skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The hype around epigenetics, or anything-genetics in general, has been going for a while [1], and it has some very annoying consequences. A lot of the friends I talk to about the subject barely have an inkling of how even basic genetics work, yet tell me about these "crazy things we can do now", except we can't really, nor do we understand as much as a lot of people like to believe. The media and their pop-science are obviously largely responsible for this, but you'll find a lot of researchers using this to promote and fund their research, and really, who can blame them (particularly in academia/research where people will get any funding they can). I do blame some of the social scientists however, who are often quick to draw correlations where there aren't any, if only to get attention.

I work with some absolutely brilliant people, and a lot of them wouldn't touch epigenetics with a ten foot pole. The hype around it means expectations are ridiculous, we're barely scratching the surface of the subject yet many people are already expecting things like authoritative dietary or educational advice. The same is unfortunately true of cancer research and cancer care in general ("that's not how cancers work" is my new go-to phrase...).

In the post-genomics era [2], we're starting to see things like phenomics [3] that could indeed further research into epigenetics, although this is still very new and the real-world applications are still to bear significant results. The most advanced use of phenomics at this point (that I'm aware of) is to monitor and control plant features using mostly image recognition [4]. One particularly interesting application is to line up hundreds of plants (often clones) and apply different conditions to different batches (including radiation to induce random mutations), then have various types of cameras go over the plants and perform feature recognition to try and infer correlations between genotype, phenotype and environment (like these guys do [5]). It's promising, but let's not forget these are plants, not animals, and certainly not humans. It's also rather obvious that this sort of brute-force approach (no matter how amazing I think it is) isn't exactly applicable to anything other than plants at this point ; having rows of bred/cloned humans in extremely controlled conditions could prove a bit tricky...

[1] https://aeon.co/essays/the-dream-of-designing-humans-has-a-l...
[2] I find the term a bit pompous, particularly considering we're still very much reliant on genomics and still improving it quite substantially
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phenomics, although it is a bit short on content
[4] http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1369526615...
[5] http://www.psi.cz/products/plantscreen-phenotyping/plantscre...
I had professors tell me that they'll always find me no matter where I move. I still got mail from my University for a while...until I left the country. I haven't gotten crap from them since.
c# has var as long as the variable is being assigned. var t; is a readability nightmare to me anyway.

As for creating classes so often, they are adding better support for tuples in the next version (c# 7).
I don't know how I feel about this issue. Haven't decided.

But if my neighbor miswires a light switch and it starts a fire that burns my house down because they're close together, that would suck. In that situation, I would have wanted a say in whether my neighbor chose to do that themselves or hire someone who knows what they're doing.

I'm living in a house that is filled with small jobs that seemed like they were done by someone who didn't know what they were doing. Lots of scrap lumber, mis-matching parts, electrical re-wires that just didn't work, etc. I'm glad I don't need a permit to fix some of that myself, but I would've loved to stop this guy before he did these things.

Or if someone's half-assery endangered otherwise innocent lives. Note: not necessarily crying "save the children!" "Innocent" as in "couldn't influence decision to get someone who knows what they're doing".
Hair stylists work with extremely sharp implements extremely close to major blood vessels. I'm pretty OK with them needing at least some training. And that's not even counting, as GP mentioned, the dangerous chemicals that come into things like hair dyes.
> I have heard more than one time, if Sanders doesn't win, people claim would switch to vote for Trump.

Note that lots of PUMAs -- from polling data, more than this is true of Sanders supporters in this election -- said that they would do that if Obama won the nomination in 2008 rather than Clinton. General election polling data found that that group had evaporated by then.

What people say in anger during the primary campaign and what they do in the fall often aren't the same.
Simpler for which majority? Aren't we talking about developers here, not the technically illiterate?

Learning 1 single (and relatively simple) language vs HTML/CSS for presentation (and all its headaches) and JS for logic/interaction? The browser is a stack, not a single piece of tech.
It should take you less than 20 seconds. Here is the procedure. First sign in here:

https://secure.backblaze.com/user_signin.htm
type your username, password, and click "Sign In", then....

Look on the left nave for "View/Restore Files", browse to one file you know you changed recently, and check the checkbox by it (and maybe a few other files) and click "Continue With Restore". Done!

Within a few seconds you can go to "My Restores" (on the left side of the web browser) to download the restore!
Linkedin: Speed, Performance, and Public Profile
IMHO the distinction between URL and URI is similar to the debate on SI prefixes for bytes, or whether we should insist on calling Linux GNU/Linux; i.e., most people just don't care enough so these things will never gain currency.
> Can't you trust people to use their own judgement as to whether they can do it sensibly or not?

