skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
It's funny that this should appear on HN ... Sunday I just completed a bit of software that looks for candidate CRISPR sites in a particular mouse genome for my daughter. In our case, the real trick is to find repeats in the section of the chromosome she wants to manipulate that don't also exist in the rest of the chromosome - or any of the other chromosomes.

Like any "big data" project, the trick is representing your data in a way that makes searching it trivial as well as parallelizable.
Agreed - as it is currently, if you:

- disagree with Candidate A on issue 1, but agree on issues 2-10, and

- agree with Candidate B on issue 1, but disagree on issues 2-10,

you'll be matched with Candidate B purely because Candidate A (a 90% match) was eliminated for a single disagreement.

I applaud the idea, but this needs a bit more work before it can come anywhere close to www.isidewith.com.
Sex is how humans reproduce, but it's a pretty big (and highly metaphysical) stretch to say that that is the "ultimate goal" of sex. As far as we can tell, sex and reproduction have no ultimate goals at all--they just are. We have some idea of how they evolved over billions of year, but we have no idea how non-life became life, or why.

We're into some pretty deep stuff here. But the point is that no master creator has commanded us to reproduce infinitely and spare no expense. In fact our increasingly conscious control of our reproduction is reducing, not increasing, our risk of a catastrophic population explosion.
Nice ad hominem. Let me try it too:
Oh, you must be very dumb.
Centuries of injustice have probably never been corrected in all of human history.
Radiolab had a great episode about CRISPR earlier this year: http://www.radiolab.org/story/antibodies-part-1-crispr/
Well, that's how all the NetBSD rump drivers work. IIUC, a while back they refactored all the drivers to interact with the NetBSD kernel through the Rump interface. Which means that all the drivers can work in a traditional monolithic kernel, or can be extracted and used piecemeal in your own kernel, or compiled directly into the application as a unikernel. Checkout http://rumpkernel.org/ for more info.

I dunno about performance impact, but I bet it is fairly negligible in the grand scheme of things. In the rump kernel case, these shims really don't do anything, they just pass the call through. Think of it as an API facade. In a hobby OS it might be heavier, if your OS doesn't have a 1:1 mapping of the POSIX/linux syscall to an equivalent.

Also, we virtualize this stuff all the time in cloud environments. Your java app uses the JVM to execute a linux syscall which the kernel translates into a Xen hypercall which Xen uses to call a native driver which talks to the disk, etc etc. You obviously do pay a performance penalty for stacking more and more layers, but it isn't as bad as you'd think (or as good as you hope, take your pick).

But the point is that layering abstractions like this is very much alive and tolerated today in moderately high performance systems :)
WSJ is a big proponent of cheap labor, which open borders and loose immigration helps

That's only true if you limit your definition of "cheap" to mean "cheaper than historical norms in geographies that have historically had high labor prices relative to those prevailing in migrants' original locations".

There's a common myth that immigration somehow reduces the cost of labor. This is nonsense. It reduces the price of labor in the location receiving the migrants (by increasing its supply) while simultaneously raising the price of labor in the migrants' original location by reducing such supply (both by direct labor outflows and by the increased leverage held by those who don't migrate, since they can now credibly threaten to do so).

Pretending that free migration is bad for workers is incredibly parochial and ignores the vast, vast majority of the world's workers, who currently live in places like India and southeastern Asia, and who would strongly benefit from the upward wage pressure that freer migration would bring about.
In the software verification community, it is quite common to supplement every new approach with a real-world case study. I wish this practice were more common in the PL world (and especially in the FP world) -- though I realize the cost of a case study are much higher when a new language is involved -- because here's the general problem with a language that relies so heavily on advanced type systems:

We know that verifying any property of a program has a computational complexity cost, and we know that that cost is very high (the problem is PSPACE-complete even for languages that are very far from Turing complete). When types are involved and the program's property is correct by construction, that complexity does not go away (it can't; that would violate a mathematical law), it is just transferred elsewhere: to the machine doing the constructing. So when I come up with an algorithm and decide to verify one of its properties by encoding it in the type -- in Ling, Idris or whatever -- the verification complexity is incurred by the machine performing the verification, which is composed of two parts: the compiler, which shares just a bit of the burden, and my brain, which incurs the lion's share. So coming up with a new type system (like built-in session types) is basically coming up with a new verification algorithm that is to be run by the human brain. As we know the complexity of general verification is humongous, all we can hope for -- as with any verification approach -- is that our approach would be tractable for a certain class of programs (which is why verification algorithms require case-studies). So as we run our verification algorithm not on a von Neumann machine but on a biological computer, we need to study how our approach runs on that machine; without such a study, our approach is no more than a conjecture of effectiveness. Not that raising conjectures isn't interesting, but it's a far cry from showing the way forward.

