time, and some have survived.

That said, there is a more interesting question underlying "why its close to us" that deserves comment. It turns out that the Sun has a tendency to oscillate up and down through the galactic halo. This is good for the Earth, because it limits our time spent in neighborhoods where there is a lot of other stuff we can run into. However early star formation took place in the galactic plane, so most old stars are very near the galactic plane, and therefore the Sun is usually not close to them.

I believe that the period of the oscillation is somewhere in the neighborhood of 64 million years, so we punch through the plane about every 32 million years or so. We last passed through an estimated 3 million years ago, and are currently about a hundred light years away from the plane, so we are still near objects in the plane, including old stars like this one. But in another 10 million years, we shouldn't be!
I think this is the first time anyone has tried to equate ECR to 57th St. There are more points of interest on one block of 57th then there are on 30 miles of ECR. Unless you think drive-thru Arbys are points of interest.
True, I'll improve the wording. The site's a week old; we're now working on properly setting expectations and funneling people toward the right class.
Resources for getting started with Ember
Did you notice the part where this affects every OS and browser?

This is a flaw in Java, not any operating system or browser. Java, across all platforms, provides a way to execute native code if you have the correct permissions to do so. A way was found to exploit this by getting access to a raw classloader using MBeans. Once you have access to that classloader you can do whatever you want.

Please do not try and turn this into an OS war.
It's not farmland low-density, it's just not manhattan. And I don't know that they want it to become more dense than it already is. Northern California likes its trees, low-rise buildings and greenbelts. I don't think anybody wants to see a concrete jungle from Santa Rosa to Gilroy, like happened in LA.
Nice! I am gonna check out the post now. It excites me to hear stories like yours - it installs a little hope in all of us :p.
Page height is calculated exactly the same way in all of the major browsers, and was calculated that way when Google+ created their interface. The fact that browsers are working around it to make a usability fix to benefit web designers does not mean that the fault does not belong to the web designers who intentionally built broken interfaces.
Man Utd vs Liverpool Live Stream Online 13/1/2013
LZW isn't considered trivial because it has "become part of programming canon".

It is considered trivial because it is trivial: http://rosettacode.org/wiki/LZW_compression#Clojure
The VTA is one of the worst public transit agencies in the USA. They're continuing to push for more money for expanded routes, in spite of the projected low ridership.

More coverage of this topic, dating back a few years:

http://ti.org/antiplanner/?p=289
http://ti.org/antiplanner/?p=475
This is true within reason, be careful about discussing your idea with strangers who have the resources and/or ability to go out and build it. Look no further than Zuckerburg vs The Winklevii to understand this
Using space to scroll on G+ works great for me. Even better, j & k - though I don't expect most people to use their keyboard at all to scroll.
Surely you prefer your computer to wait for you since you left it at home.

Are you from Soviet Russia?
The 2nd edition of The Joy of Clojure is underway
New York in stunning 360 degree detail
Few red flags here as other pointed:

- 5 years without any revenue and 20 employees? enough said.

- 5 years of outsourced work? Doesn't seem like a startup could stretch that far if they had real work/potential.

- "5%/year": 5% of what ? revenue ? equity ?
It is really too bad that the guys at Plastic Logic have executed as poorly as that have. I've followed these guys pretty closely from the huge Demo Con reveal in 2008 [1] through their multiple death experiences. I concluded you could give these guys gold bars and they wouldn't be able to figure out how to build product out of them. It is a testament to the potential that I am still mad at this nearly 5 years later!

If they had shipped one freakin' product, that thing where you print to it like a printer and all it did was provide a screen to select which "printout" you wanted to view. That met a huge need. A professional need too, have you seen how many documents a lawyer carries around?

Sadly they were not mentally in a place where they do anything, and that was perhaps saddest of all. Such a waste.

[1] http://www.engadget.com/2008/09/11/plastic-logics-e-reader-v...
Autonomous vehicle networks are the best hope for changing this.

