skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
That's something to consider before matriculation. It's just as much a problem for Americans as it is for foreigners, so sympathy might be hard to find...
>genetic modifications are usually for stuff like "keeping potatoes from bruising because people don't like the look of bruised potatoes." Or "keeping tomatoes flavorful so people can keep mindlessly buying them out of season." They're always fixes that allow the consumer to remain as passive as possible.

I think this is because biotechnology is in its infancy, and these sort of things tend to be pretty low hanging fruit that increase sales. I'm not a big fan either- I'm certainly not a big fan of corporate profits and corporate motives. The GMO world is corporate right now because it still requires substantial monetary investment- in the future technology will become so simplified that nonprofits and university scientists will be able to bring non-corporate GMOs to market in the way we have open source software today.

Here are some more positive gmo projects on the horizon:

C4 rice: http://c4rice.irri.org/index.php/component/content/article/1...

More efficient photosynthesis:https://mobile.nytimes.com/2016/11/18/science/gmo-foods-phot...

Disease resistant Cassava:http://staskawiczlab.berkeley.edu/michael-gomez-wins-prize-h...

Disease resistant tomatoes: http://staskawiczlab.berkeley.edu/bacterial-spot-tomatoes

Drought resistant plants in particular will be extremely important for fighting climate change: http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/science-sushi/2015/03/31/g...

>b) I've never hear a single scientist make a good argument against GMOs. What, like you can't come up with a single possible downside?

It is difficult to come up with an argument "against GMOs", because most definitions of the term have no ingerent biological meaning. If I edit a single base pair of a plant using crispr-cas9, is that a GMO? How is that different than breeding this plant until I get that base pair change by chance? If I edit an entire gene of a plant with crispr-cas9 to match the gene of another organism, how is that different from inserting the gene from that organism into this plant in the right spot?

I personally can't contemplate a general purpose argument against GMOs that doesn't apply to traditional mutagenesis and hybridization experiments: those are really like randomly messing with genes with no idea what you're doing- biotechnology targets systems we understand.

However, the best arguments against GMOs are those concerned with corporate influence. Yes, we do not want big corporations completely controlling our agricultural system (as they do now), especially when their interests do not align with society's. We want a biotechnology more like the open source world and startup world to keep agriculture innovative and open.
I went through several version of this response full of profanity, but I'll trim it down to be appropriate. Absolutely not, and it's really harmful to think this. Hillary Clinton was a full supporter of the active military intervention, overseas CIA action, and domestic spying programs. Delusional tribal politics is a big part of the problem.
Why, oh why, has this been posted here? Is there possibly a single institution that serves as more of a lightning rod for anger in the USA, in any political direction, than the ACLU? Would a similar article be posted about the NRA, the Simon Wiesenthal Center, or Southern Poverty Law Center (all which, along with ACLU, do excellent work for their contributors/supporters)?

From the ycombinator Hacker News Guidelines
at https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

"Off-Topic: Most stories about politics, or crime, or sports, unless they're evidence of some interesting new phenomenon." What part of "politics" is this not?

This topic now is yet another gathering point for all unhappy with the election results. Perhaps this forum will allow those discontents to vent to sufficient degree to restore themselves to adulthood and return to their work, home and friends with a more balanced attitude required of a citizen in a republic. But I fear it will simply be another place for them to reinforce their anger and distrust. It's probably a good thing that liberals, in general, avoid firearms, otherwise there might be fighting in the streets already.
I am unfortunately not a student of history. Can you explain what you mean by this?
You are incorrect in the assumptions that Mozilla is the steward of Rust (and therefore that you would need to trust them in that role), and that Rust has not already been decoupled from Mozilla.
You don't need armed raid to audit visa compliance. You need one bespectacled guy with a briefcase. It's true that most of the US law enforcement wants to look like military and tries to use armed troops way out of proportion (I mean, Library of Congress and Department of Education have their owned armed response units, because regular police isn't tough enough to deal with education issues anymore, apparently) - but I hope it's possible to avoid going full Steven Seagal in this case.
Validating your idea. That is one of the best but most overlooked advise. Validate, validate again.
Last time I tried to convert to ubuntu on a top end HP notebook I had display, camera, fingerprint and trackpad driver roadblocks (two years ago, but not a decade). I had a roadblock on a 10 point multitouch screen this year.
Scientists used to make a good living in the USA. Now the market is flooded with cheap foreigners and science is a road to poverty. Ending the employment of cheap foreigners, including as TAs and RAs, would go a long way to making science a respectable profession again.

And it would open the field to American women. When math and science professors can't make a decent living to support a family until after their prime child bearing years, any claims of equal treatment and equal opportunity are nothing but a sham. Science careers today practically demand that women permanently give up any hope of a family just to get on the professor track.

