I'm not sure if my brain is failing me but... "I calculated a less than 0.001% chance of posts (content) making the front page of Reddit. That is a 1/1000 chance."

Surely 1% is a 1 in 100 chance, 0.1% is a 1 in 1,000 chance, 0.001% would be 1 in 100,000 chance. Have I made a critical error here?

good point - thanks

As someone who was 13 years old in 1996, I take exception to this. It looks like it was made by an 11 year old in 1996.

+1.

Back then at 13, I already knew the dancing baby was not cool.

The OP links to the Popular Mechanics article in the first paragraph. I don't think it was intended as a replacement for the Popular Mechanics article, but as an addition to it.

And I feel it adds nothing to it, plus it hurts my eyes, for reasons explained in my second link.

Also, pretty pathetic I'm downvoted for personal preferences and opinions.

AFAICT they are a registered charity with the goal of promoting computer science education, so I suspect large profit margins matter less than if they were a business.

They don't need large profit margins, but they should try to have enough for an office and staff.

Profit is what you have after paying for costs, including staff.

I would be surprised if his current keyboard had LCD keys.

I am and was aware of that. You don't need LED keys is my point. Just take control of what you already have. You can do it right now.

People have this huge blind spot around their keyboards for some reason. Every keyboard is "programmable" nowadays. The symbols on the keycaps are only suggestions. Don't pine, do.

(And before anybody brings up the usual objection that your customizations travel to other people's machines poorly, bear in mind that today we're discussing a custom hardware keyboard. Software keyboard configurations travel better than that.)

> And before anybody brings up the usual objection that your customizations travel to other people's machines poorly...

I'd say that's unimportant compared to other people traveling to your machine's configuration poorly, when the displayed UI does not reflect the actual result. Imagine, if you will, someone sitting down at a keyboard configured as anything not QWERTY, but still labeled in QWERTY. They're going to ask how to fix it. In contrast, an accurately labeled keyboard will at least allow them to hunt-n-peck.

Even Apple's customizations of the trackpad travel poorly to other users. A familiar scene: a user taps it several times, then has to ask the owner how to click.

Even accurate UI needs careful design. The standard bad example is Microsoft's menus that automatically "simplified" themselves by hiding infrequently used items, making life more complex for everyone.

It turns out in practice not to be a huge problem.

As you might guess, I'm speaking from experience. I don't need to "imagine" or theorize, I'm living it.

It also turns out that if you really want to, it's easy to make your keyboard flip back and forth between QWERTY and whatever customizations you like. (In my environment, "setxkbmap us" and "jerf_keyboard" (setxkbmap dvorak & an xmodmap) does it. Bind a key to it if you like. I used to use xosd to pop up which mode just turned on when I was sharing a computer with my wife.)

I reiterate, people have a huge blind spot here and are so busy hypothesizing about how it might not work that they miss out on the fact that it does work, and there's no need to wait for fancy keyboards... that, by the way, your coworkers will still be intimidated by, so it's not as if your argument actually affects anything in any direction anyhow. Reap the benefits of these keyboards now, if you like.

Your experience isn't universal. I have people using my computer sometimes that I have to change the keyboard back to QWERTY for them, because they can't find the keyboard icon to do it themselves, even when they have directions. It really is a pain, in my experience.

It's so strange, I was just playing with pathfinding algorithms in CoffeeScript this weekend and thought about putting something like this together, but you have beaten me to it :) Really nice work.

What is strange is that we don't do things because other folks have already done it and miss a great learning experience :)

That's an excellent point! Perhaps I will put something together anyway. Thanks for this :)

The original NASA article: http://www.nasa.gov/topics/solarsystem/features/dna-meteorit...

Can anyone find the actual article on PNAS? The closest I can get is http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2011/08/04/1105715108.abst...

And this is the lab page, that also has no info on the paper.

http://astrobiology.gsfc.nasa.gov/analytical/index.html

This is one thing that consistently annoys me about most scientific journalism online, and about the press releases by institutions. Is it really that hard to post a link to the abstract page of the actual journal?

Thanks for the link. Makes me wonder, if life did come from space then we will have to start exploring space more seriously. The possibility of a aliens existing somewhere else cannot be ignored any longer.

This HN thread links to an article that describes the enormous difficulties in interstellar travel: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2639456

Mind you... space exploration does not have to be interstellar. There are probably lots of interesting discoveries to be had here in our own backyard.

I wondered this when she said "WYSIWYG". There are a few points where the tone of her voice suggests she is either at the start or the end of a sentence, but in fact she isn't.

I hadn't heard of namecoin until you mentioned it. It looks interesting.

But shouldn't it be called bitname?