It would be ironic if the US is able to leapfrog other countries in autonomous vehicle networks because it lags so badly in transit, but I bet that's what's going to happen.

On another note, this is a solution that Silicon Valley is uniquely qualified to implement for itself. Get on it.
That's not what I'm saying and you know it. Please don't turn my point into a caricature.

JPEG was patented. I can understand why. It was novel, it was not obvious, and it was useful. That trio makes a pretty good case for patentability, ignoring whether algorithms can/should be patented in general.

From what I've read, Judy arrays are novel, not obvious (moreso than JPEG, in my subjective opinion), and useful. So it doesn't seem far fetched to patent Judy arrays, ignoring whether algorithms can/should be patented in general.

Which is why I said "a little less ridiculous". This has nothing to do with complicated math, even though both data structures/algorithms involve complicated math.
Is a slippery slope the concern here, or is it just a matter of principle that nobody should be allowed to mess with your machine unless you give them permission to?

In this specific case, I don't have a problem with this security fix/decisions. I'm also they glad they did this for my parents since they use Mac's at home, and I'd rather things like this be fixed silently rather than me having to explain some complicated popup that showed up asking they to turn off "Java".
IBM sold off its PC unit to Lenovo to focus on its core competency -- mainframes and large systems.
You're confusing copyright and trademark. If copyright was allowed to expire, people could freely share the earliest Disney movies, but they still couldn't infringe the Mickey Mouse trademark by printing t-shirts since the trademark doesn't expire.
Reversing the format of Job Fair is a great idea, because the bay area job market is backwards; employers have to chase potential employees. It's refreshing to finally see a(ny) traditional institution updated to meet a changing context.
That's great news. Do you know what release this will land in?

Edit: Oops, I guess it's already there. I couldn't think of a site with an appropriately sized fixed header to test it, but Google+ is such a site and pagedown works perfectly there. Nice.
I have coded with and learned with michael before and I think he is one of the most patient and thoughtful teachers I know. I wish you the best of luck and congrats to Sacramento for getting an awesome program.
I'd assume InDesign.

(edit) I'd love to be wrong about this and discover that it was produced with Open Source software, but given that this is clearly print-ready, I'd be surprised if it wasn't. Once you start interfacing with the actual hardware of printing, you need to dot your i's and cross your t's in regards to preflighting the PDF. InDesign & Acrobat are still top of the game there.
Coded at Microsoft in H.S.; Now CEO Of Inc.'s #1 Fastest Growing Company
The problem is that the Valley is a host of municipalities of differing sizes, with San Jose at the bottom end. It doesn't really go as far north as San Francisco (yet). Westchester works as it does because it's largely feeding into New York's superb infrastructure -- there's no comparable network (or city of comparable size) on the Peninsula. There are a lot of people commuting from e.g. Belmont to Cupertino or Mountain View to Palo Alto.
Thank you for your contribution. It makes reading hacker news on my iphone much more pleasant.
Windows workflow for web designers and front end devs
Problems with VTA:

It takes an hour to go from Mountain View to Downtown SJ. The same drive takes ~15 min with no traffic or about an hour in awful traffic.

The route from MV to SJ goes through no where. It parallels the sparsely populated Tasman for much of it, though it will go near the upcoming 49ers stadium.

It doesn't go to Valley Fair Mall or Santana Row, just about the only two places worth going in SJ.

It doesn't go to Santa Clara University or the Airport.

In total, it's the world's slowest train to nowhere for nobody.
You voted with your startup creating apps instead of websites and your wallet by buying apps that this is what you wanted. That I warned you (http://drupal4hu.com/future/freedom) doesn't matter but Douglas Rushkoff warned you and you still didn't listen. So crying over the lost freedom is all that's left, congratulations.
The early web was scattered because there was infrastructure in place but the initiatives were short-lived, diverged, or motivated by personal reasons.

