skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Recomment(?) from a reddit thread on the same story from someone who claims to work in cancer research:

The chances that this antibody will work in humans is EXTREMELY small.

The model that would have to be used here is injecting human prostate cancer cells into nude mice (this is a strain that is totally lacking in its own immune system so foreign cancer cells can actually survive and not be killed within minutes), allowing the tumor to grow, and then injecting the antibody or even ust the antibody fragment int the tail vein. You then palpate the tumor over the next few weeks. You'd also want to sample the tumor and maybe do some TUNEL to check for actual rates of apoptosis.

Chances are very slim that an antibody that fights this specific strain of lab grown cancer (lab grown cancers have generally been grown for so long that they are heavily mutated to say the least) will be effective in humans. Humans have many, many, many different strains of prostate cancer and unless these researchers have accidentally stumbled upon the holy grail of surface markers that somehow indicate internal genetic expression...I am skeptical.

Additionally, you've linked to an article that is so vacuous that it doesn't even feel the need to cite the actual results which it is based upon. VPNed through my department account and I can't even find the article.

http://www.reddit.com/r/science/comments/ajcaq/an_antibody_h...
Heh, that's actually pretty cool. I like having tabs above the address bar and buttons. Thanks for the tip!
I know for a fact that real-time A5/1 has been privately available commercially since at least 2006. It is my understanding from talking to a relevant engineer that if the algorithm wasn't known-broken when released, it was broken by intelligence services within the first year.

In conclusion, don't talk on cell phones when you're talking about sensitive things. In some locations (mid east), it has compromised you for years.
I haven't seen it yet, but I assume it's just a regurgitation of a "noble savage" story.

I want to make a movie about a technologically and culturally advanced people who encounter a primitive race. The primitives have high murder & infanticide rates, endless stupid tribal wars, etc. The technologically advanced people force assimilate or drive off the primitives and live happily ever after. The End.
session lifetime is an orthogonal concern to the password.

i just don't see it as a good idea to have the password be one of the inputs to the value of the session identifier in any way, which was my point.

you can handle every scenario you bring up without tying password to session id.
Hmm interesting. Back in October, I reported a dead sea lion outside my house (I live on the Bay) to the department of Ornithology and Mammalogy at the California Academy of Sciences. They came out and removed the animal's carcass, and told me it had died of kidney failure due to a sexually transmitted disease (Bacterial Vaginosis). They explained that half of the Pier 39 sea lions were victims of the STD.

More information can be found at http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.vetmic.2005.11.045

I doubt it, but I wonder if this STD had any impact on their leave...
An appeal from Wikipedia founder, Jimmy Wales
It would probably be worth it for the other bot-net operators to pay for that service as well. Unless there's some sort of honor among bot-net operators.
Well, first of all:

US researchers have found an antibody that hunts down prostate cancer cells in mice...

That's mice, folks. Let's review the guidelines for titling your cancer-related article: If the result is in vitro, you must use the words in vitro; if it is in mice, you must use the word mice.

(Why? Because mice are not like humans. See my earlier musings on that subject here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=838160 )

Meanwhile, like all crappy popular articles, this one provides no citation. It doesn't even mention the names of any of the researchers, poor dears. But Google and I can remedy this -- this seems to be the paper:

http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2009/12/15/0911397107.abst...

Salient facts:

This is, as much as one can tell from an abstract, a fine preliminary result. But don't buy any stock yet.

Not only is this in mice, but this result is about attacking human prostate cancer that has been transplanted into mice. Now, this is a darn sight more impressive than killing cells in a dish, but it's still not the same problem as killing the cells in the human body where they originally evolved. The mouse is a nude mouse; it's immunodeficient (otherwise it would reject the human cancer). Part of the reason that the antibody may be working so well -- attacking the cancer, leaving other cells alone -- is that the cancer cells aren't just cancer, but also from a completely different part of the mammalian family tree.

The other big problem with these studies is that it's one thing to be able to label "85%" of metastatic cancer cells in an animal model, but that's not necessarily a cure. For one thing, among the remaining 15% may be the line of cells that is resistant to your antibody. Now you need another antibody!

Worse, antibodies are hard to deliver to every cancerous cell. They're not especially tiny molecules. They have a relatively easy time being delivered to normal tissues via the bloodstream, because normal tissues are very carefully engineered such that every cell is within a short distance of a capillary. But tumors, having gotten where they were by randomly flipping switches on their genomes like a toddler trying to launch the Space Shuttle, are pretty poorly organized. There are bits of the interior of a tumor that are so far from blood vessels that the cells there are asphyxiating. Unfortunately, because of this, one of the things that cancer cells tend to learn really early is how to survive in such low-oxygen conditions, and when an antibody comes along in the bloodstream and kills the easily-accessed cancer cells, it is likely to leave behind some of these orphan cells, which sit around waiting for the day that they will come across some more oxygen and start growing again. Then, a few months or years later, your cancer comes back.

