skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Much of the paper is devoted to calculations regarding the formation of heavier elements and rocky planets. Surprisingly, the lifetime of the largest stars is only 3 million years:

For massive stars that are dominated by radiation pressure and shine near their Eddington luminosity LE = 1.3 × 1040 erg s−1(M⋆/100M⊙), the lifetime is independent of stellar mass M⋆ and set by the 0.7% nuclear efficiency for converting rest mass to radiation, ∼ (0.007M⋆c2)/LE = 3 Myr (El Eid et al., 1983; Bromm et al., 2001).

Then it's a matter of figuring out how long it takes for matter to clump together and form stars/planets. After some math and citations in section 2:

The above calculation implies that rocky planets could have formed within our Hubble volume by (1+z) ∼ 78 but not by (1+z) ∼ 110 if the initial density perturbations were perfectly Gaussian. However, the host halos of the first planets are extremely rare, representing just ∼ 2 × 10−17 of the cos- mic matter inventory. Since they lie ∼ 8.5 standard deviations (σ) away on the exponential tail of the Gaussian probability distribution of initial density perturbations, P(δ), their abundance could have been significantly enhanced by primordial non-Gaussianity (LoVerde and Smith, 2011; Maio et al., 2012; Musso and Sheth, 2013) if the decline of P(δ) at high values of δ/σ is shal- lower than exponential. The needed level of deviation from Gaussianity is not ruled out by existing data sets (Ade et al., 2013b). Non-Gaussianity below the current limits is expected in generic models of cosmic inflation (Maldacena, 2003) that are commonly used to explain the initial density perturbations in the Universe.

Using current best knowledge about the early universe, it looks like planets did form, but were extremely rare. With some plausible tweaks to how "clumpy" the initial universe was, one ends up with lots more planets.

Side note: much of the paper measures time in z (red shift) instead of years. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Distance_compared_to_z.png to get an idea of the relationship between the two. The red dotted line is time in the past. The black solid line is comoving distance[1]. For comparison, some really old objects are mentioned at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Redshift#Highest_redshifts

1. Distance if you could freeze the universe at the present day and lay out a bunch of yard sticks.
The problem for Google which might cost them 1 Billion is that they say that all sales to french customers are done in Ireland but in the same time Google has 100+ employees in france whith title like "sales manager" who talks about theirs "clients" in internal emails.
It rarely makes economical sense to start with AWS. Very few people have bursty enough traffic for it. Most sites I've dealt with don't even have a day/night cycle that's pronounced enough to justify spinning up servers just for the daily peak until they're huge.

A lot do have a delusional expectation that building on AWS to handle that expected 10x overnight growth that they dream of justifies it, but that "just" justifies good caching and the ability to spin up frontends on AWS or similar if neeeded. Which ironically makes you likely to spend less on your dedicated hosting, as if your setup is ready to spin up cloud servers when the load goes too high, you can afford to get much closer to the wire before you add more dedicated hardware for your base load.

For most people, renting a dedicated server (there's a huge number of providers that charge month to month, with no commitment) will come out far cheaper for anything they use more than ~8 hours a day on average.

To me, if a startup puts everything on AWS, it's a sign they have poor cost control.
> Your character is truly random selected so expect anything.

Actually no, it's more like PRNG. Which stands for Predictably Random Natural Genetic.

Lack of save state is really bad though. Also humans are hard to grasp. Really poor UI.
You're right. I was purposely straining the term.

What I'm saying is that CIOs of pretty much every medium to largish company needs to justify their salary to the other C*s.

If he can justify it in terms of cost savings he justifies his salary. Right now, big companies either buy appliances (at huge cost and medium support cost) or build their own networks at small (or maybe huge) cost and huge support cost.

And what I really mean by "cloud" is the fact that pretty much any CIO will call a rack of servers with any virtualization vendors' software running on the bunch of them as the cloud. And honestly it's not wrong. If your company's culture is built right whether your "cloud" is "private" or otherwise shouldn't matter.

