skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I'd like to commend his propagating better-than-usual understanding of biological trait blending.

At school (in Israel) we learned that you have Dominant Genes and Recessive Genes, and Dominant trumps Recessive. Just a month ago I got to hear a more correct description from a biologist friend, which sounds much like Bunnie's implementation:

In order to capture the wonderful diversity offered by sex, I implement quantitative traits in the light genome. Instead of having a single bit for each trait, it’s a byte, and there’s an expression function that combines the values from each gene (alleles) to derive a final observed trait (phenotype).

By carefully picking expression functions, I can control how the average population looks. Let’s consider saturation (I used an HSV colorspace, instead of RGB, which makes it much easier to create aesthetically pleasing color combinations). A highly saturated color is vivid and bright. A less saturated color appears pastel, until finally it’s washed out and looks just white or gray (a condition analogous to albinism).

If I want albinism to be rare, and bright colors to be common, the expression function could be a saturating add. Thus, even if one allele (copy of the gene) has a low value, the other copy just needs to be a modest value to result in a bright, vivid coloration. Albinism only occurs when both copies have a fairly low value.

Also, Bunnie's blog has a great awesome to noise ratio. Check out his post about a tour in a zipper factory: http://www.bunniestudios.com/blog/?p=4364

Edit: text formatting
O'Reilly Sale: So Long, “Send-To-Kindle”
It might be a case of the seller using that price as a placeholder until they get the book back in stock. Amazon prefers that vendors keep items in stock, so this is one way to do that, even if you're currently sold out.

I used to work for a company making software for Amazon vendors and don't think Amazon cares that much, but lots of vendors believe it is true.
The differences between app testing and game testing
Startups, burnout, and the path to happier employees
It's just completely absurd. See how often and in such large amounts Bitcoin is stolen, and tell me that wouldn't happen with these keys as well. I get the impression there's just a lot of people getting VC money for complete and utter bullshit like this, and somehow employing a team of people for a concept that doesn't even make sense on a flashy website let alone in the real world.
How to Invent a Language, from the Guy Who Made Dothraki
Graphviz is great if you either want to automatically generate diagrams of huge graphs, or if you care more about structure than appearance.

But creating pretty diagrams with Graphviz/dot is an exercise in pain.

I love seeing more of these tools, and plan to integrate several of them in the scripts I use to build my blog, not to supplant the cases where I use Graphviz, but to augment them for the many situations where I want to do diagrams that need more precise control than Graphviz does.

(My personal Graphviz self-flagellation exercise involves an XSL file to convert the SVG output from dot to something prettier: https://github.com/vidarh/diagram-tools )
There's good reason to blame FDA regulations for problems with the Daraprim debacle. Even for approved, out-of-patent drugs, it's still expensive to get a new generic instance approved, and for drugs that have few users like this, it's just not worth it for a new supplier to get it.

Generic drugs don’t need the excruciatingly drawn-out safety and efficacy studies required of new brand-name medications, but they do need to pass a bioequivalency study proving that their drug is absorbed the same way as the original. ... it’s just too hard to start making a generic medication. If all you want to do is synthesize an active ingredient in powder form, and you’re not too concerned about staying on the right side of the law, it costs pennies and takes however long you need to FedEx something from China. If you also want FDA approval, it costs $2 million and takes two years.

Remember, Daraprim is used by about 10,000 people per year, and before the recent Turing price markup, it cost $13.50 per pill x eighty pills per treatment. 10,000 x 80 x $13.50 = about $10 million per year, of which maybe $5 million was profit. That means you have to capture a big chunk of the Daraprim market before it’s worth trying to get yourself approved to make Daraprim; the FDA is essentially telling pharma companies to “go big or go home”. Nobody wanted to go big, so they all went home.

In the absence of this barrier, it would be easy for small boutique companies with a couple of chemical engineers on hand to spend a few weeks manufacturing a few thousand doses of the drug whenever it was necessary to meet demand. This is how the supplement and nootropic industries work right now, and nootropics are dirt cheap

- http://slatestarcodex.com/2015/09/24/the-problems-with-gener...

