skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
This is full of ad hominem, rough guesses, non scientific hyperbole, ones persons opinion (the authors, or a person contacted) and colloquialisms and weasel words. Please don't assume I believe in panspermia. But this article is likely to be just as rubbish as the original paper. The emotional language the author uses makes me think that this gripe is personal. As in biased. The opposite bias he accuses the original author of. And he keeps, well, saying, why, well...

Some examples of the hyperbole:

"It’s wrong. Really, really wrong. Way, way, way ridiculously oh-holy-wow-how-could-anyone-publish-this wrong."

"[deep breath]"

Cynically calling the journal "august"

"alarm bells exploded in my head"

"not without some merits." (not 'has some merits' but is just short of no merit at all. as in just 'some')

"fervent proponent"

"Like, really fervent" (did he actually, like, well, write 'like'?)

And so on it goes. And on, and on, and on. Like verbal diarrhoea. It really does come across like he has an axe to grind. This kind of writing really doesn't help his point. Do you think this article would pass peer review and be published in a journal?

I don't know why scientists just can't keep an open mind. Maybe life comes from outer space. Maybe it doesn't. Maybe diatoms are in meteorites. Maybe they aren't. No one really knows, do they?
I see this behavior as a validation of Bitcoin in particular and alternative currencies in general. People horde the currency they feel is worth the most. The dollar is being inflated significantly by the Federal Reserve. The "horders" of Bitcoins are actually investors who believe it will rise relative to fiat currencies.
The problem is that many of us have lost our flagging privileges (accidentally tapping "unflag" after tapping "flag" really quickly seems to remove flagging abilities), so by the time the right people can flag the article it might already have the upvotes to stay at the top.
Most pools don't distribute funds to their users until 120 confirmations have been reached so none of the coin that they mined will show up in their users' accounts. The only way this could cause problems is if the pool's maintainer is somehow still mining on the 0.8 branch which would not happen as the 0.7 branch blockchain has surpassed it in length.

If you are solo-mining and you found a block on the 0.8 branch of the fork, the standard client prevents spending newly minted coin with less than 120 confirmations. It will be the same as what happens when you get any other orphaned block, the funds will just disappear.
Of course the taxi companies want to protect the status quo. Imagine if you had to invest half a million dollars per employee so they could legally operate and then some company claims they don't need to abide by the same system. Nobody wants their investment devalued. But if you think these companies care about keeping Menino in office, you're mistaken. They engaged in a decades-long legal battle to increase the number of available medallions, the limits of which were set in the 1930s.
I really doubt whether bootstrapping your own business is a good idea when you are under great financial pressure which will lead to suboptimal decisions. Getting a 9-5 job to build up a healthy financial situation first might be better idea.

Good luck!
Gumption seems related to the idea of flow from the book of the same name. Being aware of your state of mind and staying totally focused on the task at hand enables you to truly enjoy your work. I think it's time to read Zen.
>UNLESS, Panspermia is correct and all life on earth came from space, in which case it would be completely in the realm of possibility that life from space that landed on earth had already landed here before, in the distance past.

The earliest known life on earth is cyanobacteria from 3.5 billion years ago. The earliest diatoms we've found are from 185 million years ago, and they are believed to have arisen around 250 million years ago.

So even assuming that the earliest life on Earth included diatoms, that leaves over 3 billion years between the earliest specimens observed and these hypothetically original specimens. I don't think the odds are even worth considering that a species adapted for an extraterrestrial environment would be visually recognizable after 3 billion years of terrestrial evolution.
>Twenty years of using Macs conditioned me to think, “well, that’s the Apple way.” It’s such a small price to pay for such a user-friendly device.

Another Stockholm-syndrome patient cured! I recently took over a prototype project targeting the Mac. XCode is garbage. OS X itself actively works against improving your workflow. It's Apple's way or, well Apple's way. iOS is built to keep the user in a padded cell (aka Walled Garden) and OS X is moving in that direction.

