skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Wow. So quickly you went from a free, influential society where you could read what you wanted online and go where you wanted in Europe to soon this isolated island with silly censorship and a silly government ridiculed by everybody except Trump and Putin.
This is a good point, and I think it's critical to remember; you shouldn't work on something you consider ethically wrong. Do consider the moral implications of your work. But I also think it's missing something: not everyone working on such things considers them ethically wrong, and not everyone shares the same ethical principles.

This article seems like a good way to reach people who are doing something they already consider wrong, to get them to stand up, stop, object, blow the whistle.

But I would guess that the majority of people working on projects that some consider unethical don't actually consider themselves or their project unethical. Whether by rationalization, or by differing values and principles, people working on such projects may well think they're doing the right thing, improving the world.

Not everyone working on something you consider evil thinks they're doing evil. You need a different strategy to reach people who think they're doing something right than to reach those who already think they're doing something wrong.
> There was a legally binding contractual agreement between the two parties Deep Mind & Royal Free.

Which was, allegedly, far too lax.

The claim that DeepMind was providing "direct care" is particularly questionable IMO, and that has significant implications in the context of this agreement. It means anyone who slaps together an iPhone app (and has the right clout/deep pockets) can get access to full and fully identified medical records without patient consent. IMO that's the big story here, and it's troubling.

The "don't worry that's covered by existing law" responses were also problematic. Why does this particular contract need to depend upon the enforce-ability of that law? What happens if the law is repealed and DeepMind happened to keep a copy of the data? We want the protection here, in this context, so just put it in this agreement. Which is what they ultimately did in the new agreement AFAICT.

Also, the data shared is extremely broad -- I doubt you could get access to a data set of that size and quality without patient consent through standard channels, for example. I've never seen an identifiable data set containing "not only to relevant blood tests and diagnostics, but historical medical records dating back five years, including information on HIV diagnoses, drug overdoses, and abortions" for 1.6 million people. Access to such sensitive data creates a difference in kind that justifies greater care and skepticism, especially WRT audit-ability. The parties appear to agree, since they signed a new agreement recently!

Demonize these researchers all you want, but as a direct result of their work, NHS patients have stronger legal protections today than they did a year ago.
> I'm waiting for the study that shows binge drinking is good :)

I'm convinced a decent session has seen off an impending cold on occasions. Presumably by giving my antibodies a home advantage.
>Ads baked into the OS, especially one you'be paid for, is disturbing.. For me anyway..

Better get used to it; that's how people think these days. Just look at some of the other messages here that say "it's no big deal". Face it: people today are perfectly happy to be advertised to, even when they're paying money for it. And it's nothing new. Just look at cable TV: it was billed as being "commercial free" pay TV when it first came out, but it didn't take too long before they put the commercials back in. Did people abandon it? Nope. It's still highly profitable, and only recently having some problems with "cord cutters", which was caused not by the commercials alone, but rather by the availability of internet services and the general loss of interest in TV due to other interests (using the internet, video games, etc.). But for 30+ years, people have been perfectly happy to pay for cable TV and then watch the ads on it.

>Don't stand for this shit. Even if we don't, though, it won't make much of a difference since we're the minority who can even understand what's happening...

That's the problem. A few techies switching to Linux at home isn't going to make much difference. More importantly than anything, all the businesses are sticking with it, all the software ISVs are sticking with it, and most of the consumers are sticking with it.
De-anonymization has NOTHING to do with the current scenario. When legal contracts are in place, they dictate the rquirements & restriction on using the data. Today you can go and purchase de-identified but NOT de-anonymized data from US government as long as you sign and abide by contract to use it for purpose of aggregate statistical reporting and research.

Regarding your second point, yes all these issues have been considered in depth by policymakers in US government and NHS. And current rules/contracts already incorporate legal protections to prevent misuse in form of both civil and criminal penalties.

If DeepMind had done something truly unusual or nefarious they would have been already prosecuted. But having failed to find any evidence of explicit misuse the authors of the original paper have shifted the goalpost into territory of vague arguments.
Ask HN: What's the state of brain-computer interfaces?
Yes, please expand. We're using encrypted secrets part of our Ansible Playbooks. It hasn't let us down yet.
KOTOR 2. It's mostly kitsch but the character of Kreia is decidedly not kitsch.
Trippy video of a demon
Yeah, so we can spend a long time trying to find a parser generator that can solve all of our problems in the language that we use, which may or may not exist. Or you could just spend the same time to just write the parser. It turns out that writing a parser just isn't that hard, and in the time that you spend wavering on which parser generator to use, you could have most of your parser done.
Uninstalling provides an additional barrier to returning. I mentioned that I expect users that didn't uninstall to return at a higher rate than users that did.

