skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The company founded for this is Union Biotechnology; they wouldn't be getting VC money if they were more than a couple years away from human trials. Indeed, the CEO is on record in some of the present press as saying two years.

http://finance.yahoo.com/news/unity-biotechnology-launches-f...

The technology being used here in mice is not suitable for humans in its present form. But it won't take much tinkering to make it so - this is an age of gene therapy. The most important things here are that:

(a) a robust life extension was achieved with a SENS approach of damage repair, something that SENS advocates have been working towards for more than a decade. The SENS view is right. It is right today, as demonstrated, and it was right ten years ago when people were lining up to deride it. A SENS technology has produced a robust life extension and remediation of age-related diseases across the board in normal mice. People who think that SENS and damage repair are not the way forward need to take a long, serious look at why they think that, and then revisit the science.

(b) The Union Biotech VC and university PR machines are putting out word for word the SENS vision of damage repair to treat aging. SENS has won. This is the dawn of the age of rejuvenation biotechnology, with a near future of widespread support for that goal.

(c) There are at least three methods of clearing senescent cells in mammals, and most likely four. (1) The method of Oisin Biotechnology, seed funded last year by Methuselah Foundation and SENS Research Foundation, (2) the senolytic drug combination demonstrated last year, (3) the capase/gene trigger work linked here, and (4) the adaptation of method #3 currently underway at Union Biotechnology.

To be clear, half of these methods work in mammals now. If you had the right connections you could use them today. Clinical availability will not be a long time in coming, and I for one hope to see this escape the regulatory gauntlet very rapidly and get into medical tourism and clinics worldwide just like stem cell therapies did at the turn of the century.

Finally a note for investors and business people: every SENS rejuvenation technology of this ilk has a target market of every human being on the planet over the age of 30. Everyone, with treatments once every decade at a minimum. This is medicine that will make blockbuster drugs of past years look like damp squibs. That is why this should and will escape the narrow regulatory gauntlet that will try to restrict use to old people with the late stage of a few specific illnesses. That is nonsense and no way to run the future - senescent cells should be periodically cleared every few years starting at 30.
They used to be very common. There used to be football and baseball shared stadiums as well as basketball and hockey shared stadiums too. I don't know why exactly it changed, I think everyone just wanted their own special place.
Unfortunately it's impossible to reliably measure the memory usage of Java that way because the JVM will happily prefer to keep allocating memory from the OS rather than garbage collect. It makes a kind of sense: GC has a CPU cost that gets lower the more memory is given to the heap, so if you have spare memory lying around, may as well deploy it to make things run faster.

Of course that isn't always what you want (e.g. desktop apps) ... sometimes you'd rather spend the CPU and minimise the heap size. The latest Java versions on some platforms will keep track of total free system RAM and if some other program is allocating memory quickly, it'll GC harder to reduce its own usage and give back memory to the OS.

In the benchmarks game I suspect there aren't any other programs running at the same time, so Java will go ahead and use all the RAM it can get. Measuring it therefore won't give reasonable results as the heap will be full of garbage.

Value types don't have much to do with fragmentation, if anything they make it worse because embedding a value type into a larger container type results in needing larger allocations that are harder to satisfy when fragmentation gets serious. But ultimately a similar amount of data is going to end up in the heap no matter what. Yes, you can save some pointers and some object headers, so it'll be a bit less. But not so much that it solves fragmentation.
There is no ideal world where a hair cut would cost the same as heart surgery. Then we could talk about the person's passion to become a barber.

You wanting to do what you want has nothing to do with how much you might get paid for doing it.
Commuting by car is much worse than commuting by bus or train (for any time greater than 45 min).
Attacking his integrity seems kind of uncalled for.
Also, if you do want to be involved, send us a message - support@askizzy.org.au
And, remember, they will use you until they don't need you. Just because you're valuable this month, doesn't mean you will be, next month.

