skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Yep, so Linux is the right choice for you based on your immediate environment (but there was no way for the first poster to know that :-) )

No idea about that package, but there is BioPython (http://biopython.org) so that's a possibility.

My usual advice for learning a language is to get the "plumbing" first. You don't even need to understand exactly what's happening at this stage, but learn to say parse command line arguments, read and write a disk file, connect to a database, open or listen on a socket, that sort of thing. You can just cut and paste code to do this at this stage. This gives you a framework for "doing stuff". Then it's just a matter of identifying a problem and gradually working your way towards a solution. E.g. if you wanted to read a file, do some computation, then store the result, you could concentrate on the interesting part. You'll learn how the plumbing actually works by osmosis as you go along.

If I could give some advice to my younger self, and he was programming in a vaccuum, I'd have said start with ML.
There may be some bias in the Reddit thread, which is admittedly slanted toward sofware/tech startups, but I also draw on some other sources. The book "The Millionaire Mind," Thomas Stanley looked at a variety of wealthy people and found that many who accumulated wealth did so through their own (often mundane) businesses. Others were those with high-income jobs and enough sense to invest wisely.

The Forbes list also seems to contain those who largely built or somehow own (through purchase, birth or connections) business equity.

My personal experience confirms this. Those I know who seem to have legitimate wealth are a junkyard owner, a used tire store owner, an owner of an electrician outfit, an owner of a financial services company, and a couple of doctors who've invested well. Oh, and a retired NFL player who also didn't blow his cash while he played.

There is luck in getting a new business to take off, for sure. I'm not trying to downplay the risks, but I am trying to show that there is a key to how those that made it did so.

One could also have born to Sam Walton or a Hilton or something like that. But keep in mind that those parents made their wealth building businesses.

If someone knows of a better way to do it, or other ways, I'm all ears. Winning the lottery works for so few, that I'm inclined to consider it negligible.
He had nothing to do with the Stalingrad breakthrough, and he wasted two whole tank armies in Berlin because he was too daft to see that narrow, barricaded and rubble-filled streets are not the best place for tanks. Such a great guy.

Excusing the Russians' war atrocities simply because they beat the Germans is quite like picking the frying pan instead of the fire - they are both very bad, just one is somewhat worse than the other. (Then again, I'm from the Baltic states, where we were actually stuck with the Russians until 1990, so I am probably biased.)

Did the Nazis have long distance bombers that could actually destroy the industrial complexes in Ural or further to the East? I am not aware of any.
USPTO crowdsources patent reviews
How A 16-Year-Old Launched Mac Bundle Box And Made His First Million In Sales
Protein folding is suspected to be an NP-complete problem <http://www.liebertonline.com/doi/abs/10.1089/cmb.1998.5.27 >, so it seems to me that having reason to believe it will someday be solved equals having reason to believe that someday NP-complete problems can be computed in polynomial time. Alternatively, you might hope for a domain-specific approximative algorithm, but this seems tricky, too, since mis-folded proteins can end up as really bad stuff, e.g. prions <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prion >.
If you follow a long transmission line you will see several pylon designs depending on terrain, river crossings, highways, and the like. Pylon design is a well understood engineering problem with lots of software to over-engineer the designs. And yes they will need a reasonable inspection schedule as do all transmission lines.
Mint also forces me to give them my account info. I don't even let my Quicken copy talk to the web (disconnected VM), let alone give all my account info to a 3rd party for storage and use.
I'm sure I'm just being irrational, but that terrifies me.
We liked freshbooks more than quickbooks, so I can say that it's a nice product.

But right now, I'm a big fan of what's going on over at Less Accounting. I think he's on the right track to the perfect small business solution. And the support level is unreal.
After studying planet earth for a considerable time the aliens concluded that the way to get rich there is to send lots of white shirts to the laundry.
Why do Startups Fear their Idea?
Having liabilities doesn't mean that there isn't going to be any kind of investment in the country. And thanks to Iceland's unique geothermal situation, especially with hydroelectricity the power industry is thriving there ... (attracting i.e. energy intensive aluminium plants)
By blogging regularly, you invite people to pay attention to you. It seems natural then that you would want to carve out a private "don't look at me" space on the internet.

