skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
right, now ok, if it takes 25 million light years, and and in 40 years that voyager apparently only travelled 1 thousands light year away. How on earth,do they know how far it is? Can the telescope travel extend our sense faster than the light can travel? Because if not, then surely it would take 25 million years for us to find out how far it is? And if you will be lazy and ask me to wikipedia it, ave got an exam tomorrow :P. But it seems quite puzzling to me, puzzling enough to perhaps disregard the numbers.

As for how big I feel? Ohh gigantic, bigger than the sun, I contain so many cells, and these cells contain so many cells and they probably contain so many cells, I am a giant universe so giant that I have within me so many universes.
Spam still exists because there are enough people who, upon receiving it, generate profit by buying spamvertised products.

Piracy still exists because people want things for free and copying digital content is a lot easier than stealing a physical product.

Both of these things share two key aspects:

1) The technology in charge of suppressing them cannot suppress them 100% (yet).

2) They appeal to basic nature in a large pool of humans.

Yet everyone seems to focus so much on the first aspect...
Torrent streaming is very efficient for the server costs, However you have to stop trying to lock everything down somewhere because though it's a nice thought it only annoys the legit users.

In the end there is no way to stop someone just "dubbing" the video manually if there are a million software blocks in place, If you can see it you can steal it, Is the way media goes.

All the anti-piracy protections hurt more consumers who pay than the pirates who won't be worried by it once they have it.

However more to the point, Torrenting would be a wonderful alternative especially if it was made aware to the users that by leaving it streaming they'd HELP the BBC, It'd make for great content distribution.

http://trial.p2p-next.org/moreinfo/moreinfo.html
Quis incubatiet ipsōs incubatis?

(who will incubate the incubators)

Freely after Quis custōdiet ipsōs custōdēs? (who will guard the guards
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quis_custodiet_ipsos_custodes%3...)

:-)
That honestly blows my mind, My connection is 10MBit/s down and 2MBit/s up.
And that about the best i can get..

I think i should move :P
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it uses ruby or python?
I miss my yellow text on a blue background in the Turbo C++ IDE. The very first programming environment I jumped in. My Vim colorscheme is still mapped to 'borland'. Good times.
We also have Mother 3, which makes 2 out of 3.
or they might have discovered a way to travel fast into the galaxy by accident prior to being so developed otherwise.
I don't. I did a lot of research and talked to a lot of people. In the end, I decided there wasn't enough money in it to make it "worth it". I figured I could make a few k a year, and the amount of hassle it would have taken would be well less than me just contracting out at normal rates for the same period of time.

So, instead of risking alienating users with various money making schemes, I just give it away, and try to use torrent networks as much as possible to keep bandwidth costs down. I'll just be happy with high user numbers and the fun of writing the program (obj-c/mac), which is kind of why I started in the first place.
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I hope you're right -- I'd be happy to be developing for a more open system.
If you're assuming a fixed viewer, it's actually pretty easy to define position and time. There are just relativistic corrections to a bunch of the terms.
Obesity and Eating Fast
thanks for the link, it seems interesting!

One of the problems with this solution is that the content itself must become "location aware" as it wouldn't be fair to stream BBC content to the rest of the world when it's only being paid for by UK license payers.
I see this as one of the founding principals of BBC iPlayer:- they have had the technology and the content to distribute BBC media worldwide for a good few years, but to do so fairly and maintain the illusion of order (because as you say "If you can see it you can steal it") the BBC have needed a rather robust piece of software to keep an eye on things.
I hope they reach a point where they will turn off the "7 day listings" for license payers and have all the content available for download and sharing via an "in house" iPlayer Torrent.... guess it's not beyond the realms of possibility... and just think, we could finally have Later with Jools Holland on tap! That alone is enough to make it a worthwhile endeavour, when you factor in David Attenborough.... it's almost utopian ;)
Mathematicians are ridiculous. Here's an unsolved problem for you:

Take a positive number n. If n is odd, triple it and add 1. If n is even, halve it. Repeat the process ad infinitum but stop if n reaches 1. For all numbers n, will this series converge to 1?

---------

Until mathematicians can solve a problem like this, they can take their time with the Riemann Hypothesis and Axiom of Choice.

;)

( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Collatz_Conjecture )
Well we have evolved as social being and at times perhaps depended on judging their character. There is no reason to not think that we instinctly know the character of the person by their looks. Further, there is no reason to not believe that beauty and looks go together. Is it not possible that these people who so happened to be good looking and further went on to win the race are also more competent?
Welcome to the Galaxy!
Sorry but there is something that wrong here. If your
product really helps someone, and is worth more than the $ you are asking to them in terms of time, pain or effort, why wouldn't they pay again?
Why do american classics cars are so shiny?
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"Why did the universe have such low entropy in the past, resulting in the distinction between past and future and the second law of thermodynamics?[7]"

I die laughing at this one. "I know that my theory of the origin of the universe doesn't align with the laws of physics. SO THE LAWS OF PHYSICS MUST HAVE CHANGED SOMEWHERE ALONG THE WAY!"