If you seem to be performing a lot of knowledge transfer. If you find yourself, a couple of weeks or months in, cut by cut being eliminated from communications and events.

The best way to, personally, survive an acquisition is to be cultivating your options before you ever hear of it, and to be honing them once you do. You might choose to stay. You might be given no choice.
Zen Photon Garden
What kind of info are the Teslas beaming back to HQ? It can't be the ultra high volume data google's collect, can it? This [0] says google's collect almost 1GB/s. Presumably they keep a good chunk of that. Does anyone know how much Tesla is collecting on it's cars?

[0] http://www.kurzweilai.net/googles-self-driving-car-gathers-n...
You could google "HA", click in the Wikipedia link that shows all the things "HA" may refer to, and deduct that the most logical thing in the list, given the context, would be this link: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High_availability.
I take your point.
Google "Netflix downtime" for evidence that Netflix also has outages. Google has outages, sometimes very significant ones of Google Apps. Facebook has outages.

Complex systems fail. Period. All the time. Things like the Simian Army are fantastic tools that help you identify a host of problems and remediate them in advance, but they cannot test every combinatorial possibility in a complex distributed system.

At the end of the day, the best defense is to have skilled people who are practiced at responding to problems. GitHub has those in spades, which is why they could respond to a widespread failure of their physical layer in just over 2 hours.

The biggest win with the Simian Army isn't that it improves your redundancy. It's that it gives your people opportunities to _practice_ responses.
That page says this:

Sentinel + Redis distributed system does not guarantee that acknowledged writes are retained during failures,
Libertarianism is flawed in many ways, yes, and its proponents do not consider its peripheral realities. To what you wrote I would add the observations that markets are created from the will of a central authority, and that the mob can become tyranny when not restrained by a more level-headed authority in whatever form.

These critiques (and more) are prominent in the neoreactionary literature on liberalism/libertarianism (but nowadays they have more important things to talk about). An interesting hypothesis of neoreaction is that liberal ideals, or even a libertarian world, will invariably lead to democratic socialism -- due to the power of the mob.

Personally, the foundation of my disillusionment with liberalism/libertarianism is the fact that people are so much more than economic units, and that collectivism trumps individualism. What's important is preservation of heritage, culture, tradition, creation of art in all its beautiful forms, and the maximization of humanity's potential.

I can't see liberalism/libertarianism getting us much further than working on advertising systems to push junk food, while NASA spends half its time making reports to get a few more handouts, and cultures worldwide are systemically destroyed in the name of economic growth.
No IPv6, no support for Unicode in city names. This site needs some major improvement. The geo location is nice though.
I have a project I was at first very excited about but then later paused working on as I discovered more about the email ecosystem. The reason I was excited about it at first was because email is--in theory--decentralized, this part was very attractive to me because I thought this was one potential way to disrupt all existing content silos. However the more I worked on it the more I found out how "centralized" it is when it comes to consumer email. If you take a look around there are only a handful of popular email providers (gmail, yahoo mail, microsoft, etc.) Rest of them are indies. I felt like building a consumer email client (or anything that utilizes consumer email) is as limited as building a twitter client, you're essentially tapping into a big platform. This is why I ran out of steam and put the idea on shelf until I come up with a compelling reason to start working on it again. I wasn't motivated enough.
"Try me."
np-hard problems are pretty hard
My last two companies invested heavily in dropbox and both ditched it for box.com within 2 years. Dropbox is "growing" their business while they're getting beaten on value by more than one competitor.
The story behind Uber's new logo
I've seen one or two saying that when the topic is brought up. None who have actually been to Beijing, I think.
My response would be to put a personal spin on a trope that was being shoved down my and my coworkers throats circa 2005: "Mind the gap." (Yeah, some executive/consultant type went to London, heard the message, and wrote a book, I'm guessing.)

Mind the gap. When what's good for the company diverges increasingly from what is good for you...

Companies want you to "invest" in them, as a worker. If they aren't reciprocating, well, don't let yourself become co-dependent.

