skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
This is a highly computer driven field, with tons of computer scientists working in genomics. This aspect is not something where they're any more likely to have interesting results than any of the academic labs around the country that are driving machine learning methods and working closely with those that are developing machine learning methods.

Far more interesting is the data the Color will collect if they grow a customer base, which is not something that many researchers have access to. However, if they're only collecting features and not the labels (cancer incidence) then it's pretty boring data.
Users have the right to demand anything they want within the free speech laws of their country.

They also have the power to impose regulation on any kind of activity not already protected by precedent or constitution, if they can use the democratic process of the courts and lawmakers to impose it.
Palintir sued over Asian recruitment discrimination
>Swift uses reference counting under the hood because of its Objective-C runtime ties, not because reference counting is better than tracing garbage collection

Not really. Obj-C already had a GC and dropped it, to implement ARC because it's faster and more memory efficient.
£52k, some stock, healthcare. Senior dev in a video game company. ~8 year experience
Your parent's point is that this hypothesis ("bimodality reduces as students progress through the curriculum" is possibly contradicted by the fact that many late-stage mathematics courses are strongly bimodal.

(FWIW my analysis course was also bimodal.)
dont forget, when you can easily apply for 1000s of other jobs, they can also easily find 1000s of ppl out there to replace you. and as far as OmniCorp goes, you know how much IBM is paying now for one of their mainframe programmer? those guys... you lose one, you wont get another.
> Just as a worthless set of anecdotes

So what are you arguing against? That these fanboys don't exist? I think we are talking about the same thing...

I was saying there are irrational fanboys that will not buy anything else, and then you chime in "Oh, that's a worthless observation! There are lots of irrational fanboys"?
I for one do.
I wonder if this same technique could be used to protect users using Tor.
Former Realm employee here.

So glad to see the team finally launch this. I've seen them work their asses for years (literally!) to launch something I know Realm’s 100k+ dev community was clamoring for from day one but was really hard to build.

I'm biased of course but honestly I think they have soft-key shipped one of the most transformational mobile technologies ever: real-time, conflict-free sync that works as well offline as online. There was a lot of literature on this of course but bringing it all together in one product was something else!

From engineering to marketing, product & founders I know they've sweated to get here and I'm just so, so happy for them.

I know they will make a lot of developers and customers happy, and for that I say: bravo.
I have free choice on which messenger to use, but no choice at all on which messenger to reach my friends. And sadly I know I'd loose all the less close long distance friends if I refused to talk about private things on facebook all-together.

It was hard enough to make some people switch to telegram, but at least some of my frequent contacts arrived there. On signal I've been lonely ever since, no Idea how to make people switch again. For PGP I lost my passphrase because no one ever supported it and OTR doesn't work with my phone and nobody uses it...
I was assuming in our little hypothetical utopia that most consumer goods are designed once again to be repaired and upgraded.

I was also imagining a bunch of truck drivers looking for jobs, since the robots took them all.

Further along in my thought experiment, I imagined that if I owned a sizable fleet of robot cars I'd rather repair and upgraded than replace them.

So I figured if you're into trucks, have basic the mechanical skills required to drive a truck (tire chains, flat tires, oil change, spark plug change) that a new job maintenaning, repairing and upgrading the new fleets of robot taxis and trucks might be right up your alley.

For some reason self repairing robots seem a bit further off.
Disrupting the market hasn't worked at all, time to spend the money.
Yes. This is going to be another clean tech debacle, a whole lot of companies raising money on a wave of buzzword (in this example, genomics, big data AND machine learning, what could possibly go wrong) hype, offering at best incremental improvements or at worst, inferior products (eg Theranos).
Sun Tzu on the Art of War (500 BC)
I can understand them wanting to curate at the start, first impressions are critical and shovelware (quickly ported existing Android games and apps) could poison the well.

I'm personally highly interested in developing for Daydream and VR in general, I believe Google's trying to make VR affordable for the masses. Waiting a few months isn't a big deal, if it will help establish a quality bar for what is a good mobile VR app.
Are You Burnt Out or Do You Really Just Hate Your Job?
> I find it plausible that grade distributions turn into similar income distributions later in life.

Given that the people earning the most money aren't necessarily the ones with the most technical ability, why would this be the case?
I don't really understand the methodology on this test. How are you getting a fair control/variant split in Google SERPs?
Data protection legislation long predates OTT services. The original UK act dates from 1984, the EU act from 1995. True, there have been revisions since, but this didn't come into law to prevent Netflix from starting.
I found Realm to be very easy to use with React Native. I had trouble using the other tools to save data inside my React Native apps. Anyone else been in the same situation?
> Germans in general, and especially the more educated, tend to be very protective of their data protection rights.

