skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> So what is important is not so much which of these genes you have, but how many of them you have.

That hints that you could just duplicate the same cell wall protein gene instead, right?
California's last nuclear power plant shutting down
>What I meant was that the only way your investment in bitcoin will return a profit, is if there are more people after you willing to invest in the scheme. This is identical to a ponzi scheme.

That is not what makes a ponzi scheme a ponzi scheme, that is one element of a ponzi scheme but it's no different than any investment in a company that takes off. This is insufficient to call something a ponzi scheme. There MUST BE FRAUD, or it's not a ponzi scheme.

> Bitcoin has practically none, as discussed in my other points of the challenges of bitcoin as money.

Absolutely wrong, bitcoin has utility, trust-less exchanges of value, that's a valuable service to provide and the reason bitcoin maintains value.
I'm not who you are replying to but...

If it meets my other requirements (that article seems to be short on details), then yes, I absolutely will buy it.

Unfortunately, buying phones isn't like buying a laptop. I can't choose to the bigger battery option, while leaving all the other specs the same.
Yes, I think it is.

Lua "won" in games, Tcl won in electrical engineering software, Lisp won in various niche places, JavaScript won basically everywhere else.

Python does not seem a very popular glue language outside of Sublime Text.
I think it might take a while.

http://coolconversion.com/math/factorial/What-is-the-number-...
So what if life hasn't evolved yet to feed off of our power lines, but the potential for it to happen is there?
with a handful of exceptions (for example TER units, and DnaA, which seems to need to be close to the replication origin), for most microbes, placement and arrangement don't matter.

I believe they wanted to modularize the bacteria by placing cassettes of common functionality (e.g. all the tRNAs together) in parts of the genome. I don't know if they are still are working on that, or how it went.

In yeasts, the tRNAs have to be in the same orientation as the replication bubble, but there didn't seem to be that restriction in mycoplasmas.
I appreciate the research, but I'm not sure what could possible be done to change the situation materially. "Making more accurate contamination maps" strikes me as only useful in a really best case scenario.
There was an exceptional talk at Thotcon this year on the ESP8266. Amazing work, and clearly a great deal of it, at one point the speaker casually noted that a table of information was not publicly available leaving unsaid what had obviously been months of tedious reversing. Its a shame there are no videos of the talk.
Implying there are no female subject matter experts.

The problem isn't that people choose expertise and skill over gender. The problem is that men greatly outnumber women for no discernible good reason, despite the availability of qualified women speakers.

It's not faux diversity. The fact that you just assume any change from the all-male status quo must be a step down is amazingly sexist and insulting.
What sort of black people do you expect to find in Australia in significant numbers?
Yell – Package to make your classes strict
> Python isn't commonly used in situations where you'd consider embedding Guile.

Which situations would that be?
Yes. I have big a downswing right now, if anyone wants to talk with me let me know.
Scientists just got the best measure yet of one of the fundamentals of physics
nit: would be helpful if the abstract or introduction gave numbers on how frequently ball lightning occurs, instead of just saying "rare". Is it 1 in 1,000 rare or 1 in a billion rare?

From some Googling, there are 8M lightning strikes per day on earth, so say about 3.5B strikes per year. Let's say 3% of those strikes are in populated areas. So ~250,000 lightning strikes per day in populated areas. In the past 5 years, that is ~500M lightning strikes in populated areas. Let's say that there's at least one person or video camera filming the sky during 20% of those strikes.

Given we only have 1 video of marginal quality of ball lightning, that makes 1 in a 100M strikes a reasonable guess. But that also makes me think it really could just be 0 and eye witness accounts are just some visual misperception.
Bottled water also does, but in that case it states until when the producer is confident that chemicals from the bottle won't leach into the water.
Every time I see a revelation of what a spy agency does, I am surprised that anyone else is surprised.

