skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Great idea. Site is hugged to death at the moment I think

A quick issue that arose in my head is what happens if people turn away from ideas because they see it in the graveyard? Some ideas may have seen the light of day too soon...timing for startups is important, as shown in this TED talk - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bNpx7gpSqbY

With this resource at hand, people might mistaken bad timing for bad idea.
+1 - I'd like to see a copy too.
I'm not a biologist. Can someone that knows more here help me out?

From the article it seems epigenetic mechanisms aren't inheritable i.e. they do not change the DNA just how the DNA is interpreted and/or which genes are activated. So even though epigenetic mechanisms might get passed on for several generations once the environmental factor affecting the mechanisms is removed the organisms would revert wouldn't they?

It seems all this does is allow some Lamarckian traits to act as a factors in the natural selection process.

Also the two explanations for how Giraffes got their long necks seem pretty ridiculous to me. Does anyone know of legit research into that topic?
> The phone is covered with fingerprints from the owner anyway. If you have the phone, you already have the "password".

This is a ridiculous assertion. On the front, I have an oleophobic screen and constantly wipe the phone (i.e., put in pocket). On the back I have a leather case that would be impossible to get prints from.

Do you know of any demonstration that isn't "lab conditions" where touchID is broken?
The Internet does make information easy to get. It is truly wonderful in that regard.

What I was expecting with the Internet is that it would lead to a widespread increase in correct beliefs and (eventually) wisdom as well.

Certainly, some individuals do use the increased information availability to great benefit. But this isn't nearly as widespread as I predicted and hoped it would be.
I used to work in a small indie game studio (in the PS2 days) and the games we made had tight deadline (less than 12 months usually from start to finish). And even with such time and money constraints Scope creep would always rear it's ugly head.

I can only image what goes on when the devs are let loose in the SC candy store with so much money and wanting to live up to the hype(so to speak).

Scopeageddon, for sure.
Thanks for taking the time to reply, I can now better see how this could be of benefit
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/morning-mix/wp/2016/08/0...

Storied Alaska wolf pack beloved for decades has vanished, thanks to hunting

*

FYI: if you went to Denali NP, your chances of seeing a wolf used to be 50% or so. Now... the Park says 2-3%.
Show HN: Automatically generated language courses based on news sentences
Lately an hour or two per week. The only free time I get during the week is on weekends and I usually prefer other things over my side projects.
I wonder if fecal transplants could prevent or hold this off.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fecal_microbiota_transplant
If the penalties are unjust (and particularly if the penalization at all of mere possession of some or all of the materials in the class at issue is unjust), then advising people how to avoid those unjust penalties—which are an unmerited harm by definitoon—is not merely not “deeply disturbing”, but actually meritorious.

The issues cannot be separated. You can't say it's okay to argue that the penalties are unjust, but improper to help people avoid the penalties: if the penalties are unjust, it is at least good and perhaps even morally obligatory to take reasonable steps to help people avoid being on the recieving end of that injustice.
I've been re-watching Knight Rider on-and-off for a while now, and it's actually fairly good. I wouldn't compare it directly to anything modern, as long as I accept it for what it is - a 1980s show.
No, it doesn't. This is also FUD. Fukushima is a local environmental disaster - not a global one. It has done nothing to natural seawater radiation levels.

We are detecting a 'large' increase in radioactive Cesium in the world's oceans. It is, however, dwarfed by the amount of naturally radioactive potassium already dissolved in it. Radiation levels 500km from the disaster site have increased... By 2%.
>Die Technik hat sich seitdem zwar verbessert, die Methoden sie zu knacken aber wiederum auch.

Is what it was trying to translate, not sure where you/it got 'rumgeilt' from.