Most people don't have this problem, though, because most other people don't care about them. They don't need to carve out a private space on the internet because no one is paying attention anyway.

Personally, I share very little on Facebook because my Facebook social network is very close to my actual social network. My actual social network is quite varied, and there's little I have to say that is appropriate to every person I know.
That's a hilariously small sample size for a 'model'.
We wrote a an entire 7-part series on how to sell ads online. The main points were

1. Have an outstanding product (i.e. audience) to sell.
2. Hire a dedicated sales person.
3. Provide a self service ad management system.
4. Show detailed traffic statistics.
5. Sell exclusivity.
6. Let the market determine the price via an auction.
7. Simplify the advertising process.

Give it a read - http://www.trafficspaces.com/blog/2009/12/16/how-to-sell-ads...
Not that I'm a finance expert, but I'm uncomfortable with an indicator the parameters of which were optimized by backtesting half a century ago.

On the other hand, a confirmed Hindenburg Omen signal occurred on Jun 16th 2008, which would be a timely warning for the following events. On yet another hand, no word on how many such confirmed signals were false alarms historically.
I see it as an upper bound for the Kolmogorov Complexity of the brains structure. I am very dubious that the first successful attempts at doing this will be as efficient as the genetic code though...
Google and the Myth of Free Time
I am not a CL expert, but I was able to whip this up in short time (and I sacrificed a little readability for brevity):

(defun set-hash-values (hash pairs)
(when pairs
(setf (gethash (car pairs) hash) (cadr pairs))
(set-hash-values hash (cddr pairs))))

(defun in-place-hash (stream char)
(declare (ignore char))
`(let ((hash (make-hash-table)))
(set-hash-values hash ',(read-delimited-list #\} stream t))
hash))

(set-macro-character #\{ #'in-place-hash)
(set-syntax-from-char #\} #\))

But to be honest, I think this {} stuff is an abuse of the hash structure. People are really looking to make quick anonymous classes/structs; you see this all the time in the perl world, and now we get to see this abuse promoted and propagated in Clojure. In that case, {} should really translate to a MOP-generated anonymous class.

Also, you are stuck with the decision some developer made for your hash's efficiency trade-offs. In my reader macro, I left things at make-hash-table defaults, but that might not be appropriate for your situation. Do you want to be able to read quickly from your hash in exchange for slow writes, or do you want to be able to write quickly to the hash in exchange for slow reads?

On another note, the [] vector reader macro is much easier to create. I just wanted to prove to myself that I could write {}. But this additional syntax is annoying. In practice when programming Lisp, it is easy to slap in a bunch of ))))) until the right alternate parentheses highlights. Now I have to remember to slap in ] and } at the right spots, leaving me with )]}]]}})) noise. Maybe that is why CL's in-place vector syntax is #().

