skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Ah, you are correct. 23andMe is using Illumina, Navigenics is using Affy. I have my doubts as to whether either approach is truly useful at this point in time to non-researchers, but I could be quite wrong. My objection to 23andMe and Navigenics and so forth is based on the inherently incomplete information provided by a static snapshot of a person's polymorphisms.

As far as email -- sure. Though I don't know whether I'll be pleased to be associated with such a screed when the full details of their plans are more apparent.

Selling their database to pharma companies is exactly the sort of evil I'd hoped they'd avoid. Oh well. Looks like the Google way of thinking didn't infect 23andMe after all.
Bad Practice In User Interface Design - Misuse Of The Drop-Down Menu
I don't have any particular recommendations for Java books, probably any of the usual "learn java" style books are ok, it's not a particularly difficult language to learn the basics, but I'd check reviews of books on Amazon or something.

I've recently discovered http://www.cafeaulait.org/ and it seems like a good Java resource. And of course http://java.sun.com/
YC has a huge and specific audience, which makes it uniquely able to popularize a standard seed funding system. Notably, they will write emails to all rejected applicants, and they probably receive tens of inquiries per week from YC-like ventures asking for help.

I didn't intend to suggest that YC force anyone to do anything.
i've already got all the networking code ready to go. would anybody here use such a framework?
I can't find the link on their site now, maybe it's gone, but I also believe that 23andme is using a modified Illumina chip that is more inaccurate than the standard chip but is 10 times more likely to return SOME result.

Here it is: https://www.23andme.com/you/faqwin/dataaccuracy/
Implementation will make or break a company, certainly. But if you have no lock at all on your IP, you won't be able to get VCs to get interested as easily. They care about things like that. Why make it harder to get VCs interested?

Note that "ideas are worthless" is usually brought up in context of private discussion, not public disclosure. Private discussions don't start the clock ticking.

They DO affect trade secrets, as far as I know. If you tell someone your secret sauce, and they aren't under NDA, then your claim to a secret is lessened.

I am not a lawyer.
Not sure that it matters -- if you have a less accurate chip, you just resequence (run it) to greater depth. (If you can afford to, that is... and in all likelihood, they can) That's effectively what Helicos et al. are doing anyways. Their call rate for whole-genome resequencing is on the order of 99.7% at a depth of 2; at a depth of 20-50 maybe it becomes useful.

If you think of the chip (hybridization) methods being depth of 1, eg. a single scan per sample across however many probes there are for a given SNP, then you can probably see where the synthesis methods win. It's really cheap to re-run them. It's twice as expensive to run 2 chips...

All of the sequencing-by-synthesis methods are less accurate but cheaper and ultimately more useful than anything based on the existing hybridization arrays (or beadarrays). If you look at eg. the Personal Genome Project, there is a good summary from the Church lab about how eg. padlock sequencing is different from Affy/Illumina/Nimblegene hybridization arrays.

Also note that (1 - 0.999) * 550K still gives 550 miscalls.
D'oh. (Another big win for sequencing by synthesis -- just do it again, and again, and again...)

This is what I'm getting at when I bitch about 23andMe not advancing the state of the art. With the money they have, they could. But they're not.
We are doing IPhone development. Its a web app. To the best of my knowledge, there is no official SDK available (yet) to build native IPhone apps. Is there any specific reason why you want to build a native app?
Reminds me of the book - Blink, which explores the power of the trained mind to make split second decisions, the ability to think without thinking, or in other words using instinct. It describes our ability to gauge what is really important from a very narrow period of experience. In other words, spontaneous decisions are often as good as - or even better than - carefully planned and considered ones.
Yup. That's part of the reason why it's a vanity expense (I edited my comment to be more clear.)
Well, yes and no. An old employer of mine used to say there's always work for the top 5%. I'm pretty sure apple will be able to hang on to the top 5% of the market. The top 5% can afford apple in spite of recession.