A more natural sounding translation would be:

The technology has improved since then, but, on the other hand, so have the methods to crack it

You could also translate 'wiederum' as 'in turn' which might exlain the 'turn' in Google's translation.
Striking individual differences in color perception uncovered by ‘the dress’
I adore No Man's Sky, which accomplished something magical, and keeps expanding. I'd put games and DLC that are cheap imitations of what came before in the scam category; and there's probably less of that in SF games.
Food waste is the world’s dumbest environmental problem
Multiocular O
There is always Loonix and neckbeards.
I'm so glad this arrived. Thanks Keybase! Finally we have proper identity backed secure chat! (Which is going to be my main use case.)
Nearly every image on the site being a ~600x450px jpeg seems wasteful when almost all of these have easily accessible (or at least easy to recreate) SVGs.

Unless wordpress doesn't support SVGs?
Really? On a discussion about a desktop OS? There are so many things going through my mind after your comment that I can't even start typing. Branch limit reached.

I'm using Android and I have the same concerns about it. I gave my Lumia away because it doesn't have the apps that I need and, again, I had the same concerns. My time is limited so I have to pick my battles. Mobile is a lost cause.

So I decide to give feedback about one of the two desktop OSs that I use (Windows and Linux). I don't give a shit if Apple/Google is going to make you insert a coin every hour to use the OS, I would still complain to MS if they decided to do the same.

I don't even know exactly what's your point. Feel free to ask if I write Microsoft with a $.
Centennial (read, non-UWP) apps can be published to the Windows Store and don't get any sandboxing beyond registry virtualization by default. Microsoft lives and dies by backwards compatibility, they're not going to kill off Win32 - they may very well push for the Windows Store to be the primary source for applications with traditional installers being blocked by default though.
Works pretty well on mobile!
Are you under the impression that personal attacks gain value by being florid?
Interesting article. IMO: I see the majority of software being developed locally and pushed to the cloud for a while longer. Cloud for testing will move quicker. But some development has already moved, some is in the process, and some will never move (i.e. embedded/iot).
As someone that bought heavily into both games, I have to be honest here when I say that E:D was a great short-term game, like many of those single-player games we're all used to. I quickly hit the grind part of E:D and stopped playing it. I should mention here that I'm an "explorer" subtype of game player, so the grind doesn't do it for me.

On the other hand, I am a very early backer of Star Citizen, and I regularly (about once a week, which is a lot for me) play the alpha and because I'm also an Imperator subscriber, I get rental credits for new ships and weapons and stuff, so there's always something new for me to try. Then there's also the knowledge that the full persistent universe ("game") is yet to come. I've got a lot of ships to fly, and an organization/clan with lots of RL friends to fly missions with. I'm stoked for all the accompanying lore being built into Star Citizen. This universe already feels lived in and detail-oriented. I am confident that I could play for a long time and still not hit the end of the road to satisfy my inner "explorer" player subtype.
The original Wing Commander: Privateer had about 20 core team members and cost (guesstimating) around $3 million to make, inflation adjusted.

To put that in perspective, Fallout 4 cost around $150m to make (IIRC), and that was an amazingly frugal budget for such a large game (Several AAA titles have budgets twice that large).

To be honest, I would have been happy with something along the budget of the original Privateer. And that would have probably left him lots of wiggle room to experiment and engage in research-esque goals.

I cant be too angry at him for being ambitious, or even changing his goals, but the #1 thing Roberts did wrong IMO was accelerating to AAA-style development and growing the team to 400 large before even really knowing what he wanted to develop. Spending a $100k+ on mocap and acting as early as he did is like producing a movie and then writing the script for it after the fact.
If we waited until we were absolutely sure of something we wouldn't be saying much ever would we? Isn't the whole point of science to postulate things and then prove or disprove them? Advances can also take "proven" things and prove them wrong.
i always wondered how differentiated cells can have completely identical DNA and still know which proteins to fold based on their specialized function. different types of cells even look very different!
> I see no reasons to help them when it's blatantly obvious they are just fighting for themselves

They're a business, they're supposed to fight for themselves. And the bounty is the reason to help.
Thank you - categories vs. categorise is a great spot!!! Where are the spelling mistakes? I don't see the missing 'the' in the first sentence? Mechanism here is in the abstract, if that's what you're referring to? That said, I've also not slept a lot in the last week...