It's also not just about the price. A new benefit to having an Amex platinum card is $200 per year in Uber ride credits. I do not plan to return to Uber to use the credits. In fact, this is making me seriously consider not renewing that card when the annual fee comes up in a few months. I don't want Uber getting money from me, even indirectly.
I guess it would be okay if everything about the whole encryption system is 100% perfect, but what are the odds of that?

Pretty high? Encrypted secrets are used a lot for companies that host their version control system on-prem.
what is the relation between "language generates revenue" and "usefulness in objective terms"?

is the latter necessarily dependent on the former?
There was a legally binding contractual agreement between the two parties Deep Mind & Royal Free.

Personally identifiable health-related information is classified as sensitive personal data under the DPA, and as such there are particularly strict conditions on processing it. What two organisations write in a contract does not change this.
Oracle outlines its planned support for Microsoft .NET Core
Ditto. Some people simply don't understand that other people hate exercise. It is extremely unpleasant for me.

I get that other people enjoy it. Wish I did, but I hate it. The only choice of activity that makes physical work bearable for me is some sort of tangible payoff - I can work hard building things. Some of my heaviest physical activity is carpentry and light construction. I still don't enjoy it, but working towards making something is enough payoff to make it worth it. For this reason, I do quite a bit more of that sort of thing than is probably normal for a desk jockey. I also walk about two miles a day, just two and from work.

For whatever reason, my brain wiring doesn't see "vaguely feeling a bit better in three months, maybe living an extra year or two when everything is falling apart anyway" as sufficient.

The puritans can start on with the you-weren't-raised-right judgements now. I've heard it before.
Blogspam of

http://www.utdallas.edu/news/2017/3/20-32477_Unexpected-Star...

Paper full text:

http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/adma.201606264/fu...
It's also working here on both my Sky home connection and GiffGaff (O2 MVNO) mobile.
> In the longer-term, I'd like to explore match making between data visualization people who would like to get into machine learning and machine learning researchers publishing papers.

As a data viz person, I would be absolutely thrilled to work on this, I'm trying to scratch time here and there to position myself better in that respect, learning more and trying to bridge that gap.
Almost spat my latte into my keyboard reading the name.

The first time I remember doing this exercise was when the product I worked on got so large it wouldn't fit on one CD. I think we found 10 copies of one of its shared libraries.
The point that a company paid taxes, in response to an article with a title claiming that they paid $0 in taxes, is irrelevant?
They're most useful with small memory-only tables that have very frequent lookups. For example, in a lot of systems, you might store the validation rules for each field in a table. Or you might have a set of autocomplete options. Or you may have a table with the set of currently logged-in sessions. These tables have row counts that measure in the hundreds, not millions, and the whole table can fit within a couple pages.

For something like this, the cost of reindexing is trivial, and the full data is usually in a .sql file somewhere, so even if there's data loss it takes all of about 10 seconds to restore it.

Why would you do this instead of hardcoding this in code, storing it in a local hashtable, or putting it in Redis/Memcached? Bunch of reasons. These tables can be shared across all clients of the database, so if you have multiple apps (in different languages!) that require common validation, they can all make a SQL query instead of recoding the logic. If you don't otherwise need Redis/Memcached, you can avoid adding that dependency to your stack. You can use foreign key constraints to ensure that the values in real data tables match the valid values in the validation table. You can throw an admin interface on top of the tables and let customers edit the set of available options, rather than forcing all changes to go through the developers.
The thinking behind that is expanded on here:

http://weblog.rubyonrails.org/2017/2/23/Rails-5-1-beta1/

> Encrypted secrets

> If you’re checking production passwords, API keys, and other secrets undisguised into your revision control system, you’re doing it wrong. That’s not safe and you should stop it! Now that’s an easy prescription, but without a coherent answer to what you should do instead, it’s also not that helpful.

> People have long been loading up the ENV to store these secrets or used a variety of other solutions. There are all sorts of trade-offs and drawbacks to the ENV-model, not least of which that you still need to store those secrets for real somewhere else.

> Inspired by Ara T. Howard’s sekrets gem, we’ve built encrypted secrets management into Rails 5.1. You can setup a new encrypted secrets file with bin/rails secrets:setup. That’ll generate a master key you’ll store outside of the repository, but allow you to commit the actual production secrets to your revision control. They’re then decrypted in production either through an injected key file or through RAILS_MASTER_KEY in the ENV.
In 1996 The FED was calling the Internet an "irrational exuberance" because the global economy wasn't doing well. Then, 3 major events led to the crash. This is why the bubble burst:

- 1997 Asian crisis

- 1998 Russian crisis

- 1999 Launch of the Euro (flop)

April 14, 2000 was the End of a 3 week crash. The global market trend officially switched, the rest is history.
> Can you expand on this?