(and if you don't read SlateStarCodex regularly, this is a good time to start)
He probably hopes people might pay him for the development work he's putting into Ubuntu rather than the blogging.
Yes, it performs well, but not as well as it could. Would a matrix expression in breeze be matched by one of the fused functions of LAPACK (performing A*B+C in one pass)? I'm not sure of that.

If you needed to squeeze the last bits out of your hardware you would have to waste more time. That's my main complaint. As verbose as C++ is I still can't make stuff perform as best as it could in Haskell/Scala/Java without spending more time (much more than it would take me to fix in C++).

All of the languages are nice to work with but for some reason the more you distance yourself from the data representation in your memory (with references, boxes etc.) larger the time you have to spend to makes things fast, and all of those abstractions that saved you time, now turn out to be the overhead you don't want, and all of those abstractions now need to go away.

I guess value types might change the thing for Java and other JVM languages. Can't wait to see how successful it'll be.
Drugs do not operate in a market. It is definitely not true with patented drugs (which operate under a government monopoly), and as we're seeing now that monopolies are taking over generics that's becoming less true there as well.

In addition, it's simply false that businesses are more efficient than the government. For example, compare overhead in public health care systems (e.g. Medicare) to private insurance systems and you'll find that the overhead is vastly lower in the public systems - something like 3% vs. 15%. Giant businesses are as burdened by bureaucracy as any other large institution, and they're only as efficient as they need to be, which in an industry with monopoly rents is not very efficient (pharma spends as much on research as the government for much less in research outcomes). Government at least has Republicans keeping it trim.
I have a blog post I've never quite finished writing, walking through some analysis of the 34,686,770 Amazon reviews in the Stanford SNAP dataset (https://snap.stanford.edu/data/web-Amazon.html, but there's a newer and better one at http://jmcauley.ucsd.edu/data/amazon/).

Somewhat surprisingly, the median review score is 5, and if you look at median scores for products, the skew is very much left. So, the data pretty much backs up your observation!
Delivery drivers don't use doorbells where you live? What do they do, call you instead? That seems odd to me, even Fedex and UPS ring my doorbell when dropping off a package.
I remember running into the Institute on Esplanade and asking "The Institute of What?". They had all kinds of interesting gadgets on their front lawn. I really love the concept and implementation of this, in particular the careful consideration of proximity detection instead of a chat client. Really lovely way to promote human interaction instead of drawing the user in to interacting with the device itself.
Let's look at the most interesting there:

fastest encoding:

210,194,996 bytes, 0.333 sec., 0.371 sec., lz4 -1

fastest decoding:

169,476,113 bytes, 2.072 sec., 0.352 sec., lz4 -9

149,642,742 bytes, 2.069 sec., 0.646 sec., zhuff_beta -c0 -t1

gzip-alternative:

135,723,691 bytes, 8.318 sec., 1.677 sec., bro -q 3

114,602,026 bytes, 8.403 sec., 1.218 sec., lzturbo -32 -p1 -b800

prepacked:

104,094,380 bytes, 2313.780 sec., 1.693 sec., bro -q 10

90,239,627 bytes, 680.976 sec., 1.170 sec., lzturbo -39 -p1 -b800

best compression:

82,891,405 bytes, 882.513 sec., 4.597 sec., lzturbo -49 -p1 -b800

77,286,010 bytes, 6497.059 sec., 7.715 sec., glza

there are missing e.g. density, zpaq, and comments there suggest that brotli doesn't look that good for other than text data ...
Ask HN: What's your plan B, before turning 40?
I've come across to this article recently, and as a person who's not planning to move on management roles, I've just wanted to ask you and take your advice on this.

http://improvingsoftware.com/2009/05/19/programmers-before-you-turn-40-get-a-plan-b/
>some bills passed stating anyone giving/reselling thrown away food to others -- no matter how perfect they were/looked -- could go to jail and pay some fines if anything happened to the consumers of such food.

Is that something that actually happened? In the US we tend to think that's a rule, but the opposite is true, there's explicit legal protection.
I believe this was already known. This may be a different mathematical analysis of it, though.
Spotting the difference in images  using CSS
The Mini-App Predicament
Google to Bring the Internet to Indian Railway Stations
The nice thing about processed food is that you can ship it across the world.

