skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
If we put the financial resources behind it, we (meaning: a very few of us) could leave the solar system right now. It's just that we lack the technology to do it right, with minimal risk and a lot of comfort. This is an engineering problem which we could solve, but choose not to. Putting together a generation ship to leave the system would probably succeed, but it would also utterly consume all our resources. The reason for this is that we choose to suck at space. For all our achievements in other areas, our space program is basically still in the sixties.

The main thing that is missing which would allow for us to even colonize the solar system, and potentially other star systems, is a good way to get lots of energy, such as nuclear fusion. There is nothing physically preventing us from developing a fusion reactor, we just haven't done it yet. Leaving the solar system will get even easier once we master the process of changing the substrate our minds run on from biological matter to something more appropriate, but again, this is not strictly required.

FTL travel is not really needed for us to colonize the galaxy either. It would be nice to have, but at this point it's just beyond our means to think about it. The other stuff isn't, though.
Ubuntu Touch, Firefox OS, and Tizen: The good, the bad, and the ugly new OSes
> Anyone with an ounce of server knowledge would know it's impossible to keep a website up for 100% of the time

As far as I know Google has 100% uptime, so it's not impossible. May not be 100% for every geographical location but that's partly because of things Google cannot control nor make redundant.
Because the borrower had good collateral, and this was good business for the bank. It is what banks are supposed to do.

Bottom line: I think this is not a good case why you need more regulation of banks. It may be a case why you need more regulation of universities.
If April 26 is "World Intellectual Property Day," I declare April 27 to be "World Imaginary Property Infringement Day." A Merry WIPID to all, and may you all enjoy a bountiful harvest.
I really want to hear the opinions of HN community on the following:

1. Does this incident indicate the influence of Associated Press on markets?

or

2. Does this incident indicate the influence of Twitter on markets?

How did we end up using such easy to manipulate sources of information to have so much influence in our high frequency trading algorithms?
Only when they experience the problem first hand!

My brother is a novice computer user, he ripped all his CDs into his music library through windows media player as WMA files. I tried explaining that he'd be better off with a 'free' format, but he didn't care, or rather hadn't the need to care.

Later he acquired an iPod. Then he was totally baffled as to why he couldn't play his WMA files on his iPod. Anyway he went on to transcode using iTunes all his WMA files to probably M4a files. And has no idea that he has potentially thrown some data down the drain in the process.

I'd like to see his face if he then bought a device that couldn't play M4a, but WMA files!

Oh for the glory days of picking up a CD and your ghetto blaster and moving it from room to room.
My view: we will leave our solar system, but not as lumps of meat.

e.g. Greg Egan's Diaspora or Accelerando by Charlie Stross.
I've used it in Austin. I think the idea is flawed, but I've wasted $50 in worse ways before. Basically, everyone shows up with ideas they're already committed to, so no one finds co-founders.
Yes. So a company can't take _itself_ private. Stockholders can take a company private.
Best [vps-cloud_storage] setup to get "cloud syncing" ?
Note: I'm a co-founder of Everyme, but no longer with the company.

I'm not even sure where to start here, because your comment deviates wildly from the actual point of the post. It borders on trollish.

"Are you sure the world needs a social network for families?"

Actually, yes. After seeing behavior from hundreds of thousands of Everyme users, and talking to tons of families the evidence seems to indicate that the world does need it. Did I mention that 30,000 people signed up to be notified when a "private social network for your family" launches? I'm not sure how much more confident we could have been in the concept. We used all of the available data to make the right call.

"Well I don't. And neither do the girls on Instagram that have thousands of followers."

You're entitled to your own opinion, but I am certain you don't speak for all of these people.

"WatsApp had the group messaging feature like forever and I've only seen anyone ever use it once"

Anecdotal evidence, at best. WhatsApp has hundreds of millions of users, they keep the feature around because people are using it.

"Group messaging never seemed to be a popular product category, and not one of the top things to do on Facebook (unlike photo sharing) so it seems like the market doesn't need a standalone app for that."