Anyway, I would hesitate to call {} and [] an innovation.
I guess this is RIM's version of Windows Mobile 6.5...nothing spectacular, just more of the same thing we've seen for the last few years. Meanwhile iOS and Android continue to improve by leaps and bounds every year. It just doesn't make sense to take the plunge for 2 more years on a contract and be stuck with what already feels like a dated phone, and miss out on iPhones 6 and 7 and Android 3.0+ phones.
Well, this article addresses a specific point which Kurzweil is making and says that what Kurzweil said is simply wrong, not just hard.
I should print this post in a booklet and hand it to all my new potential clients...
I have not, but the table of contents sure looks interesting. Am I right that they don't do lambda lifting / closure immediately? They seem to have a lot of optimizations working on lambda expressions, and also optimizations working on records. By lambda lifting immediately I am hoping that the optimizations on records can take care of (some of) the lambda-optimizations.
Kurzweil has written enough by now that anyone hearing his interviews should be able to put his ideas in the context of his predictions about the Singularity. I have always thought Kurzweil hedges his bets quite well, and he makes it quite clear that the capabilities about which he writes depend on future gains in computing power. Kurzweil is only human, of course, and it is well known that he is trying to extend his own life so that he will be here for the Singularity. He very much wants the things he predicts to happen in his lifetime, but I don't hear or read him as asserting that that will absolutely be the case.
Myers' unnecessary "refutation" (and insulting) of Kurzweil reminds me of the reactions to the Segway. Kamen predicted that it would revolutionize transportation; naysayers then piled on, ridiculing him and saying that the Segway wouldn't work for commuting long distances on American super highways. Well, no, but that's not what he meant by revolutionizing transportation. I'm sure Myers is probably good at what he does, and he is very much concerned with the now and the practical. We need people like him, and we also need visionaries like Kurzweil and Kamen who look ahead decades or centuries.
We're probably thinking of very different things.

By learning I meant learning every aspect of launching a startup, including customer development, sales, marketing, SEO, etc. If your role in the startup was limited to programming, then I'd take a very jaundiced view of the state of affairs.

And by no means would sacrificing relationships and health compensate for even this.
@tokenadult that's some good shit. :)

This is slightly off-topic, but here goes anyway. I've long had an issue with the huge disparity between what humanities/arts people (including the large majority of the press) know about science, and what scientists know about the arts and humanities. Most scientists I know are more than able to hold their own in a conversation about, say, a good book, but 99% of everyone else I've ever met doesn't know/want to know the second law of thermodynamics.

I'm not pointing fingers here, I just think there's a serious lack of communication between arts and sciences. I think it's partly this lack of general scientific knowledge that makes the humanities/arts dominated world of the press believe pretty much anything a scientist says. And then, to make a good story into a great one, it's blown out of proportion. Ho hum.
Apple has never needed to cut the price of the iPhone in half like that. ... Oh wait. remembers 2007
This strikes me as very similar to a Mandelbrot fractal. The fractal is overwhelmingly complex and intricate, but wholly mathematically described by a very simple formula. The complexity of the brain is similar: A few simple cells and proteins can interact in extraordinarily complex ways.

Some biologists understand this just fine, thank you very much.
"Calling him a Deepak Chopra is just stupid"

That's not much of an argument. He plays on the standard things that all religions play on: the promise of some form of immortality, which instinctively plays on the fear of death; claims that the near future will be radically different than the present; etc. His extrapolations of exponential growth are not entirely unfounded but he applies the same logic to everything that suits his fancy without taking into account that science and technology have made large but halting steps forward throughout history, and the fundamentals of scientific insight and discovery haven't changed. He talks and sounds like an evangelical to me. No doubt he is a brilliant scientist but that doesn't warrant the cult of personality that has grown up around him, which I perceive as a dangerous thing contrary to the aims of science.
But even looking at it in an information-theoretic way, what is being stated is that the instruction set is far more powerful than the binary analogy Kurzweil is using. The instruction I give: "Cure Cancer" has 11 bytes. But that instruction implies a ridiculously complicated set of sequences that we haven't figured out yet.

In this situation, look at the genome as the instruction set for protein construction and folding, an ongoing problem in research we have just begun to investigate. The information contained in the genome is combinatorially descriptive and therefore not as simple as made out to be, if you define information as the amount of "surprise" in the outcome.
Will Apple Produce An HDTV In 2-4 Years? No Way
It can be argued that Apple eventually dominates in every consumer electronic market it enters. I’m sure I don’t need to point out the history of iPod, iPhone, and iPad. They are market leaders. However, the one exception is with the Apple TV. It didn’t exactly flop, but the media streamer is far from the blockbuster hit of its iDevice brothers. That may...
> I'm not so sure about the simulation, but Ray's right that the brain cannot be more complex than the data that specifies it

Which would be true if the DNA specification for that particular part of the body was the only part of what specifies the brain. Myers is pointing out that assertion is patently false. The environment of developing creature and the interactions between cell types and their environment (and themselves) is a giant information content multiplier, and the DNA need not explicitly specify any of this information for it to exist and be relevant.

