skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
>> What? There is no "factual basis" for my saying "chances are"?

> Correct. Exactly.

Honest to God. A statement of probability is not a fact, it is an estimate. You aren't even familiar with the terminology.

> Claims about probability still require factual support ...

False -- they require evidentiary support. A probability estimate requires a basis for making the estimate, which I provided. If you had any understanding of either science or statistics, you would be familiar with what I'm talking about.

Here's the evidence:

1. There are no species that were present on Earth a billion years ago that are still present in the same form, i.e. able to interbreed with their forebears.

2. There are few species that meet the above requirements from 100 million years ago.

3. There are a handful of species that meet the above requirements from 10 million years ago.

4. Modern humans have existed only for 200,000 years.

5. Using the simplest statistical methods, accessible to an average college student, we can write a distribution that takes into account the fact that modern humans didn't exist 200,000 years ago and extrapolate into the future, showing that our likelihood for existing as the same species we are now, 200,000 years in the future, is very small. This is a statement about probability and likelihood, areas with which you are clearly unfamiliar.

6. On the above basis, the probability that modern humans will exist as the same species a billion years from now is zero.

7. On that basis, the probability that modern humans will witness the sun enveloping the earth five billion years from now is also zero.

If you can't understand the above argument, by all means keep your ignorance to yourself.

> There may be a reasonable basis for that conclusion, but if there is, you haven't presented it, so it would be inaccurate to claim that you have successfully made that point, even if it is a point that could have been succesfully made.

Look -- go back to the philosophy department, where contentless arguments like yours, arguments indistinguishable from two children negating each other, are welcome.

In your fantasy, modern humans, which didn't exist 200,000 years ago, have some chance to be present to worry about the sun absorbing the earth five billion years from now. And you think my probabilistic estimates are doubtful. The burden of evidence is yours, not mine.

EDIT: Yes, people, don't bother to read the argument, the evidence, just click the downvote button. Live up to my expectations.
My comment is getting down other yet not that log ago it was said our system was so good that someone with Ebola would be immediately quarantined: http://www.foxnews.com/health/2014/06/30/could-ebola-spread-... I guess we missed the boat on that one. They were sent out and continued to expose people to the virus.

Also the odds of it leaving Africa and coming to the us were virtually non-existant: http://www.npr.org/blogs/health/2014/06/25/324941229/could-t... I guess that's another oops.

People are underestimating this virus and whenever you underestimate something you generally later regret it. Hopefully I'm wrong for example, but I see too many people sending their sick kids to school and so on. I just think that although we can stop it, it's not nearly as easy as it's made it to be. And we need to stop it sooner than later. I hope I'm wrong but I dont want to find out the hard way. Assuming were bettr than a virus is never wise...
Instapaper is now a free app, with extra Premium upgrade that costs $30/year
It's impressive, to be sure, but Jobs didn't start Pixar—he essentially bought it from Lucasfilm. [1]

[1]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pixar#Early_history
Ask HN: What should I do, 17 year-old dev?
Hello HN... I'm 17 years old from Rimersburg, PA i'm a young developer who has worked with one fairly large company on an iPad game and a few small projects of my own. My life has been complicated since that job... My parents recently got divorced and there is little to no money around my house anymore i live in such a small area that jobs are rare but my skills are above a regular job... What are my options as to making some extra money with my skills online? Freelance is sorta hard to compete with a school schedule i'm a senior at a high-school in my area as right now i want togo to college for Neuropsychology but that all depends if i can get financial aid because legally my parents aren't divorced yet as the court is still processing it. My job with the recent company a couple months ago (5) had togo because i was suffering to much from low-grade depression and severe depression because of the divorce. I know i could leave the sob story out but thats the sole truth. I've got some skills in server management Windows & Unix/Linux. I've got developmental skills in PHP, CSS/HTML/CSS, NodeJs and worked with some frameworks here and there... I was just wondering if anyone out there needed a young guy to help manage a project for a very small price as i don't live on my own yet i just want to make some money to be able to leave the area for college. Willing to really do whatever and learning a new language is no problem at all. I'm available from 3 pm to 3 am on the weekdays the weekends are whatever; i've got a nice development setup that i paid for all on my own. I've managed projects before using trello and designing projects in certain dev tools such as visio and others. I can pretty much do anything someone would need... If anyone would like to work together just drop me a line via e-mail at Seth@fane.co
Thank you; HN community i've been a follower of HN for about a year now.
Best wishes to everyone...
While Japan continues to build and push the boundaries of train travel (regardless of the cost), other countries (USA, Australia) get mired in cost benefit analysis and special interest morass on any big nation building train works. It is interesting to note that the original lines are now considered 'super profitable'. It would be fascinating to see the original cost benefit analysis (if any was done) when they started their journey 50 years ago.
I've been using Rust to process a large text corpus, and as Armin suggests, it's a really interesting experience. Here are a few things I've noticed so far:

