skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> astrological

UGHH. Astronomical.

The previous studies have mostly been lower bounds, not attempts to estimate the most likely count. We are still essentially terrible at locating earth-sized planets in earth-like orbits, we are much better at finding larger planets in closer orbits. Because of this, most of the planets that we do find are larger and/or closer, however, this obviously should not be used to deduce that most planets are larger and closer.

This study is using honest statistical analysis to estimate the likelihood of earth-like planets from the data available.
Being part of YC adds a whole new dimension of political clout and credibility irregardless. It's definitely a 'who you know' rather than 'what you know' notch on the belt beyond simple validation. Saying you were part of it may be worth something to the right people at the right time, one day.
Well, the thing is, should we target the fields we're keen on or just target high-paying job fields ?:P

I would go for the 2nd -- peace of mind I guess...
I'm only surprised that astronomers haven't concluded this long ago... Speaking of which, there has been a lot of these new astro sightings this year. Did they do something to the Kepler? I thought that spacetelescope was abandoned due to technical problems. What am I missing?
Still not loading here.
Mobile Evolution: The Importance of Standalone Apps
> It could make it much easier for children to get hold of.

There are currently no age restrictions on heroin. All a child needs is a morally-bankrupt drug dealer, which imo is easier than finding a morally-bankrupt store clerk if it were legal.

> You would also need to define what is "pure" and police that for an endless list of possible products.

'Pure' can be easily defined, and it doesn't have to be 'pure' anyway, just not increasingly harmful - beer isn't pure alcohol, McDonald's burgers aren't pure beef, etc.

> It is difficult enough to keep salmonella out of food, effective regulation of cannabis sounds impossible. Any regulation would need to be sufficiently loose that you do not need a black market.

Comparing keeping salmonella out of food to keeping drugs clean is apples and oranges - they're entirely different problems. Also, given the insane markup drugs are subject to today, primarily due to the risk of distribution, prices would fall with regulation, and imo enough to undercut any current black market. Also, the quality could be better or worse, but you know it would be safe.
Firefox Developer Tools: Break on DOM Events, Edit as HTML, Codemirror
I have to choose between Christianity and Islam. Which one is better? I'd like to dive into a religion that will enlighten me. What's your suggestion?
Show HN: Output debugging info to a Unix shell instead of your browser (PHP)
P2P Ajax over WebRTC
I love it. SVG (or any vector asset really) is probably one of the best ways to handle graphics in a responsive design.

Right now, I have no particular issue with resizing my HTML elements with CSS using different margin/padding values. Font size is easily handled as well, considering fonts are basically vector shapes (and it's the reason why they're rendered differently across browsers). But dealing with images, especially background ones, can be irritating because they're pixel-fixed.

Another interesting vector resource is icon fonts. I recently started a project that included social icons (Facebook, Twitter, GitHub...) in theme-based profiles. Themes mean different layouts and different color palettes. Instead of generating tons of uniquely colored image sprites of various sizes for each theme, I settled for an icon font. You basically use Illustrator to generate SVGs for each social icon, and you use a tool like IcoMoon to build your own custom font. I can then easily apply a different font-size and color for each theme.

Creating vector images is still troublesome, but looking at these demos, I might try to include more SVGs in future projects.
The use of equivalent technology does not imply equivalent outcomes or moral standing.

At a minimum the U.S. and UK spying needs to be balanced against the fact that U.S. and UK citizens invented the core technologies of the Internet, and gave them to the world for free.
Apple takedown notice shutters site that helped locate iPhones for sale
Edison sold stock ticker patent for $40,000
The color theme (green buttons and favicon) is identical and the front pages look very similar.
Thomas A Kempis
Correct me if I'm wrong but it has midi functionality on the payed version. This actually means that it could sound as anything as soon as you plug it on your computer and apply some sampled sound.
My idea of success is a service which works for gamers. The fact that someone flipped a company is irrelevant, there are lots of companies which turned out to be economic failures that were dumped on investors. The fact that it was an economic failure points to a) the fact that gamers didn't flock to it and b) that it wasn't profitable to run or scale
I have a huge spam problem with gmail. Someone sold my email + first name. Googles spam filters are simply powerless if you include a first name in the email. I've reported these as spam (several a day) for months at this point.