Bringing this to a familiar compsci example; imagine software for creating neural net recognizers. You can look at the source code for a net and say, "This will take N inputs and produce N outputs" You can look at a finished classifier and say, "Ah, I see what this does! It tells the airbags in this car when to deploy!" But that's as far as you can go without the training data that was used to train the classifier. This is a doubly good example because it's often very difficult to determine HOW a complex neural net is doing what it does, but it's fairly easy to explain how to train one to do that task.
That's true, there might be opportunities beyond just supplementing Dropbox's service. Thanks!
I think it's unusual, but if your startup is in the same field as your non-tech nursing job, you have the fantastic advantage of domain knowledge - you actually know the problems and frustrations of the field; and you can also speak its language so you can communicate with people in it.
Google's Rich Miner on Why Android's Timing Was Perfect
I should have mentioned, but I am looking for a solution that scales. I've checked out freshbooks before, and I think that it would be easy to outgrow. Plus, I am not just looking to invoice clients...I want to keep track of all of our finances.

I will however check out Less Accounting.
> The design of the brain is in the genome.

Given how much computation takes to "decompress" information about what a protein is built of into 3d layout of that protein (vide folding@home), statement that you could "decode" half of the genome into working simulated system is bold to say the least.

Trouble with simulating human 1 to 1 is not with how complex human itself is but with how complex, bizzare and computationally powerful is physical hardware on which program "be human" runs.
Adding kinetic energies is well defined, but adding averages is not.
Review HN: my first essay "Thoughts on learning and programming for Hackers"
Rumors of new 7-inch iPad from Apple persist
Is this sort of like having a pre-processor and system code to get a program loaded, linked and running?
Dogs improve productivity in the office
Next Montreal
The problem with the 20 percent policy is that it's likely to generate a great deal of activity on the idea side of innovation and very little on the execution side -- the other side

There are hundreds or thousands of these projects going on. The ones that become hits transition over into mainstream projects, like Gmail, Google News, Google Talk, Orkut, where they get more resources.
Computers are commodity items.
This is great that someone is trying to commoditize the space of usability testing.

I wonder, though, if target market exists? This is what article says they are going after "give small Web publishers and e-retailers access insights into the performance of their own websites that only bigger Web companies could afford up to now". Do the small guys really want it, and are they able to utilize this?

In cursory look I found that A/B testing - a technique that is easier to implement, easier to interpret results, and more immediately impactful - is scarcely used outside large shops and the few tech-savvy startups. If adoption of A/B testing is as low as it seems, is there hope for eye-tracking?

Inquiring minds want to know.
I'm not sure you could characterize those questions as measuring "interest beyond 9-5". I think they are actually just ticking off the boxes "candidate spent at least 10 minutes effort into prepping for interviews [Y/N]".

There are many big bank interview guides, all of which tell you "look up the DOW/NASDAQ/S&P open/close before the interview" (not to mention share price of the company you are interviewing at). At one point I interviewed at a big bank, and many questions I got were stolen right out of this book: http://www.amazon.com/Heard-Street-Quantitative-Questions-In...
Labeling Lessons From Wegman’s
I suspect those numbers include biotech, where single founder startups are more common because they're often spinoffs of research projects with a single principal investigator.
I keep meaning to practice some drawing. I'm half serious about that.

One of my personal heroes is this guy:

http://www.timhunkin.com/

That Randall Munroe is also a personal hero probably goes without saying at this point.
You too can maximize your output of greenhouse gases.

Edit: Changed from "impact on the ozone layer".
You're right, of course. I was just surprised to see naysaying on a site that has such a strong startup vibe.