(This, by the way, is also a big problem with classical chemotherapy and every other cancer treatment.)

So, this result is a relatively early report from a work in progress. Such work takes a great deal of time to come to fruition.
Think is hiring iPhone developers
Hi,

I run Think in Palo Alto (http://www.thinkcomputer.com is our outdated site). We're working on mobile payments, and we're looking for iPhone developers. If you or anyone you know is interested, feel free to send jobs@thinkcomputer.com an e-mail and mention HN in the subject line. We're ideally looking for people around the Bay Area, but if you've created something particularly awesome we'll be happy to take a look.

Thanks,

Aaron
Yeah, this is from a cancer researcher. As a former cancer researcher, I recognize the symptoms. ;)

All of this is basically true, though I hesitate to be so harsh without actually reading the article...
14 Creative 3D Game Characters (Girls) For Inspiration
In this post I'm sharing computer 3D game characters for Inspiration. These all are girl characters and very creative in term of designing. I am sure you'll like all of them.
Content doesn't have a TOS. It has a copyright. In the United States, at least, the DMCA allows content owners to file a take down request. If youtube has been ignoring DMCA takedown requests, that's news to me.
At any rate, it's about property protection and not passenger protection.
The author states that the site he references in the post is not the same site that is live.

"Any overlap with existing site is accident."
For OpenGL on Python there is http://www.pyglet.org/ and http://cocos2d.org/
It may be technically poor in your particular domain of operation, which you fail to elaborate on, but I think in the domain of operation it targets, i.e. servers with performance, it evidently considered good by a great deal of smart people. For example, it totally dominates the top500 supercomputers, is used by Google for their backend, by a large number (most?) hosting companies. This is primarily due to the overall performance characteristics being better (not some sub-benchmark where FreeBSD or Solaris or whatever pulls ahead by 1 or 2%).

That is to say, the Linux kernel is the fastest for general performance oriented server tasks. It may be the case that in some areas you can get some other unix-y operating systems to outperform it, and by all means use them in those circumstances for your projects, but I think your blanket unqualified dismissal of the thousands of kernel developers as being technically poor and ultimately "worse is better" is a bit over the top.
Carrefour's logo is a nice one too (look for the C)
If I were a troll (or just trying to be funny), I would have had noted that Microsoft didn't have people to develop IE for years...

(And yes yes, I know that was to slow the moving of functionality to the net.)

As it is, I can't really see why there is a need for tens of thousands of software people? But then, I don't know much about leveraging a monopoly into other areas.
Many of these examples are not examples of clever use of negative space at all.
Yes, me too. Reading tip: http://www.violentacres.com/archives/345/adventures-in-volun...
all they did was write in a few extra clauses into their ToS. Nothing actually changed for you.

Those few clauses gave Google a kill switch to his site. If it stayed small Google wouldn't have done anything, if it succeeded they'd come after him for violating the terms, and probably end up acquiring it for little or nothing.

As far as I can see the only thing Google is "guilty" of is changing a few lines in their ToS, which is entirely in their right.

It is their right. It's also a change that nullified his business model, so letting him know about it would have been the non-evil thing to do, and that would have taken no additional effort since they were already communicating with him. It's possible that their failure to do so was incompetence rather than malice, but the result is the same.
Alcohol substitute that avoids drunkenness and hangovers
Too bad they don't mention anything about how Facebook was involved. It'd be nice to know to what degree people are meeting each other through Facebook, or if people are simply failing to cover up their alternate lives on Facebook.

I mean, we all assume that things like better privacy controls are good.
> kind of willingness-to-believe stops at "George Bush

We are willing to believe in change now, becuase we can.
Maybe Steve Gibson? This article was linked here two weeks ago:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=992830
Ratings at CNN fall 30% (+ other cable year-end ratings)
Interesting website, kind of irritating that the whole thing is using HTTPS; they should only implement that for logins/ecommerce, not for general browsing.
I don't need international stuff, but Twilio is amazing. Thanks for a great service. I had to do a tedious phone integration involving dynamic menus and you guys made it a relative breeze (other than working with the voice talent!).
All would be quite straight forward--their XML schema is simple and there are helper libs in a variety of languages.
We set up something to play around with http://vanillaforums.com/. Not sure if we will open it up and run with it.

Interesting discussion on the direction of hacker news, I see value in both.
Consumer court forum
Discuss and share your consumer related problems, whether its about home appliances, loans, any stores, cars, credit cards, and other products and services.
Best speed up computer trilogy — Wondershare PC Health Suite
Buy one get one free surprise:
Best speed up computer trilogy — Wondershare PC Health Suite
I absolutely agree with you that continuous deployment increases resilience. The problem is that it also increases instability.