Heck, you can do that with most fresh food.
For the avoidance of confusion, I was just making a (fairly weak) joke in reference to Crockford's famous "JavaScript: The Good Parts" book.

The "blah" bits are obviously just placeholders - I'm sure there's no value judgment associated with them!
If someone is paying less than Amazon, they can easily undercut. Additionally, what if they'd been selling the product and then Amazon comes along and wins the buy box. A 3p seller might be willing to take a loss to just sell out remaining product to reinvest in a new item that Amazon isn't selling yet. There are a few other situations I can think of too where someone would undercut Amazon, even if it meant losing money.

There's really no way to understand someone's business model by only looking at their price.
I see a bunch of comments asking about the use case, so I'll share one...

The Defense Department agency I work for employs between 50 and 100 developers, many of whom, like me, are contractors. The security folks have things locked down to such a degree that developers don't have root access to their own machines and the process for getting new software approved for use on a developer machine takes months. We just got permission to have git installed, for example. Getting Nodejs installed probably isn't going to happen unless they could figure out a way to disable npm. All ports to the outside are shut down except for 80 and 443 and everything runs through IronPort, so anything running https has to allow you to not verify SSL.

If the latency/general performance is good enough, I think developers would love to use something like this for their primary development environment. From the agency's perspective, $50-100 per developer per month would be cheap enough to be a no-brainer. As far as the security folks are concerned, this is just web traffic, so they would have no problem with it.

My only issue is that this pricing doesn't seem to be very friendly to the use case of wanting just one instance, but with unlimited hours.
what's your twitter? I'd follow the shit out of this kind of stuff.
Could you please stop calling this code "garbage"? Virtually everything else you have to say about this situation is colorable, but "garbage" is pure distilled meanness. I cringe at TempleOS threads too, but I'm discovering that comments like yours make me even more uncomfortable.
What killed Zip and Jaz was Iomega's ineptitude. See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Click_of_death

"Only one out of every 200 users experiences sudden, catastrophic data loss!" is not the kind of thing you want to hear from your storage vendor.
ClojureScript on Android
Works for Yelp reviews too, after disabling "Yelp Sort".
Oragnisations like the police and army of any dictatorhip get swept up in it and become part of it.

But we aren't starting from a position of dictatorship in the West, nor do we have things like an army formed primarily from conscripts or a police force whose members live in fear of some secret police force hurting their families if they don't comply.
Watch Live: Nasa 'Mars Mystery Solved' Press Conference
That was obviously a fluke, and very unlikely that the transaction was actually cleared through the credit card network, it was probably an error at the bank's end of things.

A payment that (if the rumour is true) actually cleared through:

> Rumor has it that tech millionaire Victor Shvetsky purchased a business jet for $52 million on this card [American Express Centurion]

http://www.bjtonline.com/business-jet-news/supercharged-cred...
> Getting Nodejs installed probably isn't going to happen unless they could figure out a way to disable npm.

Entirely possible! Just ask the folks at the last company I worked for (a bank). What a nightmare.
I found it confusing too so I checked out the linked code [0]. Looks like when you're actively receiving pings from friends it slows down how fast that friends ping counter on your badge decreases so they accumulate a larger ping count and appear "stronger" or closer to you.

Then as you stop receiving pings (I assume, I'm at work, didn't delve too deep), the ping decrement rate goes back to normal and they get "weaker" or farther from you.

Absolutely a super neat way to solve the issue of not being able to account for signal strength.

[0] - https://github.com/bunnie/chibios-orchard/blob/orchard-r2/or...
HYPOTHYROIDISM AFTER a THYROIDECTOMY – CHRIS’S HEALTH JOURNEY – PART 1
Yes, but at the beginning the speaker explicitly calls out floppy disks as "tried and true" when they definitely are not. Tried, yes, but not true.

