skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
"The Fermi Paradox is one of the more thought-provoking signs that something might be amiss (at least in our part of the galaxy), and especially because our culture is predisposed to not take anything happening on the interstellar stage very seriously this provides an impetus for reflection that would otherwise not happen."

A hypothetical observer in North America, circa 1500, would have no idea that Asia and Europe existed. Perhaps we're not too far from some interstellar space empire, but since they use some exotic means of FTL communication, we can't detect them?
Shame it's based on the fairly old 32-bit Snapdragon 400; it immediately looks obsolete next to the current wave of Chinese wunderphones.

The 400 is bargain-basement material on that sort of market, usually paired with a 720p screen around the $100 mark. The only phones cheaper than that use the MTK chipsets.
You are claiming that indigenous peoples killed more buffalo than "the whites." If this is true, then you are claiming that the indigenous peoples are the ones that drove the buffalo to near-extinction. I disagree with this assertion.
BUilding on this, I saw the Hobbit the first time in 48, and the second time in 24fps.

The panning around at the beginning of the movie was HORRIBLE in 24fps. Visually displeasing. The HFR effect disappeared for me after a few minutes and I could enjoy the film for what it was.
Which makes the bottle now worth probably a few hundred at least.
I've always wondered at what distance it would be impossible for current technology to detect life on earth.
"Bitcoin true believers think it will ultimately do to Wall Street what the Internet did to fax machines"

Uhhhhhh yeah, because the internet totally killed fax machines right? The last three fortune 500 companies I've worked for still actively used fax machines which were integrated into their copy machines. They're very much far from being extinct.
If you're concerned about that threat vector, you wouldn't be using GAPPS/Play. Except that's the only way they'll distribute TextSecure.
But you'd still be in defined territory. Once you let the canary send out its signal any conditions you attach after that fact contradict the signal by design and that is exactly the way it is not intended to work. You set it up with a set of rules and then you stick to those rules.

The intra-period but within defined parameters risk is a different one from the post canary has given its signal one.

The way I understand the whole system to work is that you set up a fragile, fusible link that will blow exactly once to give its signal, and any further signals are suspect. Otherwise why agree on a protocol to begin with if you can then break that protocol at will?

I can see a case for changing the protocol assuming the previous one was not broken but once you violate the protocol I can't see a way to un-do that without making the whole concept meaningless as a result.
You're conflating a couple of things here: encapsulating state, and mutability of state. Your examples are about mutability. But immutability is already standard practice in Java - standard enough that it's one of the items in Josh Bloch's 2001 book 'Effective Java', the bible of righteous Java programmers:

https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=ka2VUBqHiWkC&pg=PA73#v=o...

It's not usually pursued with the same rigour as in many functional languages, but it would be absolutely normal to see a Rectangle class with a stretchedX method which returns a new rectangle rather than mutates its receiver.

Now, you might argue that despite what Bloch, and every other good Java programmer, says, "Java as typically programmed" still trades mostly in mutable state. Since Java is actually widely used in the real world, it's typically incompetently programmed, and so this is probably true.

Nonetheless, i am confident that Java code written using immutable objects could both use and be used by other code. I say this because it's what i and my colleagues have been doing for years.

I had a go at functors in Java a while ago. You're certainly right that it's not elegant:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7898294
Reading this canary has me worried, it doesn't actually say that "no warrants have been served, nor have any searches or seizures taken place", it only says that a declaration stating that will be provided.

Compare this to rsync's (http://www.rsync.net/resources/notices/canary.txt), which this seems to have been based off of. It explicitly states "No warrants have ever been served to rsync.net, or rsync.net principals or employees. No searches or seizures of any kind have ever been performed on rsync.net assets, including:..."
Read the article. Not sure I understand how this is used in real world applications? Is the idea that the sequential analysis method returns an alert / flag once there is sufficient data to conclude that an A or B has been selected?
I'm going to be in Japan next week and was excited enough by the IMO gorgeous industrial design and hopefully-fast-enough mid-range specs to want to get one, however, while the Fx0 has Band 1/18 LTE, KDDI's 3G network is CDMA, not GSM/UMTS. I'vealso been told by friends that all their phones are typically locked as well. Dropped an email and it'd be great if that weren't the case and proper antenna's/baseband support was built in, but I won't get my hopes up.

