skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Collecting stool is one of the main data gathering tools for the gut microbiome. For the this study, the portion that studied inflammatory bowel disease relied on 1,785 stool samples (self-collected and sent by mail every two weeks) for the temporal period.

Now, they did get intestinal biopsies at baseline and took quarterly blood draws so it's not exclusively stool based data.

However, recent work from Dr. Mark Pimenthal's lab at Cedars Sinai says something that could shake this data to its core:

"The gut microbiome is NOT represented by stool! The longest segment of the gut (20 ft of small bowel) is completely different."

They haven't released a paper yet, this was on a poster at a recent seminar, but if true, it could have huge implications for just about all of the gut microbiome research out there today as it uses stool samples as the workhorse for data collection and analysis.

This is still a nascent field and one I have experience in myself.

I saw first hand while at a biosciences startup how the tests we were using for stool samples of the microbiome were statistically unreliable calling in to question the validity as well.

After researching other labs practices at the time, it left me questioning the best practices of the day as well as the worth of the data being collected and reported.

Combining what I have seen personally combined with the implications of Dr. Pimenthal's lab's research and I have to wonder if there is any reliable and valid data out there on the gut microbiome yet.
The backlash has been happening for awhile now. Lots of concerns about google in the last couple years.
And of course, your code base will end up riddled with those untested, undocumented customizations. People getting into it will hate you for it, and you will look at them with a smug face, stating how they don't get the power of a true language.

There is a reason Lisp based languages are not more popular: most people don't want to learn a new language every time they work on a new project.
Very cool. I will have to read through your implementation which seems tractably small enough that I can actually find stuff in it (unlike some of the bigger projects). This is pretty much how my superoptimizer works too. I'm very anxious that I'm doing something flagrantly stupid as I sort of half-read a few research papers and then went off to build something which worked...
> Chrome and Firefox on Android. They are both worse than Safari on iOS

I realize that this is subjective, but Firefox Focus has been my preferred mobile browser, regardless of if I have Safari available, (iPad), or not, (Android). In fact having desktop addons on Android has been great.
>Schools do not exhibit any of these characteristics.

This isn't a metaphor. Schools exhibit all of those characteristics. By your own definitions:

* People are placed there involuntarily.

Private and homeschooling is an edge case, but a red herring at that: it's nearly never the kid's choice as to which school they will go to, and (in some jurisdictions) they'll be hunted down and forcefully returned if they skip, in exceptional cases by men with guns. That's what "placed there involuntarily" means.

* Their freedom of movement is confined to the prison at all times (sometimes people serve prison on weekends, so I guess that's an edge case).

School rules generally prohibit leaving and punish violations with further confinement to the school if this rule is violated. High schools are slightly more relaxed about this but attendance is still enforced, in the more extreme cases by sending a man with a gun to apprehend you and return you to school. Again, exactly like a prison; the only reason students aren't locked in is because doing that would break fire codes.

* They are put there because they are criminals (or political prisoners, in the case of corrupt countries).

They are put there because, exactly like criminals and political prisoners, Society has decided that until a certain age they are not people and we can (mis)treat them however we wish. This isn't to make a judgment of whether or not this view is correct; but if you define "person" as a being that has the capacity to question and protest its station in life there are many "persons" held without cause in that underclass.

* They are intended as either punitive measure or because we decide society is not safe if certain people are allowed outside of prison.

We decided that the subsection of society that students comprise are not safe if they are allowed outside of school (and to the point that a lack of public schooling would affect literacy rates and the ability to participate in civil society, we're right).

Identical justifications are used to imprison political prisoners. "The purpose is not punitive, it's educational." is how their imprisonment and treatment are typically justified, too.
I've made more than $5000 (each) from three books (two self-published, one '1st tier'). I don't think it's that rare, or maybe I"m lucky.

Agree on the minimum wage comment, though. I did it for career progression, personal life goals, and passive income.
What exactly are you doing?
My team has been using Clojure for close to a decade, and we found the opposite to be the case. While the pool of applicants is smaller, so is the noise ratio. Clojure being niche means that you get people who are willing to look outside the mainstream, and are typically genuinely interested in programming.

We also rarely hire devs who already know Clojure, and we typically just train on the job. It's really not hard to do when you already have people who know the language on the team. In fact, if somebody can't learn Clojure, I would question if they can learn to work on a large project in general. Dev practices, architecture, code styles, tooling, and so on tends to change quite a bit from company to company. The language is only small part of that.

In case of Storm, Apache commons is run by Java devs who have zero interest in learning Clojure. So, it's not surprising they would rewrite Storm in their preferred language.
> Of course this is mostly fantasy. I don't think we'll see gun-carry in the West any time soon. ...

