skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I worked in the synthetic biology lab (on a different project) while the early stages of the Syn3.0 was being done, and also have paid several visits to chat with them in the meantime. [Proof: first author on http://dx.doi.org/10.3390/ijms16012020] I was a fly on the wall for most of the group meetings and even contributed some unpublished results (there were transposons that were causing problems by shuffling the the DNA in the yeast and I hypothesized the orientation that causes the issue and discovered the yeast genes responsible for this process)

Firstly what constitutes "minimal" depends on what you feed the organism. There's a set of bacteria called phytoplasma which are plant parasites that are missing genes to make nucleotides (even mycoplasmas have those) and they've adapted by sucking nucleotides from their hosts.

Some insider information: Most of the mystery essential genes are vague cell wall proteins. Probably what is going on is that if you knock out too many of these genes, you lose cell wall turgidity and the cell becomes nonviable. So what is important is not so much which of these genes you have, but how many of them you have.

Second insider information, for fun: The "hypothetical minimal genome" (syn2.0 is referred to as HMG in the paper) was actually a backronym because we called it the "hail mary genome" but decided that was inappropriate for publication.
Page Object Pattern in Automated Testing
I make better money than the average SF developer at my age, and my cost of living is half of what it would be in SF. I also work 40 hours per week (or less) and work-life balance is highly valued in our small startup scene.

Optimizing for independence is something you would explicitly be moving away from by living in SF, since your income (adjusted for cost of living) is lower there. There are studies showing that as well.
Customer Lifetime Value: How to Avoid Common Pitfalls and Build Smarter Metrics
No one clicks on a link to buy a car not because no one wants to, but because, unless you're buying a Tesla, you can't, you have to buy through a dealership.
Unity Adam demo – the full film
Thanks!

Trying to read that is like trying to learn an entire new language by reading a sentence in it. Way too many words to already understand what it's even defining (commutative ring, irreducible polynomials, UFDs, principle ideal, nozero prime ideal... and I'm not following why p divides ab in R... or even exactly what that means).

Searching youtube kahn academy and numberphile, but not turning up anything. exactly how high level is this?
> Why Lightning as opposed to USB-C?

Lightning is not a D-shaped so you avoid the "oh I put it in upside down, no wait, I was right the first time."

In that respect, it is the superior design. For power and data. For headphones, I want the ability to charge and listen to something at the same time (eg working at my desk, going on long trips in a car that's more than 2 years old, etc)
I'm going to be a little bit contrarian and disagree. I totally see where the author is coming from, but it comes across of mathematical self-aggrandizement.

I especially disagree with his interpretation of the layman's experience. They're not assuming the proof or begging the question; they have a secondary unrealized assumption that is not at all their fault.

The fundamental theorem of arithmetic is "obvious" because we grow up learning a system where if p|ab then p|a or p|b. As mathematicians, we know that Euclid's lemma is a requirement for a unique factoring domain, and we understand that the choice of set can affect whether the lemma is true.

For a non-mathematician, this is an inherent part of their conception of numbers, factoring, and their definition of the word prime.

Put yourself in the position of talking to someone who thinks prime factorization is "obvious". Where will things go wrong in their explanation? In answer 2: they have a completely deterministic way to prime factor, and it relies on Euclid's lemma.

So you ask them: "Well we know 6 is divisible by 2. What if we break it into 2 numbers that aren't divisible by 2?"

"Well then this wouldn't work. But that's not possible."

"But what if it was?"

"But that's not how numbers work."

"But what if I took each of those numbers and replaced them with two numbers and that I'm going to call one big number. And when I multiply those together I'm going to multiply the first number of each pair together, then multiply the second number of each pair together. Then I'll multiply the result of that second multiplication with -5, and add that final answer with the product of the first pair I did earlier."

"uh"

"If I do that, then do you believe that I could get two factors of 6 where neither pair of numbers is completely divisible by 2? Try (1,1) and (1,-1) and you'll see that it works: 1 x 1 = 1, 1 x -1 = -1. That -1 x -5 = 5, plus the original 1 gives me 6. See! It's not obvious."

"Yeah, uh, you didn't tell me I could make a new type of number and multiplication up on the spot."

"No no no, it's all mathematically sound. You see, those second numbers are just the coefficients of the square root of negative 5."

"Okay, so is there any rule I've learned that I can trust?"

"So I bet you think it's obvious that when you add two numbers, you can always get an answer..."

We are essentially telling kids that (American) football is a game where two groups of people line up, block, run formations and routes, give the ball to someone, and try to get it into the end zone for points.

Then, when it's your turn to go on offense, you drop back, throw a pass to your undefended wide receiver, and act amazed that the other team didn't even consider that you might throw the ball simply because you didn't forbid it.

