skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I'm not gonna speak for HN, but I read this site and personally I'm totally behind India's ambitions in space. I'm happy to cheer their successes and I hope it's meaningful to Indians too.

The one thing I sometimes complain about is the nationalism. India's no worse than the others on tis front. I'd like (personally) for space exploration to be a human endeavor rather than a national one.
Love seeing Keen IO go further and solve even more embedded analytics headaches. The embed button sounds like a real win, not having to write any JS could save a lot of time.
If the lease payments backing the bond stop, Solar City will attempt to rectify the situation, but it's not responsible for the remainder of the debt in any fashion. This specific aspect of operation is similar to other online servicers, like LendingClub, which would not compensate you in the event of a peer-to-peer loan default.

The prospectus https://solarbonds.solarcity.com/assets/bond_document/180/?f... lists the following risks (among others).

• your inability to initiate bankruptcy proceedings against SolarCity;

• the lack of certain “customary” investor protective covenants in the indenture;

• your inability to require us to repurchase the Solar Bonds upon a change of control of SolarCity;

• lack of cross-default provisions in the indenture with respect to our other debt; and

• the lack of an underwriter to conduct third party due diligence and other types of “gatekeeper” actions typically taken by an underwriter in an underwritten public offering.
relevant anecdote shamelessly stolen from reddit:

About 10 years ago I was on an archeological dig in northern Israel where we uncovered two sealed earthenware jars full of pre-Hellenistic honey (about 2200 years old). My dig leader told us the same thing, and then offered us the opportunity to taste it. Only a few people dared, me being one. It tasted like honey. We then sent the jars off to be examined. Back in the states, we were in a lab with most of the people who were on the dig, and the results of the tests came back in. My professor/dig leader read the opening few lines and then slowed. He said, somberly, "Now some of you took me up on my offer to try the honey. If you are one of those people, I offer you now the chance to leave the room." No one moved. "Ok...you asked for it. In the bottom of the jar of honey there remained the blanched bones of an infant child," he said. "What maybe I should have told you is that often pre-Hellenistic cultures would offer their stillborn children to the sun god in earthenware jars of honey. It seems over the last two thousand years all but the bones have disintegrated and been absorbed by the honey."
TLDR: I've eaten 2000 year old dead baby.
Github repo: https://github.com/yoshuawuyts/choo
Don't conferences already use a blind process to determine speakers?
Sure, and none of that means that's his desk or his computer. Unless you have specific knowledge about what he keeps on his desk, this entire thread is a lot of silly speculation based on an unwarranted assumption.
I encourage people to read the one-page summary and at least the section headings in the full article.

To answer a few question that have come up:

How did they synthesize the genome? By creating short sequences of DNA and joining them together step by step to make larger sequences. They chemically synthesized short DNA sequences and assembled them into 1.4 thousand base pair (kbp) fragments. Five fragments were assembled into 7 kbp cassettes, which were assembled in yeast to generate 1/8 chunks of the genome, and these chunks were assembled in yeast to create the full genome. (See figure 2.) To try out deletions, they could replace a 1/8 chunk, rather than synthesizing the whole genome.

Why can't they delete all the non-essential genes? Bacterial have a lot of redundant genes, where two different genes provide the same essential function. Just like redundant disks, you can remove one, but not all of them. And you'll get different of minimal genomes depending on which gene you keep.

One interesting thing is that because the growth medium provides almost all the necessary nutrients, they could remove a lot of the metabolic genes, but needed to keep a lot of genes to transport molecules across the cell membrane. You can imagine a minimal cell constructed the opposite way.

The article doesn't mention that in their first synthetic bacterium (2010), they encoded text (actually HTML!) in the DNA to provide a secret watermark. See http://www.righto.com/2010/06/using-arc-to-decode-venters-se...
A Hacker's Guide to Getting Old
One can try to divine what Chomsky really thinks, believes and means, but one thing remain that always annoyed is is repated absolute stances and the way he express is viewpoint as being the only right one. Often expressed with disdain or dismissal of the opposition. You can disagree with someone, but doing it elegantly is of higher value to me.
Having attended Benconf (which was really, really great), and only having skim read this page (I'm not called Katie, it's not in the UK), I didn't realise this was a parody...
I built a Tesla coil in middle school. I was able to get a 3' long fluorescent bulb to light up at distances of over 10' away. I also knocked out radio and TV reception for the entire block when it was on. Oops.
EDB Postgres and Oracle: A New Technical Comparison
Just to be clear, blind evaluation of talk submissions is how it should be.

BUT if at the end of that you find out that your conference has all male speakers (or all female speakers, or all speakers under 25, or whatever) what should you do about it? I would say you should try your hardest to encourage more people to apply next time. There are loads of great projects for that like Outreachy.