I can buy the argument that the systems as a whole are trustworthy even if the floppy disks they use kind of suck. But this quote goes beyond that.
I adore lots of the bunniestudios blog posts but "awesome to noise" is the exact opposite of how I'd describe that blog. There are dozens of "Name that ware" (and "Winner: name that ware...") posts and in recent history they vastly outnumber the good stuff.
I'd be down to meet my doppelgänger., but if you want to meet at Window, we are not the same person. haha. How do I get ahold of you after my trip to the states?
No, "supported by git" means that if I edit the diagram and check it in, and you also edit the diagram and check it in, Git can usually merge the changes automatically if they don't conflict; and if they do conflict, it can give us a version of the file that contains both changes, with the conflict marked, and makes it pretty easy to produce a merged version.

If your visual tool merely exports to ASCII, this won't work. If it stores its data in ASCII, it might. But it needs to be more than just "doesn't use control characters and non-7-bit characters" — it needs to have reasonably short lines that mostly don't reoccur and whose position, if meaningful at all, is meaningful only relative to the position of other nearby things, rather than by absolute line number or byte position or something.
If Facebook charged money to the end user it would be immediately abandoned. It's weird that such a large service has such a low value to users. Most other huge free services could charge end users and get away with it but FBs value is tied to the fact that it's free and accessible by anyone.
Pirate Bay Founder Finally Free After 3 Years
Good Article on the Sony Attack
actually I want ads that are really relevant. I sometimes get them in Gmail, most of the time not though. Don't like or use Facebook.

I remember I had a talk with a coworker once and we talked about if the ad was good enough to give you what you really wanted to buy when you searched and he thought it should be the first result, which I don't agree with because of course what is most helpful to me at some point might not be what I want to buy in relation to the search but something else. But definitely the thing I want to buy should be presented to me when I want to buy it so that I can buy it with the least amount of fuss.

But unfortunately that is not what I get.
Serious question: Why do screen readers not evolve to run js and build a DOM? (I agree blogs should be accessible to text only UAs)
> Britain had an East India Company first:

Actually the Portuguese one was founded in 1549, but I will leave out the usual type of "products" that were traded in those days.
The PayPal Here Card Reader Comes to U.S. With Support for EMV, Apple Pay and More
Yes having talented team members at both extremes can be powerful. The key is to prevent individuals from retreating into the mindset of "I have a hammer and everything looks like a nail". A large part of that involves showing everyone that diversity is necessary and can really benefit the company if these perspectives are fused in the right way.
Yeah, I feel this pain too. MJD's Linogram might work. I've also tried writing the diagrams as Python to produce SVG, or in D3 (to produce SVG), which both work reasonably well but seem like a lot of work.
What we know about Volkswagen's diesel-cheating hack
My plan B is to pay off my mortgage before I turn 40. That is also plan A. Because after that I don't have to make as money.
Why Startups Will Have a Massive Impact on the 2016 Elections
Node.js and MEAN stack tutorial
I don't agree. SVG is very human-editable indeed. It's easier than even PostScript or OpenGL.
How about here: http://finance.yahoo.com/q?s=GILD

Says it's 10.20 as I enter this.
Going to GitHub Universe? This tool may help you meet interesting people
Even countries that have strong drug price negotiation schemes are only getting modest discounts for Hepatitis C drugs; they're willing to pay because even at full price it's more expensive for someone to slowly die of liver failure than a course of Sovaldi that will cure them in a month.

The regulatory failure is the VA system being unwilling to pay for it (assuming that's true), not the perfectly reasonably priced drug that's cheaper than alternative, less effective treatments.
Fairphone wants you to take apart your smartphone
Wow, great idea! I'm having yet another 'why didn't I think of that?!' moment!
imgmin and jpegoptim are orthogonal.

imgmin finds the lowest-good quality, and jpegoptim optimizes compression at that quality.
Just one example is the "Cars for Clunkers" program, where the government bought old cars just to destroy them. It was supposed to be both an environmental and economic stimulus, but in reality was bad for the environment and is just a form of the Broken Window Fallacy.
Looks like Danish or Norwegian, the "O" with the line and the "igen" gives it away.

