skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> [KSR on the Fermi Paradox] My feeling is, the universe is too big, and life too planet-specific for intelligent life forms to communicate with each other, except for by accident and very rarely.

What does the possible variation in life forms have to do with the nature of communications mediums or techniques? Encoding might be different but the mediums used will depend on level of technological advancement and not the specifics of how the life forms communicate face to face. (That's speciesist. I meant lifeform-to-lifeform.)

I love that KSR mentions Banks' Culture novels.

While I'd agree that biosphere sustainability is critical, I don't think it's the only critical problem, or even the most short-term problem, we may have. I may be paranoid, but I'm very worried that there is a Great Filter[1], and that it is some sort of abuse/misuse/weaponization of biotech at, or just beyond, our current level of technology. Just past that would be concern about unfriendly AI.

There are also some existential threats to modern advanced civilization due to low-probability but unmanageable-if-they-occur problems. Other than an asteroid we can't detect in time, there are also supervolcano eruptions that decimate world food supplies (volcanic winter).[2]

[1] http://hanson.gmu.edu/greatfilter.html http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Filter

[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Supervolcano
Direct link to the paper: http://math.mit.edu/~bush/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2014/...
Just as a historical note, despite getting some 58 upvotes and having perfectly good discussion, this story was flagged off the front page within an hour or so.

There's nothing that Hacker News hates more than any suggestion that the world we live in is less than perfectly fair and equitable.
* If you follow this idea, get the 30% equity in a signed written document.

* Who owns the other 70%?

* Who will pay the employees? Servers? ...

* Have a plan for the 3rd week. What would you do if the funding doesn't appear?
Give your custom code a random framework name :) Someone could make a framework out of it.
Do my downvoters have any feedback? How can you deny that content dilution is a serious problem that can be ameliorated, but not solved by intelligent modding. YC has already recognized this by recently adding the separate "Show HN" section.
> Are you being intentionally facetious? How could science defy "reasoning"?

Science often defies reasoning. Think about the history of our understanding of gravity. Newton was ridiculed when he proposed his model of gravity. And, Einstein was considered a quack for years until people understood what he was talking about.
was there any news of daala recently?
Reminds me of this:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leeds_13

Some Leeds art students faked a trip to Malaga on student grant money. Caused great outrage. I was friends with one of the 13. He dined out on it for a while, had a whale of a time.
Omission is not a lie, these details are left out because you are not supposed to post every detail of your life, especially not the ugly ones, to the mass public (which is what pasting to Facebook is).
That would certainly help (albeit at a rather large expense for existing businesses) but probably wouldn't really solve the problem. The core issue is that bowling in a team involves an awful lot of waiting around and watching while other people on your team or the other team are bowling. A hardcore smoker would like to take a few puffs during those pauses while waiting for their turn....and that used to be okay. If the smokers in the group have to take turns running out to a patio to puff, they can't continue to cheer/boo their teammates/rivals and might miss or delay their turn. Which destroys the group dynamic. The bowling alley used to be selling (to some) the experience of smoking while bowling, just as music clubs used to be selling the experience of smoking while listening to a band; taking smoke breaks between sessions of bowling is not much of a substitute.
> Let A1 = 1, A2 = blank, A3 = 3

> PRODUCT(A1:A3) is 1

3, I think (based on experimentation).
> Square's also got an EMV compliant reader coming out soon.

Chip and signature though, not chip and PIN. I can't see anything from square about the liability for chip and signature, but it's normally on the merchant, not the bank.
FYI, vim-plug also supports lazy-loading and the interface is pretty simple and concise [1].

NeoBundle obviously has more features, most notably supporting VCS' other than git, while vim-plug tries to be simpler and easier to setup and use (being a single file, no boilerplate code [2]). So they have different perspectives and I wouldn't argue that one is better than the other. It really depends on personal tastes.

[1]: https://github.com/junegunn/vim-plug#on-demand-loading-of-pl...

[2]: https://github.com/junegunn/vim-plug#example-a-small-sensibl...
We used the photo caption trick to find a title. This one's a little baity but at least is informative.
Geek Cuisine. High Protein, Low Carbs. Cooking Quick Soylent Free Dinner
x264 doesn't use any more patents than other encoders. It's simply better because the volunteer/contracting development model is better for software quality than corporate closed-allocation.

You're freed from short term thinking and team headcounts, so everyone who works on it can be a world-class expert… if you can find them.
This looks like a lot of effort was put into it, but what pain point / problem does it address? Embedded applications (bare metal) is usually not that complicated, and when they are they are usually developed either on a RTOS, or on embedded linux which gives you almost all the advantages of desktop application development.

Coming back to embedded applications not being that complicated, now you also need to get your developers to learn another framework and IDE while they are already under pressure to develop their current feature set.