Heck, even in the good times, The CEO gets the macbook pro. everybody else gets dells. I would bet up to 43 cents the CEO continues to get the shineyest newest toys ever year, while grunt staff's computers are kept in service an extra 6 months to two years to save on costs.

Now, if you'd said they make their money from ipods, then I'd completely agree.
Cool, time to teach myself a little about Django and recreate good ol' RemindMe (one of the many things I miss about ars digita)
What GodTube.com and Internet dating reveal about building online customer communities
What is this site?
I just got here and im wondering what is this site about?
Social news site with a community of people interested in hacking (the non malicious kind), startups, and Paul Graham.
They certainly benefit from people that think this is whole genome sequencing... the media tends to confuse the issue.
I'm reminded of Malcolm Gladwell discussing suicide as a contagious act in "The Tipping Point".
Lessons about Startups
Yeah, Malcom Gladwell is a great psychological economist.

The questions at the bottom of the article are fascinating-- it really puts things in perspective.
You can already buy some tracks from last.fm on a purchase rather than subscription model, via 7digital.

-- Cool, on first glance I like it; will have to look into it more later.

From the UK the subscribe page says:

[...]

-- Thanks. I guess they haven't indicated a price yet.
The bomb-testing problem in quantum mechanics
Looks like a plagiarized article.
I'm not sure your anger is well placed. 23andme gets an undue amount of attention so it's natural to feel frustrated by the media hype. But 23andme aren't (at this stage) lying to customers about what it does, and I'm pretty sure most customers will be interested in the knowledge not simply the utility. Also ruling out strongly genetic diseases is probably quite interesting to a lot of people, regardless of how useful it is in a public health sense.

Most likely their initial scan procedure isn't of great utility but does set up a market for people based on their genetics. A whole realm of industries could spring up which could be very interesting. I don't know why you think its 23andme's job to carry the entirety of biotech research, but if no one can make any money from personal genetics until we know everything there is to know about the genome then I doubt we'll advance the field at a great pace.
Gladwell is a journalist who happens to cite a lot of social science stuff, not a psychologist or an economist.

I like his writing, but it tends to end up feeling like lots of anecdotes strung together without too much actual meat, sometimes.
It's only direct royalties for independent artists. Naturally artists who signed those rights away to record labels won't get them. Why the hell should they?
Cheer Up, Ben: Your Economy Isn't as Bad as This One (Bank runs in Second Life)
Class isn't just about income. It's also a cultural thing, reflected in your grammar, clothes, mannerisms, etc. A plumber whose vocabulary includes "ain't" and makes $40,000 is not of the same social class as an assistant professor with the same salary.
It exists, and it's (surprise) called Labyrinth: http://labyrinth.codify.se/
I don't doubt it. I think anyone on this list could probably learn enough about reading programs and development psyche to teach their kids quite well. It's just that its nothing to do with being able to read yourself.
http://discuss.fogcreek.com/joelonsoftware/default.asp?cmd=s...

Go there and see Daniel Weinreb's post (just search the page for "Weinreb").
> Scaling ... I would want to see more than just 3 or 4 sites that have scaled well.

Three or four seems to prove the feasibility.

> hiring - will I be able to find talented people to work on the codebase?

Yes. The people you find who hack Scheme or Common Lisp tend to be very talented. If you want to ramp up to 1000 programmers quickly, yes, you would have trouble getting experienced people. But if you're doing a startup, no sweat. Or so I think so far; watch this space.

> libraries

PLT Scheme and Common Lisp actually have big libraries, though not as huge as Java's. In most cases, though, the equivalent library in Scheme (and CL, too, I imagine) is much better than it's Java counterpart. Find me something in Java that is half so good for parsing HTML as this: http://www.neilvandyke.org/htmlprag/

There are Scheme/Lisp hubs that aren't startup hubs. Salt Lake City would be one. More generally, if everyone in your town uses Java, move.
Count me in :)
Check out UIView-Gestures.h, http://www.hackint0sh.org/forum/showthread.php?t=20448, and http://code.google.com/p/iphonedoom/wiki/GestureEvents.
HTML is presentational in nature, so what's the point of separating presentational attributes from presentational tags?

