skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I really hope this incident doesn't break her spirit. As someone who's been shot at, beat up, robbed, held up, and still trusts people: What doesn't kill you makes you stronger.

That said, I also rent out my place through AirBnB. (http://www.airbnb.com/rooms/106355) I interview everyone who stays with me through Skype before confirming any reservation. AirBnB, has a very classy membership, and we've had great experiences with all our guests, but due diligence is still a must. Communicating with your potential guests is essential, as is reading between the lines. You should also make an effort to look at their face at least once before booking. Skype is perfect for this and AirBnB doesn't block it.
"... this development is certainly another nail in the coffin of the brick-and-mortar data archives that are record stores."

The lack of an optical drive on Apple laptops will not be the stake to the heart of the brick-and-mortar music store; lack of consumer interest will.

The social music scene is moving online. Services like Last.fm, Pandora, and user "created" content sites like SoundCloud are the future. The nostalgia of standing around a music store is nice to think about, but not particularly profitable for the owner.
The 15 coolest offices in the world
"specialized infrared ovens" That's cute. Toasters, you mean? Toasters work by heating a coil to somewhere in that range (2.5k - 4.5k degrees), and then the radiation from the coils toasts the bread.
X-Men Artist Kick-Starts Gorgeous Indie iPhone Strategy Game
Thanks for your hard numbers; they're enlightening to a worker-bee like myself. A few questions:
"Double that number if there are no outside investors" - do you mean double the 10%, or double the 2%? (I'd like to pursue this vein so I can relate to the owner's perspective.)
How do you recommend calculating what the company is worth? Assets and revenue? (Company is still trying to turn a year in the black.)

So you'd suggest that I propose a stock package based on growth of the company over a certain period? Say maybe, over the next six months (if I stay with the company), what the increased revenue is? [Or would you recommend doing that in retrospect over the last six months - to say "a growth of X makes it reasonable for a compensation of Y"?]
I think the issue is more that according to their research, the service can't use its genetic testing to give you a heads-up about upcoming disease in your physiology, which is one of the big sells of 23andMe.

Of course, this is one study and one disease, and maybe other stuff will come out that validates the approach. (I have no dog in this fight)

But you point out an interesting fact: perhaps the biggest value they're providing is simple introspection, using tools we didn't have in the past. For me, understanding how my ancestry fits into the world and its history would be more than enough incentive to use 23andMe, depending on how much detail the science and the data set can offer.
Some openness. Waiting for corporations to deem it fit for public scrutiny but not public usage? Makes me suspicious if they released all the GPL'd parts or if they missed some.
Felleisen's conjecture on the three disciplined uses of macros
I find it humorous that (otherwise highly intelligent, and
well informed) members of HN are asking "What do they need
all these people for"

I'm one of those who asked that question. The way I become better informed is to acknowledge my ignorance, then ask questions in the hopes of reducing it.

You make some good points.

I would feel better about your answer if you didn't seem so condescending though.
Pardon my ignorance but what's backing redis currently?
Dupe: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2811818
The thing that works, in my experience, is where employees/founders have pre-existing personal ties to other areas (e.g. I'll recruit personally at MIT for my startup, and probably up in Seattle, and possibly via some connections in Cambridge, Berlin, and Montreal); it's a lot easier to bridge the cultural issues that way. Then, ideally, relocate to where the startup is based (i.e. Mountain View, Ground Zero), but allowing wfh/remote or setting up an office if there happens to be a key person or a group of people there.
> downvoting without a rebuttal is cowardly at best

I didn't downvote, but I disagree. I don't have to justify every decision I make.
I don't think so. Take this statement for example:

Science needs a new set of ethics. It needs to be clear when reporting medical studies what types of methods were used, what was brought into the study a priori, the sample size, and how it was reviewed. Scientists should be clear when they are speaking on matters of reproducible science -- such as the absorption spectrum of CO2, the Greenhouse principle, the fact that man changes his environment, and black-body physics -- and when they are totally speculating, like predicting the global temperature in 100 years. These are different types of information. (I hate to use global warming, but it's in vogue.)

First, Isn't what he wants in medical studies completely standard practice? I regularly read NEJM and their standard format is: Background, Methods, Results, Conclusion. I feel like he's getting his medical science from the NYTimes, which is fine as a starting point, but those are articles written by reporters. Find the actual study to see what the scientist did.

Second, if you actually read the "speculative" studies, rather than just watching Fox News you'll typically see how they come to the conclusion of the temperature in 100 years. They detail and construct a model, sometimes via simulation. It's not that anyone is saying, "This is what the temperature will be guaranteed", rather it's saying, "here's a model we constructed. We tested it on historical data and it's accurate to this extent. This is what we see looking forward. These are the factors that contribute most to this result." That's how science is done. That's how I can hypothesize the sun will come up tomorrow -- I have historical data, I create a model of the solar system, gravity, inertia, etc... and say based on that I think the sun will come up again tomorrow, and based on my models I think it will be colder in the winter than the summer. What he considers "speculative" science is just normal science, but where the models aren't as well understood, and part of science is strengthening the models.