Like codehero states elsewhere it only adds another abstraction layer between you and the silicon, in a field where exact control of the silicon is paramount (Low power, response latency in real time, limited resources etc).

Furthermore what guarantee do you have that Mbeddr will support the latest processor you are working on. At least with C being a defacto standard in the industry you have that guarantee. Furthermore most processor manufacturers supplies demonstration code to use their latest processor features, how easy is it to pull that into Mbeddr?

I'm afraid this is a very fancy and polished solution looking for a problem.
Need for profit is not just a value but a requirement for doing business. However, you did not answer any of my questio ns. what values do you think profit motivates if any? And what values motivated profit value?
Stories submitted to HN need to be in English. This is not to disparage content in other languages; it's just that HN is an English language site.
In general, people are probably wrong to do so but "corporate personhood" was widely tossed around in the context of the Citizens United decision: http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2012/07/the-supr...

(Not sure you were saying otherwise.)

As a soundbite, it's such a red herring anyway. Of course corporations act like individuals in some ways (and not in others). Corporate entities can enter into contracts that aren't tied to a particular employee. They generally have freedom of speech. But they can't be put into prison (except metaphorically.)
Absolutely, and the 'everything is temporary' bit really hit me. It makes you look in a completely different way at your own life, both the parts already past and the parts still in the future. Think 'total perspective vortex' but without cheating.

The timescale of the book is staggering. It's like that 'pale blue dot' picture.

http://www.wscribe.com/parables/pass.html

For those that haven't read the book or that don't have access to it, the book follows the 'first men' (us) and their successors across billions of years. Not all movement in time is progress and not all change is natural. Very much recommended, I won't write any more here to not spoil the book for future readers.
Design and Implementation of the FreeBSD OS: 2nd edition available for order
Of course, Chrome runs on both of those platforms, and this (ARC) could as well.
Are .ly names out of favor now? Not too long ago they were de rigueur for startups.
I'm always curious about vim but hardly use it beyond git commit messages and modifying files on a server. I'd be interested in getting better, but have an easier time setting up Sublime (and don't really have the time during the week to experiment).

I checked out vim plug and it seems really great, but is there a vim package manager that works similar to the package manager you can get in sublime? One that searches through available packages and allows you to install them that way?
Robinson is indirectly proposing that humans alive now massively sacrifice their well-being, with a severely crippeled economy and totalitarian government.

In exchange for some non-existent, hypothetical future that nobody alive today (i.e. those who would actually suffer under his proposal) would ever experience.

This is absolutely monstorous. This is Pol Pot-level evil.
> there is a very big difference in the overall expected scale when something can only be done for personal enjoyment vs. when it can be both done for that and for commercial purposes.

That only serves as an argument for regulating large scale drone operations (commercial or not). It doesn't work as an argument for prohibiting all commercial drone operations regardless of scale.
IMO it depends if she asked for money, or missed an important family event (funeral/wedding/etc). Otherwise, what's the harm?
For those who'd like even more of a challenge, just delete your Facebook [1]. They'll instantly deactivate (not delete) your account, and then spend 7 days sending emails which are designed to make you change your mind, with various psychological tricks.

[1] https://www.facebook.com/help/delete_account
Great books. Zero understanding of the singularity or transhumanist ideas though.
The site is down now. Did they kill it already ?
Hi Wyck,

Thanks for the feedback.

I tried to answer the first one in the longer paragraph -> https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8312972

Regarding the API:

We actually have an activity API (similar to Hipchat), through which any service can connect and push activities into our client.

The "index API" will take longer to release, as it is a lot more complex and less explored.

You see, Hipchat/Slack/etc. only allow you to see the latest activities of your service. As "Deep Service Integration" means that you can access the Service's data as you type, integrating a service into ChatGrape is a lot more challenging.

With Google Drive, for example, we have to index the files, and update said index on actions like file renames, deletions, movements, and many more - additionally to displaying activities.

The good thing is, we are getting a lot better at it and the more we grow, the more services will hopefully try to exploit our richer interface.

I see it like this: The 50+ integrations of Hipchat don't matter to 90% of the people, if we integrate the 10 most commonly used services 10 times better.

Best,
F
Or it could simply return contacts taken from the user's Google account, after asking the user for permission in browser chrome.
What is the use case for a Vim script manager? I've never understood what this offers over including a full .vim in your version-controlled dotfiles. With a script manager, you have to worry about repositories disappearing, Github being down, and also breaking changes (unless you want to track a SHA on each one).

With a simple .vim, your Vim configuration is a living, breathing thing, and you can easily modify any script you're using the moment you find a bug in it that interrupts your work: You own your vimfiles. When you manually upgrade a script, it's trivial to roll back to the last version that worked. I guess dotfiles are the last place I want to introduce needless indirection: They should represent my work environment at a point in time, precisely.