With the current spontaneously emerged HTML standard we have a choice of using or not using separate style declarations, like in imperative programming we may decide to declare and give a name to frequently used constants, macros and functions separately. A library, in other words. Is library obligatory in programming? No. That would be just ridiculous.
Robert Scoble: "Do things that will get you to be recognized as a world leader in the field you want to be in."

Stephen Colbert: "Get your own talk show. It pays well and the benefits are unbeatable."
I guess we need to concretize this: Someone decides that the data on my system is valuable and wants to steal it. They find out that we're running on EC2 with backup to S3, and they want to locate the equipment. How in the world would they do it? I have no clue where the hardware is that hosts our service.

Much easier to break into someone's office and get the equipment directly, or to break into a smaller host and grab the equipment. With the cloud, finding the actual hardware in use seems extremely difficult - which seems to dramatically increase your security against a hardware theft as opposed to self hosting.
The idea of teens killing themselves because it is the current fad sounds like something from the Onion or another satire news. The fact that it's real is unsettling.
Males have a strong "play ethic". This, I think, explains why it's largely men who become world-class hackers.
The male play-ethic has less to do with brains or ability, and more to do with desire and a compulsion to play with technology as a means of having fun. Women rarely exhibit this sort of behavior.

I don't think the industry is particularly sexist.
I think there are two separate hierarchies, one based on wealth (desperate, nervous, coasting) and one on education (reads nothing, reads Time, reads The Economist). Hundreds of years ago the two hierarchies were tied together because only the rich could afford education. In the 20th century they drifted apart. The interesting question is whether they will converge again, pushed from the opposite direction-- i.e. not because wealth causes education, but because education causes wealth.
It's not their responsibility to do much of anything. But they're uniquely well positioned to push a lot of these things along, and it's a bit disappointing that they opt not to.

Plus, selling genomic information from your customers, in aggregate or not, is a rather evil thing to do given the potential for misuse. Hopefully there will not be any phenotypic information provided, but if they somehow manage to run out of money, who knows? Not all phenotypes require a whole organism, as I'm sure you know.

Also, I'm not saying "wait until we know everything there is to know". I'm saying "let's not go off half-cocked -- didn't we learn anything from the schizophrenia 'gene' study?". I am more than a little concerned about this.
Mark Shuttleworth on the interest rate cut
Seven children dead by their own hand within a year. "How do you protect your children from the Internet?" asks the Telegraph.

The same year (in the U.S.), at least 5,000 teens die in car accidents, the leading cause of death for teenagers. Where are the articles about how to protect your children from cars?
An online task manager built with web.py (I'm an author)
this from a guy named "apathy" :D
What difference does it make what kind of ist he is?
See? Libertarianism works! All those idiots who deposited into non-FDIC banks had their money redistributed to the cleverer, more deserving folks who figured out a way to take advantage of them.
I thought interest rates should rise, that way people would start putting money back into the dollar. We are still at a point where people are undecided what is better long term the Euro or the Dollar. This is going to drag the dollar so low when it perks back up people may not switch back out of the Euro.
poptakeout looks very professional and clean!
Makes it easier to suspend critical thinking.
A separate domain would work fine, but as I've said elsewhere, YC is uniquely situated to make a system like this actually work. Without them, there's a big chicken-and-egg problem: no applicants means no funders means...
ask YC: youtube clone; python or ruby framework?
I've been using rails for the past 2 years, and have had mixed feelings about it. I ported two rails applications to MERB, because I'm no longer using ActiveRecord, so most of the other stuff in Rails also seemed unnecessary. Prior to ruby/rails I used python (straight up mod_python) for a couple years.