It's the nature of our market - or maybe our culture - for things to agglomerate and monopolize though. Just notice how it's more likely you're wearing shoes made by a multinational company, not the shoemaker next door, or even yourself.
The hope is more to get rid of resumes. They're kinda bullshit, especially for anybody who makes things for a living. You need to see and feel the quality of their work.
Hong Kong is similarly amazing. The virtue of high density and central planning.
How about this one:

Figure out if the pseudocode notation in the paper is using 0- or 1-based array indexing.

If the paper doesn't match your implementation language, consider doing the initial implementation using an array adapter class. The adapters can be removed later if they reduce performance, but they will likely have save you a number of maddening errors in the meantime.
New life for live-action Star Wars TV series
but didn't it really just boil down to 6502 vs z80 back then? Now we have Windows vs OSX but not much has really changed.
This is terrible. The OpenBSD/SSH team tried this once, with the channel bug. They released the privsep version of ssh which didn't fix but mitigated the bug, and told everybody there was a critical bug and you really, really wanted to upgrade. What happened next? Everybody from Alan Cox on down started complaining about how they weren't going to dance to somebody else's tune and they were going to wait to see the real fix, thank you very much.
strabismic here. Never had surgery. As far as I can tell my brain gave up on merging the vision in my eyes and only uses one at a time. Last time I tried 3d glasses was when they were red and blue. The image kinda strobes between red and blue.
"The issue isn't ownership of the file, it's the act of copying."

On top of my head I can't see how you own a book if others can copy and distribute it. For practical purposes, the point of owning is that you can control distribution, charge for it or, say, not allow someone to do a movie based on it.
Non-trivial theoretical basis, reduced to trivial math for implementation.

JPEG and wavelet compression in practice is surprisingly simple math. But the theory that explains why and how it works is far from trivial.
Thank you for the clarification. I was wondering how Apple blocks plugins from other browsers. Both articles I saw did not care to mention that only Safari plugins (and probably third party browsers that use the mac webview like Fluid.app) are blocked.
Has anyone been asked any of these? I'm curious because I've been asked #18 before.
Olark is very common from what I notice. I like their simple interface as well.
SF also had leading edge rail transport during those times as well, which was later abandoned for the most part.

There is a significantly different topography in the bay that greatly complexifies rail projects. Effective rail coverage on a large grid is not possible due to water and hill issues.
Game development diary (Open development) : Nucleotide
What fraction of gold's current value is based on its physical properties?

I don't know the answer, but I can tell you it's miniscule.
I don't really ask these kinds of questions, but I do kind of like them.. the giant puzzle/estimation types. Can someone who asks these regularly give some feedback on how well you think they work? I'm curious how much you end up learning from them.

That said, there are some doozies in this list. For example:
"On a scale of one to ten, rate me as an interviewer".

Um, okay but only if the next question is to rate you as an asshole.
The worst is the carpeted BART cars. Yes, 1960s BART people, in the Mysterious Future we will all take nutrition pills and ride THX-1138 style Electric Trains to our jobs at the jetpack factories.

God Almighty, it makes my feet itch just thinking about it.
The last Hacker Fair was pretty awesome as a potential recruiter - a bunch of bright people showing off stuff they're proud of (some of them slightly jetlagged, which can be amusing), really engaged in an informal environment where power isn't perceived to be on the recruiting side.

If the same group of companies attend as last time, it would be a no-brainer to attend if you're interested in a job at one of them. In many ways, I found the questions asked by the candidates about the companies to be a lot closer to what I think people generally want to know, and it was great to watch two companies both trying hard in front of each other to impress the candidates.
In total, it's the world's slowest train to nowhere for nobody.