Indeed being German I can say this is true for Germany because of the experiences with two dictatorships on German ground in the 20th century - the last one ending only about 26 years ago. Many people living in the GDR that were under supervision by the Stasi (often without knowing) have read the Stasi file (if it exists) and know what details have been recorded about their lifes and what kind of kompromat could in principle be derived from it.
Who else remembers the first time they visited google.com?

I was on a 56k dial up connection, but the page loaded so quickly.

This was during a period I was used to pages taking 20+ seconds to load, and the google homepage loaded almost instantly.

In fact, just for fun, I went to google.com on my new laptop with ssd and 16 gig of ram using the latest version of chrome, and maybe it is through rose tinted glasses, but it seems like the first time I visited google using my dial up connection it loaded a lot "snappier" than it does today.
Google has plenty of dead projects too.
"We theorized that the perception of bimodal grades in CS is a social defense. It is easier for the CS education community to believe that some students “have it” and others do not than it is for the community to come to terms with the shortfalls of our pedagogical approaches and assessment tools."

I didn't read the whole article, but I'm not sure I agree with the conclusion. Even with a standard gaussian distribution, one may still believe that some students have it and some don't. Let say there is consistently 25% of students that are unable to pass their exams (for various reasons: lack of interest, motivation, intelligence, discipline...), why would a "social defense" be needed?

While I agree that we always should try to improve our pedagogical tools, I don't believe that anyone can learn anything provided they have a good teacher.
There aren't alternatives to a telephone system: there is essentially 'one' telephone. What's App is hardly a monopoly. Users could use SMS, Skype or any number of alternatives that provide almost identical utility. It isn't like comparing a telephone with hand written notes.

Interestingly, what led to What's App? Telephone company monopolies on SMS. The internet itself could be considered a public utility -- not what flows over its wires.

One solution to this, assuming we want to take the public utility route, is to start charging users like it were a utility. Perhaps €10 per month for German users to offset the lost revenue from the data FB won't be allowed to collect. Then the Germans can tax that €10 just like it taxes phones and everyone will be happy. What's App isn't 'free.' Using that service has a cost. Should Facebook just give away their product? Why would a business do that? Facebook employees don't work for free, so why should Germans get to free ride? A really popular service ought not be regulated by the virtue that it's really popular.

There is a mostly free market. What's App isn't essential or even necessary. It's about as 'vital' as Instagram. It isn't like it's the only game in town.. not even close.
To anyone reading this who's currently a CS major - if you have the opportunity to do a course in digital logic design I'd highly recommend it. Regardless of what layer of the stack you end up working in, it's a lot of fun and very satisfying to understand how this stuff works.

Seconded.

There wasn't really a Computer Engineering degree back when I was in school, but I made do. As it turned out, some EE classes would qualify for the lab science credit, so I took those instead of more physics or chemistry.

I had been fascinated in electronics for a long time before starting college, so I had a blast in those classes.

And it has all helped me a lot since then. I'm working on radar systems these days, and it would have been useful to take a little more analog and RF design courses. But those weren't my interest way back then. I've picked up a lot on my own since then though.
This will be hard to believe but it's true: for years and years, the Paris subway authority considered that people would not accept to "be transported laterally", which means seats HAD to be either facing the front or the back of the train, NOT the side.

It still goes on today; some of the newer trains now have a few seats facing the side, but that's as far as they'll go.

This thinking, based on absolutely zero evidence but deeply ingrained, wastes an incredible amount of space aboard subway trains.
Yeah, I use PGP routinely, but really mostly as a way to get servers to encrypt SQL backups and things. So my own system admin purposes without a lot of PGP-encrypted communication with anyone.
A huge thing in health care is currently the fact that many diagnostic tests turn up either (i) more false positives than true positives and (ii) diagnose things that turn out not to be true threats.

For (ii), see the debates about PSA tests. You may diagnose potential for cancer, but if the treatment causes more health problems than the disease; you've just created useless worry and costs with your test. The optimists see two things (1) better tests that could tell whether the prostate cancer is problematic and (2) as lifespans increase, the likelihood of you living long enough for the cancer to be a problem increases, so if we are trying to live forever, then the PSA test results will matter eventually.

Back to (i), the false positives. As a disease becomes more rare, the more your false positive rate matters. If a disease affects 1 in 10k people, your 0.1% FPR will diagnose 10 times as many people wrongly as it does correctly. This is pretty damn common with genetic tests.

I think you can get somewhere data mining whole genome sequences, particularly if you sequence from healthy and diseased tissues in individuals and do exome sequencing as well, but that doesn't appear to be what Color Genomics actually does.
"The bureaucracy is expanding to meet the needs of the expanding bureaucracy..."