If Microsoft can turn the enterprise into the desktop, every enterprise on our software as a new goal. Which mean abandoning huge margins, they could make huge dents into SAP, CGI, IBM, Accenture and all these huge terrible enterprise software vendors. All of them combined are a huge opportunity for Microsoft to steal all market share from and honestly I think Microsoft could definitely pull their 90s tactics and be successful.
How many of you clicked on the 'PRESS START' and then started to wonder if it's actually a key and realized you have no idea what you are doing like life itself.

Only 19,345 days remaining in your life (assuming there's no way to extend life beyond 80 in my life time and still be solid) how depressing is that? The only thing that now makes sense is go full out Skyrim, raids and pillaging, indulging in hedonism and a senseless pursuit of scarce material goods.

On another note, this site seems like a personal therapist. When I read one article I just feel calm and excited depending on the article. It's a freaking goldmine of life hacks.
what's pulling an Atlassian?
"Seems to me that they've been successful mostly because of their involvement in the Ruby and startup world, rather than making great products"

You also need to look at when basecamp & campfire were first released. They were significantly better in comparison to the competition at the time. And while basecamp doesn't personally fit with how I run and manage projects, I know a lot of people who are very happy with it. It fits in with how a lot of companies (many of them not "technical" companies) run their projects. For a certain kind of business it's a very good product.

"Nothing wrong with that, but it's good to be clear about the distinction between a company that makes great product and a company that's good at marketing itself"

A company that's not good at marketing and sales doesn't stay a company - no matter how good the products are ;-)
How is Kurzweil distracting from serious AI research?
I suppose even Yahoo and Google were "startups" at one time. 37signals probably kept the moniker longer than other businesses because they were profitable early, and they didn't need or want to grow fast for growth's sake.
I dunno, I definitely find

d = {}
d[key] = value

easier to read/write than

(set! d (make-hash-table))
(hash-table-put! d key value)
This Ballmer slide from a few months ago compares Microsoft financials to some of the other big players.

https://twitter.com/janettu/status/380824535714377728

Pretty interesting: they are still big, and they are arguably much more diversified than any other the other big players.
Apple Joins Google in Pressing Court to Curb Patent Abuse
.. I think its more like in terms of 'having something productive to do that the Masters will enjoy hearing about at the end of the month', in the case of GCHQ. My assessment of the people I know who work at GCHQ (quite a few, actually) is that they are all authority-worshipping lackeys of the 'management class' they serve. Hacking Anonymous gives them a way of justifying their hacker lifestyles to the toffs that rule them. Its a cultural thing.
Thanks. I did agonise over that part at the time I wrote it. I couldn't think of a more inclusive alternative, and chose something a little comedic on purpose ('ladies man') in the hope it wouldn't be taken too seriously.

Open to suggestions.
I love my Vaio-Z, but it's a bit like a Lamborghini - pretty and sleek, but not all that practical. It has a blazing graphics card but the fan noise could rouse a coma patient. Even worse, after a year it simply started shutting down because cooling wasn't working particularly well anymore, and the fan never goes below medium speed, even when idle. The RAID-SSDs failed too, and are extremely expensive to replace, so I had to put a new SSD in the optical drive bay.

Needless to say, next time I'll be buying something a bit more practical, and likely for a lot less money.
I was wondering from the headline if there was a merger... And from reading the post, it downed to me: I am one of.those that never realized the Basecamp 37signals connection, and I do read their blog!

To me 37signals was that webdev shop that made Rails and had a cool blog, I never connected them to any of their products Oo
" I would never signup when looking at the frontpage, it looks very outdated, and not very trustworthy. Hopefully a better focus, will make the experience more up-to-date."

Almost certainly a sign that you're not the target market for basecamp. They do a lot of testing on their landing pages (see http://signalvnoise.com/posts/2991-behind-the-scenes-ab-test... for example.)
Thanks! I've not really posted much on HN before, although I've had a few of my posts turn up in here by themselves, and I thought it would be worth trying myself.

crosses fingers
Very worrying. The environmental impacts of Bitcoin are absolutely horrendous.
It depends on the business, but in general I give a supplier my information so that they can supply me with the goods I request; inform me about that process; and invoice me.