I largely agree with this, it does go to the Santa Clara convention center which is nice. And some of the San Jose government facilities. But generally it does not go to places that a steady stream of people would want to go to.
I use -n with almost any network-related command. Probably overreacting, but I hate to just sit there staring at a black rectangle.
| I don't see any benefit to mankind if people were
| suddenly free to print Mickey Mouse onto t-shirts
| and sell them.

Mickey Mouse is a trademark of the Disney Corporation. Someone selling Mickey Mouse t-shirts would quickly run afoul of Disney's trademark lawyers. If Steamboat Willie fell into the public domain it would just mean that I could legally sell copies of it on DVD, or I could dub my voice over the video and post it to YouTube. Neither of these would materially harm Disney. Printing frames captured from Steamboat Willie on t-shirts would fall into an area where Disney could reasonably take someone to court for violating their trademark. Printing a generic image of Mickey Mouse on a t-shirt would be blatant violation of trademark, and practically an open-and-shut case.

I can't tell if you're just trolling or uninformed, but there are always a handful of posts in these discussions that don't understand the differences between patent, copyright and trademark.
The title was the best part of this piece. It included hardly any details and doesn't even come to a conclusion about what was revealed other than that the owners have more money than the players (and that the NFL has more money than the NHL).

At minimum it should have discussed what the issues both parties disagreed with. For starters, it wasn't that the owners "still think they deserve to make an attractive profit on this game".
For me, I ve never had surgery which is why I never had eye movement problems as you describe. Surgery involves shortening (cutting) the muscles that rotate the eye, which requires a period of readjustment.

Reading text in books requires quick eye jumps (saccades). Now, with smooth scrolling, we add to that the need to do smooth pursuit movements , trying to follow the scrolling text. For me, the biggest problem is figuring out where to continue reading after scrolling when the smooth pursuit ends (probably because smooth pursuit has higher margin of error). I think it would really be helpful is there was a line indicating the previous page boundary on screen when changing pages.
If your developers are pressing space four times instead of the tab (key), and the editors aren't capable of reasonable wrapping policies, you should probably replace either the editors they are using… or them. The key point of my article is that we have software to do all of this stuff for us. Hitting three more keys than necessary to indent is the fast road to carpel-tunnel and surely not the best use of developer time.
Keep in mind too that there's no huge, dense attractor anywhere in Northern California that could act as a hub to a bunch of disparate smaller communities.
single-threaded in other words. This is hardly a viable way to execute anything. It may seem like a sequence of serial single goals but in fact you're unknowingly multitasking.
The Longest Nights
Nice. Do you pay for Google Drive? My music collection is too large to store in the cloud affordably. But this looks cool, I'm uploading an album to my (previously unused) Drive to try it out.

Edit: Hmm, seems glitchy. The music is playing but tags won't load and a random textbox is obscuring part of the UI. http://i.imgur.com/sJwd2.png
I agree. When I read this article I was shocked at the low compliance, but when I read the original offer... it didn't really seem like an "agreement" at all.

>My only request is that, after you read the book, you post a review about it somewhere. On your blog, on Amazon, on -- I suppose -- Twitter. Just let people know about it.

The final sentence reduces it to a "make sure you tell your friends about us", which one usually responds "Ok. I will" but doesn't really plan to do so.
It wouldn't work if it was using PNaCl, the client support is not there yet.
There's an app for that! -- actually, there are 1000 apps for that: http://chizzl.com/
Take VTA to the Metro/Airport station. Get off and take the synchronized free shuttle to the airport. Congratulations, you are now at the airport. It doesn't take very long, and costs you a grand total of $2.

There also is a fairly fast, frequent train between San Jose and San Francisco. CalTrain. One of the baby bullet trains will get you into SF faster than you can drive there, and when the new transbay terminal is completed, it will drop you off right in the middle of the city (the current station at 4th and King isn't the most convenient location, but even if you walk from there to market st. I bet you would get there faster than you could drive).
Mass public transit is the best option for the future of everyone?