1. Writing Rust code definitely takes more time than Python or Ruby, but it's not bad in practice. I can't measure the productivity difference yet, partly because I'm still learning Rust. I do spend more time thinking about how to write zero-allocation and zero-copy algorithms, and trying to get my code to compile (but see 3, below).

2. It's possible to write very fast code without compromising memory safety. It's great to see key parsing operations happening in ~100 nanoseconds, with no allocations.

3. Rust is one of those languages where I need to work to make the compiler happy, but once I manage that, the code generally works on the first try.

4. The tooling is very good: library management, unit testing, benchmarking, documentation, error messages etc., all work very nicely.

Overall, it lacks the instant gratification of a really good scripting language. But I keep finding myself back in Emacs, writing more Rust code for the fun of it. And I really enjoy the combination of low-level code, memory safety, and a useful selection of functional programming features. I'm glad to see a new language in this niche.
It's not that they lost control per se: when the hard detective work of determining the cause was done, it was already rather late in the game. The foreigners showed up in force but the locals refused to cooperate, hiding it until it couldn't be hidden, at which point it was too late for those three counties, and very possibly a very large part of West Africa or worse.
Why is it that almost all comments worried about the Ebola virus are down it's and flagged, regardless of their quality? That alone is very telling :(

Ps: yes I expect to see this doe voted too :(
Looking just at the headline, you only know that he was an airline passenger and not abroad. Too, you know immediately that he was in an airliner - a small metal tube, with hundreds of people breathing the same air!

It's actually a pretty masterful headline, in that it doesn't actually come out and say any of that. It seems calm and fairly accurate, but is worded very carefully to encourage fear.

Nothing accidental there.
You wrote that "they were incinerated along with the hundreds of thousands of Japanese civilians", which implies that at least 200,000 Japanese civilians were incinerated in the bombings. The 129,000–246,000+ killed figure you cite covers 2-4 months after the bombings. I am confident that no one was incinerated 2 or more months after the bombing.

Wikipedia gives an immediate death toll of 70,000–80,000 people, of whom 20,000 were soldiers for Hiroshima and 22,000-75,000 people for Nagasaki. This is far from hundreds of thousands of incinerated civilians.
I can tell you that as someone with 90%+ relatives living in Lagos, Nigeria... they don't seem too concerned. But it is a real problem. Not the END OF THE HUMAN RACE ANDROMEDA STRAIN[1] like the western/UK media has been making it sound like, but a problem nonetheless. I also have a feeling if it even approached anything resembling a problem in a first world country, a cure/vaccine would magically be found and made promptly accessible to all......

1. http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0424600/combined
It looks nice and shiny, but I wonder how many new restrictions have been implemented and/or functionality removed, all in the name of "security"... to me it looks like Windows is heading quickly towards being a consumer-centric walled-garden.
If the font data isn't already compressed (I'm guessing not from the description) then a simple decompression algorithm after base-64 decoding might reduce the size considerably more, although there is a direct trade-off against added code size, given that it's a one-off.

