skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> Literally everybody else on earth has it worse than you. Grow up and take responsibility for your own situation.

So when I was trying to go to university and my family was too poor to pay my tuition, but I could only apply to <40% of scholarships available because I was white instead of a "minority", that's better off than everybody else? How is "taking responsibility" going to fix that sort of reverse discrimination? Why is it OK for scholarships to focus on poor minorities, but it's not OK for scholarships to focus on poor caucasions?
I think what he's getting at is that you can look at the genome of E. coli, which was sequenced in the nineties, and is one of the most common model systems used in research, but we don't know what the functions of a lot of those genes are. Last time I heard anything about this we had no idea what twenty percent of its genes did. That number may be off by ten to fifteen percent either way, since I haven't read anything on the topic in years, and it's going to depend on the parameters you set for how sure you are about a gene's function.

Keep in mind that this doesn't mean we're completely clueless about how the cell works, just that there's still a lot of work to do.
If I see a piece of code and I think "this code sucks", go back to rewrite it and then realize mid-way that there was a reason they did it that way, the code does suck.

Good programmers leave comments saying "this is ugly because X".
carbocation:

Can you say a word or two about the current view of short reads for re-sequencing? I worked for a time on software for a particular lab to do alignment of short(-ish) reads like 13-bp+gap-of-100-200+7bp+gap-of-5-8+7bp+gap-of-100-200+13-bp. The idea was that you give me millions or more of those reads, and a reference like the human genome, and I give you back all of the alignments including partial matches (a few bp off, here and there).

Interesting programming problem. This aren't the actual bp counts and gap sizes I was working with - they were in that range. I got concerned that the reads we were working with were too ambiguous -- similar to the problem you describe with de novo. I was having trouble doing the combinatorics to prove myself wrong and started asking: hey, where's the mathematical analysis that shows reads of this size can possibly work? Nobody could produce it and this led to some internal strife.

That was a few years back. What's current thinking on what kind of reads plausibly work for re-sequencing? (If you happen to know. And where can I read something about the math that proves it.)
I am not sure why either. Maybe coz of the link. On Cloud.App, it was still set to private at the time of posting

Anyways here is the screenshot again: http://cl.ly/1pjn
Thank you for that reference. Unfortunately, the software is Windows-only, which I don't own... I'll see if I can run it somewhere else, thanks again!
It smells a lot like low confidence

I tend to wear my heart on my sleeve. From endless private conversations and all of the entrepreneurs I'm friends with, I'm somewhere in the middle confidence-wise, but others are better at projecting an image of greater confidence. I'm a humble and extremely introverted engineer and just don't project an image that's either above or below my station. I accept that this is a flaw in certain walks of life, particularly business.

He probably is not because of what he did (he made a good amount of money) but emotionally I still feel like he is an idiot. Weird huh?

Sure, I'm still an idiot in lots of things. There's always more to learn, always more wisdom to extract from situations, always better ways to deal with things.

I think I feel as much uncertainty or intimidation as anyone who tackles difficult work - I'm just not scared to admit my shortcomings. As I said before, I think this might just be a clash in our cultures and approaches to life.

Do you feel the same way about Derek Sivers? He recently wrote about assuming he's always "below average" in things. His thought process is similar to mine: http://sivers.org/below-average
You have a point. But look at the example you provide: meetup.com. It is hopelessly crude. The bad part is that it lets you connect with groups of people (clubs, etc.) rather than actual people. For example, when I enter Go, I get (among tons of unrelated content brought up by uninformed text matching) the Chicago Board Games Club. Cool, but I could have found this using Google (in fact searching for "Chicago go game" in Google turns up many better matches). This is definitely now what I need.

As for your main point: My guess is that you are bonding with these people because you are sharing a common outlook to life, a common way of thinking. This would be hard or impossible to discern automatically using algorithms.
This is interesting, since I've been thinking for a while that your Netflix queue might serve as a decent proxy in tests about whom you might click with (either romantically or just-friends).

If I think of the things my friends and I have in common, of all the aspects of their lives (interests, hobbies, politics, etc) maybe the one where we have most overlap is in the types of movies we like. Maybe this is not supported statistically across the population, but I would be curious to see a study on the correlation between the similarity of two people's Netflix queues and a measure of how much those two people click as friends.

The similarity of the queues is easily quantifiable, but one would have to come up with a quantifiable measure of how much two people click. If they are friends on Facebook, you could see how much they interact: the higher the interact, the higher they click (of course this may not always be the case).
Sure, check it out: http://imgur.com/h6LcL.png
How do you plan to have the audio version of the code snippets?

Some things are just not meant to be in audio.
If the code works and I haven't written the same exact thing myself, the most negative comment I am willing to make is "complicated." At my advanced age, it takes nothing short of a critical system requirement that a piece of code can't possibly meet to rewrite something that works.