Hell, it gets marked as important.
One solution that will ease privacy concerns.
<rant>i find blogging very hard. the exercise of creating a narrative -- putting it together for other people --

when I write a blog, I always get a sinking feeling that nobody is reading - and it's probably true. however, the more I talk to people the more I get hurt for not having these thoughts written down everywhere.

there once was a time when it was hard to tell a story. publishers offered a platform for people to distribute their own content. the limitations of their resources led to competition for people submit their material to them. this is how we get Harper-Collins.

these days with the Cloud, Heroku, Amazon AWS, and so on, we can publish whatever rag we want and the WHOLE WORLD has access to it. for the first time in history information has become cheap.

with this unprecedented amount of information available -- every CD I have every purchased is on youtube. Or else it's on Spotify.

with instagram and wordpress everyone has a chance to tell their story. we are able to find common ground in exactly the way we want. most of the time we just play Candy Crush Saga.

my lingering doubt... with all this crap available, should I add to the mix? I thought the answer was no, but it seems to be yes. </rant>
Doesn't work if threads can have pointers into each other's stacks (which we'd like to support someday for fork/join parallelism).
Well, i've been using customer.io and airbrake for the past two months and i can say i am quite happy with them...
altough i prefer c++ i recommend you to begin with java if you are not an experienced programmer, because i think its easier to learn. in the end it won't matter, programming skills are independent of language
Rolling out a simpler design and a new website in a few days. Some of your objections will be met!

I'll answer here: there's a client for mac, windows, iOS and ipad. There's a web client too - but the conversation has to be hosted by a non-web client and invites sent as a url.

There's a headless Linux version but we use that on servers for media switching etc.

It supports call-out now (to any phone). Call-in is harder - you have to resolve an unsolicited call to a virtual office - we're working on it now.
> Although I'm sure that majorities exist opposing outright legalization, I think that the people who support "drug war" policies as they are currently implemented are in the minority.

Remember, the relevant population here is the population of voters, not the population as a whole. Voters skew older and suburban/rural.
Noted spastic blabbermouth Jim Cramer makes a point of this in his books. He more or less calls disability insurance the most important financial product that people can buy.
When the going gets tough, a "fuck you" will suffice
A tech startup model that doesn't *ever* work
Twitter & others to shelter $11BN in profits with stock option tax loophole
I'm glad Kofi Annan is doing this. I've long felt that the war on drugs has backfired, much as the U.S. Prohibition on Alcohol did. Both efforts gave rise to rich, powerful crime syndicates that inflicted untold misery and suffering on the people these laws were designed to protect.

For a fraction of the cost of drug enforcement, we could fund drug treatment facilities to help people get off meth, crack, heroin, etc., and meanwhile allow marijuana to become a taxable commodity like cigarettes.

There are no perfect solutions obviously but the war on drugs has proven to be probably the worst of the lot.
Fabric is on the way. Paramiko, the ssh library underlying Fabric, now has a Python 3 PR for which all tests pass: https://github.com/paramiko/paramiko/pull/233
I occasionally reread Isaac Asimov's The Relativity of Wrong. While Yudkowsky's The Simple Truth is more rigorous, I find the brevity of Asimov's essay more refreshing. Another perennial favorite of mine is George Orwell's Politics and the English Language.

http://chem.tufts.edu/answersinscience/relativityofwrong.htm

https://www.mtholyoke.edu/acad/intrel/orwell46.htm
I wasn't. :) Working at Netflix now, I can see why. It really is a great place to work, and I can't imagine someone offering me something more interesting (but I'm not completely locking that out).

I'm pretty sure my next move will be to my own startup, as that would be the only place that might offer a better work environment and better opportunity for learning and growth.
Hey guys! I am the CEO of Listn. Our mission is to provide the best experience for people all around the world to connect with each other through the music they love, no matter where they get their music from. Hope you enjoy the app. If you have any questions or concerns please email me: mike@listn.co
Except in the 1980s the leap between a Apple II to a C64 to a 386 PC were tremendous.

Nowadays, the leaps are tiny and marketing based. Or artificially inflated "Oh, no Siri for you!" Incremental change really is worth criticizing and people just don't like to upgrade just because marketers tell them to do so.

The 4S is barely 2 years old. Early adopters are only getting off contract now and might be waiting to see if the newer WP or Android phones scratch their itch. No need to make an urgent move to the 5 series iphone. Heck, if it was me I'd wait out for the next iphone in the hope that the incremental leap is larger. Why not keep this phone running 2.5 or even 3 years? "Good enough" is a relative term. Its good enough because the alternative just isn't compelling yet.
Given that they knew about the distributed nature of cloud computing and computer networks it strikes me as unreasonable to claim they honestly did expect to capture domestic traffic. Furthermore, by the looks of it, they intentionally avoided knowledge of whether traffic was foreign or domestic.

It certainly looks like they intended to gain access to information they weren't allow to knowingly intercept.

Finally, you're assuming they didn't simply spy domestically - and I'm not so sure that's true. They certainly tried to make it very hard for anyone to find out, and there's no indication that any meaningful oversight or review will be permitted.