Use Cyanogenmod. Be Free. Google Now is amazing by the way. Unfortunately I had to turn my google search history back on, but it was worth it.
Awesome! He's great at responding to emails if you have an actual question/comment. While I don't agree with all of his politics, he has very interesting opinions that he shares on Twitter and in interviews. In terms of tech, he has great advice. His interviews on This Week in Startups and This Week in Venture Capital are some of my favorite episodes of both podcasts.
Not really. Most biometric authentication systems are pretty poor. Add that to the fact that most biometric systems don't use very many features of the signal (e.g. they don't have a lot of key strength / entropy) and you get a pretty lame authentication systems.

A hardware key, on the other hand, can be almost arbitrarily big, is upgradable and totally random.
Actually, that sounds like an excellent thing to drill into soldiers _not_ to do in response. I want soldiers who don't go all My Lai (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/My_Lai_Massacre) in response to one setback.
I suspect the 404 is due to the switch to https.
Heh, that's true. But most Vim users also want customization, as shown by bundles like http://vim.spf13.com/.
How Google makes money from mobile
The choice was made for backwards compatibility. People are still running version 0.3-0.7 of bitcoind and up to this point that was not a problem. If we decided the 0.8 fork was canonical we'd lose a big chunk of the userbase.
The difference here, as I understand it, is that the measurements done on mars were done by looking for samples of specific carbon compounds. This is indeed vulnerable to contamination, since the compounds could be deposited on at any time.

In the case of diatoms, they were looking for fossilized structures embedded in the rock. These aren't subject to contamination (at least not trivially), because contamination would have to actually change the structure of the rock.

The results for both are wrong -- we didn't find life -- but in principle the methods of looking are subject to different kinds of errors.

In this case, the issue is that the author of the original paper has done two major things wrong:

- He hasn't shown that the meteor is actually a meteor.
- What he claims to be fossils embedded in the rock aren't fossils.
I wish the Beetlejuice thing worked here on HN like it seems to work on that-news-aggregator-that-shall-not-be-named. :)

rwalling, rwalling, rwalling!
Server backups: everything else you should take care of
Unlikely for a whole bunch of reasons but primarily that the brand value of "iPhone" is still massive and it doesn't seem to be doing them any harm right now.

Instead I think what's happening is far more powerful and more interesting than that: smartphones (be they iPhone, Android or whatever else) are changing our expectation of what a phone is and what it does.

Saying it's a phone doesn't limit it because people's thoughts on what you can do with a phone are no longer defined by an old landline handset.
I use HN.

I do not need 'badges', 'gamification', 'likes', 'high fives', 'regeeks', or any of the other bullshit that sites like Geeklist offer.

Also, Geeklist doesn't appear to have any actual information on it (see, for example, http://geekli.st/rekatz/links/15535). An entire page wasted on pictures of the submitter, social buttons, statistics, etc.
Assuming they can figure out your identity on those sites, yes. But you also generally know when you lose it, so you can go deactivate it through a backup channel.

Having a keyfob to log in is pretty standard security practice. The only thing that makes a ring different or interesting is that it's an easier form factor, and I presume it would have wireless capabilities so you don't have to actually plug it in for it to work.
It's a blog post, not a scientific paper, so you best get over the informality. Debunking bad science is a thing that Phil Plait does, so if it sounds like he has an axe to grind, that's why.

>I don't know why scientists just can't keep an open mind. Maybe life comes from outer space. Maybe it doesn't. Maybe diatoms are in meteorites. Maybe they aren't. No one really knows, do they?

That's called argument from ignorance. It's a fallacy.
The real geeks are still on Usenet.
Most of the active Geeklist users are just Internet startups who use the platform to brag about their clout.
It's pretty easy for everyone else to feel a bit disenfranchised about the platform when all the popular people are nerds.
Splitting and Merging Pdf Files in C# Using iTextSharp
This. Fingerprint scanners are notoriously unreliable. Either they reject the real person's fingerprint way too often, or they accept way too many similar fingerprints.