The jwz-documented Netscape rewrite debacle is brought to mind by the original posting.
You could have made the same argument in 1989 about MSFT attempting to graft a GUI on top of the PC and DOS, though. They tried it a couple times with Windows 1 and 2 and largely failed, meanwhile Apple made a fresh start with the Mac and has been exciting everyone for five years, clearly MSFT's approach is inherently doomed to failure and they should either develop a brand-new HW/SW system from scratch or give up on GUI OS development and focus on Mac applications.
Recent Android security hype, is just hype.
This is extrapolating from a pretty small data set, and worse, the data set was collected in circumstances different from the ones it's being used to make predictions in. It's quite possible stocks will go up in the 2010s, but the fact that stocks went up in the 1940s after losing a bunch in the 1930s isn't a very good reason to think so--- the pattern is extremely weak, and collected from a data set that isn't nearly big enough to falsify these kinds of pattern inferences.

But nonetheless, you can still do better analysis than these kinds of eyeball-the-chart analyses. Does this prediction of cyclic returns hold up under some attempt to retroactively test it, e.g. via cross-validation?

And of course that's ignoring the bigger problem, that it's quite possible average returns in the 21st century will not be as good as average returns in the 20th century were, making any extrapolation too optimistic.
It's my first time reading it. I didn't get interested in starting a startup until a year ago, and only in the last week did I really start seriously doing it. I'm happy that old articles pop up on HN years after, since I've missed a bunch.
This does seem to be the type of site I asked about in the OP. I'm curious to see how well it does when it launches.
GhostBSD 1.5 Screenshots
This issue is amazing. Even though I check Hacker News almost everyday, I missed out on a lot of gem. Thank you.
I have just finished HM #2 on my 2nd gen kindle. It look gorgeous and it's easy to read even without rotating the screen. I can post some pictures of it somewhere if you need.
Carved from a single pencil ...
My coworker and friend danced for Chris yesterday.

I don't know why but I always find anecdotes about how Reddit got started really fascinating. Perhaps personal interest.
I thought Java had interfaces for public APIs?
People are your #1 security hole. That's been true since... forever? People want to help, especially when the person they're trying to help seems stressed. It takes quite a bit of work to teach people that there should be limits to this in a corporate environment.

I love the contest setup, though. That adds a fun wrinkle to social hacking.
I am a copy-paster. All problems have been "solved", I just have to mash together a working solution for the task at hand.
I was working on something like this a little while ago. I also saw all the competition (sites similar to a site that shows similar sites :)

I wasn't smart enough to do what you did, I was thinking of somehow building the directory by hand, or by turkers, etc

What finally killed my ambitions was sears.com. I reasoned that a similar-site search would only make the big time if the search was perfect, but what is a perfect match for sears.com? truevalue.com? perfumes.com? clothes.com? or another department store like kmart? You descend into category madness.

All those competitors of yours are also latecomers, I remember in the 90's netscape's browser had a pulldown of similar sites built in.

I think its very possible you'll make a few bucks off this if you can get some buzz, but I'm not sure if these similar site searches will ever be a killer app because the problem is so huge.

Oh, I also discovered that if you put the domain you are matching in the URL, like you are doing now, Adsense does a great job at targeting ads.

One more thing, you forgot the bookmarklet! I want to be on a site, click the moreofit bookmarklet, and do a search. But of course you're now in subdomain hell, if they are on secure.shoes.com, do you search secure.shoes.com or or shoes.com?
Also interesting, showing a different trend:
http://www.google.com/trends?q=bootstrapping
http://www.google.com/trends?q=AB+test
He needs to indicate sarcasm explicitly. There are people on the internet so misinformed that nothing is too outrageous for them to believe.
If you were hacking since age 8, it means you were privileged.
PyMT : Open source library for multitouch development
This article is pretty right on some points. Most millionaires are just good earners (but not rich) who live under their financial capacity, and saved over a long time. Because of the compound effect, it is also much more important to save while young. But of course everything is a trade off: a good dinner for networking or a set of new clothes (think you may have to buy a suit to meet your first customer) can produce a positive return.
This whole stock story I found also a bit doubtful. Mint is obviously selling its product ;) But a quite boring fixed interest saving plan would do the same effect, probably with less return but with more security.
"Never Trust Spiritual Leader Who Cannot Dance."
I think most people do, just unconsciously. We don't keep a mental check-list going in our head. But if after interacting with a person for a while, we can say "I dunno, something about him just rubbed me the wrong way," then they failed an item on our implicit list we may not be conscious of.
One reason to not want a lead investor is because you can't find one. Sometimes you'll get a lot of verbal confirmations, but no one deal champion... so why wait for a lead, just take the money and move on.
Posted two days ago, with many, many comments:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1558165
You don’t call them to complain, you call them to get information. If they are unable to provide you with that information they suck and you can write in your article that Apple declined to comment. It’s as easy as that.