What you shouldn't do is decide to fill it up with some "quota people" to make it look diverse.
At this point, I'd imagine Netflix's main expenses are not engineering/bandwidth/compute -- it's content. My guess is that there's better ROI in paying Amazon a premium to not have to worry about the CDN engineering while concentrating investment on expanding their library.
No, this page isn't saying that these speakers are generalists, this page is saying that people who can't find any women at all are not trying. That's the entire point of restricting the page to a subset of women named Katie, instead of saying "Here's a list of women technical speakers, pick one and replace people from your speaker lineup at random."
Apple leaves iOS 10 kernel unencrypted in developer preview
one-off projects for 'special' customers can turn into support nightmares and drain your personnel resources. So besides taking some big $ for NRE, it would be smart to require, for example, a 5 year support contract with a hefty price tag.
Vast parts of the NSA are full of good people doing good work.

The Information Assurance Directorate is advancing the state of the art in cryptography and is leading the charge in developing quantum-resistant algorithms.

(https://www.iad.gov/iad/library/ia-guidance/ia-solutions-for...)
I think part of the problem is that for (most) tech conferences the current attendee base is skewed highly male. Current attendees become confident of the conference style and then go on to present in following years.

It's like the argument, and I'm forgetting which well known tech figurehead made this, but... "We don't need more girls in CS majors, we need more girls playing around on laptops in the summers of elementary school [to put them on a more level playing field with male counterparts 10–15 years later]."
I am thinking of George Boole (boolean algebra and logic) who wrote in the 18th centuary -- that a symbol (an individual gene in this case) in itself is not meaningful but that its meaning depends on how it combines with with other symbols.
Quote-
"..the validity of the processes of analysis does not depend upon the interpretation of the symbols which are employed, but solely on their laws of combination. Every system of interpretation which does not affect the truth of the relations supposed, is equally admissible, and it is true that the same process may,under one scheme of interpretation, represent the solution of a question on the properties of numbers, under another, that of a geometrical problem, and under a third, that of a problem of dynamics or optics." (Boole 1847)
Wireless headphones with a dead battery should[1] work when plugged into the phone. So if you don't want to worry about the battery, just keep it connected to the phone. Sort of the best of both worlds.

should: I don't know if they actually do, I've never used usb-c or lightning headphones. But they should.
Has it come to the point where your refrigerator has to wear a tinfoil hat?
> My test suite takes upwards of 10 minutes

That is absolutely mind-blowing. Can you explain a little more about what is causing that? Are there lots of HTTP calls or something? What machine is this running on?

(I'm not a Ruby dev, but I have heard Ruby is slow.)
Ask HN: Operational complexity of micro services?
If you have switched over to a micro services paradigm within your company, how and what do you use to manage the operational complexities?

For context, I am assuming you have hundreds or thousands of micro services that have to be wired up to talk to each other.
> beans, potatoes, rice, even corn - those things are much more broadly appealing, filling

Far more bland and full of carbs, too, so they may be more polarizing than you think.
Moreover, the Internet has conditioned people to think "Subscription = No ads!"

Wasn't that the promise of the early cable TV? How long did that last?
My numbers (n=1, though this is widely true among the transplants I know) worked out in spite of the cost of living. Here is my math, though obviously the number will vary based on individual.

My rent went up by around $2000. At a marginal tax rate (Medicare + Federal + State) of ~40% this meant post tax income would have to go up by $40000 to "break even". Tack on an extra $5000 per year to cover the high state tax rate (this difference varies based on origin state). In comparison, my gross income went up by over $50k within a year and $150k within 3 years.

There are other aspects that add to "why I personally live here". (1) Job security is much better, not in the sense that companies are more loyal or successful here, but in that there is so much going on that you get job security from the strength of the market, and I feel like if I ever lost my job or wanted to change I can. (2) Because of the strength of the market, employers treat employees much better here than in smaller markets. (3) Everybody else is here. The proliferation of people who I can learn from here is amazing to take in.

There are definitely things that will tip the scale in favor of going away. Kids and buying a home are a big one, since those costs are even more outsized here than rent alone. Also, the valley is disproportionately friendly to the cutting-edge, type-A career, and the numbers (in terms of the jobs you can get) are not as friendly if you want to settle down. It's for these reasons it's likely I'll leave, but in the meantime, the cost of living is offset by a long shot, to say nothing about the intangible benefits.
An Amazon employee told me that people outside govcloud (Amazon's special region for the US government) are/were technically prevented from accessing it, so the technical ability appears to be there.
The app is running Android, the device is OpenWRT as far as I understand.
If you consider the genome to be information, life is effectively the process that information supports by encoding a method to accomplish the process. Replicating and using energy in a coordinated manner are two processes of life, but their information-based encoding can differ significantly based on the method used.
The definition of life is a tricky question. The most obvious example is red blood cells dump their DNA. So they can't replicate, and virus can't target them. However, insect drones also can't reproduce and are considered alive so it's a little more open to debate than you might think.