Keeping config entirely separate from app source is the way to go. Encrypted configs is a specific version of that general anti-pattern.

Encrypted configs (and configs in source code itself) seem like a good idea at first, "I don't have to configure anything and it works in prod!" but it also means you can't flip any switches or rotate config without pushing a new version.

This also makes it difficult to stand up a parallel environment, say for reproducing a defect, as the configs are expected to be baked internally. You can't just pull out the release build and run it in a different environment with one or two variables tweaked.

> We're doing encrypted secrets in config that get decrypt by aws kms on application startup and it's been working quite well for us.

Using KMS solves the problem of where do you keep the key that locks the configs but they should still be kept externally from the app code. Depending on the scale of how you're deploying that could be a local file, an external secrets server, or just a blob on S3 (accessible via EC2 IAM roles).
Wonder why they didn't mention LiFePo4. Amazing, non explosive production cells. A bit pricier, but not that much.
SimplCommerce: Simple, cross-platform, modularized ecommerce system on .NET Core
Thanks for the chat. I learned a lot.

I think we both agree system needs reforming, and subtracting the political rhetoric from both sides, there is middle ground reform that should hopefully prevail.
Not necessarily. Most of South America is very close or in the same timezone as the East Coast of the U.S.

There is a time difference with the West Coast though.

I currently work for a Dallas-based company and I work the same hours as their employees, from Uruguay.

I'm not in the same case as the OP asked, I'm a full employee of a local subsidiary, but I've worked under a contract and filled a W8-BEN.
I don't think I saw it as an attempt to be original or funny. It's more interesting and educational in that it shows how to do build up a simple program from the very limited operations of lands calculus.
Thanks for mentioning xpra. I have always wanted something like that but hadn't ever thought about searching for "screen for X11".
> A superconductor is sort of a perpetual motion machine for electrons, isn't it?

It may seem like it, but no. As this link [0] explains, "A prime example is the superconductive metals, whose electrical resistance disappears completely at low temperature, usually somewhere around 20 K. Unfortunately, the energy required to maintain the low temperature exceeds the work that results from the superconductive flow."

[0] https://www.britannica.com/science/perpetual-motion
Building web apps that respect a user's privacy and security
I'll only add this one, it's the one thing that really grinds my gears, and that is the fact that nobody knows how to do "everything". Sure we can learn to do almost anything, but at any given minute on any given day most of us can't perform the big thing that needs to be done asap.

That's perfectly okay, don't let the company be so afraid to show weakness/stress/immaturity that you get a whole bunch of megalomaniac persons who incessantly lie about their own talents and lie just as much to cover their failures. Make them own up and grow up.

If not they will never strive to achieve more than protecting their own ego. Look at yahoo
taxes companies pay come out of profits, they may choose to raise prices to increase profits, or due to competition etc, they may not.

Its a vast oversimplification to say that all corporate taxes are just paid by the customers anyways.
I think the problem with trying to mix exercise with hobbies or commuting is that they don't really satisfy the same physical goals.

Hobbies are for fun. Commuting is for travel. They may involve physical exertion, but they repeat the same movement patterns over and over. You don't exercise all your muscles.

E.g rock climbing is hard but doesn't exercise any pushing movements. Which can become a problem when only one set of muscles is trained.

Good exercise will not only make you fitter in a generally useful way, but help you fix problems like flexibility or posture. I.E we are trying to fix your weaknesses, not just cater to your strengths.
I feel like science publication in general could benefit from disruption of the publishing model. I'm not sure that the toolkit that Distill has provided is quite enough to totally change the paradigm, and it currently restricted to only one field.

I like the idea of having research being approachable for the non-scientist, and the more important question of whether there is a more efficient form (in terms of communicating new science between scientists) for research papers to take.

Is there any relevant work along this vector of thought that I should check out? Because I would really love to do some work on this.
The Antidesktop aside, but I'm missing freshmeat website. It seems that most open source stuff is advertised now on www.openhub.net but I'm not sure if this still have the same spirit.
Neat summary and contextualization of the topic! Seems simple on the surface, which is why a nice lead through is helpful.

Last week at the zoo I watched the Chimpanzee dynamics for a good half hour or so. Very extreme by comparison to us. Loud. Chasing. Urination.

I suspect that biologically there's some overlap between Tears in Humans - which Chimps don't seem to possess the capacity to produce - and Defecation as a communication mechanism that Humans have spent a lot of time evolving away from. Each can be quite expressive.
I've never implemented anything with either platform, but I've been impressed with Dwolla and Twilio. Both provide a nice interface finding the information you need while also giving an example for each language their API supports. I'm not a super experienced programmer, but I am looking at getting into it more, and will probably use twilio as one of my early attempts to work with other services.

https://developers.dwolla.com/

https://www.twilio.com/docs/
NZ and Australia have a tax treaty so companies pay taxes where they're based. Apple's Aus/NZ operations are based on Australia, so they pay the (higher) Australia rate to the Aus government, instead of the (lower) NZ rate to the NZ government on their NZ profits.