Beware, also, of when they may be offering something but it simply doesn't fit you. Your struggles will come across -- they will communicate themselves.
Would you mind sharing some examples of good questions to ask in an interview? It seems particularly hard to evaluate companies as an interviewee when they're trying to be secretive.
>Corporations can play the states against each other in regards to 'bidding' with tax breaks. But I think citizens should do the same there; tax breaks in return for shares.

The corporations hold all the cards in that negotiation, since they're bringing jobs. Particularly corporations that do non-polluting things like software development and financial services.

If a state said "we'll give you a break but we want equity in return" they'd just get crossed off the list.
> Not only can consumers not maintain the software in their self-driving car

(1) Maintaining a self-driving car is more than maintaining software,

(2) Even in the case of software, an owner might have responsibilities with regard to maintenance (not in the sense of "maintaining software" in the programming sense, but in the sense of ensuring that, e.g., updates released by the manufacturer are downloaded and installed -- even if this is an automated, the owner may be responsible for making sure the vehicle is kept where that process can successfully complete and not interfering with it.)

> And it is the software that is the distinguishing characteristic of a fully autonomous self-driving car.

The "distinguishing characteristic" of a self-driving car is not the only thing relevant to liability.
Offshore Wind Farm to Power More Than One Million U.K. Homes
You should look at Savannah! It's almost a picture perfect copy of the London plan here:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Squares_of_Savannah,_Georgia

Compare:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:SchematicSavannahSquare.j...

vs.

http://ichef.bbci.co.uk/news/976/cpsprodpb/EF6C/production/_...
I say we get as many people as possible to botcott companies in such states. Also, send them a letter saying they did, tell them how much the competition is making on the new business, and say that continues until the law is repealed.

Make it impact their numbers until companies push (or pay) lawmakers to reverse it. Or don't and better areas prosper.
Aha, thanks for that explanation, that was really useful and concise. I've learnt something new today, which is always good :)
I never saw that. However, the "Stay Focused & Keep Shipping" signs always seemed dark to me.
Is Basecamp in trouble or out of business? Not everyone needs to be huge, and it's not always profitable to grow out of control. Sometimes the costs of growth exceed the additional profits. Sometime to pivot to a market that doesn't actually exist. But sometimes you make some pretty decent money with a pretty decent profit, even if it's not exciting.
I don't have issues in terms of expressiveness, but in terms of performance. Complex/expensive regexs that run quite quickly in sublime take a long time on atom, especially on large documents.

Perhaps this is an abuse of the tool, but I find its convenient to do these sorts of things in a text editor where I can watch my regexs highlight it's selections in real time.
Java was pretty terrible in the EJB 2.0, Java 1.4 era. I guess the current sentiment is at least partially a remnant from that era.
The thing is that the first tens of thousands of "self-reproducing robots" do not have to be entirely self-reproducing.

If you can produce 99% of a robot's mass from materials available in space (on the moon or some asteroid), with 1% of the mass consisting of the most complex ingredients provided by Earth (such as the chips you mentioned), you can effectively launch 100x the number of robots from earth at the same cost.

Once you have a couple of thousand relatively flexible robots, you can start to get serious about building specialized labs producing more complex ingredients in space, and then scale up from there.

Even then the task is ridiculously complex, and it seems unlikely that the economics of it would work either[1], but it can nevertheless be much simpler than you make it sound. In any case, we should try to get there because any significant step towards this goal will also make life on earth more robust.

[1] E.g. in the example of chips, good luck getting the masks for advanced designs, let alone all the implicit know-how that goes into a modern fab.
> One of the biggest customer-facing effects of this delay was that status.github.com wasn't set to status red until 00:32am UTC, eight minutes after the site became inaccessible. We consider this to be an unacceptably long delay, and will ensure faster communication to our users in the future.