And things are just getting worse. It's time to stop importing foreign science grads.
I'd love for someone to write about howto meet people who you'd want to join up with you as a cofounder. I know I wouldn't be able to do any of my high in the sky plans by myself but I don't know many people who'd be up to taking the plundge.
It's not overly enterprise driven at all, from my perspective. The company I work for has teams totaling to about 40 or so developers and we're completely MSFT driven. From the DB side of SQL Server to web/backend of ASP.NET and .NET. And my understanding of the industry is we're hardly alone. In my area (the southeast US) there's plenty of opportunities at similar sized companies or smaller.

Achieving an intermediate skill set in any language/platform will certainly take more than a year. The language itself takes very little time - but picking up maintainable (Clean Code, Pragmattic Programmer, etc) habits takes a good bit longer for most people. Python probably has more beginner resources available thanks to MOOCs and the like, but there's plenty of .NET intro sources as well.
Refactoring the Jungle Disk Gateway Service
This is true and I think it is important to really value people. Trying to cut that because you can is not really nice nor motivating.
> Just render a png file, server side.

Know of any examples of that in practice or is this just a joke?
Isn't it a given that it's on the way? You're complaining about known issues.

Apple will obviously improve its Mac tools. What Swift needs is great, and even better, tools for other platforms. Will Apple keep Swift wide open if it Google gives it first class support on Android, for example?
Why is it so rare for mobile apps to be open source?
I've skimmed the top 100 free iOS apps, and none of them (besides chrome) are open source.
I'm in the middle of a trial switch to Safari so that I can utilize this, but man, Safari on the desktop is such a pain compared to Chrome that I think I'm going to have to sacrifice the feature.
Not mixing things up as I understand part of the issue lies with the DE. But that's only with separate X sessions. As I wrote, the first thing I attempted was to run it as a single X session which simply did not work. That is a driver issue. If the OP's claim that drivers are a non-issue were really true, then I wouldn't even need to attempt separate X sessions.

I only mentioned the separate X session part because that has been suggested as a "workaround" for over half a decade; hence why I even have that setup on my old install. I was simply anticipating someone posting a response claiming that it would work with such a configuration as I know the inevitable answer (I revisit trying Linux on this computer maybe once a year).

> Since the vast, vast majority of people nowadays do not run multiple X screens, there isn't a lot of interest on the part of desktop environment coders to get them working (also because likely they don't have that hardware themselves and so can't try it either)

Yup, I get that it's uncommon. It's just sad that what used to work years ago has regressed and simply does not work at all anymore. I also considered doing the .xinitrc thing you suggested, but stopped myself from wasting more time as it would just result in a frankenstein DE that wouldn't be very usable (Gnome & KDE are quite far apart in usability philosophy).

(edit: Also remember that to a non-technical user, they would simply try what the GUI suggests. Nvidia defaults to separate X sessions across different cards. Since DEs don't work with that configuration anymore, that would appear no different than a driver issue to the end user.)
I am for free market and competition. One thing about the cable and satellite industry that annoys me is everyone keeps merging.

But I totally feel like the cable is way behind satellite technology. I have Time Warner(Well now Spectrum). We kept cable for phone + internet but switched to Dish for television. So the jack with the modem gets cable signal, while the rest of the house is wired to satellite.

Setup took a bit to download, about a half hour but it did a software update over the satellite. While the guy was explaining the features and everything.

But once he had it all setup, so much superior. The box was more responsive than the cable box felt, even though we just replaced it a year ago after complaining to the cable co. Then another cool thing is the remotes are paired to each receiver like a game controller would be to a console. So you can still use it without aiming right at the box. It still uses IR for volume and power on the TV itself, but when using the Dish box itself it's nice.

I remember with cable I'd fast forward and the stupid thing wouldn't play when I hit play even if I aimed right at it. The boxes were super laggy. Cable seems to have very outdated tech...

We have the whole home Hopper, we had the whole home with cable too. One big box in the living room, and then the other rooms have a box that can watch recordings(but not store them). With cable you had to go in the living room to record shows, with Dish you can record from any room but it's still stored on the main box. And the smaller boxes, The Joey's are like a quarter of the size of the cable companies equivalent box.

Plus Dish already support 4K, unlike cable. I've asked, they don't even support it. But even though Dish supports it, not all channels broadcast in it anyways. But I remember seeing ads that Dish had HD even before cable had it. Oddly though they install two dishes now. One for local, and a separate for the rest. But it doesn't go out so far in the rain in about the month we've had it.

We'd had Dish in about 2003 when I was a little kid, and I remember it always went out, but newer systems don't seem to have that issue. It seems like Dish has improved a lot in over a decade. Cable seems like it's always playing catch up. I seems Dish puts the user experience first.