A real key is 100% reliable if you have it and 100% secure if you don't.
Tardigrade in Moss
It was great to see in action, but given the way the system is right now it wasn't that incredible.

The maintainers of the biggest pools are all very active in the community; it would just take 2-3 of the big mining pools to say "hey, let's go back to 0.7" for this to be resolved automatically.
There is an amazing and unjustified arrogance on the part of the author on what "software" can do. Add to that the author missing whole areas of our labor force (creative, vocational non-factory, farming).

I would say the labor force makeup is changing and our schools have done a piss poor job of picking the right trends, but we still haven't got to the point a robot can do construction, in the field building / maintenance, or what's left of farming and ranching. I don't see robots getting there for a great while. I haven't seen the robot who can do even basic creative jobs.

The way forward is still humans. If you want to really help the workforce, get micro-transactions that work. That will change everything.
This almost feels like voting based off the results of voting. Read the article, if you find it interesting, up vote. It seems like a pretty simple system. I don't think that other people's comments should play a part in determining whether I feel a story is interesting, but that is the great thing about a vote. You get to determine the criteria for distributing it.
The ring would most likely be used in addition to another authentication factor like a password. An attacker would need both to authenticate.
It's not apparent why it's useful for me. And it probably isn't.

Yet another aggregator? No thanks!
He's pretty responsive via email.
Just in case anyone else was confused: The cost is the same.
Your social media voice will build your real brand
And to the dark fiber BIND THEM.
Note that this is from 2005.
It doesn't seem easy to me to steal a ring from someone's finger.

Do you wear a ring? I ask because I used to think similarly, but now that I've worn a ring for a couple of years, I find them incredibly easy to remove.

Admittedly, some might wear smaller and tighter rings, but I think the good ol' twist & pull works in a lot of cases.
I am in Europe on a 50/5 Mbit line and youtube is just slow and always buffers if i try to watch something HD in the evening. Speedtests give me 40-50Mbit constantly so it has to be a Youtube issue... very annoying :/
Me too. I feel disappointed.
Maybe we have found the evidence, maybe we haven't!
Get Lastpass. It's awesome. All my passwords are 20+ completely random characters. I access the password list via a password and 2 factor authentication (google authenticator on my phone).
Cloud-based media library management for Web and mobile applications
The recession probability chart
Self-healing chips survive repeated LASER BLASTS
This blog post introduces Cloudinary's new cloud-based media library and transformation management UI. Whether you are are developing in Rails, PHP, Django, .NET or other frameworks, you can use this new library to browse through all user uploaded images, perform manual image uploads and use the visual interactive interface to generate image transformations that matches your websites' graphic design.
When someone comes up with something that has all the positive characteristics of fossil fuel (handling and delivery, storage, easy taxing, all weather) then people will switch.
Combining Qualitative & Quantitative Research
From the article:

"The quick backtrack illustrates the danger of bypassing peer review when announcing new results, Peter Doran, an Arctic and Antarctic researcher at the University of Illinois at Chicago, told OurAmazingPlanet.

. . . .

"'You can say anything you want in a press release,' Doran said. 'The peer review literature (by contrast) is very controlled. It needs to be substantiated, and written in clear language.'"

Yep. That's the problem. There is a well known science news cycle

http://www.phdcomics.com/comics.php?f=1174

in which a researcher announces a preliminary result, but as a press release is compiled, the result is hyped up. Then credulous journalists who don't know much about science hype it some more.

My all-time favorite link to share in any Hacker News discussion of a speculative research finding like those posted here in the last few days is the article "Warning Signs in Experimental Design and Interpretation" by Peter Norvig, director of research at Google, on how to interpret scientific research.

http://norvig.com/experiment-design.html

Check each submission to Hacker News you read for how many of the important issues in interpreting research are NOT discussed in the submission.
Perhaps. But they would have made even more money if the financial crisis never happened. We've got a case where executives make bad decisions for short-term personal gain.