The fundamental theorem of arithmetic was proven around 1,800 years before sqrt(-5) was even conceived of. Over two millennia before Ring Theory. Those proofs were correct for the systems in which they were written. They might even be obvious within that system. That that they are not generally true does not change things.
I read "lightsabers are totally possible". Where can I preorder?
Chris does not have any vision of the project anymore. He does not have enough time even to publish releases [0]. And it was actually he who suggested Benno to fork GNU nano.

[0] http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.editors.nano.devel/4598/focus=...
Some of these IoT devices are solar powered or rely on ambient electromagnetic energy and don't have enough juice to perform crypto.
Cliniko's developer paradise: 30 hour weeks, no managers, no meetings
And, you won't believe it ! With an almost magic like event, this 1.5 decade old bug was marked fixed today, after I wrote this comment!
I had thought that this might be an announcement about the availability of the ESP32. It is not. It's clickbait about an ESP8266-like chip with some onboard flash memory.
> CRUD apps are mostly about synchronizing facts about the world with the world itself.

Yes, but as already stated, the world is bigger than CRUD apps and a big collection of facts about the world isn't very useful without any behavior attached to those facts. Once behavior is involved, OO becomes useful.

> but if you're trying to perform a map / filter / aggregate operation across several different collections (sometimes these kinds of things need to be done!), OO doesn't give you many tools

As those things are completely orthogonal to OO, so what? You can perfectly well use the database to do the map/filter/querying and still have an OO program; OO has nothing to do with map/filter/querying, so as I said already, this is a strawman.

> Objects being more than structs with immutable data is exactly what's wrong with them.

No, it's exactly what's right with them. It is the very reason they exist, it's entirely the point of OO to hide data and expose behavior instead through a message based interface. Structs aren't objects, so claiming objects being more than structs is what's wrong them is to claim that objects shouldn't exist and that claim is unsupportable.

> I think that's strictly inferior to reasoning by transformation: what is the input vs what is the output. In particular, I think functional transformation is more composable than invariants.

Functional programming is great, and mixes quite well with OO, but it's not what's being discussed, we're comparing OO to procedural programming as implemented by topmind and his table oriented programming here.

Both of your replies are strawmen, you cast objects as data and then complain that they're bad at being data: but objects aren't about data, they're about pluggable behavior as I've already said. You have to step outside the "data is everything" mindset to actually see what OO is and where its value lies.

Frankly you don't give me the impression than you actually understand object oriented programming, like topmind himself, you seem to be full of misconceptions related to an inability to step outside the "it's all data" mindset. I could be wrong, but that's the impression you're leaving.

Take a basic example from a simple CRUD app; say I'm selling a CRUD app to many businesses, many of which already have corporate websites with global login systems and they want my app to use their member database and login system. The solution is simple and obvious, make my authentication system pluggable and for each big client that's worth the effort, implement a custom login provider that ties my authentication into their existing systems API. Can you describe a nice scalable procedural solution to this problem that's better than the obvious OO solution?
Restoring YC's Xerox Alto, day 1: Power supplies and disk interface
One thing I would focus on is that it is a bad idea to write one Microservice in Python, another one in Node.js, another one in Rust, another one in Ruby, another one in Go, etc.

If there really is a special reason to do such a thing, go for it, but dealing with serialization/deserialization code in lots of languages as well as repeated logic is a big waste.

One answer to that would be to have as many microservices as possible depend on the same framework for as much as is possible/reasonable. The more things stay the same the easier it is for developers and admins.
Well yes, if there were actual mammal-mushrooms then it would make the proposition more credible, and rightly so.

Well, I think, even if that were the case, it would still be a logical fallacy, because the fact that a mammal could be a plant/fungus/whatever doesn't tell anything about whether that particular mammal is. All it does is to increase the "refuted counter arguments" score which gives it the illusion of credibility. So the whole "can a mammal be..." debate would be a red herring.

You could pull the same trick with the airplane example: "What do you mean, this thing can't be a plane because a plane needs wings? The rocket plane XYZ-34 doesn't have wings either." (while ignoring the fact that the helicopter you're watching doesn't look anything like that rocket plane)
It can be additional work for people self-hosting their mail. But I base that on my own experience many years out of date.
Coinbase Adds Support for PayPal and Credit Cards
The stories I know came from Dealers of Lightning and what I remember (correctly I hope) is that the weekly meetings were quite contentious and that he would even encourage haranguing the presenter. Is that true? Did the people there feel it as healthy constructive criticism? I would worry that this would more likely stifle creative thought than encourage it.

If you are computing on a $1000 computer, you are computing in the past.

I know that this was true in the past but it's my contention that hardware has had Moore's Law where software has stagnated, and that the passing of time has meant that now current software doesn't often take full advantage of the hardware available. If you did architect based on where the puck is going (optimized for multi-core, no main memory) current hardware wouldn't slow you down the same way as it did before and sometimes you would even see a performance gain.