As is this article is pretty much worthless. No information, only an anecdote.
I think facebook will make billions on this. Basically facebook will have the ability to track all your interactions in the facebook environment and develop good intelligence of your consumer preferences.

Facebook will then create a targeted ad platform that utilizes this intelligence. Advertisers will pay good money for better targeting.

Targeted online ad market is huge.

This is facebooks way of delivering targeted ads vs googles targeted ad method, of pairing ads with search terms.

The competitive advantage facebook has is that it's hard for a competitor to copy and replicate the same ad network and get the same amount of consumer intellligence. The competitor in essence has to create a hugely successful and popular social network and get people to interact/ share a lot on it before they can even think of competing with facebook.

Facebook wants you to share and connect with people because the more you do the more information they can use.

Facebook is sitting on a goldmine.
Okay it boots to GNOME, that's always a start... for the uninitiated, what is GhostBSD, how is different from *BSDs, and why would anyone want to go through a "tough" install to use it?
True. Listening to 4-Hour Work Week now and the msnbc article paths are killing me..."h t t p colon forward slash forward slash m s n b c..." + guids galor, haha. So they'd definitely need to weed out unreadable portions, but I think I would still find a lot of value in it. :)
you don't like http://shirtlessfriends.com ?
Stem Cell Trial Wins Approval of F.D.A.
I wouldn't mind seeing a few pictures, especially of the more visual pages like the pictures leading into the articles, some of the ads, etc.

But I can also just take your word for it if you don't feel like taking and posting pictures.
The article's author seems to invert the relationship the designer has with their customer.
I find it's better to pull a small amount of cash ($200) for a week or two to cover lunches, little things, and is always handy when I'm out with a group.

People who never carry cash are a social nuisance: they often slow down the queue at convenience stores and are always awkward splitting the check.
Good programmers don't go rewriting code without understanding what and why it is doing what it is doing.

Bad programmers will always have a reason to call everyone else a bad programmer, because that's the easiest excuse for sucking.
"If my car is seen leaving the scene of an accident, can I be sued for damages because the car is registered to me even though everyone in the family uses it?"

Yes. You'd defend yourself by providing evidence as to who was actually driving it at the time. So, for instance, if your car is seen fleeing the scene of an accident, but you reported it stolen the day before, you would have a defense. Or if your sister admitted to driving your car, but then she'd be on the hook.

"It seems they need SOMETHING that ties it to me. What if it was my sister?"

There is: you're the account holder for the broadband account that was downloading the movie. That is something. And it doesn't link several other people 'to the same degree'. If you have logs on your router that how it was your sister's computer on the router that was uploading the movie, then so be it.

"It seems at most they could use the IP to get a search warrant and look through the computers to try to find some actual evidence."

This is what they will do if you don't settle.

"Besides, is it really a crime to download a movie when they don't know if any of it was actually saved?"

This is why people should not play lawyer: the charges (for every instance I'm aware of, and certainly the popular USCG cases) are for illegal distribution, not illegal download.
I think I know the difference between fmora and me. I forgot the article's title (I'm an idiot) before reading the article, so everything I read came off as a lot of honest introspection. Just like with Derek Sivers' article.

On the other hand, it seems to me that others, who go into the article with the idea that it's going to be a lot of low-confidence self-pity type statements, approach it with a different attitude.

Obviously I can't speak for fmora or anyone else, but the impression I get from his statements make me think the title of the article is the main sticking point; taking it too literally colors the rest of the article in a much more negative light. On that note, Derek's article is titled in a "better" way, since saying "I'm below average" has nowhere near the negative undertones that saying "I'm an idiot" has.

fmora - Would you agree with what I'm saying? Or am I misinterpreting?
Hi Kevin! Glad somebody else has a shared interest in this problem.

Sears.com is a very difficult problem to solve. The "category madness" you bring up certainly is a very good point, and I rely on the wisdom of crowds to mitigate this issue. After a site has been tagged thousands of times, I'm assuming that the unique description of the site is pretty good. However, there is a slight "snowball effect" present with my dataset (delicious): When a URL is first tagged, those tags are suggested to all future people who bookmark it, causing the initial set of tags to have more bias.

At any rate, back to sears.com. The current matches now are all stores, but they're not at specific as you suggest they could be. Moreofit offers a "tag filter" feature, and a tag signature matching feature for this occasion. Of course, it all depends on the user being savvy enough to use these things.

On moreofit, you can specify tags and how important they are for your search.

Try these results to see what I mean: http://bit.ly/cVXgED

I agree that it will never be a "killer app," however, I do think it pretty useful and a preliminary search on Google shows a lot of interest in searches for "sites like chatroulette" and "sites like XXX". I'm hoping to serve those customers' needs.