I am starting on a new project where I need to make a video site. Think youtube with limited users and functionality. My initial plan was to do the front-end in MERB and the back end with ruby hooks around our custom video server (c++). However I vaguely remember that writing wrappers around c++ was easier in Python. Thus I thought maybe I could just do the whole thing in Python. I don't really want to use Django. Is there anything similar to MERB in the Python world? Or should I just use MERB for the front end and then use whatever fits best for the video processing. THANKS.
I wish I were smart enough to understand that.
Hence the initial irrational exuberance.
Yep. They can't for housing and transportation, and food is paid for by uncle sam. But televisions are all Visa.
I could never understand Israel with respect to Gaza. The closest I could come up with--Israel increases the pressure on Gaza to the near-breaking point, only to suddenly withdraw. At that point, they make a slight and subtle but meaningful advance on the West Bank. The West Bank, unlike Gaza, is economically and strategically valuable. But still...does it really take a blockade to do this?
Test Driven Development Proven Effective Or is it?
Teach your kids to code, Part II
Debugging the Universe
That is some brilliant marketing by Facebook right there.
If dozens of teens started purposely driving their cars into trees then you would probably see those articles.
This is better:

http://www.comedycentral.com/motherload/index.jhtml?ml_video...
The Hype Cycle
Bloggers talk to bloggers, scientists talk to scientists
as somebody starting a project in Django right now, can I ask why you really don't want to use Django?
Are you a problem solver or a developer?
I wouldn't be using the ORM or auto-admin stuff. It has a lot of things I don't really need.
Technical Debt Decision Making
I think the problem has to be something else. Look at the PC industry - Macs work with minimal hassle precisely because the h/w and s/w manufacturer are one and the same.

And these companies do have an incentive for creating great software - more people will buy their phones!

The problem is probably that these large companies don't have a strong leader who cares about product design...
How To Win At Negotiation
I live in Cole Valley, which is quiet and quaint and right next to Golden Gate Park. I highly recommend it, but good luck finding an affordable 2 bedroom apartment.
Journey of an idea
How 1,000,000 people can become your first 500 precious customers
He describes himself an an economist all the time.
So they're aborting the first possible experiment in libertarianism. What a shame, I wanted to see what would happen next.
Gladwell is an excellent writer, but he does overstate his case in that book to serve the interest of a very good, gut-level story. I didn't read the above to ding him - just to set the record straight.

I feel very negative in this direction about Psychology Today - interesting stories, but even less, much less, below the surface. Gladwell at least gives footnotes and references actual researchers. He serves a critical function and serves it very well. PT reads more like a tabloid of science journalism.

Regarding this article, people have won the Nobel Prize in Economics after showing, at least twenty-five years ago, how bad we are at judging real-life risks. The scientists doing that work? Psychologists.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prospect_theory
The "Google generation" and emerging web behavior
Salmonella doesn't kill you - it just makes you wish you were dead.
Tracking the World's Appetite for Innovation
Reducing spam and encouraging helpful behaviors in web 2.0 sites by pairing up users randomly.
Would something like that make sense?

Imagine for example on a social news site pairing up users randomly when they log in.

You would be able to see the activities of your partner in real-time. You could help each other and even report on each other in case of spamming.

Since this partnership lasts the entire session, you will feel some connection to your partner and a greater sense of responsibility in ensuring things go well.
Number four explains fear of flying, too. When you fly in a plane, you are completely at the whim of the pilot and various crews. In a car, your actions make a difference. I think that's a bigger factor than "spectacular and unlikely."
I lived in Emeryville for a year before heading out to Boston for YC. Now I'm back in SF living downtown.

I think Emeryville would be a grand spot to raise a family, but it's definitely the most "LA-like" part of the bay area. Meaning it's a car town, not like SF or Berkeley.

That said, you should still consider the Watergate apartment complex in Emeryville. It's quiet, safe, right on the water next to the bike paths, has pools and spas, and a free shuttle to BART. Pretty affordable too (about $1800 for a 2br or $1000 for 1). It's also right next to the bay bridge for easy car access to the city and 10 walking minutes from trader joes.

Good luck!
If you really want to understand, read the second chapter of this book:

http://www.amazon.com/Fabric-Reality-Parallel-Universes-Impl...