Individually, yes, you can expect people to act in their best interest. When doing things for others, not so much. Look at the #ventyourrent movement for examples of the way people are being treated in pursuit of profit -- not high rents, but the sheer number of landlords that either fail to maintain, or negligently maintain their properties in a way that puts tenants at risk.

The US has a serious problem with licensing and regulation, but that also seems to be a product of their litigious culture as a whole.
Uh, so how do I point out that the guy is a fraud? Did you read the whole sentence?
>Finally, Estonian for "strawberry pie" (maasikapirukas) is Finnish for "earth-swine devilish" so perhaps there's something to that thing about earth, after all.

The pirukas part might come from baltic - pyragas and/or slavic - pirog.
They are lucrative. Portland State University probably isn't widely known outside of Oregon, but their fundraisers make pretty nice salaries:

* Foundation President / CEO: $278,000

* Chief Development Officer: $170,000

Source: http://www.oregonlive.com/education/index.ssf/2015/08/portla...
I'm not sure if you visited the page but it's a google slideshow, no advertizing revenue and I'm not sure how much "slide" impression stuff is actually tracked on google slideshow.
The train engineer analogy is a good one, you would imagine that a single "truckgineer" so to speak could be responsible for managing a convoy of let's say 10-15 trucks which would make it much more efficient. In regards to fueling, would you make that more efficient by adding a larger fuel tank or fuel car?
IIRC, one of the big sources of cheap money is expecting that easements for giant elevated tubes would be available for much less than the land value of the required land underneath.
Maybe that's why he's not building it himself?
for tables use https://github.com/bradleyayers/django-tables2

for forms use https://github.com/gregmuellegger/django-floppyforms

For navigation just use something like http://purecss.io/menus/
It was really interesting to read in James C. Scott's work that many uncontacted tribes are not only not primordially isolated from other human beings, but may be descended from people who deliberately separated from other civilizations because they didn't like them. (Edit: for example, they might have been slaves or conscript soldiers, or people who were defeated in a war.) Some of these people may then have significant, but maybe increasingly vague, awareness of outsiders, and a dislike of them.

Scott suggests that we might tend to think that isolated people have been there for millennia and have no idea that there are other human beings, but that very often they just wanted to be alone, or not part of a particular society. (And for those who deliberately left, they may have left behind things like governments, agriculture, and metalworking technology.)

It does seem like we have a tendency to say "ooh! unchanging primordial antiquity!" and not remember that human migration is one of the greatest constants of human history, and everyone has a story about how they got where they are.
You need to import shit to make shit. Whether the shit is local or international, water remains the cheapest form of transport.
Sounds to me like backseat entrepreneurship
To the police, this was a sting. I'm not sure, but maybe warrants aren't needed for those? The "suspect" willingly allowed the property to be searched (drive attached and booted). The police overreacted, and according to Derek, ignored the plan and substituted their own. There's no detail on how Derek was robbed, but if it was more of a mugging, the police would consider any suspect "armed and dangerous" in ANY context.
how street-paving frequency (e.g. paving a road right before putting in a water main then re-paving it right before installing Citi bikes then re-paving right before making a change to the water main...) ticked up in election years

Houston has the same problem. This is a form of corruption.
> in part because it assumes that it shouldn’t be possible to infer specific sensitive details about people based on metadata alone.

> One of the government’s justifications for allowing law enforcement and national security agencies to access metadata without warrants is the underlying belief that it’s not sensitive information.

Is this true? I didn't think this was an actual part of the argument for using metadata, but that metadata wasn't covered under current laws, and was therefore easier to get.

I was working under the assumption that it was an unintentional oversight, not an intentional hole in legislation.
I used pyjs (pyjamas) for some personal projects and I liked it a lot. Unfortunately it got stuck in time, and in 2012 the current maintainers did a bad political move, and left the project in even worse shape than it was.

Nowadays, I wouldn't consider pyjs to build anything relevant..
Ask HN: Are Facebook chat bots worth building, and how to promote them?
The primary issue I have with the Facebook messenger platform is that there's no distribution/promotion channels. In the iOS app store, new apps appear in the "New" section and you can get some new users that way. In the old days of Facebook, there was a similar system. With chat bots, I don't see how to promote a bot once it's completed. There's no bot store. Essentially, the task becomes asking users to have both Facebook + Messenger, and to install the app by sending a message. That sounds like a lot of friction.
The question is whether anything relevant has changed in 60,000 years of separation.

Given that humans only evolved around then, it's reasonable to ask about tribes that split off.