Perhaps the closest example I can think of with regards to continuous deployment in mission critical situations are the martian rovers - I think they had some real-time deployment of new code. But, the implications of a problem with them were relatively minor - a few hundred million dollars, and no lives lost.

Are there any examples of continuous deployment in a scenario in which hundreds of lives and/or billions of dollars are at stake?
Fixed.

http://dig.jsondns.org/IN/dkim1._domainkey.grepular.com/TXT

http://dig.jsondns.org/IN/_sip._tcp.grepular.com/SRV

http://dig.jsondns.org/IN/_jabber._tcp.gmail.com/SRV
vaksel, great comment. You took the words out of my mouth.
Just me, or the the Wikipedia the NPR of the internet? Since it doesn't have a monetization strategy at all, it constantly has to look for everyone to support it. Not saying this is a bad thing, but their fund drives often remind me of each other.

That being said, there's got to be some good way for the wikipedia to make a few $ but also stay neutral in regard to their content and keep their content open.
3 days left to help the FreeBSD Foundation reach its 2009 donation target
There's always advertisements. But, as you might suspect, that's turned into a religious war on Wikipedia.
Thank you for the writeup - definitely an eye-opener.

Options:

1) Re-enable videos to be uploaded to your own site. Put ads on those. You have enough of a name that you should get at least a trickle of videos which you can use for public (free) parts of the site. Maybe video contributors get free access - X months per video.

2) Get other non-video content up there. Forums, user-submitted articles etc. Change the balance of Youtube vs. non-Youtube content.
Totally agreed. Either that or they need to someone constantly apply for grants from places. Do something. There's got to be a better way than e-begging.
It should, is like saying he had a head transplant:)
They left after San Francisco's best radio station got shut down, Energy 92.7 :P That happened a little while ago though.
Uh, sea lions != dolphins.
Why don't they find a way to monetize it and stop begging for donations? Even a non-profit needs money to survive. I can live with non-obtrusive ads if that ensures Wikipedia's survival. It might even be less obtrusive than the huge banner at the top right now asking for donations.
I'm a pretty light sleeper. I can usually only get one decent night of sleep a week. Might as well spend it being up and doing stuff.
Why the Chinese Gov is Launching its Own Hulu and YouTube
Here is the most recent sign that that data is 'cooked'.

On Tuesday, the Moscow based Institute of Economic Analysis (IEA) issued a report claiming that the Hadley Center for Climate Change based at the headquarters of the British Meteorological Office in Exeter (Devon, England) had probably tampered with Russian-climate data...
Over 40% of Russian territory was not included in global-temperature calculations for unknown reasons, rather than the lack of meteorological stations and observations, according to the IEA.

http://global-warming.accuweather.com/2009/12/was_russian_cl...
Why Human Brains Vary
GIYF, "hacker news noprocrast"
How to Cut Costs with Green IT
Absolutely. Wikipedia can dictate the ads, how subtle they must be, text vs image, and they have a fantastic ability to target. So the whole universe gives them this business model they could nail, and they refuse.

Well, okay. I'd rather click on ads than give money every year. In fact, the plaintive wailing bugs me more than any real ad so I'm motivated to not donate.
not true. Google is a platform provider and their path is to let niche and verticals work independently. And even if in the path, Google can handle it without pick-a-brain meetings with the micro startup in order to smush them
I'm a little worried that the UI submissions might be very Vista/7 focused. As it stands, this website shows a Vista/7 screenshot. Isn't one of the points of the browser that it's multi-platform?

There are still core UI issues they face on a mac:
https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=430745
Google is NOT other player. They are the Internet
They could hide ads from those that prefer to donate. Besides, there are ads. Just Jimmy Wales ads.
I wonder how much they would be making from Google Ads? They're generally targeted at the content for the page, the reader is obviously already interested in the subject, seems like a win-win to me.
I agree. I don't see the need for such an invasive govt run organisation to get airlines to provide security - they already will have an interest in not losing their planes, they're expensive as hell.
I used to work with a guy who wrote horrible commit messages. My (least) favorite was "works better." This was especially annoying because his code generally didn't go through review and was pushed into production within minutes. So any problem with the new code and we'd need to stare at the diff (which was often very complex) and try to answer the 3 questions in the article plus why it caused a problem.

Mind you - this was a guy with a few decades of experience.
Nice visualization of a very cool data source:

http://wordnet.princeton.edu/wordnet/

Re: the visualization: maybe uses the Box2D Flash port? I don't do any Flash development so can't easily look at the source to see, but it feels like Box2D under there.

http://www.box2d.org/wiki/index.php?title=AS3_FAQ
I'm sure totlol.com is a great site and all, but I seriously doubt you're single-handedly responsible for a change to the YouTube TOS.
Why we write: a modern Greek tragi-comedy
and how do make a bullet list on HN?