ROFLLMAO
A plea for reasoned discourse and the end of the politicization of science by the left. Excellent article on the quality of the discussion of climate issues. The climate change debate itself, I know, has been done to death here. But I still think that the quality of the discussion, the role of politics in science and vice-versa, are important issues regardless of whether the topic is climate change or not.
He starts speaking about the secret to high productivity at 45:45. It's 'Renegotiate Requirements'. Small tweaks in the requirements can reduce the amount of work dramatically. Don't be a hero, nobody really cares and you'll just wear yourself out.
It's only routing tables that they claimed are growing at a rate outstripping Moore's Law, as I read it.
Some ISPs have done very well in staying ahead of the demand curve. Others, such as BT and Virgin Media here in the UK, are not investing in areas of their network where demand has already outstripped supply.
Only if you assume no acceleration on the objects. But he said charge, so they do accelerate.

You'd have to figure out the position and velocity of each one relative to the others to figure would what the effect of the charge will be. And don't forget to include the propagation delay of the charge field.

This is by far not a simple problem. Much much harder than the N-body problem.

If the top poster had only left out "Physicists are ridiculous." it would have been quite an insightful post, instead it was an inciteful one.

Look up http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Einstein_field_equations - add in http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stress-energy_tensor and you'll see that the motion of relativistic bodies is barely understood.

I'm upmoding him, because I think -7 is more than enough.
I remember seeing this same alarmism in 1995. And 1997. And 1999. And...and...and. Tired of it.
Excellent advice! This is exactly what I'm doing and I'm busier than ever. As budgets tighten, companies are looking for better (cheaper) ways to get the same work done. It's times like this that enable major shifts. OP has it exactly backwards. I can't imagine releasing a free app right now when the pickins' are so good.

A couple of recent examples:

One company has a lot of clerical work but a hiring freeze. I automated their intranet-->fax function, freeing up enough time to get more work done with the same number of people.

Another company had to push out all of their purchase orders for the next 18 months because their revenue stream was slowing down. A nice little 3 week project for me.

Another company had planned on getting a new Oracle product for $500K until I showed them how to get the same output from their existing system for one fifth that amount. (Hopefully they'll have me do that work.)

Notice the pattern: slowing economy --> more IT work --> everybody happier.
Here's an hour of your time: the secret to high productivity is doing less and feeling more motivated, so make things more fun by pushing back against requirements.

In short, work on things that matter, and if you see an easy shortcut, ask for permission to take it.
You're right, he pulled that into the article to support his very weak argument.
I know it's currently in-fashion to give everything away for free but I personally think most reasonable people (that is to say, the ones you actually want on your site) don't mind paying for something of value.

Create a product. Charge a fair amount. Provide outstanding value.

It has worked for us. I'm no billionaire but I'm doing a hell of a lot better than 99% of the other 35 year-olds around me doing something I love and providing a product I can stand behind.
O3D plugin update
Can you infer the purpose of these tools?
The truth lies in between. It depends on what you sell: your time or your knowledge.

I would never contract someone on hourly basis, I'm always trying to buy someone's knowledge not his time.

I'm trying to build partnership not contractorship. If you sell your time you are like an employee; If you sell your knowledge you are like a friend.
Please please just use Java. It's open source and runs cross platform.
Then you can get all those valuable Windows / IE users and not just Mac 5%

---

From my previous post :: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=552633

* Desktop Notifications - This is solved, I wrote one myself[1]

Try using existing Java/Browser technology.

I would suggest this:

Each compatible web page has a signed applet which can also run resident on the remote machine via Webstart. If the server is not listening yet, start it.

If it is listening, send it a message. The Webstart remote applet then displays the message in the GUI.

My server just bound to a range of well known sockets, and the clients tried each one in turn. Try to keep it simple. I just wrote a string with a carriage return to the socket. No XML, no heaviweight protocol.
For no other reason than the fact that I can, I'm going to build this for you...today. I'll post the link when I'm done.
I thought the parent might be downmodded to hell here on HN. Only time will tell.

The guy who wrote that comment is Slava Pestov, author of the Factor programming language.
Automatic updates: There has to be a better way
What Microsoft Research is up to: From HomeWatcher to Somniloquy
But with pie charts it's easier to cheat http://www.wired.com/gadgetlab/2008/02/macworlds-iphon/ :)

Thanks for the link! I noticed that it was harder for me to memorize information from pie charts, but didn't know why.
I worry that Palm are putting too much faith in fixing iPhone "complaints" like lack of hardware keyboard, removable battery, multitasking.