A type system that is not accompanied by results of the effectiveness of its verification algorithm on the machine that's going to run it -- namely our brains -- is an outline of an algorithm with no complexity analysis or any actual runs on a computer. A type system without a case study is no more than saying "this is an algorithm which we believe may be effective on such-and-such inputs". The only possible response is to say, "hmm, interesting!" and to move on, because we really have no way of evaluating this.
I don't understand what subvocalization even is, based on the Wikipedia article. It sounds like "the voice in your head reads things as you do". So I'll go with that.

I can't read without subvocalization... I tried keeping my mind preoccupied with gibberish words and even thinking in a foreign language but a second voice chimes in with the words as I'm reading them in the background. This is also quickly mentally exhausting...

I don't consider myself a slow reader - as I speedread at 700~800wpm. The subvocalization merely happens by slurring words together as if playing a movie on x3 Fast Forward w/ sound. I'm not capable of seeing how it hurts the rate of reading. I could see voicing or actually reading aloud to slow down reading, but not this.
This doesn't sound much like a physics paper from the abstract (http://arxiv.org/abs/1401.1219). "why do conscious observers like us perceive..." is an appropriate angle for philosophical discussion (or maybe psychology, depending on where you took that).

But in physics, we use experimentation and observation of the physical world. Put a brain (or a human) on a table, do some experiments, and write about the results. If you find that atoms and molecules in the brain do strange things that they don't do when part of a brain, document, publish, and theorize.

And if you don't do any experiments, and instead probe the depths of your mind, that's not physics.

(sorry to sound so condescending, but it's frustrating for the word "physics" to be co-opted in the service of bunk science)
I understand your feeling. But speaking about dead end, that is exactly what a concentration means while you pick a major in college, otherwise you can pick liber art. If you change the perspective and think like a you are a software developer without any other skill, you are in dead end too. I think the main problem is laid on whether you like to learn more about other skill sets and take risk to create something new from what you learned
I grew up in Southern California and the tone of the LA Weekly Article reflects the reputation of The Gas Company as we knew it, conservative, safety oriented, safe.

I guess a culture built around nothing going wrong doesn't always respond well when something does.
Even if the utility function was linear, I'd still prefer to insure some things, even with a negative expected value, for the sake of smoothing variance.

EDIT: I'll clarify this to mean; even if the EV of insurance was exactly neutral, I'd still buy it for smoothing. And even if the EV was negative, I'd still buy it for smoothing. There's a difference between smoothing and loss aversion.
For a lot of those people, just having free time, let alone free time that you can use to learn a skill is a privilege.
Ignoring the FUD that is the rest of the hilariously unsourced article, how long is it going to be before people finally drop the "but my reclaimed seeds" argument? It's not done in modern farming[1]; it's literally a non issue. Monsanto is certainly no saint, but as far as IP suits go suing the farmer that purposefully stole round-up ready seeds from a neighboring farm (as evident by the fact he turns around and uses the pesticide) is pretty mild as far as things go[2].

At least the issue can remain as a litmus test for the amount of BS present in an article.

Further reading
[1]https://gmoanswers.com/ask/isnt-it-better-farmers-harvest-an...
[2] http://www.npr.org/sections/thesalt/2012/10/18/163034053/top...
Good to see LoseThos there. An interesting story about an interesting guy - and also a great programmer.
Multi-point just means that the traffic is going to flow to the nearest datacenter that hosts the VAC, gets filtered and checked and then traverses on to your system.

The goal is to spread the DDoS out over as many different bandwidth heavy locations as possible.

See the images at the bottom of this page:

https://www.ovh.com/us/anti-ddos/hoovering-up.xml
This claim is unfounded:

"the vast majority of the legion of logical punctuators are not consciously rejecting illogical American style, or consciously imitating the British. Rather, they follow their intuition because they don't know the American rules. They don't know the rules because they don't read enough. Don't read enough edited prose, that is;"
boy, the 19th and 20th century sure introduced a lot of crappy products thinly disguised as food.
As much as I mourn the Murdoch sale, National Geographic has long been famous for its occasional bare skin.
Agreed, that's why I personally like the rump kernel idea. Pick and choose the various NetBSD drivers that you need, automatically gain battle-tested drivers for a wide variety of devices. Bonus points that they are POSIX-compliant which helps with porting code.
The Questions on Transparency That Product Hunt Is Intentionally Ignoring
In the U.S.? - It was predicted that as jobs became automated, the population would "share the wealth" and we'd become a leisure society. What's really happened is that the economic gains have gone to a relatively small ultra-wealthy class. If things had worked as predicted, we'd have had to reduce our work week already due to a lack of work.
How do you guys trace the real packet sender of a packet with a spoofed IP address?
That's funny, because it seems to me like the Oxford comma is the logical rule. The American standard is a special case: "use a comma to separate items in the list, except the 'and' substitutes for the comma before the last time".
Fullstack Academy (YC S12): Teach Front-End Web Development Part-Time in NYC
Cool motte-and-bailey agrument, but no.
Just to give 1 example: if, as you claim, "privilege" would universally mean simply the opposite of under-privileged, the "check your privilege" phrase would never exist.
Show HN: Wayback.co, Easier Wayback Machine
Pawnshops Emerge as Solid Lender in Post-Austerity Spain
This is cool but I would love it to also tell me what the differences would be in my income, cost of living and education.
Eh, I think terminology can evolve. Technical debt can also mean incidental complexity explicitly and consciously being introduced at the code level for very good reasons. And paying down the debt means code-level refactoring, introducing abstractions, unifying interfaces etc. It can also mean throwing the code out since the experiment was a failure. (One thing often overlooked on incurring tech debt is there are cases where you can just 'write it off', when the thing you thought was going to be important turned out not to be, so you can just kill it.) The opposite of incurring technical debt can be over-engineering, for example.

Personally I find it an improvement to have two terms that separate the concepts, if for no other reason that it underscores that 'conceptual debt' is a thing that matters a lot and isn't just 'the engineers can come in and clean it up later' type of deal, which technical debt often can be. Recognizing conceptual debt as something that all team members can contribute to, not just people writing code, is a profoundly different type of conversation than the ones you'll have today around tech debt where it's assumed a) stakeholders can't understand it and b) it's nobody's problem but the engineers: they create it, they pay it down.
I used to do that and it started to really stress me out! Get into Pocket or Workflowy or something else to sort those for later!
> I think reading 100/year would require
> reading books instead of watching TV nearly
> every night.

That's about right. I spend about 2-hours per week on television (depending on the season I spend zero) and I haven't played a video game in 5 years. There have been many times that I've wanted to see certain shows (Supergirl looked fun) but when the time comes reading wins out almost every time. I can only read this much because I love reading more than any other form of entertainment. It would be impossible otherwise. It does kinda stink to never be able to engage in conversations about games and shows though. Maybe there's a market for semi-annual books about current media. ;)
I think I'm channeling Feynman accurately when I say "oy ve" to this one. Come on, conciousness is very cool, and a great mystery; but a state of matter? Maybe in the degenerate sense that any object is a "state of matter". But please don't feed the woo-woo quantum-mechanics-is-god crowd with stuff like this.
Not exactly a puzzle, but a good game of Mao is always a fun challenge.
If they're using the typical anti-DDoS mitigation equipment (usually Arbor) then they're almost certainly throwing out good traffic along with bad. AWS's approach of having an ingress pipe large enough to absorb DDoS traffic rates and allowing only valid HTTP requests to pass through the ELB is a superior solution, IMO.
How old are you? You might be under-estimating how lucky you were to even have access to a personal computer at home at all. See the chart on page 2 here: https://www.census.gov/prod/2013pubs/p20-569.pdf

For example, when I first started using computers as a kid, it was at a time when less than one in eight households had computers. That's pretty privileged.

> I'm not sure I would describe that as the height of privilege. I spent most of my childhood living in a trailer.

It's not a spectrum along a single axis. You can be privileged in some areas and not in others.
Wages with Minimal Wiggle Room, The per-employee profit at Apple is $407,000
In 1986, I "text chatted" via my Commodore 64 to another kid in a neighboring town, across our 600 baud modems, using our parent's home phone land lines. I'll never forget typing the white letters on the blue screen: "Hey Brian can you see this?"

...then seeing the screen cursor start to produce characters that I didn't type:

"Yep sure did"

It would be 8 more years before I accessed the Internet in 1994.

I think what I miss is the thrilling self-discovery of communicating in a new medium.
I could say the same about a few psych experiments that were actually conducted. The Stanford prison experiment [0] seems rather awful, and it actually got released as a thriller this year [1].

But this particular one seems to be much like Clockwork Orange and Human Centipede, staring into one another's eyes and speaking candidly.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stanford_prison_experiment

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Stanford_Prison_Experiment...
Creating Your Own Video Course, Part I: Preparation
Microsoft copies your encryption key for Windows 10 to its servers
There's probably a really obvious answer to this really stupid question, but why don't they light the leak on fire until they stop it?
I think it's open access. The PDF link works without a paywall.

Lot of complicated mathematical notation in the actual paper; will put this on my table and attempt to not get lost reading it on my flight tomorrow.