FWIW, this is the submission to my committee, so I'm now spending the next few weeks meticulously going through to tighten up the grammar, catch typos etc., before it gets officially submitted in June.
> This is why people don't trust you, science.

And instead they go with anecdotal shit like "holy water", "homeopathy", "christian 'science'", etc. which are even more untested.
When I teach biology classes, I emphasize that what I am teaching is an approximation of a much more complicated reality. Simplification is a useful didactic strategy. Students will get more details later if they need them (i.e., in graduate school or reading the original papers).
Ah its probably because you've only seen fighters kicking, boxing, and smashing each other, no? There is one crucial part of MMA you are forgetting: grappling

Grappling is more like chess, you need to make the proper position and holds to execute the next move. At the same time, you must avoid opening yourself to critical locks: kneebar, choke, kimura lock etc. A smart fighter, for example, can render a stronger opponent to submission if he has him on a "kneebar".

One of my favorite fighter is Sakuraba who fights smartly (He comes up with counter-attacks on-the-fly). His fights are entertaining and full of sportsmanship. If you're into it, google Sakuraba vs Gracie family.
Ask HN: What (dissatisfying) products do you spend the most $ on?
Specifically, things that you:

a) Spend lots of money on

b) Have actively sought out alternatives, but failed to find something better [i.e. you don't just talk about your frustration with the product, you've actually spent time or resources looking for an alternative]

I believe this is an interesting question, because if someone spends a lot of $ on something but actively seeks alternatives, it indicates an area that is valuable and with customers actively seeking solutions. Many startups die because their target customers are not dissatisfied enough with their current solutions.

For me: Soylent.

I eat Soylent all the time, but I really wish it was better. If someone made a better Soylent (entirely subjective, I know) I'd buy it. I've purchased ~6 other products trying to find something better but have come up short so far, but I'm not giving up hope.
I'm less susceptible to the lure of sports than most, but I love that sports exist, since they're proof that human beings can create meaning out of thin air quite efficiently, thank you very much - existential dilemma solved. Perhaps there's a way to tie ordinary people's activities into ways to advantage their favorite teams (including in esports), and expand the reach of that conjured significance?
I wonder if this is involved in storing information in the brain.
Yes, I keep a journal for a few key reasons.

One, because without writing them down, my thoughts seem to take on actual weight in my head. Putting them into my journal seems to remove the weight while helping me to sort through things, sort of like talking to myself in real time.

Two, because it helps me to stay practiced with Vim. I started just one single file called journal.md, separated by markdown headers/dates and keep it in a folder that gets backed up instantly (though I'm thinking of moving it to Dropbox so that it also gets versioned in addition to immediate backups).

Three, because it keeps me writing. As someone who is continually writing short stories, it's important to keep the words flowing out of my head, even if I'm not writing about something that happened to someone else, real or imagined.
Why would you call that a personal attack? It's my standard opinion on quotes. I used the same wording used to dismiss them to make the message stand out more.

To paraphrase Chesterton quotes have not been tried and found wanting. They have been tried, found hard to abide to, and been abandoned.
Does anything like this exist for Apache?
The point is that the Hanford site is unrelated to the future use of nuclear for energy production, not that in the past nuclear energy production and nuclear defense have been entwined.
One should post about what happened in Mozilla for the past chaotic 4 years as well, especially for those offices not in the USA. The story is sorrowfully similar.
But couldn't he have done iterative releases instead? Give all the backers more that just a little demo, but a real mini-game that demos the tech and can keep gamers occupied for a few days. Slowly add more onto it?

Or maybe release the game in 3 different parts?