Meanwhile, companies based in NZ are paying no taxes in Australia. WHEN WILL THIS MADNESS END?
Discord is down
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13717557
I understand perfectly well the rationale behind it.

I'm saying it's a fully loaded foot gun.
I bet that hot baths move lymph at higher than normal rates, just like exercise. This is the mechanism by which our bodies cleanse our tissues.

But, that is considered "woo" by a lot of people. I am sort of annoyed at the heat molecules explanation at the end of the article. Like, we can't just admit that maybe our own body's mechanism for taking out the trash matters when it gets pumped up to a higher rate? That is too...weird? or something?
That's one hell of an accomplishment, to be sure. But I take great issue with the headline. What's better about it? The guy was wearing basically a hand-cast to let him draw through the injury he was inflicting to himself with that workload. The animation itself doesn't seem to be that good -- I mean, your mileage may vary and different people have different sensitivities, but it looks like one of the ways you animate a film by yourself is drawing fewer frames per second than a traditional studio animation, and for me that looks below the threshold where it's comfortable to watch, and I couldn't imagine sitting through 80 minutes of it. It gives me a headache. In terms of art... man, I'd really rather sit through a Studio Ghibli movie, I well and truly would.
I've always liked his "Final Version" method better, where you select tasks you want to do, and then do them in reverse order.

http://markforster.squarespace.com/blog/2015/5/21/the-final-...
Why should individuals pay the tax? This suppresses demand
FreeBSD jails are on a different level in terms of stability (and simplicity, that contributes to stability) compared to Docker. Personally -- having run Docker containers for over a year in testing -- I would take jails over containers in a heartbeat.
Also notice the awesome "Sparse FFT" https://groups.csail.mit.edu/netmit/sFFT/
which takes time just about `k log (n/k)` to recover the `k` largest coefficients. So often a complete Fourier transform is taken only to immediately discard nearly all of the computed values. (Compression for example.)
Where did you draw that line?
Could you give a brief summary of these events?
The ICO (the UK data protection authority) has an ongoing investigation into the deal. This is even mentioned in the original report.
He said perpetual motion, not 'perpetual motion machine'.

Do planets ever stop rotating?
Full paper, with video:

http://www.cell.com/current-biology/fulltext/S0960-9822(17)3...
What stops your current employees from stealing code or intellectual property? As long as the OP has decent hiring practices, he shouldn't be any more afraid than hiring an American.

I've been on both sides of the table (both hired and been hired remotely) and this is covered under the standard employment contract.
I agree that it is an oversimplification to say the effects are exactly the same, but my point was just that the price will go up and the consumer will pay more regardless of where the tax is levied.
Leopold FC750.
Amazing build quality, super sturdy.
British banks handled vast sums of laundered Russian money
function composition sort of emulates a list of procedures but it's not really the same thing. There's restrictions on function composition that aren't intuitive.

A typical task list has tons of side effects, which is not the case with your "pipe lines."
This is relevant to my interests as well, as art in the US isn't produced in a vacuum and economic conditions what they are...it's not to take away from the achievement, but rather understand the context upon which something was produced. If two people both make an identical origami swan, but one had the luxury of leisure and tutoring while the other was created between shifts working in a coal mine using self-directed creativity, well, I mean that's part of the story.
Anyone have experience with US-based startup and a Canadian cofounder?
How is this handled? The Canadian cofounder could be paid as a contractor, but how would that affect vesting or other considerations?

Anyone have experience with this or can point me towards any resources? Thanks in advance.
Make America Singapore Healthcare
I find it telling of the number of commenters at the article who are for the removal of the FG statue. For if they were secure in their positions (whatever they may be), they wouldn't be protesting so much about the work.
Concerns about de-anonymization are NOT AT ALL relevant in cases where patient level data is shared. Since its common knowledge that this data is ripe for misuse and abuse. As a result government agencies have developed a set of legal requirements and contracts to be used when sharing such data. Talking about differential-privacy and de-identification-is-not-de-anonymization is meaningless in this context since all parties are acutely aware of the potential for misuse of this data.

And regarding your concern about me, if anything I should be the one engaging in this ridiculous witch hunt against Deep Mind since I have during my PhD developed an Open Source transparent analytics platform for data on millions of patients.

But unlike the authors I want real debate and real systems that can be used, not faux outrage over another click bait article.

http://www.computationalhealthcare.com
Just wondering if you've read Confessions of an Economic Hitman. You may feel better knowing that not all of these conspiracies are crazy. Though reading about economic hit men may make you more paranoid; it's a dark, ugly world.