What part of the West are you talking about? It's super common in vast swathes of the US.
Sure. But complex if/else logic, like I said, is often a code smell that indicates that the behavior might be better off abstracted out to a polymorphic entity of whatever sort is idiomatic in your language. There are a lot of "If statement considered harmful" style articles on the web, but I can't seem to find the specific one I had in mind :/
Not really true, you have a problem of toxic gases being released.[1] For my latest safety training in the maritime industry the handling of lithium battery fires was essentially put yourself upwind and let it burn it self out to prevent any exposure.

The conclusion from the paper is important:

"Using water mist resulted in a temporarily increased production rate of HF but the application of water mist had no significant effect on the total amount of released HF."

Though presumably, submerging the car would help by solving the fumes in the water creating hydroflouric acid instead.

[1]: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-017-09784-z
Then you learned something, I guess ("solving is hard"). I see a lot of timeouts with mine. Mine is 'easy' in that I'm looking for SIMD programs so the domain is essentially u8 "in lane only" SIMD code, so the small bit-width makes life easier.
It seems a bit rough that you're getting downvotes. [Edit: The parent was grey when I wrote this].

AF447 seems like a pretty important case study for figuring out where to put the balance of trust. Along with the very final stage of Aeroflot 593 (after the child had left the seat), also mentioned.

There's a few more: Colgan Air 3407, AirAsia 8501, Korean 501, etc, where flight crew ignored or overrode systems. Which is not to deny that in the majority of cases the flight crew are the best judge of what is needed, just that one surely has to look critically and honestly at counter examples.

There is of course also Germanwings 9525, though as the GP implies, systems protecting against malicious piloting will probably be counter-productive.
Actually, it's far more muted than the backlash against Microsoft was, in public as well as by government officials. The memes were far more mainstream in nature [1]. Hell, even my non tech-savvy parents were aware of it and worried by it. In fact, Chrome's success owes a lot to the public backlash and antitrust lawsuits against Microsoft.

[1] http://www.tjscafe.com/tjs/gallery/billborg.htm
Why do we need Knowledge Management?
> Even if they deploy an ineffective version in 12 months, in 240 months they might have effective hardware.

Provided they can still borrow money to fund operations.
See the noprocrast option in your HN user profile to have the site help enforce discipline in that regard.
Yeah, but the conspiracy to carry it out would need to be absurdly large.
My favorite ideas for web apps in 2019
Pony 0.28.1 Released
Amazon could face heightened antitrust scrutiny under new agreement
Cloud Contingency via restic.

https://revenni.com/cloud-contingency-when-the-ban-hammer-dr...
You underestimate this treat model. We know from the history that if votes can be checked, the misuse will increase.

* In traditional families women will effectively lose their vote.

* Vote buying becomes possible.

* fellow party or church members start to check the votes.

The ability to use smartphones to take pictures in ballot box is already threatening secret ballot. Let's remove secret ballot so that we can have secret ballot is not valid solution.
Exactly this. I wonder how many people who claim to live by “biblical principals” actually have read parts of the Old Testament and some of the rules contained there?
'Consent condoms' need four hands to open the box
It's been really interesting watching the evolution of use cases for Workers.

I would put them into three broader categories:
1. Additional functionality built on Workers: the interesting thing with Workers is that it can be a standalone function, or it can act as a proxy. That means that customers can easily add new functionality on top of existing APIs for example, without having to migrate the whole thing to Workers at once. One interesting example of that was an e-customer used Workers to add a barcode generator funcionality for one of their customers.

2. Applications built on cache: the way CDN usually works is that you build an application, and put a cache on top of it. That comes with all sorts of limitations around what you can and cannot cache. I think with a built in cache, we're going to start seeing more cases where the cache is written to from the beginning. This enables customers to do things like cache content for logged in, or paid users by doing the auth on the edge next to the cache, rather than at the origin. Or easily update only certain chunks of what's in the cache, and thus do all sorts of customization at the edge, without necessitating added latency.

3. Standalone serverless apps: there are a few very interesting examples here, one of which we'll be able to talk more openly about in a few days. I think SamKnows is a good one: they were able to build a download speedtest directly from Workers [1]. Another good one was building the reservations website for Workers.dev - we were able to get that service spun up very quickly, and have it scale infinitely to handle the influx of traffic [2]. Similarly, Cloudflare Access is built entirely on Workers (we are pretty excited about dogfooding!).