"modern humans evolved in Africa possibly from Homo heidelbergensis, Homo rhodesiensis or Homo antecessor and migrated out of the continent some 50,000 to 100,000 years ago"

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_evolution

I suppose this could be mostly answered with a DNA test, on further thought.
I am responsible for creating a false positive. A notebook was stolen soon after I received it back from an OEM screen repair. The next day the same model showed up on Kijiji of all places. From the pictures, I was certain it was mine because there was an identical ExpressCard, the logo on the back of the screen was bent just as I had received it from repair, 2 of the 4 stickers were removed just as mine were, Also the RAM and hard drive were a non-standard upgraded amount. To top it off, it even had the ubiquitous glowing mushroom background. The cops checked it out, and the serial # and windows product key did not match.

The 'collision' of my cosmetic and functional alterations matching with someone else may have seemed unlikely, but it really wasn't. The laptop did not have a SD card reader (the expresscard), the stickers were in annoying places, of course you're going to get the same size of upgraded hard drive & memory, and that logo attachment sucked. Even the mushroom background was common enough.

The police showed up and asked to match the numbers at the door of the seller. There wasn't. They apologized. They phoned me back, and I apologized for wasting their time. I also made an apology to the seller, who was incredibly cool about it. Probably because no tasers were involved.
The matter of consent is much more nuanced than that, but as another comment on this thread points out, the search was not conducted by a police officer, so Fourth Amendment arguments are moot.

He consented to a stranger searching his laptop, and the Fourth Amendment provides no protections against that.
Probably in your sinuses.
The metric is very convenient and a useful rule of thumb which is therefore perhaps useful for some proportion of the general population: especially for those with limited medical knowledge and/or equipment - but it's really not a niche minority who is unaccounted for by the BMI.

Muscle density and bone density, amongst other factors, will vary by ethnicity enough that researchers are discussing the value of one singular set of windows for the BMI[0], and although I don't have evidence I would also say that it really doesn't take much exercise for a person to skew their BMI by a noticeable amount - I would venture the top 30% of all exercisers would see their BMI affected by their habits.

So while there is value in the BMI for being easy to collect its data and make recommendations based on its value, in this day and age you'd really expect a more granular and precise measurement for use in research and disseminating health information.

It shouldn't be such a big leap for smartwatches / fitbits to measure body fat %, for example.

[0]http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/19221673?dopt=Citation
I don't see how it can't be about "breaking the little guys". Google/Chrome has decided a very small list of companies (including themselves, with youtube) get non-broken sites, while everyone else has to cope with their websites breaking. No option of an opt-out. Why not at least lead from the front and block flash on youtube? Because it would seriously hurt youtube of course.
What does "better" mean?

Outside of governmental regulations, the market is what determines progress and there isn't much push by consumers for environmental impacts. They just want cheap and reliable transit. Price also wins over speed (and it's been show things like wifi have a greater effect on travel comfort than speed).

Unless you cut down the travel time significantly, it just doesn't matter. And at those speeds there are more engineering, operational and logistical costs that increase the ticket price so the value is reduced further. I also don't see how the engineering for a pioneering vactrain concept will somehow be cheaper than existing understood infrastructure.

Unless you can charge $50 and get from LA to SF in 30 mins while building the entire thing for just a few billion, this won't work.
chrome did not have extensions when launched, and firebug was far superior back then. it was a long time before extensions came maybe even 2010. they did not run with what ff did, far from it.
"supposed [...] since may 2014"
Picking a wrong niche is better than not picking one at all
.. Unless they've committed it twice. 'Failure to abandon your fifth amendment rights', 05/2016. 'Failure to abandon your fifth amendment rights', 05/2018. 'Failure to abandon your fifth amendment rights', 05/2020. etc.
Lots of money no longer willing to chase returns through subprime investments.
Brian from Backblaze here. It completely, utterly blows my mind that we are the first and still only company to do this.

First of all, it is a great way for people to hear about our company, which sometimes leads to people buying our products and services.

Second, even just for the good of all humanity, why wouldn't you do this to promote the best drive manufacturers and heck, even help them learn how their drives are working in the field?

It boggles my mind that Facebook, Yahoo, Google, and Amazon (Amazon Web Services include S3) don't publish their drive failure stats. What could possibly be the reason they keep silent?
Blowing up inside a tube would be a lot more expensive than blowing up a train on the tracks.

But then again, someone could just plant a bomb on the outside of the tube so I guess it's moot.
Maybe the MAC number with the letters spelled out and he didn't hear it fully?
I'm not a patent attorney or anything, but...how could this ever be enforceable...?
Yah pretty much. But for some reason tech people think Amazon is better than walmart. I'm not convinced we should be enamored with technology and ignore the actual economics of their business.
of course, then you'll end up with regsvr32.exe which is signed by microsoft and still happily downloads and executes script code from remote servers.