Haven't we known, or assumed, this is the case all along?
I think for so many important cases, this is almost the only way to do it. The problems were caused by short-sighted vendors and programmers getting locked into particular computers and OS software.

For contrast, one could look at a much more compact way to do this that -- with more foresight -- was used at Parc, not just for the future, but to deal gracefully with the many kinds of computers we designed and built there.

Elsewhere in this AMA I mentioned an example of this: a resurrected Smalltalk image from 1978 (off a disk pack that Xerox had thrown away) that was quite easy to bring back to life because it was already virtualized "for eternity").

This is another example of "trying to think about scaling" -- in this case temporally -- when building systems ....

The idea was that you could make a universal computer in software that would be smaller than almost any media made in it, so ...
Absolutely. I would change a few things (my pricing model should have been subscription-based from day one) but on the whole the business has wound up almost exactly where I intended it to be.
If you actually want to develop applications you should probably stick to Common Lisp. SBCL and ClozureCL are extremely high-quality implementations and Common Lisp generally has the most libraries.

It's probably the worst Lisp from a design standpoint, but the best from a practical one. Racket seems interesting in that regard however.

If you want to embed a Lisp in a larger application, Guile is definitely good with an easy API and high-quality implementation.
I wonder if there is something in the human mind that attempts to reject Occam's razor. It seems as though a lot of conspiracy theories are significantly more popular than they should be.
presumably. Or just put in fewer of them, behind stronger promoters.
Worst offence I've ever seen: http://img1.liveinternet.ru/images/attach/c/2//64/152/641522...

(Squirrel and protein are homographs in russian, although in different forms).
How Google Is Remaking Itself for “Machine Learning First”
Cosmetic Neurology?
Experiment is first to see kicking photons heat up nanoparticles
Because there's different motivations for being vegetarian. Some do it, because they simply find meat disgusting, in which case, yes, they probably don't want their food to look, taste or feel like meat.

But others do it for moral reasons, and to them, meat might be the tastiest food in the world, they just choose to abstain from it, because well, you know, animals have to die for it. So, if they can eat something which tastes like meat, but doesn't require animals to die for it, that's the best of both worlds to them.
I don't know what Hulu's numbers look like, but what % of US consumers who will spend $7.99 a month on something won't pay $11.99 instead to avoid commercials? If the gap was between free and $11.99 then I would very strongly agree with the price sensitivity.

Amazon and HBO are already basically forcing ads in front of the shows now though it remains self-promotional. There is a substantial amount of value that could be unlocked if TV ad budgets moved to Amazon and Netflix. Irregardless of current claims I wouldn't be surprised to see some form of sponsorship appear on Netflix if subscriber growth starts reaching its limits. Quite honestly strongly merchandised brands like Disney should be paying for video distribution rather than licensing it out.
Yes, exactly. The reason I said that is because Gödel himself used FTA to build his observation (Göodel numbering).
You have to put your money where your mouth is. If you "call foul" on Apple, but continue sending them your money for their new iPhone sans headphone jack, then you're a hypocrite and Apple has no incentive to listen to your complaints.

IE (6 mainly, that was what everyone was complaining about the most) finally failed not because of people "calling foul" on it, it failed because people abandoned the thing and used alternatives like Firefox and Chrome. When the marketshare for IE finally dried up enough, web designers stopped targeting it, making it even more useless for web browsing, and MS was forced to attempt to make changes. They still haven't caught up.

"Calling foul" on an industry leader is useless, unless you're trying to convince people to abandon that leader and switch to an alternative. You're not going to get the leader to change because it's the "right" thing to do, they'll only change because their profits are in jeopardy. Ditching the headphone jack is the right thing for Apple to do because it'll make them more money: people will buy expensive dongle adapters, or overpriced new Beats headphones. If consumers don't like this, it's their job to not buy the new iPhone, just like Windows users finally wised up and stopped using IE6.
How Quantum Mechanics Could Be Even Weirder
But none of this is true. #600000 on your monitor might be lighter than #FF0000 on your monitor if they're compared at different times, or if part of your monitor happens to be in the shade. Or if I have a weird viewing angle to your monitor.