This assumption that people always work for the long-term gain, even for themselves, was proven wrong in the financial crisis. The economy is made up of humans, and humans make mistakes.

Later, you bring up the point of $100 million paid to the Lehman Brothers executives. Do you know how much they got every year ? These guys are paid $50 million / year or $30 million / year PLUS stock options... if they wanted to make more money, they should have kept Lehman Brothers operating for just 3 more years.
Yes, having the tabbar on the left is amazing in Opera, esp. with a 16:9 display. I've uploaded a screenshot for you[1] to show you my current tab list. They're grouped into tasks I'm working on atm. On the left the groups are expanded, on the right minimized.

CTRL+# are reserved for websites stored in SpeedDial. But maybe [2] helps you. I doubt that any experienced Opera user would require such a feature, because the more fluent you become with the UI the more often you swap tabs around. Instead I stored sites into the SpeedDial that I visit regularly, e.g. CTRL+7 is HN :)

[1] http://i.imgur.com/Z55rPDh.png
[2] http://my.opera.com/Tamil/blog/go-to-a-specific-tab-using-ke...
An itch I scratched: SnoozeTil
1 and 2 are in the realm of bug fix / minor enhancement. 4 very much depends on where you are in terms of both how much deals cost and how they're structured and what that money means to you but in any case it's not killer.

3 is definitely the most interesting one though it still doesn't feel enough like magic to sway me just yet. Basically it's worked out that he wants to go home and at that point has behaved the way a decent Sat Nav does.

The Sat Nav bit is neither here nor there, that's established technology. The interesting bit is how it worked out that he wanted to go home - get that sort of thing beyond lucky (slightly educated) guess and that is a big deal but without knowing how often it's making incorrect guesses it's hard to know.
some jobs will never be destroyed, i.e. prostitution

i still jerk off manually
You can use google authenticator as a second factor for lastpass, that's what I do. Install the free app, hook it up to your account, bam, hugely more secure.

And you can get lastpass to remember certain devices, so you don't have to keep authenticating on your home laptop, for example (and you can always go to the site and revoke access to that machine if it ever gets lost).

It's pretty awesome.
I wish I had recorded some of my better moments when I worked web hosting tech support. Being able to jump onto a box, poke around at two or three things, notice something wrong from that, and come up with a solution was magic. It's hard to believe unless you actually see it happen, though.

I have the recording capability now (and, more importantly, playback too), but the constant influx of broken boxes is gone. Funny how that works.
Dustin Curtis on Medium
Give red the nuclear option too. Now, blue will think twice before they react with nuclear retaliation to asymmetric warfare.
For what it’s worth the Timepiece ligature demo linked to from this article appears to have been hacked - I’ve let ALA know and submitted it to Google’s malware checker. Would probably avoid visiting that link for the time being.
Show HN: Word Tree in D3.js
Some startups are 'willing' to hire whoever is best for the job but have invisible (to them) obstacles that may prevent them from doing so. I thought the article explained some of those obstacles well.
AmazonBitcoins: Amazon gift codes conveniently sold for bitcoins
True, but then its the geeks who make the likes of Facebook, Twitter and then not use it themselves :)
Learn Sublime Text line bubbling in 2 minutes ☰
An Anti-iPad for India
The real question is, how hard is it for someone to steal your ring without you knowing? Because that's the only part that's important. As long as you know it's stolen, you can go in and deactivate it before the thief can do any real damage. (There's usually a backup authentication measure, like a password text messaged to your phone that'll let you log in to deactivate the key).
Well then he really needs to clean up his writing style. I think his writing is terrible. If he wants to persuade people to be sceptical of the original paper he'll have a lot more success if he tones down the colloquial attacks. It's just way over the top.

Unless it's just preaching to the converted.
Good luck mate.

You had the guts of making a hard decision, and you are paying the consequences of the uncertainity it brings.

Over the last years I have been thinking of taking the same route (like many people with a reasonable stable/steady job, but wanting more from life I guess), but I always had the fear finding myself in your current situation, and never took the plunge.