Mark Zuckerberg recently said: "The big stuff that we’re seeing now is sharing with smaller groups". When a founder who has data from 1 billion people says that, you know it's true.
Sunsetting Flash
Contabo : VPS with 200GB @ 10 EUR / month : http://contabo.com/?show=vps
Well done ones (e.g. in native iOS applications) work really well in my experience, they're regular lists with memory savings.

Badly implemented ones (which is 97% of those on web sites) on the other hand...
Hmm:

This Connection is Untrusted

You have asked Firefox to connect securely to
lukasa.co.uk, but we can't confirm that your
connection is secure.

Normally, when you try to connect securely,
sites will present trusted identification to
prove that you are going to the right place.
However, this site's identity can't be verified.
Yes, but judging intrinsic value is something for investors to do. I want my companies to concentrate on what they are good at---and random companies are not good at playing the stock market. (See the other current discussion about Cooper Union (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5599385).)
Great looking phone, great price.
Ask HN: Would you pay for a variable data printing API?
We are building a REST API which should easily allow to integrate into your website any variable data printing features. Would that interest someone from the HN community? The pricing would be on request inside of licence based.
Maybe you were doing it wrong?
Interesting, my 14 year old son (who is at a private school) is keen on going to a foreign University (probably in the US) and it's not because of the tuition fees - we don't have them here in Scotland.
> The biggest problem I personally have with Dropbbox et. al, is that none of the commercial solutions sync symbolic links opaquely

The tradeoff is to have all your stuff in one place, with is not a good thing most of the time IMO.
A frequent problem I stumble on: there is a work folder where everything is already on svn/git, but I'd want to temporarily sync a few folders to dropbox only when needed, and get them out of dropbox when finished.
As dropbox works now, to do this without using symlinks would be a PITA (I'd have to put all my files in the dropbox folder by default, and then play with the selective sync ? I am not even sure there is a way to do it without moving files around).

If dropbox had support for arbitrary multiple folder selection (but the the complexity would go way up?) I'd agree with your stance on symlink, but now this is more of a necessary evil.
Nice work!

Is there a way to add the stress/elasticity factor to it, so as to demonstrate that after certain point of pulling a point on cloth, any more force will tear the cloth?
Kanban beats SCRUM (at Mozilla)
scribd is "unable to display this document", and the download button doesn't even work. Just link the original.

http://www.valvesoftware.com/publications/2009/ai_systems_of...
I agree that being myself is a great asset, though it can also be a great liability especially if that self is not yet honed to its greatest potential. However, being yourself is still a great way to be an asset someday.:)
> 4) The fist-bump at the end is lame. Seriously.

I thought it was in tune with the whole "awkward hug/handshake" thing in how they botched the fist bump as well.
This looks fantastic. Keep in mind that this phone is designed for the worlds poor-- people who can barely afford enough prepaid airtime to send a text message. Nokia and WhatsApp are bringing technology to an underserved market that have the most to benefit from it. They are achieving what OLPC couldn't.

Now, I only wish this phone had a flashlight.
> Hopefully the practice of trying to revive people for longer periods of time becomes standard throughout medical practices

Hopefully not until we understand what makes that these people don't loose their cognitive functions. Otherwise you'll end up with an army of people in coma. What do you do with all the resurrection failures ?
Are we going to have to whitelist every currency that will exist in the future?

Why not?
“if anyone else can get hold of your phone, he can access to files of those apps where data is not protected.”

As always, if someone has physical access and unlimited time, no device or computer is safe.

Also, Mailbox.app only supports GMail. Security minded people are obviously not the target market.
An important fact is wrong: You actually need to unlock the device to access the data unless the iPhone and the computer were paired before.
shoe shops.
Besides the fact that 6.1B is not the value to the US Economy: those engineers and developers would have probably produced value anyway. So, to be specific, we should know the value without YC and with YC and the difference would then be "the value of YC to the US Economy"; I think we should ask ourselves:

1. How does the YC-factor scale to make a real impact to any economy. Don't ask me data, but 6.1 billion in few years have a 1*10^-n impact to the GDP of most western economies, where probably n>10.