I also highly suggest reading Bostrom's "Are You Living in a Computer Simulation?" The mathematics he lays out isn't that complex and he makes a good case for the hypothesis that we are either in a simulation, will eventually be able to create a simulation of our work or we'll go extinct.
I've heard there is a variety of emotional responses by the patient.

Some are frustrated by former simple things becoming too hard to do.

Some are angry at themselves for failing. Or angry at others who think others are playing tricks on them.

Some of the excess emotion may come from the degeneration progressing at different rates in different parts of the brain. Especially if the frontal lobes lose their inhibitory powers.

Some report a sense of peace. Life is simpler and more basic.
One idea: that they bring capital with them.

Increasing the supply of labor while not increasing the supply of capital can drive down productivity and wages in the nation getting migrants. If they come with accompanying capital, it could help maintain or improve productivity.
> easy to spend an hour on 1 page of a math text.

Absolutely true! I don't read much math, but I have and my reading rate was much slower. There have been a few books over the past year that took me months to get through whereas most others took a matter of days. I read a few books in parallel though.
This Year in Spring – A look at 2015 by starbuxman
This is why the API should ALWAYS at least have a first pass before any coding is done. Changing how things look and feel after the fact? Not an issue. Changing the underlying data structures? Holy shit, kill me now. Hell, if your API is solid (and you're using actual restful calls) then you should be able to completely decouple UI coding, business logic, and data management. Of course with the modern love of AGILE (see rapid prototyping) people wonder why so much rework is always needed because that's simply not the case.
Minor point of order...Ruby is OO because it very much follows the Smalltalk-style message-as-function-invocation pattern.

Javascript (at least before ES6) is perhaps too minimal in its language affordances to qualify for "true" OO status.
U.S. Bandwidth Use and Pricing Across the 1990s (2000)
The blog post is much more hand wavy than the actual arxiv article. The notion of factorization of the wave function in particular is interesting.

Scott Aaronson has fairly convincing arguments against IIT http://www.scottaaronson.com/blog/?p=1799
New Kind of Hydrothermal Vent Forms Ghostly Chimneys
> It's not a fair reflection of the company at large; recruiting is very often a shit show for all kinds of reasons

I have personally dropped the ball on an interview once, had the wrong time written down to meet someone. Apologized profusely when i did arrive. :/

Having interviewed with Amazon, MS, Google, and Facebook I have to say MS was by far the easiest experience of the 4. Applied, a few weeks later they contacted me, 2 weeks later I did my interview, offer a day later. Facebook and google it was more like apply wait weeks for response, wait a couple weeks for phone screen, wait a week for resposne, wait a couple weeks for a second phone screen, wait a week for response, wait a few weeks for in person, wait a couple weeks for response. Amazon was similar, but at least that was over the holidays and I actually travelled for that one.
Plex and Alexa: Interacting with Your Media Server Through Voice
> Once they establish dominance or once the smaller players run out of wall street sponsored discounts, the Amazon offers will also disappear.

My experience as an Amazon customer in the US has been contrary. Amazon is actually one of the rare companies that values loyalty and rewards existing customers. Most other startups (even ones outside e-commerce, like Uber/Ola etc. have offers that aggressively target new customers, but rarely offer anything for existing customers) Compare that to the experience of an Amazon Prime account holder. What started as free 2 day shipping now covers free 2 hour shipping, access to lots of media etc. at no added charge. A majority of the offers and discounts are also made available to all customers, not just new ones. Is this not the case in India?
Roughly 30% of the Internet benefits from our security research in 2015
34, and I grew up poor but in a moderately wealthy suburb. I had to pay most of my way through college, and when I couldn't find a job with my degree (Physics) I learned how to program and have been making a living off that ever since. I didn't get what I have today because of privilege but you would probably see it differently.
I wish someone would do the advanced Postgres version of the standard RDBMS "library" example as a book, going beyond just joins and simple window functions to arrays, json, notifications etc.
ProtonMail – Secure Email Based  in Switzerland
I'm almost certain that I've heard his music before, but this was the first year that I actively listened if you catch my meaning.
A lot of small open-source projects lack a structure that allows them to be worked on by more than one person at a time. Without that structure, it is nearly impossible for external people to contribute to a project.

Categorizing issues by required familiarity with the code ("novice" vs. "expert" levels) and establishing a good contribution and style guide are just a few of the very useful things one could apply to his or her smaller open-source project.

One OS project that I've seen and love is https://love2d.org/. Most of the work is done by a few contributors, but some members of the community give back at times.
That's how the Door to Hell[1] was made.

1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Door_to_Hell
Cron? Syslog? Seriously? This could, in real-time and fewer lines of code, just directly get and increment a counter...
How Amazon Has Clouded Wall Street’s Vision
Ironically, the author, the person behind GSRlevator, never worked at Goldman Sachs. (He did have an offer to join)