These are all complex engineering trade-offs, it's my natural inclination to think that Apple have got these right. It is, however, incredibly easy to second-guess such decisions from your blogging armchair with no knowledge at all of the factors involved.

I'd rather Palm gave us what we need (even if we don't know what that is yet) than give us what some internet blowhards with a ad-revenue based agenda are asking for.
Quis incubet ipsos incubatores?

Nice try though (I'm sure Juvenal would be proud) but custodiet is just a plain-old future, and incubo incubare declined the same way is incubet. See http://nodictionaries.com/novifex?text=Quis+incubet+ipsos+in... for details.
FFS. Colour me the stereotypical bad guy in that steaming pile of an article.
Thanks for the clarification, I have to admit that m latin is rusty. Or rather it's guesstimated :-)
"But the fact that space near us seems dead now tells us that any given piece of dead matter faces an astronomically low chance of begating such a future"

I think that statement is completely unfounded. We don't know how dead the space is, except that we haven't detected anything so far. The author goes on about us a single data point like that makes us incredibly rare, all it makes us is incredibly ill informed.
Virgin sees space tourism as just the beginning
Not only do comments and stories probably not take equal work, but there are unequal numbers of stories and comments.

This is an issue because the goal is to maximize karma per unit of effort, so the question is how does the expected_karma_per_submission to expected_karma_per_comment ratio compare to the work_per_submission to work_per_comment ratio.

Finally, submissions are assymetric in the sense that they can only be voted up. This is hard to capture in the above ratios. Submit some mindless articles and you will collect no karma on most - but you will get a few points here and there, and in aggregate your karma will increase. Submit a similar number of mindless comments and you'll net lose a bunch of karma.
... gotta be careful here else I'll still be typing tomorrow :)

I started with Delphi 1 writing 16 bit apps for Windows 3.11. Ah, those were the days. My love affair with Delphi continued for almost the next 10 years.

Sob :(

[Edit: I'd like to see a special place in Hell reserved for the managers of Borland, right next to the managers from Commodore]
The improtance of property in capitalism is that it allocate scarce resources such as land, computers, etc efficently.

I do not see how musics and source code fit in the overall scheme of property rights. Rather, copyright and patents actually violate property rights by forbidding people who actually own a copy from distributing new copies at will or building on the copy at will. (Remind me why it needs to last 20 years or 13 years, or whatever years? If it is property rights, than it should last infintely.)

In any case, your assertion that without copyright and patent, there would be no innovation is well contested by a book called Against Intellectual Monopoly.
I have a feeling that this kind of pricing has more to do with lack of competition than with lack of capacity...

That said, Sweden is quite ok. At least during summer.
Hey Nir, it's James from Heroku. Sorry to hear you had trouble with Heroku. I'd like to address some of your concerns:

1. Gems

We completely support all types of gems, including gems with native bindings (which get compiled automatically for your app). Detailed documentation: http://docs.heroku.com/gems

2. Support

While we were were running our completely unsupported public beta, we tried hard to answer support requests, but our main focus was getting the technology developed. Now that we have launched commercially, we have a full support ticket system, fast response times, and are committed to making immediate support a priority.

3. Financial Solvency

It's true, we aren't Google. We are, however, backed by high quality investors with large investment funds, who are committed to Heroku's success. We have strong interest from many additional firms if we wanted to raise more capital, and we currently have a very healthy runway.

I'd love to talk with you directly to better understand your needs and get more detailed feedback, please feel free to email me at james at heroku dotcom.
um, this has been going on for a while. you post a link on twitter, and the google crawler comes by almost immediately.
I guess if we'd throw all our resources at it, the probes would not be far off.

Hey, if we transported enough garbage up to Mars, now, some Microbes would probably survive, adapt and flourish.
It's a really interesting article, and I completely agree. Sci-Fi is a great genre, and it's a real pitty that some people only think about it as space and laser books :(
I am not a GIS expert, but have a passing interest in it among other things. As well as in geocoded tweets.

One thing that jumped out at me was the unnecessary precision with which you post your #ll examples. Twitter, as you know is limited to 140 chars, so space is precious. In your examples you go to 15 decimal places. This seemed extreme. Apparently anything over 6 decimal places is.

.000001 degree of latitude = 0.3 feet or 0.11 meters or 4.32 inches or 11 centimeters.
source: http://www.abika.com/Reports/latitude_longitude_lookup.htm

One's location within 4.32 inches seems pretty accurate for most things, especially if this is extended to GPS devices, which are usually only accurate within a few meters at best.
I have a theory that prestigious schools give you a 'clever grin' which greases the wheels of business AND gets you venture capital. Almost like an old school tie.

Evidence? Look at Mark Zuckerberg's grin. He also wears his tie now...
My tone was a bit overly confrontational I think, for which I apologize.