2. If it's fair to call copycats everybody that tries to replicate the concept, any concept. Innovation involves lots of copying, I thought we agreed on that.

3. If the YC-factor can make a real impact on industries that are likely to be fundamental for our future welfare: food, pharma, hospitals, insurance (pensions).

And I am interested in point 3 especially. Because 6.1B is nice, but we need to face the reality here. We live in an aging world were people want to retire at 60 with the same shape they had at 18. Implications of this are enormous for our future.
Speak for yourself, until I was forced away from it that form factor was by far my preferred type. I loved my old Motorola Q9h.

(Not sure what WhatsApp is though... err, 28 year old male, am I in the demographic for it? I already have unlimited SMS for $5 a month or so, and it is indeed how I primarily use my phone.)
Function is beauty.

I doubt you will find another sub $75 phone with a QWERTY keyboard and WhatsApp.

The Pink and Yellow colors are a nice touch too. I think low-income buyers are tired of being limited to just black and gray phones.
If those currencies gain traction comparable to Bitcoin, why not? The standard is being changed every day anyway.
Does that mean that basic security should not be in a company's mind, especially when it comes to the kind of data emails can contain? Mailbox is BIG. We are not talking of an average app here!
>> "The fact that it has not decomposed shows you how unhealthy it is for children."
> How does that show it's unhealthy for children? I'm not saying that a burger from McDonald's isn't unhealthy, but why is this evidence of it?

When something differs from the natural order, I think it's fair to treat it with a large dose of suspicion (even horror!) and put the onus on the unnatural to justify itself as safe.
That's a very interesting read, even though in practice, the ingame AI still feels lackluster. Survivor bots often ignore nearby players attacked by special infected to move (slowly) towards some far away target (another attacked/incapacitated player) and special infected bots could really use some cooperation (as do many human players ...).
You've twice now stated that you're able to do accurate estimation and that "methods for doing so are well known".

Yet failed to cite any sources to back up this claim. My experience among novice, intermediate and experienced developers has been that while order-of-magnitude estimation is often acheivable. Truly accurate estimation is not. Software is far too 'soft' to fit our expectations every time we try and build something.
Yes, I most certainly didn't.
A maze of twisty features, all different. It doesn't seem designed so much as thrown together based on what seemed a good idea at the time (a criticism that is certainly not unique to C++).
> Take the word launch out of your vocabulary – it’s a sign that you are gambling on your app and not building a long-term, sustainable company.

From Steve Blank > Your startup is essentially an organization built to search for a repeatable and scalable business model. [1]

I don't think taking the word launch out of your dictionary is necessary. I prefer to use the word ship anyway. Also, who cares if it's a sign you're gambling? Everyone know's you're gambling by doing a startup. What you're talking about is running a marketing/pr campaign. And yes I whole heartedly agree - do not spend money/time on marketing/pr until you have a product/market fit. What they've effectively done is increase their churn and customer acquisition costs. Marketing does not work unless there is actually a market to be served.

> Instead, put your sign-up page up or your app out because you need more feedback on your idea. Find an audience of passionate users, even if small, and reach out to their community through appropriate means.

This is the only thing web startups need to know.

I launched Compete Hub about 6 weeks ago. I knew it the site isn't perfect, and even though I only have about 20-30 users I do have something possibly very little startups have - passionate users. For example:

1. I belong to a triathlon club full of people who are testing everything out and giving me feedback.

2. I have a follow up meeting with this person: https://twitter.com/competehub/status/313658484245803009

3. After writing a blog post about my plans, I had someone provide feedback.[3] I have a call with this guy in a few days to speak with him in person.

4. I had a sign-up page before we launched that basically said "Are you interested in a website that helps you triathlons? Put you're email here:" I got 60 email addresses from that.