But at the end of the day there's just the general insanity of it all - the harm to american interests by trying to do to others what would be domestically illegal, and on a large scale - that's just crazy. The status quo seems to be entirely in our favor, and then some rogue agencys seem to be doing their utmost to upset it. What were they thinking?
Gosh that would be the perfect example of poetic justice.
Both tobacco and alcohol have sizable black markets, mostly as a way to avoid tax.
LetsLunch Launches Coffee with entrepreneurs
I really don't understand how we can be the most ethical about treating people after they are dead... especially when we don't know their wishes. For example, my understanding is that before China was the popular source of cadavers, medical schools in the US procured their specimens from India. People routinely turned up downstream in the Ganges and their bodies would be unclaimed and at least put to some good use. If we were to bury them in a mass grave or cremate them... these would be equally offensive to many religions and yet is society really responsible for providing a plot of land in perpetuity for every single person who dies? Or more to the point... should a person's wishes be trumped by the wishes of society on their death? This kind of thing comes up (for different reasons) when discussing estate taxes and organ donation. I don't think there is a perfect answer because it depends on your politics.
thanks for the explanation, I guess I need to do some extra reading on this...
What the....?
It's definitely not easy. And you'll fall back into old, bad habits from time to time.
But going through with it as completely as possible can really make a difference for you productivity.
Elasticsearch 1.0.0.beta1 released
I think a better question to ask is: "Do I know somebody who is proficient in this language that can help me learn when I get stuck?" A real life friend that will explain things to you when you need help is going to be infinitely more useful that an online tutorial.

Go with Python.
The Future of Journalism in the Touch Era
Given that both drug prohibition and the War on Drugs both started as highly racist policies, it seems to be working as intended.
Impressive. But what's the main use case?
Twitter Is No Leap of Faith
Multiplayer games run with a synchronization/prediction model. Most are not run with a purely server-driven world-state. The entire game simulation code and logic runs locally and is sent to the server, the server than collects all the inputs and calculates differences to the world state and sends back the diffs with predictions based on latency. These diffs may differ from the local state, and so corrections are applied. In the majority of cases, the differences are minor enough that the player doesn't notice. When they are severe, the player notices hitbox inaccuracy or worse, rubberbanding as his actions are "snapped back".

So when you're playing an FPS and you press a button to shoot, the local game logic and physics computes and displays the result immediately (firing animation, sound start playing). A short delay later, the server confirms a kill.

Even with this fairly sophisticated model, you still want <50ms pings. Video streaming and running the entire game in the cloud just won't work for games that require rapid hand-eye coordination.
It's a tabloid; what nation in the developed world doesn't have tabloids?
I just get a "Ghostery blocked comments powered by Disqus." when I go to that page. Why does it seem like the whole article is wrapped up in Disqus?
Support the drug war ... for moral reasons?

That mother showing pictures of her 4 missing boys in the article this thread is about, I think she would argue the war is immoral.

I think the people who think the drug war is moral, would change their mind if they spent more than 30 seconds thinking about it.

Baffles my mind, and when pressed in person, even pious blowhards admit there are serious violent death problems with their methods --- but the people who support them seem totally oblivious to the violent oppressive death that their war causes.

How the fuck is it a moral war?
For hacking it's essential that lyrics don't take up any brainspace, as (at least for me) the verbal part of brain needs to 'hear code' I'm reading/writing.

So it's either something purely instrumental (say, Apocalyptica), something completely foreign (j-rock? most european languages don't work as too many words are semi-understandable), or something that I've listened to for a dozen years and know entirely by heart.
We're (other people, not me) at least working on it.

http://www.nasa.gov/centers/glenn/technology/warp/warp.html

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/100_Year_Starship

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Faster-than-light

If they're successful and you warp to a planet that's 100 light years away then warp back, I don't know how much time would have passed on Earth though.
I would recommend following the patterns outlined here: https://github.com/umdjs/umd
Mozilla will be attacked when sites start breaking.

I have been browsing with third party cookies blocked for years - the problems have been trivial, like disqus embedded comment boxes not letting me log in. I've never noticed anything important breaking.

You can experience it yourself in Firefox via Preferences -> Privacy -> Third party cookies -> Never
Great site! Good idea! Bookmarked!
Whats your take on affiliate programs?
I would like to hear whats is working for you and whats not working.
For the same reason dating couples breakup: because something changes, externally or internally, that makes staying together less desirable than splitting up.
I've been married for 3+ years, and been with my spouse for almost 10. We have a child. There is, to put it lightly, momentum that keeps us together along with societal pressures (a dad married to the mom is superior to the dad divorced from the mom, all other things equal.)

I'm not posting to comment on whether this pressure is good or bad, but merely to point out it exists. We live in a culture that celebrates weddings and proposals and scandalizes divorce (look at any tabloid for copious examples), but has little to say about the tenure between.