If you want to argue about what #600000 and #FF0000 should look like, you're back to a rigorous theory of color.
This is great. This is the proper engineering approach to understanding life. Whittle it down to the minimal reproducing test-case, and poke it with a stick until you understand what all the parts do.

This is just excellent science. It seems like it should be very easy to get these unknown genes to reveal their function now. Very exciting times.
That's if you use what Asimov calls "tug of war" as your definition: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tug_of_war_(astronomy) .

I believe astronomers use the Hill sphere to define that bit of technicality. Quoting https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hill_sphere :

> In the Earth example, the Earth (5.97E24 kg) orbits the Sun (1.99E30 kg) at a distance of 149.6 million km. The Hill sphere for Earth thus extends out to about 1.5 million km (0.01 AU). The Moon's orbit, at a distance of 0.384 million km from Earth, is comfortably within the gravitational sphere of influence ... All stable satellites of the Earth (those within the Earth's Hill sphere) must have an orbital period shorter than seven months.

This asteroid is outside of Earth's Hill sphere so is in orbit around the Sun.
I recently saw the air analyzers in some stations across NYC. Thanks for doing this!
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Interesting work, but it reminds me of the famous "Could a biologist fix a radio?" paper [1]. The paper imagines biologists trying to determine what parts of a radio are essential using a similar trial and error technique. As you can imagine, this technique would lead to many erroneous conclusions, especially when paired with the "publish or perish" and "gold rush" mentalities so prevalent in academia. It makes you wonder if we are trying to understand biological systems with a fundamentally wrong approach.

[1] https://www.cmu.edu/biolphys/deserno/pdf/can_a_biologist_fix...
Depends on the email service. Colleagues of mine who work at military research lab have their emails filtered to junk in my email but then I routinely receive email notices in my inbox from university emails warning me my "Account is expired/full/overdue" and I must take immediate action by clicking on a link.

Hint: I think gmail filters are good. The rest? Not so much.
GNU copyright assignment is to make enforcement actions possible[1]. In the US, copyright law doesn't really give a community much power to enforce their copyright claims. The GPL is not weak because of this, it's just how the FSF operates. The SFConservancy doesn't have this requirement for projects they support, but it's clear that the FSF lawyers believe that having copyright assignment makes enforcement much more powerful.

As for "taking away people's freedom", the copyright assignment explicitly states that your contributions will always be under a copyleft license. So you're not losing any protection of the GPL if you contribute to GNU. That's just an insane proposition.

[1] https://www.gnu.org/licenses/why-assign.en.html
Not OP, but what about Aboriginal Australians?
I honestly don't get that comment. It quickly mentions that the BEAM hasn't got a bright future, and then goes on the qualities of Scala, and how Ruby was horrible.

How does that contribute IN ANY WAY to a thread about a new version of Elixir being released? I'm not saying that what they say it's wrong, just tremendously out of context and unnecessary.
Expedia uses scala now? That's crazy. I worked there about 5 years ago and I'd never have thought of Expedia as the kind of company to play around with Scala. We were in the middle of a Java migration at the time.
How Google Is Remaking Itself as a “Machine Learning First” Company
Can't we just have fun some of the time?
I am not complaining about the quality of the list, but I fear the authors have conflated several senses of the word "rule" in this list.

I have an intuition that "signal comes with noise", isn't the same kind of rule as "keep is simple."

It might be useful to break it out into a checklist of things to look at, philosophical principles to keep in mind, and useful tips or something.
This was my recollection as well. People who were making the "starving children in Africa" argument were being downvotes and rebutted.

I remember a large number of users who were enthusiastically supportive.

Mostly what I remember is how quickly the conversation dove into people wondering why the American program was expensive, then discussions on Musk.