I have a comprehensive marketing plan (that can hit a massive reach for fairly cheap), but I will not unleash it unless I've proven with my early evangelists that there is a market for this type of thing.

TL;DR - The purpose of the MVP is to engage discussions. The purpose of engaging discussions is finding a product-market fit. The purpose of product-market fit is to build a repeatable and scalable business model.

[1]http://steveblank.com/2010/01/25/whats-a-startup-first-princ...

[2]https://www.competehub.com/

[3]http://blog.competehub.com/2013/04/10/endurance-race-discove...
File transfers are peer to peer.
Don't have any data on this, but I know a bunch of not-so-tech-savy people that don't use lock codes. Their data's then as naked as a greek nude.
I wonder if the article writers realize that they've probably let a few people die by not linking directly to the CPR video:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ILxjxfB4zNk

I couldn't even find it on the British Heart Foundation website.
This is correct @nezza. I should have verified this with my friend's iPhone first. But the original issue still remains the same which is the files are not protected!
Exactly. I don't get why whenever someone talks about correlation, people suddenly assume he is claiming causation and start beating him to death.

Correlation is correlation: whether or not there is a causal relationship doesn't change the correlation.
Neat! Here's another one that works not only in Chrome but also in Firefox: http://www.toothycat.net/%7Esham/dev/webaudiodemo/?elysium.m... ;)
If the device is not locked, how about just launching the Mailbox app and browse the attachments via its fancy UI? :)
Maybe use s3fs to store one of your BTS copies on Amazon S3?

That'd cost you $9.50/month just for the storage, bandwidth and transfer costs are a bit hard to predict - storing your mostly-write-only archives are different from your mostly-read-only mp3 collection or your pirate-bay-sourced movie collection collection.

I'm quite excited by this - I've been planning-but-not-doing-anything-about a cluster of inexpensive processors (probably RaspberryPi's or TPLink WR703-Ns) running Tahoe/LAFS. If this busts through NATed internet connections like I suspect it will, I'll probably give up on that plan and just install a bunch of copies of this in various places.
If you had funding already then why not pour a couple of grand into advertising?
That's a pretty sure way to get into the top sellers list.
Is there any hope of a compiler ever coming close to the level of optimization you can get from hand-coded assembly language? The numbers in your table routinely exceeded 10x gains over straight C. What's the compiler doing that's taking so long? Is it not able to vectorize at all?
Stealing the users back button with the History API
Glad to see they're going about it in a scientific way. I don't have high hopes (or any, really), but it would be amazing if it proved to be true.
An entrepreneur's character is truly tested only when his company is failing. You can take one of two options: 1) pay your employees and suppliers everything you owe, return any money that's left to investors and close up shop, or 2) take all the cash from the till and go to Vegas (or some other equivalent of betting the farm).

If this story is true I wouldn't want to have anything to do with Mr. Smith.
I can't reproduce this in Chrome or Firefox. Is this still happening for you?
regarding,
>"Joining as a low-numbered employee is a really big act of trust, bigger in some ways than being a founder.

The reason it's not a "bigger in some ways than being a founder" is precisely because you CAN follow the suggestions you then list

>You ought to find out everything you can about whom you'll be working with, and what they think of you, before you consider it. Getting things in writing definitely is a must-do, but it's not a silver bullet.

There is simply NO way to do that as a cofounder! The paperwork SIMPLY DOESNT EXIST. As an early employee, you can view our patents, trademarks, etch stack, talk with other employees, see our level of funding.

As a cofounder, you get to see an idea.

There is no guarantee whatsoever of ANYTHING as a cofounder, EVEN if you get it in writing. The only thing you can be guaranteed is 50% of nothing.

So in some ways you could say that joining as a low-numbered employee is for people who want to make it rich but don't have the balls not take any salary, not to have any paperwork, anything in place whatsoever that they can do due dilligence on except the person of the their cofounder and the ideas and work that they personally bring to the table with their own two hands.
This is exactly the reason why I don't like playing computer games. The games feel really scripted. Enemy character that wait until I cross a line before they attack me etc.