Using that information for other reasons without informing me is a clear, unambiguous, invasion of my privacy. It's probably not legal in the UK.

Tl:dr yes, it's creepy. Especially in the context of a game dev.
Mike Lynch gave a talk at Cambridge Uni last night. The synopsis:

> The session will look at how the vision needs to meet with reality. The entrepreneur needs to be true and wedded to their beliefs and vision for the business venture, but also, to be open to learning and taking feedback. It is important to be flexible with business models in the early days. This session demonstrates the importance of entrepreneurial self-awareness for learning and reflection purposes as well as the need for personal direction, drive, persuasion and persistence. Participants will learn about strategy and developing business models to achieve the vision. It will look at the influence of early customers and sales and the role of mentors, company directors, etc. in shaping business models.
When you flirt with other brands, you only like your old favorites more
A CPU will be better off mining Vertcoin in the long-term, as it uses what they call Adaptive N-Factor scrypt algorithm, meaning that RAM becomes more important over time than raw processing power.

That, of course, is assuming that they have equal value, which clearly they don't.

Also, as it's still a new coin with less take-up than Doge you may be able to 'get in on the ground floor', so to speak, but it's less likely to soar in price in my opinion.
"instability to the state"

^^ thats the crux of it. However: s/state/status quo/ and you have a more accurate assessment.
Google and Cisco  have entered a cross-licensing patent deal
It's not easy building that project-management app that is usable by both geeks and customers.

We (http://countersoft.com) are pushing the approach of a single tool for both project tracking (geeks) and ticketing (customers). It's not easy to say the least because customers love to just do everything in email!
State of the WebRTC
WOW.js: Reveal Animations When You Scroll
Err.. why?

Clearly the keys need to be obtained somehow, but that was out of band for my application. Once they are obtained I don't see any reason why passing them from a 3rd party app over HTTPS (using CORS) is any less secure than using session based authentication with a 1st party app.

In both cases you are vulnerable to MTM and XSS attacks. Sessions expire which is nice, but that's the only real difference.
Creating re-usable components in Knockoutjs
HOw is having two versions of Basecamp (old and new) simplification?

Also I think Asana is beating Basecamp in terms of having both simplicity and power, although I would say that the Basecamp UI is more simple than Asana, Asana is a lot faster and a lot more powerful and Asana is free for up to 15 users. I think Asana will take a lot of business away from Basecamp over the long term.

Having said that, in our business we use Jira, Asana and Basecamp (part of the reason for using all 3 is that we integrate our product with them). We keep Baecamp as a central repository of information and for that purpose Asana is not really as well suited.

For task management, Asana is way better than Basecamp.
is it just me or they are saying 'in other words' that only basecamp succeeded and most other products failed ?

otherwise why not just bring in more devs instead of focusing on one product.
Depending on the business I guess it's okay. But for a game dev?
Large companies have big pockets and lots of people so they split their resources on multiple products. Things are very different for small companies and startups. Losing focus for a small company is deadly. It is extremely hard to be the best in a single market, trying to do it in multiple markets is crazy.

Best strategy for a startup is to find the best market they have a chance at dominating and focus all of their resources on it. Branding is just one of the resources you have. You want everyone to mention your product when they talk about you.
What can be proved not to match with reality? Calling it a religion is needlessly antagonistic and does not address any of the arguments for it. On top of that it quite frankly isn't anything like a religion. There is no faith or supernatural belief or churches or rituals. Sure you can make superficial analogies but it's still entirely different.
Me thinks they are feeling some pressure from rising stars like Asana and they are quickly trying to solidify their lead before it's too late.
Everyone verifying everyone is O(n) work per person or O(n^2) total work. I think it is possible to do better than that. Web of trusts for instance.
>they're the good guys after all

Nothing could be further from the truth. The NSA, CIA, GCHQ - these are the most corrupting influences on western society, and they are responsible for a great deal of terror, instability, and insecurity in the countries they operate.