As to life without DNA. The methodology is somewhat in question for this but here is a more in depth link: http://science.sciencemag.org/content/332/6034/1163.full Now, this is really 1:1 with DNA just using slightly different chemistry, but it's hard to call something DNA when you swap out one of the building blocks.

Other examples are hard to locate in large part because you can't direct detect this stuff.

Anyway, my point was while a virus is 'stuck' using DNA as it needs to infect things that use DNA. However, they can use RNA internally.

PS: For a really out there example, prions seem really close to life.
Is it just me who has the impression that Python "won" as a glue and application extension language?
Yeah, I was just giving an example. Not saying that this in particular will be a stumbling stone.
Of course he can do anything he pleases with nano. (So can you, and so can I.) He just doesn't get to do anything he pleases with GNU nano.
It's not just Apple doing this. Lenovo/Moto is removing the 3.5mm jack from their next Android phone too.
The .xyz TLD was a red flag, if for no other reason than Namecheap is practically giving them away.
Or you implement a HomeKit bridge in software and use that to make non-HomeKit devices available in HomeKit, e.g. using
https://github.com/nfarina/homebridge
If I were a biology/biochem/genetics/etc type of student today this is exactly what I would love to work on. Perhaps someday we will actually understand how life works. That's both exciting and incredibly scary.
CRUD apps are mostly about synchronizing a set of facts about the world with the world itself.

Re complex queries in a non-relational language: I know that's not what OO is, 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, and the tools you can build are usually poor versions of what's available in functional languages, which are themselves less specialized and less declarative than relational languages.

If you can represent your problem as a map/filter/aggregate operation, it (a) becomes more testable, (b) more parallelizable in both large and small and (c) more composable. I happen to think it ends up being easier to read, write and reason about too. So I try hard to make my problems look like this, because I know the tools in that area are very strong.

Objects being more than structs with immutable data is exactly what's wrong with them. OO encourages you to reason about behaviour in terms of invariants: what's true before vs what's true after, or what is always true for an instance. 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. I'd feel happier about OO and its implicit invariants if they were made more explicit, and more than just like Eiffel: it needs to be in the type system, if possible.
Oriel WordPress Ad-Blocking
If a widely distributed open compiler for Objective C and GnuStep (and other related efforts) had resulted in thriving Cocoa cross-platform development, I might be heartened by Swift's port and standard library.

As it is, even after NeXT had started down a cross-platform development road, Apple made several decisions that were indifferent to it (and a few that were hostile). Why will Swift be different?
I would seriously love to give this a shot and replace some of the static documents (markdown) that I have. The only thing that's stopping me from it is the fact the HTML output is not mobile-friendly.
I think I wasn't clear enough. I never meant that axiomatic proofs in general are meaningless, only that axiomatic proofs of trivial arithmetic facts (1+1=2, 2+2=4...) are meaningless.
What would a simulation of an epidemic look like? Or a simulation of ants finding food via pheromone trails. Or simulation of dye diffusing in water? Or a simulation of an object being dropped?

Etc
Interesting, thanks for the correction.

Reading that page, it appears that this due to US IP ownership agreements for employees. Is that correct?

If so, why isn't there an exception for personal-time-only contributions by single developers, or at least those outside a jurisdiction like the US where an employer may own each and all of your ideas and intellectual output? To be clear, I haven't lived or worked in the US, so this is all foreign and weird to me.
"Maybe Apple is making a mistake"? "It's going to suck having to use different headphones"? "Will they ship with headphones -- probably not ... Cough up the extra $29"?

I don't know how anyone could see those comments as favoring Apple, diminishing the problems, or somehow seeing them as acceptable.

I guess if you start out with the assumption that Gruber is an Apple partisan and nothing more, it's easy to read anything you want into his words.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7013002

[EDIT: The link above gives a few quick examples of particularly biting criticism against Apple by John Gruber. Not sure what I've said here that's so objectionable -- perhaps one of you could post a reply?]
The ESP8266, which is popular for hobbyist IOT projects doesn't have enough memory to do SSL.

That's not to say that you can't do encryption though, just that you need to rethink how to do it, where the solution is not just unencrypted JSON APIs.
"The new internals will eventually allow for user-space
tasklets or green threads that suspend to a scheduler when they would
cause blocking I/O, allowing users to write straightforward network
services that parse their input and send their output as if it were
blocking, while under the hood Guile can multiplex many active
connections at once."