There's a dedicated site/product portal for the Fx0 and it looks like they kicked off the launch w/ some hackathons last month: http://au-fx.kddi.com/
The "we are the first" argument seemed less convincing than it could have been. A better argument from that perspective is the observation that Type III civilizations expand at an alarming rate. Whatever the motivation for expansion[1], basic simulations and back of the envelope calculations show that even with technology we could imagine building in the not so distant future, humans could expand into the cosmos at >0.9c. We must assume the same of ET.

Now information only reaches us at the speed of light; we are only capable of looking for ET in our own past light cone. That means that any Type I or Type II civilization like us should expect to see an empty sky for most of their existence, until all of a sudden the most distant stars go dim (Dyson sphere, or whatever energy capturing device). And the darkness spreads in a wavefront travelling at almost the speed of light, until it hits and ... the unpredictable happens.

We see an empty sky because if the sky wasn't empty, the planet we call Earth and our Sun would already be consumed by some extraterrestrial Type III civilization and Fermi would never have existed.

[1] An inflationary universe provides incentive for a hypothetical Type III civilization to spread throughout the cosmos as quickly as possible, as idle time means regions of the universe becoming permanently inaccessible. Or maybe just resource competition and a desire for some elements of a population to remain on the frontier.
Looks good. I was just about to post how I think JSON is crappy as a config format and how I really liked INI. TOML seems to be very INI-like. Any software actually using it?

Anyone know any other config file targeted formats? I'm not keen on YAML for config. There's libconfig (and assoc. format), but, imho, it's a bit complex
disclaimer: I work on FxOS

Care to elaborate why hopeless? I Use Flame as my second device and while I totally agree that there's a lot of work needed before FxOS "feels" as polished as Android or iOS, I don't feel like it is hopeless.

Remember Android 2.0? What a piece of.. ehm.. unpolished mobile OS it was?
FxOS 2.2 is significantly more useful than any 1.x.

p.s. If you also have any basic webdev skills, you can fix UX yourself. I miss charging time notification on lockscreen and I started working on it yesterday [1] - fairly easy to add. We just need webdevs to help us hack :)

[1] https://github.com/zbraniecki/gaia/commit/a7829b7f4750e294b3...
OnePlus Allowed to Resume Sales in India After Court Order
Some interesting work coming out of the contractor space with IST research (http://istresearch.com/our-work/)
Outernet https://www.outernet.is
We're building a global broadcast data service to provide a basic level of news, information, and education for all of humanity.
I remember a very old episode of Columbo where an air capsule system to open wine bottles was used for poisoning...
Good point. I Don't suggest the assertion would refute the inferences from the canary death, but I'd like to see some non-repudiable assertion, as it would lead them to make some position.

All this non-sense about their "offices being closed" is just silly.

My conclusion is that they've lost the trust of the public, and their reputation and credibility is tarnished, perhaps irreperably.
Well, to be honest, they also managed to pull off another feat: They overcosted initial price PLUS insanely costed consumables.

Truly, a gadget fit for a king(or people that don't like money).
Yes, they could. A federal judge can compel people to do many, many things.
Except for the fact that Google does not have the signing keys that are used for the TextSecure binaries. They cannot silently distribute a binary that has been tampered with. This distributed trust system is one of Android's strengths:

https://developer.android.com/tools/publishing/app-signing.h...
James Cameron (Titanic, Avatar, etc.) wants to get frame rates up to at least 48FPS. He considers that more important than resolution, pointing out that higher resolution only benefits the first three rows in a theater.