Note that I say "simple decompression" (not compression) because the compression itself can be arbitrarily complex, to optimise the compression ratio. Such asymmetries are not uncommon in compression algorithms, so it probably wouldn't be too hard to find one that fits the bill here.
Sadly, it's not new. The former Sun Microsystems was the king of this insanity. Like how Java jumped from 1.4.2 to 5, except that it was still sometimes 1.5.

Or worse, the SunOS renaming fiasco, where SunOS was also concurrently Solaris. So that SunOS 4.1.1 was also Solaris 1.0. Except that, crazily, so was SunOS 4.1.1.1.

Eventually, SunOS 4.1.4 (aka Solaris 1.1.2) was the last of the old BSD-based SunOS line and Solaris 2.0 came out, which was mostly SysV and different enough that most everybody started calling it Solaris. (Except that `uname` still reported SunOS 5, of course.)

And then everything was sane again. At least until Solaris 2.7, aka SunOS 5.7, which they started calling Solaris 7.

So, Microsoft has a ways to go before the names are completely ridiculous. (ObDisclaimer: Microsoft employee.)
FireChat gets embraced by Hong Kong protesters
Until he was symptomatic, 4 days after arriving, he wasn't infectious. Or so we believe, with a fair amount of data; obviously we'll be drastically extending our knowledge over the next few years.
Exactly, all evidence suggests this could easily reduce user contributions by 50% or more. Why not instead do something that would actually increase intrinsic motivation? E.g. since IIRC people still retain copyright over the writing they publish, why not make it easier for people to turn that content into newspaper articles, blog posts, books, etc.
CMV: I just checked out your sub and subscribed, it looks interesting.
Sequential write on my $5/month DigitalOcean instance in NYC2 region:

$ dd if=/dev/zero of=~/test.bin bs=1M count=1000
1000+0 records in
1000+0 records out
1048576000 bytes (1.0 GB) copied, 3.84267 s, 273 MB/s

It used to be about 80 MB/s last year, so it's gotten a lot better since.
This is great feedback, thanks. And if there's anything that you don't like about Rust, please let us know now while we still have a chance to possibly fix it! Only a few short months left until all of our mistakes are forever entombed in Rust 1.0. :)
That they can opt out does not mean they can opt in.
موعد بداية ونهاية اجازة عيد الاضحى المبارك 2014 فى القطاع العام والخاص والبنوك
I know it's an old argument, but they don't have an attack vector and thus no known infection, because iOS is locked down, so only jail broken devices would be at risk. Say what you will against Apple's tight control over their ecosystem, but between keeping the NSA out of our phones data and things like that ineffective, it'll keep being a plus for me.
I was two semesters away from finishing my degree. I quit. As a result I was unable to pursue the job that I had dreamed about as a child (joining the Navy as an officer and flying). I've also been turned down for opportunities, that I was qualified for, simply because I didn't have a degree. It took me years to gain the experience that overshadowed my lack of a degree and it was a long, painful, and difficult road. Please get your degree.
From Yosemite GM candidate:

Not vulnerable to CVE-2014-6271 (original shellshock)

Not vulnerable to CVE-2014-7169 (taviso bug)

Not vulnerable to CVE-2014-7186 (redir_stack bug)

Test for CVE-2014-7187 not reliable without address sanitizer

Variable function parser inactive, likely safe from unknown parser bugs
Epitaxial growth of large-gap quantum spin Hall insulator on semiconductor
CPUs Outperform GPUs in Financial Markets Benchmark
> This has the potential to make malaria look like a walk in the park.

Based on what, really ? It may be exponential in some area but not in another with different climate conditions and genetic pool. We have NO IDEA at this stage.
I think there's some exaggeration of ebola when you consider the lack of splashy headlines about heart disease, which by the numbers, is arguably far more important.

That said, if there are rare issues where sensationalism might be justified, this might be one. This is one of those areas where preventative aid funding is incredibly hard to muster, even though money spent in containing the outbreak now could have an oversized impact.

More at Radiolab on this:
http://www.npr.org/blogs/money/2014/09/26/351515481/episode-...