A couple random cool ones: I've seen some experimentation with ML on the edge (very much POC, and very early, but everything starts somewhere). And DNA sequencing analysis, which really blew me away [4]

[1] https://blog.cloudflare.com/the-samknows-cloudflare-platform...
[2] https://blog.cloudflare.com/api-at-the-edge-workers-and-fire...
[3] https://blog.cloudflare.com/building-serverless-apps-with-wo...
[4] https://twitter.com/RobAboukhalil/status/1121095204281430016
In my Linux and Freebsd boxes I have to install the proprietary driver for Nvidia cards to have full hardware acceleration.
Cloud Contingency When The Ban Hammer Drops, or, restic for the masses... don't be caught without an offsite backup!

https://revenni.com/cloud-contingency-when-the-ban-hammer-dr...
The title of the article (which is different from the title here, which is merely clickbaity) is misleading, though there is the potential that ad blocking becomes much worse due to the deprecation of the webRequest api mentioned in the article. If that does have a significant impact on ad blocking, I would expect many users (both devs and casual users) to switch to Firefox.
Here the fiber is also owned by a big telco, but my ISP just rents the fiber. The equipment on both sides of the fiber is owned by my ISP. That's how they can offer gbit speed (and in some locations 10Gbit) while the big telco doesn't offer anything above 500Mbit.
Human needs are quite easy to satisfy with shelter, food, some basic medicine, and a certain mindset. The costs of all these are asymptotically approaching zero with technology.

Why would you want a job or any employment protections if they offer absolutely nothing of value to you?
Just fix them? Where I work we explicitly do not automatically retry failing tests. Otherwise the incentive goes away to fix them. At some point somebody will be frustrated enough to fix the issue.

Note: we have run hundreds of little browser-based tests, visual snapshots and thousands of unit and integration tests on each PR. Flaky tests get annoying real quick and get fixed quickly as a result.
Not necessarily. You could provide people with a 4 digit code they can use alongside their id to verify that their vote was counted as they intended, but also give them access to a tool that allows them to receive a code that “proves” their vote was counted for any arbitrary party. That way you can verify you own code because you know the real reference code, but anyone else can’t rely on your vote truthfully being anything beyond them trusting you, which is already the case for the current system.
> I don't believe for a second the developers of Firefox for Android use it every day and haven't fixed that.

Why is that so unbelievable? I use Firefox every day and haven't even considered that this might be a problem. I don't have difficulty hitting the [-] on HN, but if I did, I would simply zoom in until it becomes large enough.
I disagree, It is a free image hosting platform for sharing images. There is nothing wrong with linking to it.

If you upload or want to share what is on the platform, they would prefer if you link it that way, as is their right.

It is a business after all. And If people want to hotlink directly to an image they should pay up and host it themselves.
Plus one. This was the beggining of the rot in Mozila. This marked the moment the went from making general purpose web/http based platforms based on OpenSource principals to builing a single a www specific advertising platform. I still use Firefox and support them financially. Its the best we have. But they stopped caring about anything other that being the frontpage to the Internet a long time ago. They gave up on supporting developers.
China’s Position on the China-US Economic and Trade Consultations
Apple will trust whomever offers them more economic advantage in the long term if they need to be open about the relationship - and short term if they don't and don't think it's too much of a reputational risk. However, never think that you'll always be the one providing them the economic advantage forever - just note that, they'll most likely keep your data forever. Choose wisely.
Performances issues will be hard to estimate, as you can not compare safari to the others on the same phone, which means that you will not be able to correct for hardware and software stacks influences.
User hairtuq gave a good summary. There seems to be a tension between pushing more work into the solver vs breaking up the problem into smaller sets, so there are many different designs. For example, I can pass thousands of candidate programs to the solver with opcodes specified ("please go get me some constants that make this program work for this task") or one completely unspecified program ("find me all the opcodes and all the programs") or some continuum between. My current experience is that partial specialization works well.

I have a lot of optimizations I'd like to apply. I'm doing the slightly brain-melting task of trying to get the super-optimizer to cough up its own optimization rules to speed the process, but that's a long topic and I'll be a lot chattier about if I see it ever work properly.

I'm also trying to figure out a way to make this pay in some fashion, being between jobs. Love to work on it more but I suspect reality will kick in soon.
>That's not what I was talking about. What I discussing is security, you always need to assume the worst to build good defenses and information leakage only serves to help those who aim to break your security.

Assuming is not the same as accusing, I am OK if you say that for national security all sensitive hardware needs to pass some criteria, what I do not agree is "we know X has backdorrs,weapons but we can't show it to you because we don't want them to know what we know"
I thought of making a tool for language-agnostic verification and/or refactoring advisory. That would be a modular system with a design looking something like:

AST -[basis]-> Normalized AST -[to sequence]-> Common Representation [graph; embeddings] -> [Code Structure DB; Temporal DB(reflects what's a code actually doing, runtime info involved)] <-[query for anomalies]

The idea is simple, we teach some database, feeding with lots of source codes. We may want also to define some rules, like, what's a deadlock, what's an event, etc. I've no clear idea how to implement the rules, but it should be possible to make an embeddings for the temporal data and map it onto a space where checking for correctness can be done in linear time, fingers crossed. But here comes the question, what's a temporal db should be? Should it be a separate data definition language, or code is the data?