(ingen means 'not' in Swedish)
Uh, I'm pretty sure David knows about graphviz. (You said "graphviz and dot", suggesting that you don't know that dot is one of the programs in graphviz.)
How to peel mango skin fast – within 15 seconds
Recipe: rsyslog and Redis and Logstash
> Adding to your Kotlin to your project is pretty easy as now you can just have it mixed in with Java classes. You’ll need to add the gradle plugin to your build script, apply the Kotlin Android plugin, add your source directories, and include the standard library.

Wanted to ask for a step-by-step guide for awfully lazy developers, but found one myself. I suppose I'll leave a link here: http://blog.jetbrains.com/kotlin/2013/08/working-with-kotlin... (haven't tried that yet, though)
To each his own then I guess. Some may enjoy aligning pipe symbols and pluses, I don't.
When Schools Overlook Introverts
I really hate redesign articles that don't show comparisons to the old model. Is it really that hard to get a picture of the old T-Rex?
Mathbox 2: PowerPoint Must Die
There's already a copy function that does this.
Eh? Rich people don't get rich because of skill, ever. No one gets rich because of skill, they get rich because they are in a position to exploit power. You simply cannot earn a billion dollars through wages. No one is that valuable or unique. The only way to do it is by appropriating the output of others, or having it handed to you. For example, the wealthiest family in America, the Waltons, owns more money than 40% of the country. All of them inherited their billions. Even if we do believe that Sam Walton deserved untold billions, how does this tell us anything about his children?

In addition, why should we empower rich people at all? Why is giving a single person a billion dollars, skillful or not, better than allowing a million people to democratically direct that wealth? Even if those million people simply redistribute that money into their pockets, the outcomes will likely be better for everyone, and it's mathematically far more likely that those people will direct it towards the common good than a single person would.
3.7 million people that now are the largest refugee population in the world. You can leave off the quotes.
The 8" disks I used were actually pretty good for reliability[1]. The 5 1/4" drives were just plain problematic. Doubly so if you used a "Disk Doubler"[2]. The 3 1/2" were pretty nice after the 5 1/4", but I'm still not sure they were ever as good as the 8". I'm glad to be rid of the whole lot of them with USB Flash drives.

I will say it was quite exciting to buy an Indus Floppy Drive for my Atari 400 (upgraded to 48Kbytes). It was amazing going from the 410 cassette player to the floppy. The door popped up in a most satisfying manner.

1) I'm with the other posters that "tried and true" and "know quantity" is probably a better way to look at it. Also, the stuff using the floppy drives probably just works.

2) for the younger crowd, at one time 5 1/4 floppies came in single sided and double sided varieties. So, depending on the floppy drive you bought the correct one. The price wasn't all that different. 5 1/4 floppies have a notch on the side that tells you how to insert it. Put it in wrong and the drive won't close since part of the mechanism goes down through the notch. Now, some "genius" decided that if you had a single sided drive and cut a notch in the other side of the floppy you could use both sides of the disk in much the same way you could play both sides of a record. This 'genius' started selling a device that was basically a hole puncher with a metal attachment that held the floppy properly to punch the hole (really a small square punch). You then could use both sides. Now, inserting the disk upside down would work, but the disk spins the opposite direction. You can guess how this interacted with the fabric that removed dust built into the floppy. http://www.atarimagazines.com/compute/issue10/036_1_FLIPPING... is an old article on it and Wikipedia has pictures https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Floppy_disk_variants#Flippy_di...

Serendipity is an amazing thing, as I type this "I'm Much Too Young (To Feel This Damn Old)" just started playing on my music player. I'll leave it to someone else to explain the purpose of the pencil when talking cassette tapes.
I like what I see, though there seems to be significant overlap with Scala. Though I suppose Scala has never had much uptake in Android-land.

http://kotlinlang.org/docs/reference/comparison-to-scala.htm...
Perhaps by comparison with desktop CPUs, but since the A8 had 4MB of L3, presumably there are good reasons for Apple to include more L3 in the A9. It may well be that Apple has found that a larger L3 cache contributes more to overall performance (or power efficiency) than, say, faster clocks or more RAM.
> C to JVM isn't a well trodden path.

But it does exist.

https://wiki.openjdk.java.net/display/Graal/Publications+and...

Check "Truffle C: Dynamic Execution of C on the Java Virtual Machine."