Famines are similar, apparently aid workers all know they're coming, but just no one cares enough to donate until it's far too late to prevent.
This crap has been a PITA a for flyfishers for a while. Rock snot is an apt name for it because it is treacherous when you're wading. Personally, I prefer felt boots because they have better traction, but they're also an easy vector for didymo and it's just not responsible to use them anymore since I'm in multiple rivers. I ended up switching to rubber boots. Not nearly as nice to walk in, but far less likely to have didymo hitchhiking along when practicing proper river hygiene.
Announcing California 0.2: The next release of Gnome 3's new calendar app
SMPPL – Send Me a Postcard Public License
This sort of tech is showing up in various places and cloud appears to be a big market for it. Onlive had quite a bit of technical success with it though gaming probably wasnt the best market. I know what I'm talking about. Comparing this to 25 year old technology like vnc is a bit silly.
Sounds more like Drudge to me.
I agree - and I was not that much impressed by what I saw, but there are a couple million news articles about Windows 10's announcement and less than 500 about the Matchstick...

And that's not even mentioning how many of our customers run Windows (or personal tastes aside).
the WinRT architecture is using .net (more or less) so developing for different type basically only requires different inputs and displays. everything else is more or less exactly the same
I'm about to get signed up and start recommending this to a few small business, I'll be looking forward to this change on the AUP. Thank you for your response.
For anyone truly interested in Little Boy and Fat Man, do yourself a favor and pick up Atom Bombs by John Coster-Mullen.

It's self-published, and he's a great fellow; he'll email you and offer to sign your copy, as well as answer any questions you've got.

http://www.amazon.com/Atom-Bombs-Secret-Inside-Little/dp/B00...

This next year is the 70th anniversary of the Trinity test, which is open to the public once a year: http://www.wsmr.army.mil/PAO/Trinity/Pages/default.aspx

Edit: He's also the guy who deduced the most probable internal configuration of Little Boy, and built an inert 1:1 scale model which was presented to and signed by the living members of the 509th Bomb Wing.
The only thing that matters in the context of evolution is passing on genes. In this respect, the genes which code for cattle are incredibly successful, largely due to human interference. It would significantly decrease the success of the species, and while the surviving cattle would be happier the individual's happiness is not relevant to the species' success, so long as breeding continues.
Nigeria has so far been very lucky: a single index case who was already quite sick when he got on the plane to the country. 20 cases (19 lab confirmed), 8 dead, no new cases since the 5th (http://www.cdc.gov/vhf/ebola/outbreaks/2014-west-africa/inde...). They need another 17 days to be sure, if memory serves, but it's looking good. For this index case....
I roll D20 to cast Nuke From Orbit.
> Microsoft has a ways to go before the names are completely ridiculous.

Ceasing to be meaningful is not the same as being ridiculous. Remember the Windows XP family lineup? From Starter Edition, Home, Professional, Ultimate and all the Server editions?
Zero based indexing doesn't make any sense. You start counting at one, not zero. It causes confusion.

Lua's universal tables also simplify things and aren't that less efficient.
Is Your Staff, Like Netflix, Hopelessly Devoted to Amazon Web Services?
I like how cliche this is. They would have written word for word "think of the children" that it would have been exactly the same.
The entire purpose of a jailbreak is to bypass the security protections on the device.

It should be a known risk. I imagine many people don't know (friend told them "this is how you install this weird thing", "this lets you customize icons", "this lets you get apps for free"), but this is the purpose of jailbreaking.
Java got so bad they had a 'Java Naming Help Desk': javanaming@sun.com
There have been at least 3 different articles I've seen about Windows 10 on the homepage today. One about the announcement, one from the BBC, and this one from Wired. I think that's enough coverage, personally.
FCC to NFL: Don't screw over fans
All the smartwatches are very large so far I think. "Too big" is really dependent on the wrist as there were already very large traditional watches that don't suit everybody.

There seems to be some photos on wrists here:

https://www.google.com/search?q=apple+watch&num=100&client=f...
Even if you do that and build one. You'll need to spend many many times over that budget lobbying, making friends, getting noticed and networking, formalizing through red tape and so.