The mission was just straight up cool and everyone was kicked to see it succeed.

(I think many people here are still kicked that we as a species could get a satellite that far, and at that cost)
I believe this comment is not directed to people who are trying to create something, but to people who feel entitled/special because they are trying to create something they perceive as improvement for humanity.
I've gotten the impression over the years that this compiler rewrite and simplification was a necessary step to ensure the long term success and viability of Scala. I think it's great that they've made so much progress with so little disruption to the Scala roadmap.
We must be talking about two different audiences then, because web development in my experience has little to do with distributed messaging.

Most web developers work in JS for the front-end -- they use Chrome to debug client behavior. Most also write the layer in the back-end that communicate with databases and other data sources and handle business logic. They use debuggers for their language to follow program flow and inspect values.

Once their layer needs to communicate with other systems or do anything with distributed messaging, their responsibility ends and the need to debug the issues of the other systems becomes someone else's problem.
> 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."

What? USB-C is reversible: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/USB_Type-C
Quantum physics presents particular limits on human knowledge
No other prime is divisible by 3 than 3 itself and so on. And you can't ever get a number divisible by 3 by multiplying numbers that are not divisible by 3. (3n-1) * m mod 3 and (3n-2) * m mod 3 cycle predictably and never become zero unless m mod 3 = 0. The same principle should hold for every number.
FSF copyright assignment is done such that they state they will always distribute your code under a copyleft license. So it's not an issue like with Canonical (which asks for the right to make copyleft code proprietary). Copyright assignment is important if you register your copyright to make strong enforcement possible. US copyright law doesn't deal with communities of contributors very well, in terms of those copyright holders exercising their rights.
Amazon RDS for PostgreSQL now supports cross-region read replicas
The research community was "an arguing community", and knew how to argue "in good ways" (i.e. no personal attacks, only trying to illuminate the issues, etc.) This worked pretty well almost always ... (The weekly meetings were not for being creative, but for discussion ...)

Let me respectfully disagree with your contention. The point that is missed is not what the hardware could do, but what can you do without optimizing. It is very very hard to put on the optimization hat without removing the design hat, and once you've removed the latter you are lost.

The key to the Parc approach was to be able to do many experiments in the future without having to optimize. (There was a second part to this "key" but I'll omit it here)
The Economist explains: What makes the AR-15 an assault weapon
Show HN: Zero Copy Network lib for golang
Shouldn't they have replaced them with a gene of the same length, filled with only stop codons?

Otherwise, it would be like cutting out instructions from an assembly language file, without knowing whether one of the instructions does something like adding a constant integer value to the program counter. You might think the code that was removed was critical to the operation of the program, but you could have instead replaced all the instructions with an equivalent number of no-ops, and it would still work as expected.
Thank you. This is helpful.
Show HN: Angular 2 Components for Hybrid Apps with Material and iOS Design
Funny, since my favorite solution to the N-Queens is from Knuth. http://www-cs-faculty.stanford.edu/~uno/papers/dancing-color...

He has an update of this in his book on Fun and Games.
Software contracts with conditions are license agreements. You get to use Windows, Ubuntu Linux, Photoshop, Facebook, etc. as long as you adhere to the terms of the license.

You don't get the copyright. That's still held by the software company. That's how they can force you to adhere to their conditions--they own the software and they can take away your license.

But if they gave you the copyright, they couldn't take it away anymore, so you would have no reason to follow their conditions any more.
Wow, that really says it all, doesn't it?

Set up "BenConf" with an all-male lineup clearly not chosen purely based on their qualifications, and dozens of people will pay money to attend.