The day we depose these people and put them in the asylum where they belong, will be a bright one indeed.
Ah, ok. I did read the article, but it was a half read, half skim, so I must have missed that.
This is awesome. What I'd really like to have is an improved HUD for this game that permanently displays the internal states of Health, Energy and Willpower. Google Glass + some biosensors maybe.
It's such a waste of computing power.
If Microsoft released the source code to Windows 98 OSR2, which is effectively abandonware as far as I understand, it would be great. A lot of multimedia applications and old games would instantly become easier to preserve.

Is there still any value for Microsoft in Win9x?
I'd think an HN user would know better.. It takes drastically less time to clone a product than to make it from scratch and refine it to perfection.
I think the Windows 8 gamble could still pay off. We're starting to see 8" tablets that run full Windows. Give it 12 months and the 8" form factor will be powerful enough to cover a lot of enterprise needs. 8" tablet + docking station is a very compelling way to get work done.
Girl Geek Jobs
> so some countries can easily take advantage of that by lowering them (or completely removing them) so companies will be attracted there.

God forbid anyone try and make a country a good place to do business.

I'm for closing the various loopholes, because big companies should have to pay the same taxes that smaller companies do. But I am also very much in favor or countries trying to compete and improve in order to attract business.

> Edit: could you explain the downvote a bit? I'm curious to hear what you don't like in what I said.

You call other countries who don't want to import the crappy, unfriendly business climate of countries like France or Italy (where I live) "parasites".
What Indians can learn from Satya – New CEO of Microsoft
A computer on every desk.
A computer in every pocket.
A computer in every body.
A computer as everybody.
One thing that makes a good difference in the iPad is using it with a Stylus
The only feature I can think of that we ever removed (I might be wrong) is OpenID, because almost no-one used it and it was really confusing.

Time tracking is still there in Basecamp Classic, and that's not going away. If you rely on time tracking in Basecamp Classic you can continue to do so.

See this from the announcement page FAQ:

Q: What about Basecamp Classic?
"We are fully committed to running Basecamp Classic forever."
- http://37signals.com/
Yes and no. The services that Google provides are already priced at the supply/demand meeting point. Tax is merely reducing profits that are already made.

Google is not going to insist on making X% net profit and will not put up it's rates just because a tax rate changes.

You can't pretend that Google dropped their rates in the UK by a few percent when the corporate tax rates dropped last year?
Because if you make some business in one country it's fair to proportionally contribute to that country. And hiding behind schemes in order to minimize it should be prohibited.
I'm getting old.
I think you mean "Google is much more scary than MS". The gerund doesn't make a lot of sense in this context.

For bonus fluency points, it reads better if you say "I fear Google much more than MS".

I apologize if feedback on your English was unwanted.

---

On another note, I generally agree. Google has a lot more scope for evil than Microsoft does. Embrace, Extend, Extinguish applies to what appeared to some Google properties too (eg Reader).
So some people's predictions in the past were wrong, therefore everyone's predictions for the future now must also be wrong by default?
So the solution is for .nl and .ie to close their loopholes, not create new taxes, no?

.ie is the loophole, most of the time.
You forgot about a product called the Apple II Computer by Apple Computer.
10 years after they released Basecamp and apparently it's still their "best idea". This explains why every 37signals blogpost I read was so devoid of good ideas. One hit wonders.
ASIC's consume very little power compared to a PC. One watt per gigahash is a rough value, although most promise quite a bit less. You'd need about 100 PC's, at 300W each, to produce a gigahash, using the assumptions in this article.
Github would be better to write a campfire clone in a day or so, and roll it out.