End-to-end encryption, by definition, is something that excludes any third-party from being able to intervene. If you take the Hobbesian view of the State and subscribe to the idea that Government has a legitimate monopoly on violence, how would a government be able to exercise this monopoly without relying on cooperation from any of the end parties? It is not in the interest of Governmental agents to give this much power to its citizens.

End-to-end encryption is something that NO government will ever adopt or actually push to its citizens, ever, unless they are one of the "ends" on this.

I don't buy it, and I hate that I am starting to sound like a conspiracy theorist, but if the concern about privacy was serious, why haven't we seen any legislation about encryption on email? Which country is actually educating people about PGP? Why is the privacy concern only for phone and messaging, where the telcos have been making their money all these years?

You can have a "Privacy Regulator" all you want, in the end it is just a role that is being used to give some sense of legitimacy in this play directed by the corporations.
Could you elaborate? I am using Telegram not because of privacy concerns but because of the desktop and tablet clients. I had absolutely no issues so far.
I want to know if this is classed as fraud or not. According to the original story I read, the printer allegedly reported that the cartridge was either broken or missing, and the system was programmed to lie in this way on purpose.

Lying to a person in order to gain pecuniary advantage is fraud. Is this analysis correct?
Write an AI to play Pong w/ Reinforcement Learning
tried, I seem unable to find any email.
Larry Ellison doesn't seem to agree with your "nothing to do with [...] JVM" assertion, to the tune of a 9.3 billion USD lawsuit, and indeed Google itself is developing Fuchsia with no java stack at all in it.

Moreover, it's not Linux if you have to use a Java API to do anything useful.
You can opt-out by uninstalling Whatsapp. I mean, if you don't trust them with their analytics, why do you trust them with the rest of their features? Doesn't make much sense to me.
not a very useful or informative article. correlation is not causation and many things could make you move up the SERPS in addition to a title change.
I'm not a hawk or a dove, the world isn't black and white and situations should be examined on their own merits. People fleeing unlivable conditions, who are essentially helpless, and who are fleeing conditions with deep roots in the places they're fleeing to, are a very different set of circumstances. Not to mention that there is simply no need for the extremes of violence, that would just be a ridiculous choice to satisfy xenophobia.

In this case, the helpless and nearly extinct intelligent animals aren't humans, but elephants. For decades, peaceful attempts have been made to preserve them in some way, and all of those attempts are failing. The alternatives are very clearly to take drastic action, or accept the extinction of an intelligent species.

As for whether I'd be willing to kill a human to save an elephant, yes, I would frankly welcome the chance. I despise people who destroy life in the name of ideology, profit, and a general lack of giving a shit. The only difference for me personally is that I'd be much more willing to kill the people truly responsible, rather than the poachers themselves who are often tools of those people.
To be fair, this is slightly less lame than Glass, where even the published developers were prohibited from making money by either charging for the app or advertising.
It's a problem. Not only tech illiterate people get tricked. People who know better get tricked.

Now, it's worthwhile asking whether one favors one over the other, but to say one choice is pro freedom and the other anti freedom is hyperbole and does not advance the issue either way.
They will tell you, “you know the cost of litigation is this number”. Which I unfortunately know the cost of litigation is like that. “All we are asking for is a percentage of that cost and then the risk of punitive damages will go away”

It still amazes me that extortion via lawsuit is legal.
The entire panorama of Silicon Valley is littered with the corpses of things tried and abandoned. I think that's the nature of software.
I've seen a few different curving processes:
1. Formula, like square root of grade times 10, that's designed to bring up grades. There're a lot of possibilities here
2. Top x% get A's, next y% get B's, etc
3. Look for clusters: top cluster gets A's, next B's, etc

These can also be applied to classes as a whole or individual assignments and tests
depends on the location of your property, a nice condo in NYC is better than most of the retirement funds.
The compromise I use is to break the cycle: Use a password manager to generate strong passwords (and different ones, because breaches happen), and use a hardware token-based password for the manager itself. At least that's the compromise I'm comfortable with.
Completely wrong.

GC was dropped from Objective-C, because Apple did not manage to make it work safely with C semantics.

Objective-C developers weren't able to mix Frameworks compiled with and without GC, there were lots of corner cases and forum discussions regarding GC runtime crashes were quite common.

Apple's decision in such scenario was to take the alternative route to make the compiler do what the Cocoa manual reference counting patterns already required.

Nothing to do with being faster and more memory efficient, rather having something in Objective-C that would work at all.