Imagine today you have that device in your table. Ok. What is your next step. Just show up at the Pentagon with it in your bag?

A lot of that costs money (unfairly probably) and that is one of the reasons soldiers sometimes end with crappy hardware that costs some astronomical amounts.
I have a huge hatred towards both the STL and boost and that has existed even before I worked in the games industry.

I really don't understand why STL gets so little love. It's a little lean on features maybe but in my experience it just works, and it's fast. Once you get your head around the iterator concept it's pretty simple to use. And with lambdas in C++ I can write code that's almost as concise as Ruby or Scala.

Any strongly-typed, flexible collection & algorithm library is going to be complex and require a learning curve.
Also agreed. It's a bit presumptuous to declare that your product possesses such subjective qualities.
How many died because the US fought the advance of Communism in Asia?

Nowhere near as many that were systematically slaughtered by their own gov't.
Some software startups are losing a million dollars a month. A new bubble?
> - Wanted to heat up my GPU to warm a brownie, so I opened one of those WebGL water demos and had Sikuli repeatedly pick up a ball and drop it in the water.

I'm not sure why this is like nails on a chalkboard for me. Maybe it's the programmer equivalent of dog-earing book pages.
Why does PG list Sam Altman among the 5 most interesting founders? (2011)
It's not that nobody cares, it's that all that you need to have a page is 'notability' and notability is defined as having media articles written about you. If I can get the New York Times and one other publication to write an article on the spider that lives outside my front door, I can create a Wikipedia article for that spider and nobody can take it down, per Wikipedia policy.
Funny, since i find that to be the best example of communal remorse and reflection that i can dredge up for reddit. Compare reddit's turnaround to how quickly and thorough redactions take place in establishment in-groups of journalists or business leaders or politicians. The fact that an amorphous group of humans can come to have reddit's institutional memory and remorse is astounding imho. The boston bombing error is known and passed down like folklore from old members to new, keeping similar actions on check.
Is there any chance to be able to pay with paypal?
Exactly. A hackathon is for prototyping and MAYBE going "hey look, you should hire us if you want our idea so we can do it the right way".
Excellent so far, although I've always thought of the entire interactive userland as the shell -- not only CLI, but also GUI, as each wraps the kernel on sort of the same plane.
Dwolla raises $9.7M in latest funding round
StarTalk SoundBite: The Hunt for a Real Medical Tricorder
The problem is, things get damaged. Sometimes very severely. It's not possible to keep everyone from acting irresponsibly, and as humans in a modern society, we have a lot of impact on nature. All it takes is one ship with a handful of zebra mussels to infest the entire Great Lakes ecosystem. All it takes is one person accidentally releasing Asian grass carp for it to infest the entire country. All it takes is one farmer using a bit too much fertilizer to form massive algae blooms in a nearby lake.

Conservation is an important preventative step. But that's like telling a bleeding person that they shouldn't have stepped on that nail. The damage is done, and the patient needs antibiotics and stitches now. It's important to prevent damage from being done, but it's just as important to fix it after the fact.
Book Review: The Checklist Manifesto
It doesn't matter what these articles say. Under what Constitutional law is law enforcement going to force Apple and Google to change their encryption systems? Perhaps the NSA and the (still unconstitutionally vague) FISA court can force them by putting a secret gun to Tim's head but ordinary non-secret law enforcement organizations have no legal way to challenge this that would pass even this Supreme Court which is where anything would eventually wind up years from now.
Looking forward to reading the new one. I have been evaluating your company for a month now and had decided to move some sites over, however as your AUP is written they would be in violation (cron jobs).
Islamic problem or country problem? American media owned by Reza Aslan
I would be interested in knowing more about how it undergoes explosive growth when its food supply gets low. Sounds like the opposite of most species, and that's an interesting evolution to take.
Glad to hear it! Guess it's more surprises between platforms :| Given that, I'm even more interested in the Android version, and definitely curious what the source code looks like - that's a respectable speedup, you must be doing something right.

Would you have the source code for the benchmarks available somewhere? On the iOS post there was a link, but I didn't see it on the android one.