I can only see two benefits: The ability to try out new plugins quickly, and the ability to upgrade all of your plugins at once quickly. Are these worth sacrificing control over your editor config? This has puzzled me since the day tpope released Pathogen to much fanfare.
Sure, let's instead roll the dice that whatever's in our best interest now, and in the near future, won't be too bad for future generations, despite that we can see that we're altering the biosphere in significant ways without a good understanding of the long-term effects and with no plan to reverse the changes we're making and have made, much less a plan and the technology to deal with unforeseen consequences. Is that not monstrous?

What if our decisions, due to the culture and lifestyles of developed nations, free markets, and short-to-mid-term democratic attention spans, lead to an ecological catastrophe that can't be technologically ameliorated 100 years from now? What if it could have been mitigated at present with modest intellectual effort and modest cuts to standards of living?

I recognize many problems with the sort of governance that would be required to mitigate long-term ecological and technological problems (ecological collapse, grey goo, unfriendly AI), but calling it "Pol Pot Level" evil to trade some quality of life in the present for reduced risk of having the biosphere take a wrong turn a generation or two from now, seems polemical. If reduced quality of life increases mortality rates, that's unfortunate, but concern about people today should not trump concern about people in the future, to the extent we can foresee risks due to stressing the biosphere in ways we have no empirical analogs for.

I think the popular idea that technology can and will overcome problems we cause in our biosphere, is unsupported (and unsupportable, even if it's true) by evidence. We either take it on faith or we don't; I choose not to.
Love this. Very cool project, even if, as pointed out already in this thread, it was emulated from the Leeds 13's own fake trip.

Also fascinating how hostile some of the commenters are here. The project explores the illusion social media sites create. I think it's pretty cool.
Where did he say he would? He said getting paid changes things for many people, and many people will take stupid risks either with their own safety or that of others if there is a paycheck in it. And I don't think one can reasonably say that isn't true.
It's all C. It is all syntactic sugar on top of C so if at the end of the day you want to go back to C then just compile it down and take it from there.

Your comment reminds me what people were saying when assemblers were first developed. Real programmers did not use assemblers because it was too high level or too far removed from the hardware or any number of other excuses. The fact is that plain C is inadequate for delivering correct software in high assurance environments. This tool addresses that problem and then some.
Do you ever reuse code from previous projects?
The grandparent asked explicitly about Java 8 and 9. What are the market share, jobs and tooling like for those versions?

As someone who's had to push for both, many organizations find introducing Scala easier than doing a JVM upgrade (since the latter requires work on the ops side). Last time I looked, e.g. the New Relic agent would crash if you tried to run it under Java 8 - whereas it will profile your Play transactions just fine.

Popularity is a lagging indicator. The tooling is there already, quite frankly - we see first-class support for Scala in new efforts like Takipi. Jobs are what you make them - more than once I've taken a Java job and turned it into a Scala job. I honestly believe it's the best general-purpose language going right now (which is why I use it, and why I have a job doing it full-time).
Butg there is the time spent in learning a new idiom, and maybe nothing is gained. Tech churn.
Funny you should say that because his team was hired to develop all the tools and IDEs for Siemens and their industrial systems. The tools you see on that page were developed jointly by the BMW embedded development team and I think a few government agencies. So I'm a little puzzled by your comment and your reaction to an obviously better way of developing correct and verified software using C.
On that note:

(...) An habitual truth-teller is simply an impossible creature; he does not exist; he never has existed. Of course there are people who _think_ they never lie, but it is not so--and this ignorance is one of the very things that
shame our so-called civilization. Everybody lies--every day; every hour; awake; asleep; in his dreams; in his joy; in his mourning; if he keeps his tongue still, his hands, his feet, his eyes, his attitude, will convey deception--and purposely. Even in sermons--but that is a platitude. (...)

Excerpt of "On The Decay Of The Art Of Lying", by Mark Twain: http://www.online-literature.com/twain/1320/
He didn't advocate that at all.
Classic Harry Turtledove story from 1985, in the Golden Age SF vein (compare to Clarke's 'Rescue Party'). It's a prequel to Herbig-Haro, which mostly inverts the idea. You can also view it as a precursor to Turtledove's Worldwar series.

But as the pastebin is a blatant copyright infringement, and the story isn't new, I don't think it's appropriate for HN.
Not the same url as submitter but there was a previous discussion about the New Yorker article:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8180493
You can use CMUSphinx http://cmusphinx.sourceforge.net for keyphrase verification. For example you can find Android demo for keyphrase spotting at http://cmusphinx.sourceforge.net/wiki/tutorialandroid
The First 5s with iPads
Agreed. No one is doubting his ability to form sentences. Rather, he packs so much into each sentence that I question my ability to keep up.