I'm betting github has a larger userbase than campfire, so what would be the point in paying a few million for campfire?
This isn't the completely worthless observation it appears (like, for example, the snarky retort that Babbage's difference engine outpowers all the world's Bitcoin ASICs put together, on a decimal arithmetic benchmark). The Bitcoin ASIC network is a modest amount of equipment: in dollars, watts, or transistors, about the size of a one supercomputer from the TOP500. So this really underscores that general-purpose PCs are terrible at very simple & very parallel problems.

Adding a FPGA to the CPU/GPU mix could narrow the gap:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1933192
I don't even want process per tab, I'd be happy with something much simpler: Tell me which tab is causing Firefox to use 100% CPU! This happens fairly frequently with lots of tabs open (I guess I use a lot of websites with really bad javascript) and the only recourse is to either quit Firefox entirely and re-open it, or play a guessing game.
Contractor problems. I have a second hand Surface Pro. Its much lighter than a laptop, but more powerful than the laptop I had before. It runs Visual Studio, Eclipse and all the other tools I need very well. When I'm at a client site or at home I can use the USB port to dock into monitor, keyboard and ethernet. When I'm in meetings I make notes with the pen. When I'm in between on the train I can use it in tablet mode or mini-laptop mode.

I figure that in a few years I'll be able to do all of that on a smaller 8" form factor - even better.
Netflix and the self-inflicted demise of major media
The fact that you are french does not make your opinion meaningfull without any explanation on why you disagree with this tax. Please, explain us why or do not leave this kind of comments.
So why did they cry and make google remove the webchat client then?

The idea that campfire is refined to perfection is laughable.
Suggestion: ignore whiners like this who petition for 'manhole covers' to be renamed 'personhole covers'.
Can you elaborate? how google being taxed has an impact on my own income?
Your memory is no video camera, it edits the past with present experiences
One way to see the renaming is that it's not for outsiders, it's for those that work there. There's nothing that could do the job of informing everyone in your company what the new direction is more effective thank this.
Are java script arrays primitives strings objects?
The Washington Post and The New York Times both carried fair-sized obituaries, for what that's worth. I'd bet that quite a few papers got it from AP.
Software is a hard business. Novel becomes trivial fast. Competitive edge can become a standard "best" practice fast and a product or business which was revolutionary and profitable one decade can seem naive the next.

Basecamp needs to move to keep up. They have their commitment to "not too much software" and simplicity which is great but has some tradeoffs. In any case, collaboration between people working on things remotely or in the same office using the internet is not done yet. There are still big things to be figured out. The culture and the technology is evolving. Personally, I use Basecamp and it is better than email for a lot of things, but there are a lot of thing I wish it did or did differently.

In essence, there is plenty of work for a 50 person team in this space. Good luck to them.
What a waste of time. I haven't given too much weight to criticism of Bitcoin's use of computing resources--there's enough low-hanging fruit--but this is actually somehow reprehensible.
Not really. Basecamp wasn't created until 2003, in the second wave of of web SaaS after the Salesforce wave (1999).
I see, so you use .NET and complain about the fact that Oracle owns Java. And somehow you blame Red Hat for all that.
I think it's creepy and ridiculous, but you could rebuild most of a person that way. At least create a new person that would have the same personality, maybe memories, and be completely indistinguishable from the original (that is, you wouldn't be able to recognize any difference at all or do any test, especially if it's reconstructed from your own memories.)

As for whether it's moral, well it depends if the copy is actually sentient or just a really advanced chatbot. And if it is sentient, well we create sentient beings all the time; children.

But I do agree it isn't a solution to death.
How much energy, resources, etc are required to sustain cash and credit card transactions? Think of all those banks, skyscrapers, ATMs, computers, money printing machines. All of those things exist to power the security of the modern financial industry.

If bitcoin powers the post-modern financial industry, the resource savings will be enormous.
I assure you, he has no idea what his underlings are doing.

They most certainly kill things dealing with crypto-currencies.

The questions is it overly-sensitive anti-fraud, or overly-sensitive anti-competition.
The takeaway of the article seems to be: when fighting limited-liability companies, being irrational is a good tactic. It is sad if guerilla warfare is the only option left when fighting corporate actions one disagrees with.