By the way, thanks for doing this.
At the beginning of his presentation, Jafar Husain explained how a team at Netflix started out with a mostly RESTful API, but then it degraded to RPC. That suggests to me that REST really wasn't the best fit for their requirements. It's easy for us to say from the sidelines that they should have just tried harder to stay pure and follow the REST way. But requirements change, and the REST architectural style wasn't designed for today's world, where users don't want to think about the distinction between their devices and the network. I think it's quite likely that Relay and Falcor, having been designed by teams working on large-scale consumer applications, really do make some progress toward solving some problems these teams face better than REST does.

More generally, I'm skeptical of any hard-line position which insists that you just have to stay pure and follow the true way. I already rejected one religion; I don't want to get sucked into another.
The news _should_ be about informing and educating people about the current state of the world, including the parts that are working well. Why does obsessing over crime and inflating the importance of celebrity and politician have to dominate the news?
SOLRAD: First Electronic Intelligence Satellite – launched 56 years ago
Show HN: Scala Idioms in Java – Patterns, For-Comp, Etc.
Maybe I missed it in the article, but it's interesting to me that people aren't give 2 versions of the same device to choose from. That's like saying people prefer the color blue, because they keep buying blue Accords over red Civics.

There's clearly more than the one option going into the choice here.
So everyone should learn something of the language of every country they visit however shortly?

English is the 2nd language most people in the world knows so that's a natural language to use approaching people whose language you don't know.

English is not my native language. If someone visited my country I would expect them to speak to me in English, not learn my language unless they were going to settle here.
Putting a captcha in front of the tools takes the fun from playing with the site.
I don't use Hulu, but I've read that some shows force ads regardless of price plan, e.g. The Mindy Project.
> But the reason he's made it as far as he has?

Because the Republican nominating system's non-proportional allocation of delegates, combined with the schedule of Republican primaries and caucuses, is designed to very strongly favor the candidate with an advantage in early name recognition especially if they can effectively appeal to a particular demographic that the Republicans have been focusing on as a key element of their coalition since Nixon's southern strategy, especially in a crowded field since the system is designed to create artificial delegate majorities from small electoral pluralities.

(This is engineered as a way to shorten the competitive period of primary contests by making a candidate's victory nearly inevitable very early in the process without them needing to secure anything like majority support even within the primary electorate, allowing the party to move quickly on to focus on the general election.)
> Who are you going to sue if I order a cell jammer from a China or Hong Kong based company and your own governmental postal service delivers it to me?

Nobody, but you might go to prison: https://www.fcc.gov/general/jamming-cell-phones-and-gps-equi...
That's like forking someone's program, but not understanding two thirds of the code. (What's the big deal? It happens!)

If you take someone's 4000-5000 line program and whittle it down to 473 lines which are still somehow useful, "newly created" doesn't apply in full honesty, let alone if you don't know what a third of those lines do.
In College Turmoil, Signs of a Changed Relationship with Students
Is this the way to go for Clojure? I've been using prelude (I wrote a 270 page book published by Packt in emacs org mode!) emacs is amazing
CD's had a storage advantage over floppy disks, and CD-RW's came out which killed the one remaining advantage floppies had.

There isn't an alternative to the headphone jack that's 500x better.
Well, there's no point in waiting around for a company to make a local service their device connects to for us, since the incentive is not to deliver what we would really get the most use out of, but to deliver something that maximizes their revenue, likely though only accepting other devices of the same company, or those that have licensed access in some way. If we make a system that can be interacted with, we'll get some cheap cheap manufacturers that use it because they'll try anything, and if it catches, either we'll have a good system, or more likely, manufacturers will band together to create their own standard that's technically not as good but more likely to be supported widely.

I imagine something like the following would be good:

- Each component runs in it's own chroot/container/virt so the manufacturer can provide whatever they want, and the user can throttle it if it's poorly engineered.

- Discovery service that allows installed network server components to register with it for discovery. (Sun's RPC service, anyone?)

- Possibly also to proxy all traffic through discovery service, so network components have to specifically register for direct network access with very specific access limits if they want to use an internet service or talk to a company server.

- Separate file systems exposed for the application and stored data for each app, so a memory card card can be used for the data portion, and replacing hardware is fairly simple (after base software is installed, each application will discover it's configuration and stored data from the provided memory card). Possibly even a separation between data and config as well. IP cameras can spool all their recorded video to the data partition, which might be a large attached disk, but their config can be on a separate, easily swapped memory card, for maximum choice when upgrading.

- Let the manufacturers work out standardizing protocols for their industry, or not, and integrating with other apps, but let apps see the list of available apps, and request access to other ones, so devices from the same manufacturer or ones with a partnership can leverage each other.