Amazon could learn a thing or two from Github in terms of understanding customer expectations.
I second taking a look at Go, but be aware that for replacing shell scripts Go has one big disadvantage: binaries tend to get rather large, because all libraries are statically linked.

I have one script that writes postgres, does a HTTP request and needs to read file. 100 locs resulted in 7.2M binary size.
https://f-droid.org/app/org.adaway

Works like a charm. Needs occasional root of course.
Did you mean "New England", like the US Northeast? Because as a lifelong New Englander, I find that a terrible inaccurate statement. There's a Town Common (if it hasn't been converted into a parking lot!) and then cow paths radiating out from there.
They gave up because of general lack of opportunity.
Good luck getting people to agree. as was stated in the article, everyone knows they're smarter than George Bush Jr.
I can see this market playing out to be an oligopoly not a monopoly.

- Very high barrier to entry. You need $X of development costs, and $Y on traffic/mapping data. Anyone with money can get those.
- Self driving cars have limited economies of scale.

* Self driving taxis get better (less wait time) as their density goes up, to a point. Today Uber and Lyft are both dense enough in SF for me to not care which one I use.

* Self driving cars get safer as you collect more driving data. Safer self driving cars are better up to a point. Safety matters a lot now, since cars are unsafe. On the other hand I don't care if Boeings are 2x as safe as Airbuses, both are safe enough for me. If you can make your self driving car safe enough, I'll buy it. To make your self driving car safe enough, you need to spend $X on developement and testing and $Y on really good maps.
Trying to catch up to Box in the enterprise market. Box is all over the corporate world.
Roughly $520M.

http://www.lindenwood.edu/moPolicyJournal/issue02/articles/c...

>However, the Cardinals
also receive significant returns through an estimated
$520 million in public subsidies: $350 million from St.
Louis City’s five percent admission tax 30-year
waiver, $20 million from St. Louis City’s 25-year
property tax abatement, $108 million paid by St. Louis
County to retire the $45 million in stadium bonds, and
$42 million from Missouri tax credits and highway
ramp construction. Further, the Cardinals also receive
an additional estimated $150 million in new stadium
selling sources: $100 million over 30 years on stadium
naming rights, $40 million from the Ballpark Founders
Program that charges season ticket holders $2,000-
$7,500 for new stadium seats, and $10 million from
old Busch Stadium memorabilia sales
The first issue is surely an issue with Go as well, if they ever do change the language or std lib in a way that isn't perfectly bug-for-bug compatible? As to upgrade Go I thought you have to recompile everything including all dependencies (I guess there's no stabilised ABI?), so it amounts to the same thing: if one of your dependencies doesn't play nice with the new Go, you can't upgrade.

The private APIs thing is indeed one of the most common issues, along with needed upgrades to bytecode rewriting libraries.
that is interesting. i'm not sure what to make of that. i have half-formed ideas about why that might be, or why that might be ok (or not ok), and whether that sort of solution is better in principle than an inheritance tax, if one had to choose. but none of those ideas are fully baked enough to mention.

do you happen to know why that's the case? for example, that wiki entry says sweden abolished the inheritance tax in 2005 (retroactive to 2004). was the motivation that it was unnecessary? did constituents complain about its existence?
Ahh, can't have a HN thread on aging without mention of SENS. Is this a bot?
Flink's event-time support is coming along nicely. Their first round of true event-time support came in November (https://flink.apache.org/news/2015/11/16/release-0.10.0.html), and much more is on the way. Flink will be an excellent platform for Beam, both batch and streaming.

As I understand it, Spark has event-time support coming soon as well. I think basic stuff is landing in 1.7. Not sure precisely what they have planned, but I can only imagine that Spark will also become an excellent platform for executing streaming Beam pipelines in due time. In the meantime, the streaming runner for Spark can either target those features which Spark does support well (i.e., processing-time windowing, in this case), or try to emulate those it doesn't (such as how it was done in the article).
> Sending schema over the wire is not a good solution for anything else than point-to-point communication.