I think the cable company uses a third party vendor for their boxes and software too. From what I can read, it seems like Dish is closely affiliated with EchoStar, that makes their hardware. I don't know if the cable company executives try out competitors products, but I'd recommend their CEO signup for Dish for their own home. Then once they see how much better it is then take all their R&D in house to step up their game. I think companies should try to control the whole experience as much as possible. So everything is all integrated and works as smoothly as possible. Apple is a good example of a company doing this.
You might miss things like this:

> telomerase activity (the enzyme that repairs the telomeres and lengthens them) increased in both twins in November, which may be related to a significant, stressful family event happening around that time
Thanks for the explanation, this is pretty accurate.
For the "humans are still involved" comments, maybe the article is referring to the fact that these machines allow you to purchase a big mac without having to talk to a human.

In this situation, the experience of a fast-food purchase is being removed of the small talk, the smiles, the "have a nice day!". And now there are people behind a curtain that you don't see or interact with.
Yep, totally agree. A lot of founders don't do this as they're too attached to the idea or too worried about criticism. It's a tough learning process to get over the negative feedback.
Via a Brain-Computer Interface, Paralyzed Patients Say They Want to Live (2018)
Any politician who supports weakening surveillance or anti-terrorism measures will be out on their ass as soon as there's another attack (maybe sooner). And there's always another attack. Unless that's the only issue they care about they're not going to sacrifice the possibility of advancing other parts of their agenda to commit political suicide over it.
Funny how you guys are now thinking this is a big issue NOW.

How is this sentiment useful? Sorry, guys. Whatever you do now is invalidated by what you didn't do before. The past is only useful as something we can learn from. Focussing on what can be done now is something we can actually grapple with, change, and improve.
I donate to a state-level 2nd Amendment rights organization, GeorgiaCarry.org, rather than the NRA. Why? Because GeorgiaCarry stands strongly against racial discrimination and is working hard to end Jim Crow era Georgia laws that to this day attempt to thwart non-white citizens voting and asserting their 1st, 2nd, and 4th Amendment rights. By contrast, the NRA has a consistent record of remaining silent on race issues when they intersect with 2nd Amendment challenges.
and not all locations in America pay the same amount of salary for tech workers either.

Indeed. The $130k limit should be raised to $310k in SF, NY, DC, LA, and Boston.
I was never asked to; Congressional offices and campaign offices are supposed to be legally distinct, and that information would have all been held by the campaign.

That being said, once the sums you contribute get large enough you will almost certainly get to be known around the office -- either explicitly (e.g. the Chief of Staff tells all the people who handle correspondence "Bob Smith is a good friend of the Congressman's, if you find any messages from him bring those straight to me") or implicitly (e.g. the staff of the Congressional office notices that when Bob Smith comes in to meet with the boss he's ushered right in and stays for a long time). So large contributors' messages can easily get special attention, even without that kind of direct connection to their contributions ever being made.
The murder of innocent children in or out of the womb is neither civil nor American; nor is it an expression of liberty in terms of doing what is right. But if the ACLU calls this "liberty", that is terrifying.

"There is a healthy and an unhealthy love of animals: and the nearest definition of the difference is that the unhealthy love of animals is serious. I am quite prepared to love a rhinoceros, with reasonable precautions: he is, doubtless, a delightful father to the young rhinoceroses. But I will not promise not to laugh at a rhinoceros. . . . I will not worship an animal. That is, I will not take an animal quite seriously: and I know why. Wherever there is Animal Worship there is Human Sacrifice. That is, both symbolically and literally, a real truth of historical experience."

http://www.nationalreview.com/corner/421961/wherever-there-a...

https://www.aclu.org/blog/ag-gag-not-just-about-animal-welfa...
Just started diving into it. It's fascinating from a bureaucratic, administrative, and operational perspective.
--we have to increase CI/Intelligence capability or we'll lose primacy to another agency--
Paraphrasing
I can confirm this works reasonably well and includes xcode and some other stuff IIRC.
Kalman filter is a natural example of iterative algorithm. Writing it in Fold does not gain much.
If you live in middle America flyover country it's hard to get any tech job. And the H1-B program is making it a lot harder.
Because you only focused on getenv.

I was replying about the whole UNIX API surface, regarding functions like strcpy.

You need exotic features to guarantee that the memory doesn't get corrupted.
Opera Mini bypasses this restriction with doing Server Rendering. I wonder why Apple is ok with them (because it'a a big security risk to server render HTTPS IMHO).

And regarding your quesiton: I'm sure you cannot replace their webkit usage with one switch to Blink... I'm sure the iOS internal webview is deeply integrated/
"Corporate oligarchy" would be a less partisan way to say this.
Looking at your profile, as a technical person you'll be a lot more in-demand than someone non-technical. Go to meetups and talk about your ideas online, people will naturally come out of the woodwork the more you talk about your high-in-the-sky plans.
Yes, I experienced this as well, though it was about 8 years ago. I was really disappointed in the ACLU, I would have thought of all people they would be the last ones to sell off private information. It bothers me that all these groups have spent more money on sending me mail in the ensuing years than the original donation amount to the ACLU.