I don't think that you would have any trouble in finding a job with a steady income if things go pear-shaped, but I hope you succeed in finding your own independence.
I recently found a set of RFID chips that could be bought cheaply in a small set. They were small enough that they EASILY could be fit into a ring. Paired with an RFID reader, you could have some good fun.

The problem is, there aren't any consumer purchaseably RFID+Asynchronous encryption options out there meaning that someone just has to manufacture an RFID with the same ID to spoof your identity. Kind of why I lost interest in hacking something neat.
Maersk's container shipping division is mostly a money-loser. They're lucky to break even on it.

Maersk is a major player in the oil and gas industry, and that's where the majority of their profits come from.
Forgive me if I'm missing something, but doesn't iTunes match have a very similar limit?

http://www.macworld.com/article/1163599/dealing_with_itunes_...
In reality Blue would not do that because then they wouldn't have access to petroleum ever again. All the mideast oil would be burned. Mad Max, anyone?
It's an interesting question, and I'm really just an arm-chair SEO when it comes to the world of extreme money keywords. What I do know from experience is that there are a lot of these extremely profitable keywords. With a little research you can figure out what the top 10-100 keywords are, by traffic, in the world or just in the USA.

Some are totally 100% owned by big corporations who get the majority of the hits for that term and expanded phrases. Some might say that's legitimate because that big corp is the best result for that word. But there are plenty of other keywords that are owned by (formerly) regular webmasters who are now on top and fighting to keep it that way, with a sizable incentive to do so. These keywords are highly competitive and those webmasters will do anything it takes to keep the payday rolling in.
Yeah, I exaggerated the amount of skill needed to operate manual espresso machine. But I don't think it diminishes the point about de-skilling. The point I think most people missed reading TFA (due to my so very highly nuanced brand of snark) is that I don't really have a problem with jobs disappearing... I have a problem with the political rhetoric that we should be creating more jobs. I want less work to do, or at least less _boring_ work, dammit!
I don't see a problem with this - this is a classic problem with systems where people can vote - it becomes a popularity contest, almost by definition.

So all it really is is a popularity contest, it has nothing to do with validity or value...

(insert some political rage about politicians not being leaders her)
Apple is literally selling them as fast as they can make them. The iPhone 5 and the iPhone 4s were the #1 and #2 selling smartphones last quarter. So, I kind of doubt they are on the verge of shuttering the brand.
Here is a crawler for the Play store (Python):
https://github.com/ohwang/scraper
And for the App Store, try the following:
(C#) https://github.com/geykel/AppStoreScraper
(JS) https://github.com/johncch/AppStoreScraperJS
This only scrapes the icons though, but I bet you could adapt it to scrape info too.
History of the Text Editor
iTunes Match has a limit of 25,000 songs:

https://discussions.apple.com/thread/3492422?start=0&tst...
While reading it I got a distinct sense he's paid by the word.
How about not upvoting the article if you haven't read it and verifying its sources? Reading the comments, specifically, has little to do with it.
Arduino for audio - autogain, noise removal, and beat detection with LEDs
My main experience with Geeklist has been the emails they send telling me to use their site more at least once a week.

I can understand them wanting to grow their network, but the damn thing won't let me unsubscribe because I can't log in (forgot password).

I've noticed quite a few sites hiding unsubscribe buttons behind a login wall lately. It's slimy, and not what I would expect from a site aimed at geeks.
Lego Stephen Hawking kit
Are you being serious right now?
Can you give examples of good stuff you've seen from Google Now that have been a real help to you? Stuff that's genuinely useful rather than just "look at that" cool.

EDIT: So far I'm seeing a lot of reasons why Apple wanted to get into maps. A lot of the value add here seems to be navigation related.
Yeah, I found interesting to discuss this 8 years later.

I think a good example could be Frozen Synapse. Not the first [1], but he has fixed some of the listed flaws [2].

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turns,_rounds_and_time-keeping_...

[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frozen_Synapse#Gameplay