The trend of dating long term, co-habitation, and finally "tying the knot" late in the relationship is an interestingly recent development in America. I'm curious to see how the data on US divorce evolves as this trend matures. Most of my peers (I'm late Gen X) and Millenials I know are following this pattern.

I suspect it is a direct reaction to generations raised in divorced households, but I have no proof of this.

EDIT: small clarification.
Hey guys, CTO of listn here. More services are always in the pipeline we had to stop adding new ones at some point and focus on making sure the ones already in there are as perfect as they could be.
Leahy is the author of CALEA, a surveillance law that is one big reason we're in this situation to begin with. He introduced portions of the Patriot Act under the name EPPSCA a year before the Sep. 11 attacks (http://thomas.loc.gov/cgi-bin/query/R?r106:FLD001:S58859).

Leahy has sat on modest surveillance reform (requiring search warrants for email, cell phone location) for over three and a half years without advancing it to the Senate floor. One proposal he circulated a year ago included an exception allowing dozens of federal agencies to access email without a warrant (http://news.cnet.com/8301-13578_3-57552687-38/). Then, after Snowden's revelations, when the political tide was moving toward significant reform, Leahy's first instinct was to handcuff companies from challenging NSLs (http://news.cnet.com/8301-13578_3-57592778-38/).

I suspect that, after all the likely political compromises and conference committees and markups, any bill principally authored by Leahy will follow the same pattern as CALEA and the Patriot Act. One obvious solution, of course, is to avoid limiting yourself to looking at a pair of existing flawed bills and find a politician willing to back real reform.

Another solution, better for HN, is to work toward technical solutions that will work in the likely event that our esteemed leaders in Washington, D.C. get it wrong once again. Trust math, not laws.
When I was a teenager, it was easier for me to buy pot than beer because pot was illegal in general while beer was legally available for most of the population.

From what I have heard, this situation was not atypical.
"Spiritually, economically?"

Community norms would be an interesting dynamic. Some groups of humans like to conform more than others. What does equal rights for beings with different numbers of tentacles mean to us? Humans think its hilarious good time to fight and kill each other over multinational corporations "owning" teams of grown men playing childrens ball games, so if you think humans aren't going to kill each other over "equal rights for unequal tentacles" from some alien culture, you're a little over optimistic.

Looking at politics, many humans behave as quislings and support groups that basically exist to ruin the groups the quislings are members of. What happens when the same type of quisling susceptible personality meets space aliens is so weird I can't even think of a sci fi story about it.

Also assuming light speed communication is more realistic than light speed transportation, something along the lines of internet trolling behavior is unfortunately highly likely. If you thought your mom browsing 4chan would be uncomfortable, wait till the space alien sociologists start reading /b/ and related. Or even worse, watching televangelist TV shows. Or reality TV. If they discover us by watching honey boo boo and decide to photon torpedo the whole planet, can we really blame them?

Does venture capitalism work across light speed delays? It would probably screw up exponential growth if the bubble has already popped before the IPO news even reached the other side. Can you do a bitcoin like protocol as a concept with multi year light speed delays between 3+ civilizations? What if latency is so long that it increases the likelihood of factoring attacks?

I would be most interested in learning about space alien UI fads. Our own fads are somewhat slow paced compared to faster paced ladies clothes/shoes fashions.
I might be completely off here but it almost seems like they don't actually want people to quit. They just want the tax money.
I know when I smoked I could get a 2 week supply of patches OR gum (at the time) but that just wasn't enough to actually get to the point I needed. Maybe for some people it works but the success rates aren't that great, if I recall.

EDIT:
I just wanted to mention that, I feel this, is completely the wrong use for taxes. They should be for raising revenue not for changing behavior. I don't have a great solution so I won't even attempt to go there.
No, we shouldn't bother trying to plug those leaks.

Current situation:

* You request website A, which includes 3rd party code from C. C drops a cookie
* You request website B, which includes 3rd party code from C. C knows you previously visited A.

New situation:

* You request website A, which includes 3rd party code from C. Website A sends details of your visit via a backchannel to C.
* You request website B, which includes 3rd party code from C. Websites B sends details of your visit via backchannels, and C knows you previously visited A.

Wouldn't you rather such tracking to be out in the open and easily blocked - stop accepting cookies, rather than them creating backchannels to track you instead?

Yes - You should give up if you think you will able to continue sending websites HTTP requests directly, whilst not being tracked.
I cannot listen to music when programming. If you held a gun to my head, I think New Age is the only thing content-free enough not to distract me.
I don't want to start some design war and I am a fellow xfce user, but yeah, its not modern looking at all. It looks like a 1990s unix workstation. Nothing wrong with that, but lets not pretend that its eye-catching to a hypothetical average user.

For the geek minimalist who just wants a low-resource GUI environment, its very, very nice. I can see why Debian went with it.