At least now it seems like they let you opt out.

This is a problem in the non-profit industry that should get addressed, especially given younger generations are less likely to respond to mailers anyways.
Show HN: TIMi-Visual Interpreter for lazy functional language in Rust
Anyone working with video, 3D animation, storing RAW photography (and taking 100's of photos on a daily basis), and I can imagine a few other purposes. Especially if you want an on-site backup of that data.

I've bought 10TB of storage space every year for the past 3 years and don't see myself stopping. I need the storage space! If these data-heavy hobbies were instead my daytime job I could easily see myself needing 100TB+ in storage (and then 100TB+ of backups). I fill roughly 8TB/year in storage space (4TB of data + 4TB backup data).

Some people believe in redundant backups. I only have redundant backups of extremely important information - which are mostly text documents so don't take up much space. But if someone was storing 3 copies of all of their media assets you end up using a lot of space. For example, 10TB of video turns into 30TB of video. And 180TB is really only 60TB of data, which isn't that much for data heavy hobbies.
Lattner was in charge of all dev tools, managing ~200 people. Hoare wasn't hired to take his job.
Portability across UNIX platforms.
Good points, and I definitely don't have an answer re: best layout engine. But my critique wasn't aiming that high and was merely about placing CSS syntax outside markup.

CSS design genesis seems to be "ok we have this and that HTML presentation attribute; let's put it in an entirely new item-value format and separate HTML attributes/CSS properties syntactically".

From this arbitrary decision in language design the idea developed that markup attributes are part of the "semantic" content of a document, and not for styling, when, to the contrary, markup attributes were specifically designed for styling and other properties.

As a consequence, CSS has numerous redundancies, asymmetries, and absurdities such as CSS shapes, SVG properties you can style with CSS, the "content:" property, dogmatic and implementation-driven limitations for using presentational attributes on elements, etc.
From a little googling, 4k video appears to take about 22GB an hour[1], so 188TB would beover 8,500 hours of 4k video[2]. That's almost an entire year of constant 4k video. That's a lot of storage for personal use.

1: Not sure what encodig

2: Napkin calculation, corrections welcome
> If you don't qualify for the family-based or refugee route, employment-based immigration is the only viable pathway.

This is, I think, the fundamental problem of our immigration system and ultimately tied to the source of the illegal immigration.problem that arises whenever the economic and social climate is relatively good (right now, we've got negative net rate of illegal immigration, because the economic and social climate sucks), and also much of our border security problem.

Our immigration policy seeks to do three main things:

(1) prevent people we absolutely don't want in this country (usually, for safety/security reasons) from coming in for any reason at any time.

(2) Allow people we specifically do want in the country to come in, and

(3) Manage the costs incurred as a result of the total level of immigration.

#1 is pretty straightforward: we prohibit certain people from entry, period, based on certain rules.

#2 and #3 together are served by a complex set of visa categories, with quotas in each category (both global and per country, in each category.) And we treat anyone that doesn't get a slot in the quota.or doesn't fit a preference category exactly like the prohibited individuals in #1.

A better way to address #3 (and to replace some existing categories, like the H-1B) would be to allow either entry- or annual- (possibly both as options) fee-based immigration or annual residency with work status for immigrants above the caps. The fee structure might be different for people eligible for dofferent existing preference categories but "skipping the line", and higher than any of those for non-prohibited immigrants in no preference category. Third parties could sponsor such supernumerary visas, but would have no special status for doing so (other than contract rights, but even then law could limit contract enforcement to recovery of the cost of sponsorship according to the rules applicable to general debts.)
What do you think about a following evolution of the advertisement network idea that could support higher quality content creation?

A company Foo connects content creators, consumers and businesses.

Creators can join the 'Foo' network and display a short 'join the Foo to support this site' info on their pages without any other ads. Consumers can join the Foo network to have access to deals offered by businesses. Businesses can reach to the Foo network members offering discounts for their products.

A part of such discount is transfered to the consumer, giving an incentive to buy on the Foo network.
A part goes to the content creators. After each purchases a consumer is asked to which creators the money should go.
A small part from each transaction goes to Foo.

Unlike with ads network today, the user is in full control of which sites receive money from the user transactions, so the incentive to create useless clickbait sites is gone. Content also no longer needs to be cluttered with ads, because there is a separation between content consumption and business transactions that support the content.
I'd love a set of charts made that would plot Hours Runtime vs Failure Rate and Data Transfer Rate vs Failure Rate.

These tell us little about how good these drives hold up, it tells us more of the churn cost that backblaze has.