With the low 24FPS frame rate, pans over detailed backgrounds look awful. This is a serious constraint on filmmaking. Cameron's films tend to have beautifully detailed backgrounds, and he has to be careful with pan rates to avoid "judder". "The rule of thumb is to pan no faster than a full image width every seven seconds, otherwise judder will become too detrimental."(http://www.red.com/learn/red-101/camera-panning-speed)

There are some movies from the 1950 and 1960s where this is seriously annoying. That was when good color and wide screen came in, and films contained gorgeous outdoor shots of beautiful locations. With, of course, pans. Some of the better Westerns of the period have serious judder problems. Directors then discovered the seven-second rule. Or defocused the background slightly, if there was action in the foreground. Some TVs and DVD/BD players now have interpolation hardware to deal with this.

The author's analysis of the human visual system is irrelevant for pans. For pans, the viewer's eyes track the moving background, so the image is not moving with respect to the retina.
Hell it's valid for everything period. Even vectors! Splitting struct a into hot/cold chunks is pretty common. Minimize the sise of data being iterated on to maximize cache usage. Can result in big wins.
Yes. I'm sorry, what is you manufacturing background? It's relevant as you seem to be under the misapprehension that material cost is the only consideration here.
A very short distance. IIRC something like 20 or so light years, but I'm having trouble finding the citation. That's for radio waves (and the number is getting smaller as the technology is getting better -- EM radiation blasted into the universe is considered waste by hardware engineers).

For direct detection of life, that's still an open question. I remember a poster done by a grad student who looked at whether life would be detectable from the Moon, looking at the Earth. This was tested with data from one of the outer solar system probes which did a lunar flyby on its way out (Cassini?). The result, IIRC, was inconclusive -- you could see signs of life, but not anything that was absolutely definitive proof.

Indirect evidence might be provided by spectra of the atmosphere observed via solar transit. A biome is likely to have different spectra than would be predicted by inorganic atmospheric physics. Still, that's making some assumptions about what extraterrestrial life would be like, and only only visible along the elliptic plane.
Nothing stops you from following the COM ABI from C or any other language, which is kind of the point. The .h files generated from the idl have that CINTERFACE macro which has the vtable structs, in a form convenient for consuming from a C (and not C++) program.
Ask HN: Why the red bar in HN?
Why is the main top bar red? Is it a Christmas thing or is it a permanent change? I'm just asking because eyes are kind of bleeding right now.
Hooray, parsedown! Thank you for your hard work on this, it's my favorite of the PHP markdown parsers. I really like the philosophy and execution.
I'm digging the translucent case. Brings back good memories of Nintendo 64.
Immersion. It doesn't have to be real, it just has to take you there fully enough for you to have an experience intended by the creator.
"As of Thu Dec 25 19:07:56 2014 UTC, here are the current headlines"

So it's up again?
Where are the specifics defined? What you posted above leaves room for interpretation. You can say "if you don't hear from me in a month, I'm probably dead", and I can indeed assume that if you're gone, but if you return I won't say "sorry, I already assumed you're dead, tough luck".

Similarly, the above defines what the assumption is while the canary is not being updated. Nobody is arguing with that.
I hope there's something along the lines of sub-space transmissions. Once we discover it, we'll start listening and discover a plethora of civilisations out there.

Would also be nice if they periodically transmitted decoding instructions :)

But who knows, maybe it's far more rare with life that are similar to what we can recognise?
Wesołych Świąt Bożego Narodzenia!

All the best to the community. It's the only place on the Internet where comments are often more insightful than articles :)
Coffee:

[45,69,82,82,89,0,35,72,82,73,83,84,77,65,83,1].map((x) -> String.fromCharCode x+32).join('')
TheInterviewMovieStream.com
I rather prefer Mozilla to spend resources on Servo and Rust.

Symbian web widgets, WebOS, ChromeOS, Chrome Packaged Apps, ...

We have already seen it multiple times already, it always fails to impress.
Yes, I finally gave up and re-typed the HN URL.
I would be worried about that long after I'd be worried about people simply striking a deal in some trumped up criminal lawsuit after being suitably intimidated.
Watch the face of a little one opening presents on Christmas morning, and the question obviates itself.
And end up with bad design choices for the sake of speed? No thanks. I'd rather wait as long as needed to perfect the design. Rust won't succeed unless its benefits over C++ are dramatic, obvious, and uncontroversial. I'm fine using C++ for a few more years if it means Rust will be amazing and not just OK.
Wow, I never knew. I have this a a low level. Always have.