Just the second chapter isn't too long, and should help tremendously.
Does your VC have a Democrat in his pocket?
My sister's friend is an Emergency Room physician. After talking to her, you would be scared to leave your apartment and do something risky like crossing a city street.
Selling the information along is another thing, I'm just responding to your comment I'm not saying 23andme are a great company.

I've noticed myself that when I know a bit about an area, its easy to look at a particular company and see how far behind the research they are. 23andme are trying to take genome sequencing and give it to the masses. Is it very useful? probably not, but they are trying to hit a consumer price point - so doing a whole bunch of original research on genome sequencing, or making a sequencing chip of their own just isn't practical.

A lot of Brin's money is and no doubt will go to good causes, but this isn't suppose to be a charity. Even if it doesn't take off, it's likely to be a positive thing for the personal genome industry not a negative.
Soros: "The present crisis is the end of an era based on the dollar as the international currency."
I don't believe that. He seems too responsible to say that - ever. If so, I'd like to see one quote from him saying exactly that.
an oddly titled article - its amazing to me that there is international political pressure to quickly re-contain / restrict a group of people in need of basic food, supplies, and services.
No, they won't converge. It will get easier to live comfortably. With less effort required to live, fewer people will seek out education.
Hawaii venture capital to hit $146M
I've heard discussions of why local news papers do not report teen suicides as suicides in obituaries for precisely the reason of copy cat effects in the community.

I'm have not read 'The Tipping Point' but surely it makes similar arguments. The question I would like to know answered is if the Telegraph is helping the situation through improved discussions on teen suicide and the need to help youth suffering from depression or will they spawn copy cat effects by broadcasting nationally/world wide of a suicide craze. I certainly hope that the youth in the community are helped and that this fad is stopped.
I agree -- the international community should decisively deal with the problem of violent thugs in control of the Gaza Strip, and be done with it, rather than letting everyone involved suffer slowly, and then having to deal with it decisively at some later date.
I've had a gutful of this reductionist tripe.

Yes, Web 2.0 allows uneducated fools to become movie directors, artists, musicians, writers, etc but let me tell you NOBODY is mistaking this stuff for high art or culture. Quality will still rise to the top, and people will still be willing to pay for quality. If the amateur is as good as the pro, then great, Web 2.0 has uncovered a new talent.

Put another way, the people using Web 2.0 technologies to create rubbish were NOT going to be reading Plato, Kafka and Nietszche had Web 2.0 not existed. These are two mutually exclusive sets. What Web 2.0 has done is given these amatuers a voice that will likely not even be heard by most. The real artists will still create great works irrespective of the noise, and they will continue to be recognised because people aren't stupid and can spot quality when they see it.

No one is suggesting that the regulat joe and the pro are equal in their skills to produce good work.
Server-Side JavaScript with Jaxer
Israel's policy hasn't been entirely consistent in its aims. There are rival political forces which disagree. Just like US policies sometimes change after elections.

But Israel has other factors making it difficult to be consistent, too. Specifically, variable international pressure, and inconsistent support from the US.

The heart of the problem, which makes a policy difficult to agree on, is that on the one hand Israel ought to defend itself vigorously enough that zero innocent Israelis are killed by violent thugs. And on the other, Israel is under massive pressure not to do that, and not even the US will support Israel in defending its citizens enough to keep all of them alive.
Really? Tough crowd.
Allegra Goodman: Calming the Inner Critic and Getting to Work
Would no one else be worried of the potential for bad VC's to abuse fresh startups and their probable inexperienced founders that apply to YC? I mean, not every one here knows how to handle investors, I'm guessing there are a lot of fresh college students. Wouldn't there be a good chance of these VC's just offering money in one hand and taking all of the company in the other? While it is still possible that any of us could be taken for a ride, it's entirely different when you've put yourself out in the public and have no real idea what you're doing.

I just want to say that there would be a potential for abuse, and do you really want the bad feelings of young entrepreneurs scammed from the YC site?