Set up "KatieConf" and you get people coming out of the woodwork complaining about faux diversity, saying that gender doesn't matter and you should only choose speakers based on qualifications, saying that conferences shouldn't have to care about combating sexism, complaining that it's patronizing, etc.
I decided to build a robust zero copy network lib for linux. It includes packet injection as well as capture. I'm leaving it here for anyone that's interested in hacking around with it.
If the code is under a copyleft license, then distributing a modified copy is only possible by complying with the license. So at the very least, you can get the code under that license. Non-copyleft licenses might fall into a worse trap here, but that's why we have the DCO. An affidavit is more than enough.
Can confirm that similar tests were run in the DC Metro as early as 2003.
Either you learn Erlang, or you learn Erlang and Elixir.

This seems to be the case for languages running on a VM originally developed for another language:

Writing in Scala, Kotlin, or Clojure? You'll still need to know Java.
Coffeescript or Dart? You'll still need to know Javascript.*

Usually this comes up during debugging or interfacing with existing libraries.

For some of these, they're really just a pretty syntax on top of the same semantics as the 'host' language. Others can offer both a new syntax and some improved semantics (to the extent of the capabilities of the underlying VM).

Whether the overhead of keeping the mental models for two languages in your head is worth the gain I think depends on what you're familiar with and which of these language pairs you're looking at.

For this pair in particular, I don't think you're getting around learning Erlang. The syntax of Erlang is 'weird', but that ends up not being the hard part of writing Erlang. The hard/wonderful part is the semantics, and Elixir doesn't fundamentally change those.

Personally I don't think the benefits of most of these is worth the hassle of keeping two languages in your head, but I do like the idea that people are writing new languages and syntaxes trying to figure out how to make our lives easier...

*(this also seems true to a lesser extent with Swift and Objective-C, but I think that has more to do with Cocoa and the library interface than the underlying runtime/debugging issues)
I don't believe you need a custom chip, but HomeKit does require some advanced crypto that many low-end embedded devices probably can't support. See the dependency list for this open source Go implementation of the HomeKit Accessory Protocol: https://github.com/brutella/hc#dependencies

Edit: Missed this line in the original article:

The issue, according to Lombard, is that Apple HomeKit certification requires a co-processor to handle device authentication. That co-processor is where the device’s encryption key is stored and handles the computing associated with encryption.

Looks like (for security purposes) Apple wants a dedicated crypto co-processor. Probably a tamper-proof chip that stores a private key, similar in concept to Apple's Secure Enclave.
> If the FSF believes this to be a real threat, any group of users anywhere relying on the GPL should take the same view.

The issue with GNU license assignment (at least in the years I worked on) was the "defense of infringement".

The only legal recourse for a GPL violation is a copyright lawsuit and that can only be made by the copyright holder in question.

If FSF wants to defend a GNU project in a court of law against infringement, they need to represent the copyright holders.

As a GNU project, you opt into their legal infra as well as the technical ones.
C'mon now. It is Wednesday my dudes. Please don't mess up my favorite little text editor.
Therefore, the best offense is reducing the chances that such bad guys crop up in the first place by diplomacy, peace, foreign aid, and just friendly relations with our neighbors.

This might not seem like the place and time to preach peace, but now is as good a time as any.
You're still selling a commodity. Agricultural commodities aren't very elastic -- and local honey purveyors are already pretty high up on the cost curve.

Jack up the price 50% and people will find other vendors selling at market prices unless you're selling in a venue that increases perceived value.

Example: Two liters of coke costs $1.29 in my local market. A cold, 20oz coke in the soda machine outside my office is $2.50.
Question. Are there any laws/regulations that we know of which prevent the NSA from altering domestic discourse for security reasons? What is the oversight of this?

Can the NSA, say, alter/create Facebook posts in order to disseminate domestic propaganda in the name of national security? We know the Chinese do this. Does the US?
> But you should say that you are relying on this.

I do say that. It's right there at the bottom of my comment.
Damn that Fermat margin.
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I am shocked, shocked... :)
It appears US and allied governments have achieved much of what they wanted to anyway by immobilising Assagne in a small building with limited connectivity. This is possibly more valuable than highly publicised trial etc if he were in fact actually extradited.