However this urban myth keeps being repeated.
Might as well say goodbye to all NSFW content then.
The solution strikes me as targeted killings of people like the president's mother then.
Aha! Well done - I hope you are getting some high in the sky hourly rates now for your highly specific skills.
You can go get an off-contract sim card, use it on a clean Android, create a fake gmail account in order to download and install Whatsapp. Now you make connections (you add family and friends to your contacts) and start communicating. By now both FB and Google know who you are simply b/c other people in your network, not concerned with privacy, have you saved on their contacts list, pressumably under your first and last name. Using analytics data that you inadvertedly share through your usage habits, both companies build a detailed online persona that will never be forgotten. B/c we are creatures of habit and social bonds, it is quite easy to determine who you are and what you do, by indirect information like your locations (gps), connections (contacts), online presence (IPs), browsing habits, etc.

THERE IS NO ESCAPE. Unless you do what they themselves say you should do if you do not agree with the terms: don't use their services.
Performance wasn't the main problem, rather crashes and memory corruption.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12589998
All of the phone features were available from web apps. Including the dialer, camera, accelerometers etc. It's a big improvement because if you only know HTML and JS, you can access all the features of the platform. You don't have to write a version of your app for each platform and maybe submit your app to a store. Just push your new page to the web and presto, you're on every platform.
Here are some ways words can be incorrect: http://lesswrong.com/lw/od/37_ways_that_words_can_be_wrong/

In the end it's not a very fulfilling battle even if won, to preserve the meaning of a word. I always liked the line "In the face of ambiguity, refuse the temptation to guess" as a guide to be more explicit and ask for clarification in general communication.
Thanks for bringing up the quote. It is worth remembering when it comes to Facebook.

That said:

> The only question is how many times can this be done.

Seems like German courts says it stops here.
Top Greatest Singers of All Time
> Should the user be required to correctly answer some quiz questions about the TOS every time they use the product? I don't think any users would agree to that, for any product.

Well, that's technically a problem of service provider. If you're afraid your product won't be used because of a complicated TOS, then... simplify the TOS. Drop the tons of legal bullshit, and stop hiding shady stuff in it.

The more I think about it the more I like the incentive structure it creates.
It's possible that the same organizations which were found directly discriminating on race, and desperately resist any transparency (both before and after), have secretly reformed.

It's also possible that admissions numbers didn't change a lot because "holistic" admissions discovered previously unmeasurable mitigating factors for blacks having low SAT/grades/etc.

And in yet another major coincidence, these systems also discovered that Asians are inferior in similarly unquantifiable ways, resulting in Asians who are admitted having SAT scores 450 pts higher than blacks and 140 pts higher than whites.

I don't find this particularly likely, however. Do you?
Man, I was born 20 years early!

And in the wrong country!

This is much better to watch then Dota or LoL tournaments.
And the folks funding it are tools of the folks merchandising the products (ivory etc). And they are the tools of the folks buying the products. Who are the tools of the fashion industry. Ad infinitum.

In the end, we are all responsible for our own part in the play. Go ahead and shoot poachers - they know what they're doing. Got to break the chain somewhere.
They took 20,000 pages, split them into test and control groups, and changed the title of questions in the test group from "$QUESTION - Coderwall" to "$QUESTION (Example) - Coderwall". They then measured how many more clicks the test group got compared to the control group.
Forget vanity metrics: 7 truly important KPIs for your Drip Campaigns
Post office really isn't voluntary. When I get my required tax forms from France, if I don't have the post office, I'm unable to complete an action required by the State. That means the Post Office isn't voluntary unless you want to break the law.

When my kid's school requires What's App in order to submit required documents, then there might be a claim that What's App rises to the importance of the Post Office or the telephone.
Government control like DMCA is very much put in place by big corporations trough the corruption of congress. I'm not saying the control is total but we're certainly getting there. Even if there are alternatives today they are getting slowly stripped away through more regulation and reallocation of funding. It's not a far stretch to entertain the view that we're under Orwellian control.
The difference is that the arguments to socket() were arbitrarily defined, but DFS is an algorithm. Anyone who has taken a intro data structures course should be able to at least derive the pseudo code for DFS.
Read section 4 of the paper.

They fix some data that as a matter of mathematical fact is/is not bimodal, and then ask people who do/don't believe in the "geek gene" hypotehsis to interpret the data.

Conclusion of the section: "We found a statistically significant relationship between seeing-bimodality and participants’ responses to the questions relating to the Geek Gene hypothesis"

So the "social defense mechanism" theory is definitely debatable, but apparently people who believe in the "Geek Gene hypothesis" are more likely to see bimodality where there is none.

> I don't believe that anyone can learn anything provided they have a good teacher.

The point isn't that everyone can learn anything. The point is just that the distribution isn't as bimodal as people seem to think it is. Also worth noting that the researchers posit normal distrbutions, not uniform distributions, as the alternative to bimodality.