Easiest way is to indent each line (2+ spaces) and make your own bullet. eg:

- one
- two
- three

More info on formatting here: http://news.ycombinator.com/formatdoc
.
Sorry bout that. Didn't notice the additional character.
Sorry man. GWT _is_ simpler for me vs learning your framework.

I would advise you to drop the whole "SproutCore, GWT" vs JS/your-own-framework angle because usually argument like that looks ... immature ...
BaconBits, A BitTorrent Tracker for Redditors Only
Interesting, although as far as I can see, there's no way to distribute your game without the source code?
10 Unique Characters You Might Meet At The Casino
We've put together this list for all of the inexperience gamblers out there. Next time you're sitting at a slot machine or rolling at the craps table, just look around now and then and see how many of these people you can spot. We promise it's a lot of fun.
This guy didn't get banned by Google, but he couldn't make enough money with his startup so he had to get a real job. To save his ego, he blames Google and their TOS.
Demi Moore's lawyers send threatening cease and desist to Boingboing
"The Decade in Design" and not a single image in this blog post?
This project has one of the best READMEs I've seen in recent days of looking at a lot of open source code. Good overview, well written.
I agree. I don't mind the concept, but the execution is poor, especially on the Brand Union logo. Egg & Spoon, 8 Fish, Yoga Australia, and Guild of Food Writers were all cool, though. The Bermuda Aquarium logo just feels oddly disconnected, with all of the negative space and then the tiny triangle floating over on the left. I love clever use of negative space, but I don't like things that float in the middle of nowhere.
I've been a DJ on several commercial radio stations in medium sized markets and legally we have to keep track due to contesting rules put in place by the CRTC or some other part of law. That being said if it's a lesser contest for tickets or something then nobody will be really paying attention and we just sort of eyeball it on the phone system with no screener needed.
I'm not sure it would interact nicely with the request authentication system that S3 uses.

I think a generic cache layer would be a better solution. A bit of googling turns up fuse-cache, which sounds like about the right thing (although I haven't actually examined it in detail), or fs-cache, which also sounds like a discrete cache layer to be added to any file system. Basically, you mount it, and it passes requests through to any other mount (like s3fslite) while adding an on-disk cache layer.

I haven't tested any of these, but that seems like an approach worth pursuing.

- Russ
While I understand that the YouTube integration is really nice, rolling your own encoding and video-serving is not out of the question. There are a number of libraries for some popular languages that will help automate the process (with ffmpeg) and cover up the messy details if you need. The cheap FLVplayer is easily skinned to match your site, etc. And Amazon's S3 storage is almost free.
thank you, will definitely use next time
Functional Programming Doesn’t Work (and what to do about it)
I really hate scrolling in Flash.

IE6 dropdown boxes used to hijack scrolling, especially when you are filling a long form. IE7 improved this, the dropdown combo will only scroll when your mouseover the control.
ANN: Planet Clojure
Could be worse, at least he was claiming it was done. I frequently see several completely unrelated changes committed together with the comment "wip" (which stands for "work in progress") and these aren't from just one dev. Drives me nuts. "Was this finished?" "Did QA have any idea what you were sneaking in?"
Some quick math suggests that even billing my time to set this up, it will be cheaper than the piece of freaking garbage service I use to give my family a Chicago number to call that dials Japan for them. I pay them $25 a month (minimum) and the call quality is terrrrrrrrrrrrrible.

Thanks, you'll improve the lives of my family.
I'd like to see a rebuttal to the core criticism:

Imagine you’ve implemented a large program in a purely functional way. All the data is properly threaded in and out of functions, and there are no truly destructive updates to speak of. Now pick the two lowest-level and most isolated functions in the entire codebase. They’re used all over the place, but are never called from the same modules. Now make these dependent on each other: function A behaves differently depending on the number of times function B has been called and vice-versa.

In C, this is easy! It can be done quickly and cleanly by adding some global variables. In purely functional code, this is somewhere between a major rearchitecting of the data flow and hopeless.

I am almost certain a Haskellite will say something about monads or arrows, but I don't know what.

EDIT: I guess another criticism might be "when would you possibly need this?". It smells suspiciously like a symptom of bad design -- these two totally independent, low-level calculations are now dependent on each other. A possible use case might be a tweak to an artificial physics, as in a simulation or game.
Ask HN: YC vs TechStars
I couldn't help but notice that the TechStars/Boston deadline is approaching (Jan 11). TS looks and sounds a lot like YC, but I'm wondering how it compares. As far as I can tell it looks like a wonderful alternative for east coast residents.

Has anyone had an experience with TechStars? Is anyone in the position to compare the two?