Green threads in the future sounds really interesting. I've never touched scheme (only dabbled in Clojure), but I've always wanted to get a Lisp under my belt. Maybe Guile will be the one, but the biggest issue for me in choosing a Lisp is the sheer amount. It's hard to know the true tradeoffs between different implementations, so maybe I should just go with Common Lisp
Unlikely. The DACs in most of the available chipsets in phones are far superior to something you could put in a pair of headphones or as a bump in a cable - and would need batteries to run it.
AT&T Exec: Wireless network built at expense of wireline customers
Yes, you can plug a USB DAC into your phone with most modern Android devices, and I believe the same is true with iPhones. They even support the standard USB audio device class used by many common DACs. People just don't generally do this.
It is worth thinking of an analogy to TCP/IP -- what is the smallest thing that could be universal that will allow everything else to happen?
Agree! But, the nationalism display happens because of 2 reasons. 1) People making fun of how all Indian villages doesn't have electricity and it is spending money which is a waste. When someone makes this point on social media, people go on defensive on how great ISRO and India is.
2) The government and media aggressively pushes this as national achievement to ignite interests in sciences among kids and youth.

At the end of the day, ISRO will be an Indian space agency and so the nationalism display, sometimes though excessive.
Charging and listening in a car is not at all an edgecase.

Sure, a new car has a USB port that integrates with the media center, but thats only cars purchased in the last few years with the premium media options. A lot of car USB ports are power-only USB.

By far most people I know who drive use an aux cable. Since most music now is streamed, you need to be charging it at the same time or else your battery drains by the end of your trip.

Seems like you're saying "get this $25 dongle or a new $25000 car". Both are shitty and unnecessary options.
wets pants
The first time I tried playing a device into the car radio, I had a bad experience - it was noisy to the point of being unlistenable. Later I discovered it was because I was charging it at the same time, unplug the charger and all was well.
That something can be described in a procedural manner does not imply we humans work that way, nor does it preclude the fact the those same things can be described in other manners as well.

When you interact with other people, you do it the OO way, you send them a message and they either act on it or not depending on their own internal state with different people able to respond differently to the same set of messages; I can just as easily claim we humans work in OO ways.

Beyond that, it's easier to describe a sequence of steps in OO where the implementation details can be hidden and swapped out with different implementations than in procedures where the logic and implementation are all mixed together and tightly coupled.
Yes, you can plug a USB2 DAC into your phone. There's a list of working configs here:

http://www.head-fi.org/t/595071/android-phones-and-usb-dacs/...

and of course lots of discussion.
I think the person you're replying to is talking about the difference between maintaining a low-carb diet, and ketosis, which requires you to maintain a low-carb diet but specifically IIRC forces your body to break down fats instead of sugars in your body for energy.
I cover my camera. For me though, it's not because I'm paranoid. I do understand that point of view though. I understand that rogue malware or espionage software could be installed on my workstation. However, if that were to happen the contents of the disk on my laptop provide much more value than the look on my face or the conversations I am having. Sure, I utilize full disk encryption but by that point I am logged into my system and the contents are accessible.

I cover my camera because almost all business conference software in 2016 turn the camera on by default. BlueJeans, GotoMeeting, etc. Sometimes I am just attending a meeting as a listening participant or talking with a client who honestly only dialed into the meeting. At any rate, I'm not very interested in showing my face by DEFAULT.

I would suspect that may be the case for Mark as well. TheGuardian's piece is a great fluff article (my opinion only) but I have to wonder if Occam's Razor applies here. He too may not want his face transmitted to a meeting by default?
While I think your point is superficially valid, I'd ask you this – what if you had the power to change something that you admit is less than ideal (i.e.: the lack of a wide variety of speakers, or even the exclusion of a group) – if you had that power and didn't use it, wouldn't you be part of the problem?

All of this is a vicious circle – women don't apply to be speakers at many tech conferences in equal numbers as men, possibly in large part because they don't attend in equal numbers as men and that happens in large part because it's clear they're not amongst peers – i.e.: there aren't women who are speaking in equal numbers as men and they're not seeing women in attendance in equal numbers as men, so they're less inclined to feel like it's a place for them.

Where does that system of subtle/unintentional exclusion end? Why shouldn't it be the role of the conference to encourage a breaking of that cycle?

PyCon US is a good example of a conference that did just that...
Limiting this conference to the name Kate is extremely Eurocentric. and I don't see a single black attendee.
The Birthday Paradox and how it is applied to hacking passwords
You didn't need to do a WHOIS to figure that out. The information you 'found' is right there on the page. Just scroll...
Weasel,
Would you send me your contact info? (mine is in my profile) I have just started with bees a little over a year ago, and plan to ramp up. I have learned so much in the last year and am excited about all the paths that I can see.
Twilio: A Retrospective