I'm going to have to say that is not true simply because there's no best that fits everyone.
" He got lucky and his team pulled Facebook through the rough times till the network effect kicked in and everyone had to be on Facebook."

Lucky for 8 years with all those decisions and all those competitors? Luck alone isn't it
Tablets and similar devices are great at what they do, but I can't think of one use case (aside from extreme mobility) where they exceed desktop and laptop computers.
In my experience these "Fermi questions" aren't that useful, the primary thing they tell you is whether the person has previously been exposed to the concept of "Fermi questions" or not.

I guess if the person being interviewed is 30+ and working in software development and hasn't been exposed to Fermi questions then maybe that's a red flag, but other than that I've seen no indication that answering these types of questions well correlates to real world performance.
How to hire a great iPhone app artist on oDesk
The common case is going to be many readers with a few or even a single writer. In that scenario, a read locked database would destroy any chance of operating at scale.
I wrote a similar thing a while ago for python:

http://www.grant-olson.net/python/pyasm

It even mapped all the exported symbols from the python API so you could do stuff like:

CALL PySys_WriteStdout "Hello, World!\n\0"

About every three months I get an email from someone where I have to explain it was a proof-of-concept and never intended for production use.
How To Date Like An Entrepreneur
Automation is a very nice thing. We, too, use Git hooks to run a wide array of checks and cleanup routines. The base that we use is from my hooks collection: https://github.com/amcgregor/snippits/blob/hooks/pre-commit-...
Irony of ironies, the son (grandson?) of the developer is now complaining about too much traffic in his hometown.

"I think developers represent change, and change is difficult," he says. "A lot of people in Menlo Park don't want change, so they don't want development. ... But now here we are — a very wealthy community that has turned its back on development for many, many years."

He recognizes that a lot of the anti-development sentiment comes down to a key issue: the fear that developing the city will lead to more traffic.

"Like it or not, Menlo Park, like every other city on the Peninsula, is growing," he says. "What was going on here in the 1950s is not going on now — this is a major urban center. ... I don't like the traffic either — every time I go home in the afternoon, I can't stand driving by Hillview School."

EDIT: cited from http://www.almanacnews.com/story.php?story_id=3655
Anyone got an answer for this great unanswered question on Quora?
Those family trees are fun. In a different life when I worked in one particular small, tight-knit industry I took a large whiteboard and traced each employee outward. That was a lot of fun.

I suspect in the case of Apple, however, that there would be a lot of circular loops many times over. =)
Yeah, you're right. I should have done a little reading first.

From Wikipedia: "It is sometimes erroneously stated that the Mickey Mouse character is only copyrighted."[1]

I could have avoided this one. :)

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mickey_Mouse#Legal_issues
Ask HN: How to earn $1/day?
I'm looking for ideas to create a passive income of $1/day online and will appreciate any advice from HN community.
“A penguin walks through that door right now wearing a sombrero. What does he say and why is he here?”

He says "deslizarse". He's there because he is my power animal.
That is the point of trusted java applets that you opt in to, but not to standard applets that do something like animate a scientific model.

Java handles sandboxing, but there is no reason the OS couldn't provide a backup. When something wants to run with elevated permissions you would get a prompt from Java, and then a prompt from the OS/browser. If Java had an exploit bypassing its own prompt, the OS and/or/in-conjunction-with browser would still prompt as soon as it tried to do something that required elevated permissions.

Chrome does its own back-up sandboxing for Flash, even though Flash is supposed to do it itself, but Chrome lets other plugins slide (because Chrome doesn't have a notion or interface for user-controlled elevated permissions in its sandbox):

http://productforums.google.com/forum/#!topic/chrome/err6mfb...

This is the failure I'm referring to. It is a concious decision and not an unintentional mistake, but it is still full of fail.

Chrome used to have a --safe-plugins option that is mentioned in the linked thread and could have attempted to prevent something like this exploit and still allowed something like a Java-animated lava lamp or whatever.