The bookmarklet is coming soon -- and subdomain hell isn't a big issue -- search the subdomain first, if no matches, then the main domain.
with parallel computing becoming all the rage, i wonder why the makers of Perl 6 did not focus on it?
Facebook's fuckup is not to have some sort of anti-scraping system running. If they'd limited the number of public-facing profile views to 100 a day per IP address then this would have taken 41,666 days for one IP address (obviously you'd use more, but it illustrates the point).
Looks like an interesting gadget but I'm not sure that it really works for me. My handwriting is shite and my typing, while not always accurate, is pretty fast. I like the relative portability though.
I like Apple's method: the 10 to 3 to 1 design winnowing/crossfertilization seems to end up with great products. (If only they'd done that with iTunes).

Porting that method to open source is a little problematical. You need a great curator/BDFL.
Your blog theme sucks.
Starting a business is the second thing you have to do
There is another reason code sucks though, besides being over complicated: Redundant logic and/or not abstracted enough. Sometimes the person was just getting things done and abstracting the logic for reusability wouldn't be necessary in the long run because it was a prototype etc... However, the vast majority of the time I find that taking out redundancy in my code speeds up development not only later on but for the initial release.
This is why we put comments there. Personally, I put comments so future me will remember what the heck I was thinking when I wrote it.

That said, there's no doubt there's code that definitely sucks. Some of it is mine, too. If I wrote it last year, it sucks. If I wrote it yesterday, it's really great. You can really see how much I've learned in a year when you compare it with my previous sample. At least if I have to rewrite the old code, I'll know what traps and special scenarios I need to watch for if I properly commented it.
Nice patchwork magazine. Thanks.
Record Efficiency for Lithium-Air Batteries
M-1 M-q: justifies text, adding spaces between words.
"The corporate secrets are things anybody who's ever walked into the building could determine."

If you work in a security conscious business then no unaccompanied persons have access to computers; you can't walk in and sit at the desk and determine what computer platforms are being used, say, in the finance section.

Also they're getting people to visit a particular site of their choosing - allowing the "right" combination of software to be dropped some malware (eg open the pdf coupon and print it).

Where do you work that someone can walk in and install software on your computers without being challenged? ("things anybody who's ever walked into the building could [do]").
Toyota Recall Might Be Caused by Cosmic Rays
Aw man. Is there video of it??
Interesting article, and some really nifty graphs, but stay away from the comments section.

More seriously, could someone with a bit of experience in this sort of thing speak to the actual import of these patterns? It's not entirely obvious whether or not there are shenanigans at work.
falters after attending yet another pointless big company Dilbertian meeting

Really? It's those mind-numbing, pointless time wasters that increase my drive to go out on my own! Bring on the meetings: it just increases motivation.

Maybe my startup should build a tool for better meetings :-)
Facebook | Friends
And many college students would be blocked from Facebook... even if you increased the number to 1000 :)
Becoming Cyborg
>They made consumers re-purchase music

How many people actually bought PlaysForSure music? I don't really see how that's a huge deal. You could still use all of your existing MP3s, DRM-free AAC music from iTunes, and WMA files from Windows.

>it was widely considered to be hobbled with DRM.

Here I definitely think that's the anti-Microsoft spin machine at work. The problem with the beaming feature is that no one owned a Zune, so it was useless. If it had more market penetration, it could get really interesting. But people don't want to believe that anything coming out of Microsoft can get better, so the reviews said it sucked.

>it's reported that the entire iPod development process ... only took 18 months

Pro-Apple spin machine at work.
Lucky, yes, but not privileged. The plethora of stories listed here, to which my own could be added, show that we were just lucky to get hold of computers so young.
Don't know about the stock thing, but finding a cheap city to live in (Pittsburgh being one) and living like you're a poor college student is definitely one way to save a crapload of money. What some people earn and spend in a year will probably last me 3-4 years if not more.
What's interesting is that I can use the website to find websites similar to itself.. or, wait a minute, can I? :)
I was working on updating a backup script, and it had the same function written ten times, with no arguments, entirely for the purpose of calling it. No closures, just pointless repetition.

Also, about half the lines of the script was other very similar blocks of code that had been commented out.
Ask HN: Does a potential founders financial history or credit rating matter?
I have a friend who is considering a 'strategic default' on his home. He is a software developer who I think will eventually try his hand at a start-up, most likely through the y-combinator/tech-stars type approach.

It got me wondering if this could potentially back-fire on him in the longrun because I know part of his plan is to relocate to the bay area once the rubble settles.

My question is this - if you are a potential business partner would you hold this against him? What if you were a vc/angle and he pitched his start-up idea? Does this affect his credibility or tarnish him or the idea in any way?