OK, let's back up a moment. I am not entirely sure what "Schema / Class Id" in your table means. Your table claims Protobuf doesn't support it, but the text below is unclear on what you think Protobuf doesn't support.

You frequently use the term "self-describing", but this could have two meanings:

1) Like JSON, where the names of all fields appear in the message, so that a human can read the message easily without external information.

2) Limited self-description in which field values can be identified and parsed, but their names are not available (perhaps replaced by numeric tags or indexes).

Protobuf can support (1) by including the schema in the payload. I agree this is not commonly useful.

Protobuf supports (2) natively, by virtue of being a TLV format (just like ION).

Re-reading the page, it sounds like you are assuming the Protobuf format cannot be deciphered at all without the schema, but this simply isn't true.

If you meant something else, please explain.

> The Protobuf documentation says very clearly that you cannot see when one message ends and another begins.

I wrote that documentation. It doesn't mean what you think (my fault, perhaps). What it's saying is that the top-level message is a series of tag-value pairs with no explicit indication of where that series ends (on the assumption that you already know, e.g. based on EOF). Thus, if you concatenate two whole messages without adding any delimiter then it will look like one big message containing all the fields from both. However, each field within the message is clearly delimited and sub-messages are length-delimited therefore skipable.

> We have looked at Cap'n Proto - but late in the process where we had already looked at quite a lot of formats. From what I can see, Cap'n Proto is pretty much just a binary struct. That is pretty close to what we wanted to do with ION, except we wanted it to be compact on the wire too. We have seen that Cap'n Proto has a compaction mechanism, but we have not yet had time to analyze and compare it to ION's.Cap'n Proto with compaction would be very similar to ION - on a conceptual level.

ION is a TLV encoding like Protobuf. Cap'n Proto is fixed offsets + pointers. These are vastly different styles of encoding that enable different modes of use. You can certainly debate which is better but I don't think it's correct to describe the formats as "pretty close", unless you consider all binary formats to be "pretty close" to each other.
Goldman Sachs May Be Forced to Fundamentally Question How Capitalism Is Working
Are you aware of Escape Dynamics? You might want to see what they're trying to do with beamed energy thermal rockets.
Yes, people are extremely shortsighted. Imagine the world 50, 100, and 200 years ago. the microprocessor didn't exist 50 years ago. Most households still had black&white tv's.

http://www.usatoday.com/story/money/business/2013/06/12/tele...

We have twice the population now. If we could get more people working on real problems...
You make me feel optimistic, not something I often feel.
While I agree that compaction is desirable in theory, empirically it's not really necessary. For example, there are no C/C++ malloc/free implementations that compact, because compaction would change the address of pointers, breaking the C language. Long-lived C and C++ applications seem to get by just fine without the ability to move objects in memory.

Java code also tends to make more allocations than Go code, simply because Java does not (yet) have value types, and Go does. This isn't really anything to do with the GC, but it does mean that Java _needs_ a more powerful GC just to handle the sometimes much greater volume of allocations. It also makes Java programmers sometimes have to resort to hacks like arrays of primitive types (I've done this before).

People like to talk about how important generational GC is, and how big a problem it is that Go doesn't have it. But I have also seen that if there is too high a volume of data in the young-gen in Java, short-lived objects get tenured anyway. In practice, the generational assumption isn't always true. If you use libraries like Protobuffers that create a ton of garbage, you can pretty easily exceed the GC's ability to keep up with short-lived garbage.

I'm really curious to see how Go's GC works out for big heaps in practice. I can say that my experience with Java heaps above 100 GB has not been good. (To be fair, most of my Java experience has been under CMS, not the new G1 collector.)
I'd try it too!

...if I could get my hands on some of this stuff :) For some reason, I feel like that might be a little difficult.
Just like my mix tapes
My FB is also a free speech zone. But so is my workplace. If someone doesn't like the things I like to say, then they shouldn't talk to me.