Here's a mildly interesting thing: Say you are at a stop light, and you want to get the jump on the other guy.

Jiggle your eyes rapidly around the light, and you will pick up the change more quickly than other people do.

Eyes do not have frame rates. They sample in a staggered fashion, some rods / cones, others, inner eye priority, outer eye lower priority, with movement getting priority overall and detail.
speaking as someone who eats copious amounts of Indian food, I agree with all this article says.
10 litre bottle of argon is about $45.

The capsule contains 20ml and costs $10 ($500/litre).

So yeah, someone should be able to create non-original capsules for a lower price.
Of course we can't know for sure. The article presents a large number of hypotheses and arguments for them, most of which are fairly reasonable.
TulaLens -- http://www.tulalens.org

Yelp for low-income people in the developing world. They just did a pilot in Hyderabad (India), and helped pregnant women living in slum areas discover hospitals around them offering better, cheaper care then they were receiving elsewhere (some were having to pay bribes to get care at government hospitals).
Rust's package system, Cargo, uses it. See http://doc.crates.io/guide.html for an example.
"Fx0 is the first high-spec Firefox OS smartphone with the latest Firefox OS update inside"

So does this mean it has FxOS 1.4? or 2.1?

It's good that they have a mid-range phone now. Hopefully they'll someday have something here in the US that's competitive.
Saving this awesome thread for future reference.
Facebook: class action lawsuit accusing it of violating its users' privacy
The alternation between red and green numbers on the front page would seem to suggest an xmax theme
How Facebook Killed the Internet
I'm looking forward to the face of the guy who uses this to open the $2500 wine bottle and then gets the needle stuck in it...
Yep, the method will alert you when there is enough data to be able to conclude which hypothesis is true.
Running Python and R inside Emacs (2012)
But that's not what was said... what was said was: If we do not update this canary file in x days you are to assume that we have received a warrant of sorts that we are not allowed to talk about.
EDIT: Deleted parent comment pointed to [1].

The article lines out how to neutralize an attacker mindlessly building a chain of useless transaction but this obviously does not solve the problem. What if the attacker forks and rebuilds the chain of the last week but randomly leaves out every tenth transaction while slowly poisoning the genuine chain with useless transactions until the algorithm decides to switch? You just undid thousands of transaction originally confirmed a week ago. If you could just make up a couple of rules to prevent all 51 % attacks they would not be an issue in the first place. But this again would imply that it does not matter how the computing power is distribute between the good guys and the bad guys which obviously completely contradicts the fundamental design of Bitcoin.

[1] http://gavintech.blogspot.de/2012/05/neutralizing-51-attack....
Sounds like a hell of a book/movie plot.
I can't speak to the others, but Immutable is not in any way sufficient to replace native immutable data structures. The fact that you don't get native notation for initialization or destructuring is a huge deal in practice. Nobody wants to write 'foo.get("a").get("b").get("c")' where "foo.a.b.c" would do. (Likewise for assignment/creation.)
Well I don't want to get into a flame-war regarding intrusive/containing or C/C++, but I will say that type safety and intrusive/container are orthogonal things. One can have a type-unsafe container as well as a type-safe (generic!) intrusive structure. See my code for proof :) I think we'll agree that it's not too complicated and easy to use.

Implementation: https://github.com/ambrop72/aprinter/blob/master/aprinter/st...

Usage: https://github.com/ambrop72/aprinter/blob/master/aprinter/sy... (the BusyEventLoop keep track of QueuedEvent objects).

If you wonder what's the purpose of the Accessor, it's for when you can't use the simple member-pointer based interface due to C++'s eager evaluation, and can hack around it with forward declaration of a custom Accessor class, followed by the complete definition later.

I think Boost intrusive structures are type safe too, but I'm not 100% sure. But Boost is another matter altogether.
The first thing I thought about while reading the article was minimalist classical music, like Philip Glass.