I haven't played any of the demos but it does look like a really impressive game. I probably won't play it as I don't like MMORPGs, but I did really enjoy his earlier work in the Wing Commander series.
The thesis won't be publicly available for a while because there is fair amount of (currently) unpublished data that is associated with various collaborations.
I think the point is that it recognizes their fingerprint, and doesn't mistake it for any of the 999 other users. If it can tell the differences between a thousand fingerprints, why can't it be sensitive enough to reject at least 999/1000 false fingerprints?

Think of it this way: What's the probability that one of the 5 master prints match their specific 1/1000 fingerprint, and not one of the other 999 customers? If you can distinguish between 1000 people, you should be able to distinguish a real from 999 fakes.
But... grid search for number of trees in random forest?
More is always better, just slower (and at some point there is no difference).

Correct me if am a wrong, but this particular optimization looks as waste of (CPU) time.
Oops we had a problem... :/
What type of software will you refuse to develop for ethical reasons?
I cases like [0] where software developers vowed not to create a muslim registry there has been recognition of the responsibility we have as software developers/engineers. What personal lines do you draw? Do you think drawing these "I will not create or use this software" lines help? I personally will not work at a gambling firm due to the damage I see the industry cause in my town.
What? People trust science. If they don't they are morons. Of course sometimes things and long held truths are proven wrong or different from new discoveries but that does not at all hurt science, this is the process.
I funded The Way and it was eventually released.
RMNP has to cull elk because they like hanging out where they can't be hunted and overcrowd the local ecosystems where hunters cannot reach them. They are very intelligent and they know the seasons and the regions where they can be preyed upon by man. You'd think the world was covered in elk the week before rifle season starts, then they go to ground.

I agree traps aren't as humane, that's why we practice our marksmanship with "high powered rifles with optics" so that our shots land true and there is minimal pain and suffering.
The most obvious explanation would be that there's some sort of legal issue with the soundtrack.
That's an interesting story, but can you clarify why you mentioned it? I don't understand the relation to my question.
Duke Nukem Forever did eventually come out.
They never actually "switched engines".

They've been on CryEngine since the beginning. They've heavily customized large portions of it, to the point that I think one of the devs estimated it was only 50% original code left. They also actually bought a full license to the CryEngine source, and stopped taking any real updates from new versions of CryEngine as the codebases diverged.

They did recently announce that they were "switching" to Amazon's Lumberyard engine, but Lumberyard is itself a particular fork of CryEngine. The switch was primarily about branding and sponsorship. CryTek has been having serious financial issues, while Amazon is busy putting resources into Lumberyard. CIG also just switched all their backend cloud computing from GCE to AWS, and I'm sure they're getting a deal on AWS costs as part of the switch from "CryEngine" to "Lumberyard".

If by "titles that fade into the background" you mean the Squadron 42 single-player campaign... yes and no. Yes, they've been deliberately very quiet about that, because as a single-player game they'd like it to actually be meaningfully new and interesting on release. Also yes, backers are getting a bit antsy wondering where SQ42 progress actually stands at this point. However, it's not like they've abandoned development on SQ42.
Sorry, i am little bit confused, you don't need azure cloud or anything to run you ios app inside your visual studio when you developing it?

It iOS vm or it is just deploys to your IPhone from windows?
Lots of companies have high P/E ratios, meaning the investors believe in the future of the company rather than next quarter.
I thought about preempting your post specifically, because every time I mention that I've put investment into the game, someone mentions it. I think if you dig into my post history, you will find about six posts exactly like yours, link to more information included. Let me put it this way: I don't gamble with the rent money. That money is gone, and I'm not counting on a return. This is the way I think when it comes to this kind of thing, because any gains I see are a wonderful surprise. I started changing my psychology when I started going to war in my twenties: As I went out expecting to get hit, it was always a wonderful surprise when we didn't. It's pretty cool how that works for funding Kickstarter projects!
As in, after I wiped, I uninstalled Minecraft, and within 5 minutes it was reinstalling.
This is really exciting! Quick question for you.