Every sentence he said (as well as his responses in the AMA) was a a complete idea, full of insight and depth. Mere mortals, like yours truly, need to take a couple minutes to process examples and counterexamples, to define the assumptions made, to wonder at the implications. You want him to speak more on the subject.

Instead, it's so obvious to him that he continues speaking and you've just missed 3 more profound statements. Makes him fascinating to listen to.
The Scala community is, and always has been, quite heterogenous. There's a vocal, and sometimes quite abrasive group of fundamentalists on HN and Twitter. But the Scala community is much more diverse than what you would hear from them.
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Gombrowicz's diaries are a classic of contemporary literature and testament to the man's genius (and temperament!). Strongly recommended to anyone who wants an ambitious, but rewarding read.
You'd want to version-control your entire .vim/ directory, not just .vimrc. (Presumably .vim is where this stores plugins.)
I was disappointed by this as well. Not so bothered at the time it was dropped, as I was a bit pro Linux and didn't want to see a killer feature that would beat it. There was a lot of talk of an open source equivalent, but it seems that as nothing came of WinFS, nothing open source appeared either. It would be damn useful having a queryable filesystem.
These startups are not making the world a better place.

As opposed to governments gone berserk?
3 Reasons Why Finding Direction Is So Important
What if I write a compiler which is able to produce automatically the mp3 compression scheme through a more generic description of lossy stream processing, along with the ad-hoc math notions (fourrier transform, etc)?
Does it mean every person using that compiler will potentially have to pay? We already have software framework able to automatically (dis)prove theorems and generate code, so we're not very far practically from the above hypothesis, what will happen then?
I am already off Facebook since a few months. The first 2 weeks I caught myself opening a new tab typing 'face' and then realizing I deactivated my account. I just moved to a new city which breaks my old ties even faster. But my really good friends call me now and that feels really good!

Next up: 99 days without hackernews :)
> similar to the package manager you can get in sublime? One that searches through available packages

VAM[1] tries to. That is the only one I am aware of. But the list is managed manually, which in my opinion is always a bad idea.

I think the best hope for a MELPA-like vim plugin source is to use the vimawesome[2] API, but I'm not aware of any plugin manager that does so yet. vimawesome scrapes various sources and looks at publicly-available .vimrc files. This is a technical solution rather than a "human vigilance" solution. People want to post their vimrcs, so take advantage of that rather than trying to curate a massive list. Passive/organic is usually better than active/centralized[3].

[1] https://github.com/MarcWeber/vim-addon-manager

[2] http://vimawesome.com

[3] I know some people still have a soft spot for Yahoo directory, but whatever.
And she should, this is important to be present when baby is born and growing. Those who 'communicated' importance to their wives... I don't have good explanation honestly. You don't want to be their kid anyway.
Why have any package manager then?
The broadcast media is absolutely H.264/5's home ground. Even if Google's codec play is wildly successful, this will be last place to fall.

Google has been fairly forthright about this e.g. WebM project has Web right there in the name, not TVM or BroadcastM or PlasticDiscM.

And as such, regular refreshes of the codec is a very Webby, a very Googly, and a very Open Source-y thing to do.
Have you considered or tried melting steel though?
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8297296
For those of us in the UK who'd like to read an article about a UK airport written by a UK media organisation...

http://web.archive.org/web/20140912134733/http://www.bbc.com...
Just a few days ago by chance I was searching my notes for the word 'magma' (for unrelated reasons) and it matched an article by The New Yorker on Ithkul that I had saved years before, which mentions a french progrock band called Magma having had an influence on Quijada as a teenager with their chant opera and theatrical performances sung in an invented German-like language. It's funny the first time I read through that article I didn't pay any mind to it. Now I'm in love with Magma's MDK album these days, so thanks Ithkul.
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I don't see the modernity of the project because she used traditional methods like setting up a complete scene and photographing herself. Perhaps a more modern variant is to make lots of posts from a south Asian chat room to convince people your are from South Asia?
"We're sorry but this site is not accessible from the UK as it is part of our international service and is not funded by the licence fee. It is run commercially by BBC Worldwide, a wholly-owned subsidiary of the BBC, the profits made from it go back to BBC programme-makers to help fund great new BBC programmes."

I'm sure there are excellent legal reasons why UK residents can't access BBC Worldwide content but it is really, really annoying
Ask HN: PostgreSQL and other server backup services?
Hi all,

I'm looking to back up user-generated data on a server. This includes a PostgreSQL database and a few directories with uploaded files. Both are fairly small for now (<1GB).

I could hack something up with cron, pg_dump and rsync, but would rather prefer paying for a hosted service that knows what they are doing. Surprisingly, all the backup services I've found so far seem to be for home desktops, but this must be a common need for everyone that runs servers?

If I do have to set it up myself, then any suggestions about best practices are of course also welcome.
How to Create Scalable and Maintainable JavaScript Applications: Namespacing