I think Glass does the repetitive/unexpected thing exceptionally well, though it's often subtle.

If you're already familiar with Glass (or if you like Beck) you might want to check out Beck's song from Rework, an album of remixed Glass: https://soundcloud.com/dunvagenmusic/nyc-73-78

It's repetitive, but has enough of the unexpected mixed in to make it a stimulating listen.
> Does every entrepreneur ready to take over their startup upto MVP?

Can you rephrase with proper English? I don't understand the question.
> May be I don't.

Nonetheless, I am curious. Can you give examples of what (you consider are) innovations that you've seen? For what it's worth, I am aware that some of the bigger Indian outsourcing companies have initiatives for innovative and research-oriented work, but I have not seen what they actually produce.
Eh, any $1 hypodermic needle is sufficient to inject poison into wine. If you're worried about potential poisonings, your first priority should be to eliminate what's worrying you about potential poisonings.
No, the systemd people probably just wanted to avoid an dependency that they don't control.
I would have thought dot matrix would be easy. Few characters and fixed spacing and all...
For inexplicable reasons, Lollipop removed silent mode. The new task switcher is an abomination and memory management is way too harsh (constant gc-ing)
Yeah, for your types, but if I'm a provider of a library of generic data structures (which is what the people asking for generics are probably thinking about), you're out of luck since I have no way of letting you generate appropriate instances.
I haven't used Parsedown but I am glad things are moving to CommonMark -- it will shift the focus to performance, structure and extensibility instead of struggling with edge cases and Markdown idiosyncrasies.

PHP CommonMark's compliance is very current--CommonMark spec 0.13, Dec 15, 2014 and it will continue to keep up.

It follows the reference implementation very closely, has good support for extensibility and the code is very well structured. It's likely to become the de facto PHP implementation in my opinion.
EDIT: Deleted parent comment suggested hard forks to prevent 51 % attacks.

See my response to your first comment - you can not simply prevent any 51 % attack by changing the protocol. By the way, I am not downvoting your comments, I am (usually) not voting on any responses to me but let the other users judge.
I didn't seem to catch it but it stands to mention that Santa and most everything about Christmas don't have any Christian origin, so yes, the concept does occupy a strange place because it's not cohesive to Christianity, but rather pre Christian paganism.
I'm not sure where you came to the conclusion that it meant complete and utter annihilation vs something much less dramatic like moving from the primary way to send and share important documents to a marginalized secondary player kept alive mostly due to legacy/dated procedures. Trust me no one who is 10 years or under today is ever going to send a fax in their professional life.
I may be persuaded that the individual tasked with signing and updating the canary got drunk over the Holidays and forgot.

Nobody is going to convince me that same individual went on a twenty day bender and sobered up on Christmas morning.
I feel that the other side: zero cost to protect a sidechain, is a much bigger benefit. Presumably, the sidechain has mining rewards as well, which devalue the amount of BTC you get when going back to the main chain.
Seems that silent mode is still there, but the name is changed:

https://gigaom.com/2014/11/17/silent-vibrate-do-not-disturb-...

I haven't used lollipop so I don't know about the task switcher and memory management. These seem like they could be quite annoying, but fixable and not a complete failure.

I haven't heard Lollipop being widely described as a boondoggle, so I'm wondering if it's as big of a failure as you are ascribing.
That is exactly nih syndrom told in another way.
This looks brilliant! Wish I had an android device to test.

This would be great on iOS 8, which allows developers to bake photo editing tools and custom filters into the stock Photos app.
That's a great link, thanks. Wine goes bad so fast that I was giggling in excitement when I watched the video. But then my jaw dropped when I saw the price of the machine. And it drop again when I saw the cartridge price.

I can't help thinking that this is a product planned by MBA type. But I rarely spend more than $20 on a bottle of wine, and if the product is head and shoulder above competition out there, the company can pretty charge whatever it wants for people who routinely drink expensive wine, or restaurant establishments.
Look at the images on that article. Has this guy been to India? Snake charmers? Simpleton logic as well.