I wished that instead of investing in graphics, the AI got more attention.
Most of the people I know in the UK use Viber. Likewise most people I know in Japan use Line, Lot's of people in the CHina region use Wechat. It's still a fragmented market and SMS is still the only service that is common. With operators looking to disrupt the market with RCS, it will only fragment it more.
Google's PDF viewer works for reading in the browser (scribd isn't working on this one):

https://docs.google.com/viewer?embedded=true&url=http://...
Far be it for me to rain on this parade, as the founders seem great (and probably somehow related to me given their last name), but if I were to bet on a startup capitalizing on the moore's law change in genomics, it would not be this one (or any other existing company).

Why? From what I can tell, Counsyl is doing genotyping as opposed to sequencing. The latter is what is undergoing "moore's law" price declines.

Second, from the comments by employees on this thread, and the CEO's statement from the article, they are spreading themselves too thin by aiming to be the so-called "Apple" of genomics. Apple didn't start by trying to control the "full-stack", and it wouldn't be Apple if it did.

Third, any company that has Steven Pinker and Henry Louis Gates as advisors, at this stage, seems to be aiming at the wrong things: media exposure and political/legal maneuvering (Our test requires a doctor's prescription) as opposed to making something people want.
It's available at other store like ThinkGeek where it can be shipped outside USA ($26 in case, France !). Search 'Blast Off! Espresso Cup Set'.
What do you mean with "data printing"?
You could also try out redis, it's a key-value store that is easy to use and needs little to no configuration.
The borrower has plenty of assets - I presume these were used as collateral?
The climbing sequence is particularly impressive but maybe a tad excessive in my opinion but. I count six operations, two of which seem to computationally intensive due to their trial-and-error approach. I can see the reasoning behind it if the AI is climbing a physics props but surely map data could be retrieved relative to position and save all that ray tracing (if that's the correct term)?
Your iOS device isn’t as encrypted as you think
I've had the same problem on my windows phone. I think it's an issue with StartSSL certs that are not trusted as much as others.
I have had a HTC ChaCha for quite a while.

It would have been a great phone however the memory management is embarrassingly bad [1]. If they had sorted the memory problem and allowed the dedicated FB button to be used for anything e.g take photos or activate a chat app, they would have made a dent in the phone market.

[1] https://www.google.com.ng/search?q=htc+chacha+memory+problem...
Yes, still happening for me.
Hmm, interesting.

I was going to go with our hard-deadline for life on earth, 800 million to 1 billion years in the future the sun will have baked us so hot there's no liquid water left.

But you're probably more accurate. It's entirely conceivable that by then the increased solar output and our own tech advances will have made it possible to take up residence in other places in the solar system, which may even have become slightly more habitable by then due to the increased solar radiation. Hmmm.
My thought is, that you'll most likely grow slowly like this at first - it might speed up a lot if you're very lucky. However, I don't see the harm in 'launching' down the line (6 months/year) or re-launching when you've got product/market fit.

For example, the people that made pebble had made other smart watches before, Facebook was used for 2+ years in collages before it was 'launched' to everyone. Mozilla spent 6 years developing it's plaform before it launched Firefox (which was 99% the same code as Mozilla anyway).

I'm not saying have a closed/private-beta - just don't go out of your way to call the press, until you have product/market fit.
I can second that. Lightroom is indeed an awesome tool. You should really check it out if you have large amounts of images to be organized and want to bulk-optimize them. It takes some dedication to get used to the workflow and the available set of tools (many!), but it's worth it. Also, Adobe dropped the price significantly some time ago, making this great product available for a bigger audience.
On any app that consists of sensitive information, one should probably implement passcode security on the application itself. Now this might annoy some users, but if you know you are going to use it for something special, you won't mind it!
How do you differentiate yourself from Google Drive?
Looks great! There is an issue with installing/running it on OS X Lion, but I am sure it will get fixed soon.