- Lots of other stuff people will come up with along the way.

I imagine you could get any relatively cheap box, install the base software (linux distro of choice plus framework, or distro dedicated to this), and have it mostly work. Something like FreeNAS and similar projects.

Does anyone know of any groups out there working on something like this? Maybe some docker oriented distro that aims to be super simple comes closest?

Edit: Added another point or two.
> If they are the subject matter experts, then yes, I would prefer they are all present, and none of them be excluded because we are searching for faux diversity.

My understanding is that the complaint is not "these men are not qualified", but "there are women who are qualified who are systematically being ignored".

There isn't an objective ranking of subject matter experts, from which conferences simply invite the top N people. Nor, as far as I know, is anyone in favor of inviting non-qualified minorities to speak. The question is "why are qualified [women, people of color, trans people, etc.] not being invited?".
Sounds like a good point, however, what was the price differential between the two? If the double-capacity version cost twice as much, then obviously not many people are going to buy it.

I think it'd be interesting to have an experiment where some flagship phone (like the Galaxy S*) is sold in two versions, one with double the battery life but a little thicker (and cases for both sizes are available), at the exact same price, to see which one people really prefer. Personally, I'd certainly go for the double-capacity version, but considering how popular iPhones are, I'm under no illusion that my tastes represent the mainstream.
Empathy: The key to a successful software project
As mentioned, I'm not a regular reader of his, so the fact that I've somehow missed 3 pieces of his published 3+ years ago shouldn't come as much of a surprise.

Would you feel less defensive if I just called him a biased partisan instead of using an absolute-sounding word like "ever"?
Numerai uses order-preserving encryption, which is homomorphic. The algos are trained on the ciphertext itself.
Chomsky is wrong that statistical models of language provide no insight. They do.

Chomsky is right that language has meaning and that many modern statistical techniques essentially ignore this.

My take on the issue is that you can't separate linguistic command from true intelligence / cognition. There's a long tail of tricks that us intelligent people can use, but fundamentally they'll only be tricks. And if we truly get something resembling a perfect linguistic-aware AI by this long tail of tricks then we've probably accidentally created real cognition. Maybe after typing this all out I finally understand what Turing meant.
What Is the Future of Gravitational Wave Astronomy?
See my reply to brokenmachine.

Let's do a little thought experiment. Suppose that I, living in the USA, want to send money to my aunt living in the Caribbean. Let's also say that she has never used bitcoin (like most people) and that I don't have an account on a bitcoin exchange (like most people). How do I get her $1000 within 24 hours using bitcoin?
Europe Will Spend €1B to Turn Quantum Physics into Quantum Technology
Yep- arclanguage.org.
And people say on HN advertising doesn't work :))

It's all to make you buy their products, my friend. No big company is doing philanthropy just for the sake of it.

Instead of paying taxes honestly (yrs, it's legal what they are doing, but not ethical), they bribe you with LGBT campaign. Bufff.
For something that involves the US gov, anthrax, and a crowded public place, that was remarkably ethical.

Clickbaity title IMO, but I'm not sure what to suggest. I think the current title suggests malice on the part of the US gov, but they were actually just doing some interesting research.
They are more accessible here on HN, though, because crawlers that obey robots.txt will not see it on git.savannah.gnu.org but will see it here on HN.
Well, if you really didn't want to get robbed, you should have donated the laptop and cash to charity, donned a tunic and joined a monastery
Increases to property tax are tightly capped. If housing prices skyrocket (which they have for a long time) the taxes on the houses barely rise at all. It highly encourages never selling property, and largely decouples property tax from the actual market price.

All this results in a situation where the state with the biggest economy is constantly broke.
Judging by the stock price today, I think that may be exactly what happened, but only just a bit. Stock is down 8%, some investors have decided to get out of tesla.
And then they buy a thick phone case to put it in.
Assange isn't a UK citizen: he is Australian.
Article is from 2011
Digital HR … Social, Apps and Next Steps?
That's a reason, but I suspect not the prime reason. The ACLU, the Institute for Justice, Pacific Legal Foundation, etc. usually never have a direct claim themselves in the cases they're involved in... they look for some other party that has standing and then assists that party in pursuing their case in court. I don't see why the FSF could not also follow that model by supporting any copyright holder in litigating/negotiating GPL license breaches.

What they do get with assignment is that they can ensure that the software is only ever issued under the license/license version of their choosing. Any other copyright holder can cease distributing their software under the GPL; true, they cannot revoke previously granted rights, but future versions, etc. can be made to be non-FOSS. An independent copyright holder could also dual license their code GPL and closed source. I think avoiding those scenarios is really why FSF wants the assignment. Not the ability to litigate, that's just an excuse.