Have you experimented at all with using the Apple Watch to measure blood pressure?

I have done some reading that suggests the optical sensor could measure blood pressure with some accuracy, but that Apple is hesitant to release it as a feature due to regulatory and accuracy concerns. It's my #1 wished for feature.
Over the past 17 years there have only been two documented fatalities in North America caused by wolves: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wolf_attacks_on_humans#North_A...

The idea that they will hunt down, stalk and kill humans is laughable. I know first-hand the primal fear one feels when within close proximity to a large predator (I had a scary encounter with a bear myself when hiking in California), but let's not spread FUD.
+1 although an Ubuntu user since it's very first release, i3wm has been my go-to productivity DE for the last 5 years or so. Plus it's multiple-monitor support is superb, much more useful than Unity's
Publish websites directly from Sketch
Ask HN: Who's Got a Bullet-Proof Web Dev Consulting Contract? (USA)
Care to share it?
It should cover "agile" model of Time & Materials and have some terms for a 'retainer' or deposit.

thanks!
Sailboats devote a lot of structure and surface area to propulsion. All that stuff gets in the way of loading and unloading containers.

Also, they're slow.
> This is why people don't trust you, science.

Funny... but I wish that were the case.

Last week when I was picking up my kids from school, I challenged another parent to confirm her bumper sticker's claim that the Earth is flat. Sure enough, she told me to my face that yes, the Earth is flat, that I've "been lied to," and that I should "look into it." I'm still reeling from that.

I happen to know that "religion" is at play in this case, not the critical analysis of conflicting information. Likewise, my uncle, who is a lifelong engineer on the space program (via contractors), still believes very zealously in all sorts of superstition. There's apparently a cottage industry of authors who try to reconcile biblical literalism with contemporary science. Alan Kay talks about this somewhere, how even scientists are prone to ridiculous and unsupportable beliefs.

Right now (and maybe forever?) we have a Zeitgeist where "skepticism" appears to be tied to popular tribal identities, including evangelical Christianity. Despite the above, though, I doubt that anti-science sentiments are actually very widespread. I think we're hearing a lot about it because industries (energy in particular) are using people's distrust of authority and institutions to muddy the waters, so to speak, in public narratives where they see the truth as a threat.
Off the top of my head, the initial month of crowdfunding raised approximately $6.5M, with roughly $2.5M via Kickstarter and $4M via the RSI website.
Fully Convolutional Instance-Aware Semantic Segmentation
>With due respect to the Cardiogram developers (hi guys) as a doctor I really can't see a huge amount of value in this - my patients who present to emergency departments with paroxysmal AF are all anticoagulanted or on rate control and there has only been one instance in the last 3 years and many thousand patients when someone has presented to emergency and we have had to run through the full spectrum of echo -> anticoagulante -> cardiovert.

Isn't this a version of survivorship bias? Who about to those who aren't that lucky to manage to overcome the attack and become patients...
You can't make a domain more complicated by technology choices.

You can make it more technically complicated.
While the article does say that ... eventually, the headline and the first two and a half paragraphs undermine your point.

Since most people won't actually read and digest the full article, but instead go by the headline "That Fingerprint Sensor on Your Phone Is Not as Safe as You Think" and read the first paragraph or so, none of the caveats matter much, people will walk away with the impression that this is a verified fact.
Ok, but this article does not explain that.
This is Alan Kay's best explanation of his "inventing the future" philosophy.

To make trillions the big companies of the world (Apple etc..) have to spend money on big ideas and invent whole new industries.

Apple is sitting on billions of dollars in cash overseas.
People don't trust "science" because people are not taught logic , critical thinking and the idea behind the scientific principle. Instead, people do celebrity worship (even of scientists !!!) and follow abrasive personalities.