As for basis, we're supposed either to use some generic calculus and its subset for the particular programming language, or somehow make it possible to aggregate into the same database with different bases.

Obviously this approaches ask for machine learning instead of traversing the graphs. I think there's good reason for that. For example, if I've written many chunks of code which actually do the same thing, it'd have taken enormous time to prove that using combinatoric approach (graph self-similarities, NP).
I've worked with plenty of devs in my time who don't really understand what they're doing and just copy and paste code from Stack Overflow until it seems to work. A lot of the enterprise takes the monkeys with typewriters approach to software development.

I think there are cultural reasons for that because enterprise treats devs like fungible cogs that you replace when they burn out. It tends to be highly dehumanizing environment where devs have no say, no autonomy, and no ownership. This naturally pushes out people who have options, and you end up with a pool of devs who just want any job that pays the bills.
I’m sure I read that once you reach a certain age the risk starts to fall off.
I don’t like the tone of your parent post, but he does have a point: during communication/marketing, highlight and focus on unique features, not on a unique programming process, or only those interested with browser programming / architecture will be interested, not the majority of end users.

Nonetheless, congratulations on your project! It is already a big accomplishment!
I don't find it "reasonable" to be filmed all the time while I'm at my desk. Things like that always end up being abused, not matter that "the ICO must be notified as to why they intend to use it".

Plus it create a terrible working culture. The work place feels not part of my social life anymore. Why would I feel motivated to do better ? Do be part of a mission ? To feel some meaning ? I'm not doing my part anymore, I'm doing my time.

Cameras on the parking ? Sure.

Cameras on the shops and other places receiving customers ? Ok.

Cameras on areas with risky data or money ? Make sense.

But keep the cameras outside of my freaking office. I've quit for less than that.
> Most of us have personal computers on our body most of the time, as you point out.

Most don’t have a sysadmin account for that computer either.
FWIW, I have a very different read on this, based on both my experience with Clojure and some of the leading Storm-using orgs (and the Apache process).

Firstly: Clojure isn't actually a problem. We hired people who are highly junior (one who even refused to call themselves a developer) and taught them Clojure. It was fine. It is true that you need a strong dev lead to guide them through that, but honestly, if you don't have a strong dev lead your Python/Java project is screwed too.

Secondly: look at Storm's increased success at Java data processing sweatshop^H^H^H^H^H^Hconsultancies. Of course "can write Java" is what you're going to get if most of your business revolves around the lowest bidder.
We tried using a worker for a bit, and while it's mostly very convenient, the request/response cache API does NOT support Vary headers, which was a major dealbreaker for us.
On average older people start losing their faculties - not just through dementia. A minimum age limit makes sense, but so does a maximum age limit.
But only 19% of the population.
You can implement pretty powerful type checkers as constraint based systems. I used Z3 in a project called LightDP to verify differential privacy as a property of the type system.
Also, to get there, you're already accepting the assertion that the move isn't a management decision :-)
Reading Deadwood’s Newspaper
> [1] In Japan walls were made of literal rice paper stretched on frames, and as an obvious corollary people generally knew their neighbors' business. "Rice paper privacy" refers to social conventions to, er, "pretend" that there was actual privacy.

Where can I read more about this?
https://data.firefox.com/dashboard/user-activity probably has the most reliable metrics on Firefox users. Not enough to compare to other browsers, but if there's a large switch from Chrome to Firefox, it should eventually show up on the graph.
I would like to suggest that companies have such blanket bans precisely because they want to be able to take advantage of free software in this way without contributing back. If you really don't care if they do or don't, fine, use a permissive license. But I think it's becoming clear that people do care about contributions, and that's part of what copyleft licenses are for.
If we target standards, then the standards are driving. The browser gets supported when it builds to the standards. Perhaps the issue will then be getting standards in place quickly around new capabilities?

Then maybe the standards process needs disruption. But if we don't build to standards then we are building roads that only certain cars can drive.
Ask HN: Data Science portfolio projects ideas
Hello,

I'm looking for a couple of midium-size project ideas that are not just following tutorials.
Mostly this, performance is atrocious on a lot of sites I use.

I also dislike its history management, download management, auto-complete, search in address bar functionality, pocket integration, and much more. I'm sure if I were forced to spend more time with it I could possibly find configurations to customize all those things in a way I like, but even using it for a few days the easily findable settings weren't flexible enough.
cough Uber.
That's because they'll be maintaining the 1.1.x and 1.2.x branches...
If someone is being coerced, couldn't they just lie and say they had a different token?