To the startup side of HN, this article is just another "me too" piled on top of dozens of copies of itself every month

True. I liked it, though. I thought it was well-worded and somewhat inspiring. Certainly I'd thought of a lot of this stuff before, and seen it here. With the current economic tornado, though, some of us were unconsciously beginning to lose hope and faith -- myself, at least. Reading about how this guy keeps at it after his kids had gone to bed: that was encouraging and inspiring. I have one kid. If he can do it ...
If defense spending keeps the dollar strong, it is the definition of an investment. What word would you prefer used to describe the US' empire building/maintaining, and why?

Even today, during two active wars, if you look through the appropriations bills you'll find that a surprisingly large amount of US defense spending is not spent on violence. Back in the cold war, the proportion spent on maintaining that detente was even greater.
I agree, don't dismiss design lightly.

I learned from industrial designers at Black & Decker that form can enhance and suggest function.

Just changing the shape of a cordless vacuum cleaner changed peoples impression from "This is a shitty, low-powered vacuum cleaner" to "This is a terrific powered dustpan"

http://www.blackanddecker.com/dustbuster/dustbuster_innovati...

Just changing the outside shape - with no change in product specs. - made the DustBuster into one of the highest selling Black & Decker products ever.
Google v. Google?

http://www.google.com/robots.txt
One of the most useful things you could do at this stage is go write a lexer to split some input file up into lexemes / tokens.

As an example, think splitting a CSV file up into numbers, strings, separators and newlines. If you get this right, think how easy it would be just to parse this data into a simple data structure and generate SQL to spit it into a db.

Right there, in that one lexing module, you've probably taken the single largest step towards accomplishing the tasks that Steve Yegge talks about.

Of course there are tools to generate lexers, but if you're learning something, not much beats getting your hands dirty with real code.
I watched Dirty Harry and I know how to write in cursive. I also remember a time we didn't have cable.

I have not gotten a cellphone until this year! It was not a smartphone either.

I am old fashioned, but I was only born in 1991.(And I just attend my first class at college yesterday)

But don't worry, I am ahead experimenting with technologies that the HN crowds or the college crowd care not or think that I am on crack.
I'm a life-long programmer who presently works in software, but I studied biology in college... mostly because I wanted to learn about learning by studying how living systems do it.

Biological systems are nothing like anything we would ever engineer, and to understand them we must remove our "anthropocentric engineer goggles" and look at them for what they are. Analogies between biological systems and computers, software, machines, etc. are very loose analogies meant to illustrate a point. Never take these analogies too seriously.

DNA is not a program-- it is a molecule, and one that may very well do things at the quantum level that are biologically important.

The brain is not a neural network. It is an interconnected colony of living cells of a variety of types, and it has been shown that all types of cells in the brain are involved in cognition.

We are nowhere near anything with the parallelism or information density of the brain. Getting close would take an advancement in computer technology of the magnitude of the transition from vacuum tubes in individual boxes to a 32nm Core i7. Nature has had billions of years, and it is way ahead of us. There's a nascent field called quantum biology that suggests that the brain may very well be a quantum computer, so maybe quantum computers are the vacuum tubes->ICs scale transition I am speaking of.

I think it's now possible with a big rack of multi-core machines in an MPI cluster to approach the capabilities of a fruit fly's brain.

Cells are not machines. I don't think we have the language to really describe what they are perfectly, but the closest I can come is "stochastic quantum probability field device." A bacterial flagellum is not a "motor," it is a quantum-scale chemo-electro-motive... well... our language breaks down. Like Feynman said, don't tell stories. Just speak literally and then use math.

Actually, come to think of it, there's one engineering analogy that might work for biology. Biology is quantum-scale nanotechnology. Yeah, that's pretty close.

(On a related tangent, I've found that many engineers are sympathetic to intelligent design type arguments against evolution. This is because they try to think about biology like engineers and take these machine analogies literally. It just doesn't work like that.)