Unfortunately, not even this approach will work. No. To be totally safe, you have to whitelist by digest of the exe and command-line arguments. Which basically means that you have to know the the OS works internally.
Most tj/co code is to support these yieldables:
- promises
- thunks (functions)
- array (parallel execution)
- objects (parallel execution)
- generators (delegation)
- generator functions (delegation)
(see https://github.com/tj/co#yieldables)

Have your library the same support?
Show HN: ContentBox.js – Design Engine for CMS and Web Apps
Most users haven't made a conscious choice to use Chrome. They install it accidentally by not unticking a checkbox[0] or because they are told it will make the Google work better[1].

[0] https://i.imgur.com/LNFjqzd.png

[1] https://i.imgur.com/B3b5iCZ.png
Scratch and Google = Next Generation of Programming Blocks for Kids
I think electing judges might also be a uniquely American thing, and less than half the country does it. It's a much weirder practice than using juries. Obviously you can still say a judge was appointed by people elected with lobbyist money, but it's not that direct.
Ok. I don't know anything about PyQt so if you tell me that the dual license arrangement prevents you from using and extending it, despite your willingness to pay, I'll take your word for it.
Aren't they being accused of misrepresenting over $20 million worth of loans to institutional investors? It sounds like they are dealing with some serious fraud allegations. How will they survive? It looks to me like the company is imploding right now.
Millennials: The next great opportunity in nuclear security
A classic story in local elections is that books are 20 years old and the system needs a millage to buy new books.

If you assume that a student uses ~10 books a year and that they last 10 years, with $200 books you get grade schools spending about $200 per student per year on books. If it's 20 books and 5 years, it's $800 per student per year.

So while there is probably an obvious opportunity for grade schools to save money on cheaper books, it's also pretty obvious that it isn't the main component of educational spending at that level (the high price scenario puts it at less than 10%).

I think things have gotten worse, but I probably only spent $1500 on books in college (and ~$40,000 on in state tuition). So that's a noticeable fraction, but it wasn't in any way something to worry much over compared to the total costs.
Interactive Docker 101 Tutorial
Unless I'm misunderstanding his account of events, the police did not search his property. The person whose laptop was stolen searched it, and the owner of the laptop consented to that search.

The police detained him, I suspect, because they were satisfied they had reasonable suspicion he was handling stolen goods.
That it can be done on a Raspberry Pi using the Pi camera is of interest, because cheap small hardware makes it feasible to buy and install hardware dedicated to the task.
Some .io domains are cool for startups – this one would be AWESOME
The real problem with issues like this is that while I have chosen to remove myself from certain social media (have a facebook but it's poisoned data), is that friends and family aren't as paranoid or knowledgeable about privacy implications as I am, so I have to remind people to not tag me, not upload photos of me, etc.

Friends and family are reporting on their friends and family without even understanding the implications of what they are doing.

It may seem benign at the moment, but given the nature of the turn-key totalitarian state, it's when that key gets turned and the cat starts getting walked back that this sort of information leakage from unexpected sources really becomes an issue.
There is a hardening guide in the docs [1] and it would be great if you have ideas/contributions on how to make it more complete. Right now it is mostly focused on reducing remote services.

[1] https://coreos.com/os/docs/latest/coreos-hardening-guide.htm...
Is Harm to a Prosthetic Limb Property Damage or Personal Injury?
There's nothing stopping you from having a human aspect do the training and verification behind the scenes.

It's how companies such as Expensify were able to handle their receipt OCR gracefully for such a wide variety of invoices and receipts.

I'd err on the side of saying this is a more palpable sales approach to selling it as AI. Letting your customers know that while AI is running the show, things are being monitored closely and fixed by real people when misclassifications arise.
Should I Switch to BTRFS or ZFS on Linux Desktop?
Show HN: Neural Network Visualizer Classifying Handwriting – D3/Redux
Show HN: Komodo IDE X – New frameworks, Chrome debugging, build systems,
The interplay between the Beach Boys and Beatles was interesting, if memory serves. The bands came out at about the same time, and I think were roughly the same age. But since the BB's sound harkened back to the 50's, and the Beatles moved early to a 70's sound, the BB's got labeled as "old people" music and so were less successful.

Also, I believe the main creative guy (Brian Wilson) in the BB's had a breakdown trying to keep up with the Beatles, which is understandable.
Horizon 1.0: a realtime, open-source JavaScript back end from RethinkDB
Planet Money documented the plight of a woman in Utah that wanted to start a hair-braiding business. She needed a full cosmetology license.

http://www.npr.org/sections/money/2012/06/22/155596305/episo...

A recent ruling negated the requirement:

http://www.npr.org/sections/money/2012/08/09/158498244/its-n...
Developer of anonymous Tor software dodges FBI, leaves US
The sad part is the industries that do actually need some quality control are the ones that are completely unlicensed.

If a florist does something stupid - no one gets hurts.

But bankers,programmers treat their profession like the wild west.
How much work would I have to do to set up session to take users through a tutorial of one of my open source projects?