But I do think the analogy holds. Theo van Gogh was indeed killed for his anti-Islam statements, but by a disturbed individual who had hoped to solve the situation that way. It only made it worse, of course.

The murder of Pim Fortuyn follows more or less the same pattern. Killed by a disturbed individual that figured that was the only way to stop him.

Fortuyn especially had a relatively large following among the Dutch. I don't think "punished" is the right word for it, since it implies that there is any legitimacy to their murders, or even sanctioned by the populace, which is simply not the case.
WiGig Alliance to develop spec for  short-range, gigabit wireless networking
The carrier is really matter of where you are. Where I am, refusing to switch from AT&T makes no sense. AT&T are by far the worst carrier to have around here, with their service seldom having coverage at all; Sprint has good service here, though it's not the best (Verizon is). So, the fact that they are on Spring, rather than AT&T, is what makes Pre far more appealing to me.
Any time that you hear someone say, "we need to get beyond debate and act," it usually means they are no longer willing to listen to others and they just want to implement their solution.
Murdoch: Web sites to charge for content
How does EC2's pricing compare in the early stages? With AppEngine it seems basically free until you reach a certain threshold. Is Amazon comparable, or are you paying a little bit from the get-go?

I'm interested in having more smaller projects, with a higher rate of failure. GAE seems like a good fit, would Amazon's cloud offering work too, and be more flexible?
Wolfram Alpha vs. Google: Answers to Your Queries
Technology Review: Amazon's Bigger Kindle
Not to mention improving my vocabulary - mostly of swear words.
I have fond memories of learning to program in a Borland C++ IDE, but right now I can only think of one thing related to this news:

Please, please let StarTeam die so that my work might switch to something else. It will probably take a few years, but anything at all would be better. Those of you who have never used StarTeam don't know how good you have it.
Fair enough, but perhaps you should make that clearer ("[1] Log on at twitter.com") for the less swift among us like me. :)
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The road less traveled: The coder's bookshelf
It depends on the viewpoint, I guess. Isn't everything a free market in a way? Like in communism, you can trade away as you want, as long as you are prepared to pay for it (with the risk of being killed or whatever).

I am actually very much pro free market, but I still think it is dangerous to assume that all things will just sort themselves out fine. They probably will - to the satisfaction of somebody. That somebody might not be you (or us), though.
A Facebook “Bug” Revealed Personal E-mail Addresses
Star Trek's Warp Drive: Are We There Yet?
Because when a crisis strikes, it's the bankers and derivative traders we really need to here from. Now, you scientists, you need to go out and do something useful. Go shopping.
I would also recommend checking out Stephen Few's books (Information Dashboard Design and/or Show Me the Numbers) for quick and useful guidelines on visually communicating data. Few is a big advocate of Tufte's work and books, and he has a nice set of good vs bad practices in Information Dashboard Design.

I've been an evangelist for Few's books and practices as a "best" starting place for those of us less naturally gifted at data visualization (especially for simpler data or business purposes). He has heavily influenced how I look at typical IT charts and graphs.
While it probably wouldn't be as useful as Lisp macros, due to the comparatively complex syntax, it would at least avoid bugs involving things like #define macros that evaluate their arguments multiple times.

OTOH, not having the C pp tied to C means it can be used for other stuff. The only thing I can think of offhand that uses it is the BSD calendar system, though, and that's largely just #include.
How about just doing science? Seemed to work just fine for hundreds of years.
It should be more often observed that the only reason we see this call for consenus (and opposition) is that they demand government action.

This is a very statist mindset, and that grinding sound you hear is statism running up against science.

In other scientific matters (e.g. If string theory is real) you don't get empassioned pleas for one side.

Environmentalists would do more good by abandoning statism and focusing on private action.

There is nothing stopping people from supporting research into alternative energy themselves. Farmers could be paid by private citizens to slow burn their biomass turning it into stable sequesterable charcoal. The roofs of private buildings could be painted white.

Once those that care about the issue realize their methods and not necessrily their ideas are why they get a lot of resistence, more people will come to their side.
I think we should close all hospitals. Those stupid doctors can't cure all diseases therefore medicine is complete useless.
I don't know - they could have started over and succeed several times in that timespan. The problem must be something other than not giving up.
I play a bit of music, I suck, but I do play, and I can absolutely tell you I KNOW when it's wrong. Not just out of tune but WRONG. And as the grand parent poster pointed out, the creativity in science isn't in the verification part.
It would be interesting to see whether the same correlation holds when you look at individuals. These numbers would make perfect sense if food prep time is included in the "time spent eating" measure (the page summarizing the study doesn't say).
New York City's War on Fat
Anyone else underwhelmed by the keynote? I was hoping for some new material regarding Rails 3, but if you've been following the commits there should be no surprises.

Except when he was alluded to mounting Django apps through Rails 3 ;)