I just feel like he doesn't get science at all. When you don't really understand something, you're more likely to hate it.
Sorry. My original argument wasn't very clear, I didn't mean to argue that the look and feel is patentable. It's not, obvioisly. I suppose what I meant that I could imagine Steve Jobs seeing an advert like that, picking up the phone to the lawyers and saying 'what can we do about this' and these various patent suits are the result. I am not arguing for this use as a justification for software patents, just making an observation that HTC don't have 'clean hands' in the greater scheme of things.
Why isn't the title the original one explicitly mentioning AirBnb? Bad PR for YC's portfolio company?
How about following existing precedents? Flook is good precedent, as reiterated in the recent Bilski decision. Just about every software patent we talk about on HN would be invalidated if that precedent were followed.
My father is in the hospital right now and I feel the same frustration. A family friend who is a professor of radiology mentioned that a major driver of research in medical imaging comes from video game graphics work. He even submitted a paper to siggraph around interpolating 3d space from 2d CT scans. There are direct and indirect applications from the techie scene, it just doesn't get the kind of press like consumer tech and the hacker scene tends to be at universities and learning hospitals.
Samsung Is Only Tablet Maker Giving iPad 2′s Display a Run for Its Money
Perhaps, but I think there is a level of determination that makes people endure the hardships that come with living in very expensive cities. Often that is to grow their career.
Microsoft and Linux?
Apple Updates Response in Lodsys Patent Case
Interesting how, like in the open-sourced protobuf, there are no commits by Jeff or Sanjay...
Original article from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, from which the physorg blogspam is copied verbatim (except that they took out some useful links and added some irrelevant ones): http://news.rpi.edu/update.do?artcenterkey=2902

Abstract (and full text, if you don't mind paying or have an institutional subscription) of the published paper: http://pre.aps.org/abstract/PRE/v84/i1/e011130

Preprint in the arXiv: http://arxiv.org/PS_cache/arxiv/pdf/1102/1102.3931v2.pdf

Discussion at HN a few days ago: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2805125

Can't we please stop linking to physorg blogspam? Please?
That doesn't change the fact that we have enough data to know you're more likely to win the national lottery than making it to 120. And you're probably more likely to fly by flapping your arms than making it to 130.
Just go ahead and downvote it instead of whining. Either the link was to something useful and relevant or it wasn't.

The fact that there's an affiliate link has no bearing on that.

If someone's spamming the site with affiliate links, they ought to be banned. If someone posts a link with one from time to time, I see absolutely no harm in it. I think it's pretty clear what's what.
La iniciativa para la creación de una Nube Abierta - Open Cloud Initiative
La Open Cloud Initiative(OCI) ( lanzada durante la Open Source Convention OSCON 2011) pretende reunir a usuarios de servicios Cloud Computing y a los proveedores con el objetivo de construir un ecosistema que brinde a los usuarios la libertad de elegir su proveedor o cambiar a otro cuando así lo deseen.
Now, it is often easier to carry around a usb flash drive which gives higher data sizes, speed, r/w, and easier to carry. Buy a new one every 6 months and that is an ok non-enterprise local backup.

My main problem with optical at this point is that the storage capacity and price really haven't kept up with USB Flash Drives. It is also now easier just to buy an external hard drive for live backups.
I just recently decided to not pursue a PhD in scientific computing, so I'll be finishing my Master's and working at a startup starting in September.

One of the biggest reasons I decided to not do further research is that I have noticed that there are an unfathomable amount of people hobbling about on ancient and primitive tools when there are existing implementations and papers available that would make their lives orders of magnitude more efficient. So I've made a personal choice to not pursue the latest, fastest and most cutting edge algorithms and rather bring my knowledge, experience and problem solving abilities to people who are trying to solve real problems right now.

My point is that even though you think you can't compete with these guys who read, study and do 'real' science they could use a lot of help from the likes of you. Sure learning some linear algebra and bayesian statistics can help in directly implementing the algorithm, but usually the biggest problem I've seen is a complete lack of software engineering and hard coding specific to certain data sets.

I think the scientists can gain a lot from the software engineering field, especially open source practices. They will be resistant to it, as others have pointed out the incentives don't always line up, on the other hand there is a lot of low-hanging fruit in terms of improvements a decent programmer can pluck.
I recommend "Javascript: The Definitive Guide". It's not a "fun" read, but it will tell you almost everything you need to know. From javascript the language to the DOM and the different browser behaviour.

It also includes a reference section that is indispensable. I recommend getting it as an ebook though because you're going to be using the reference section a lot.
Stock in a small business like this is worthless. If you are truly making less than $20K/yr you need to move on. You can make more with better benefits at Starbucks.
no, no - nothing that clever.

i just meant that rather than using the hash as a direct source of randomness, and generating the image from that, it is easier to use the hash to seed a random number generator and use the random numbers from the generator.

maybe it's obvious, but at first i was trying to use the hash directly, and kept being constrained by the amount of available data.

but if you do that in a security-aware context (originally this was for hashing user names, so security was not an issue) you need to worry about how much state the random number generator has. it has to be large enough to cover the minimum of (all distinguishable images, original hash). so if you had a random number with a byte of state, then that would be no good (unless the image was a single grey-scale pixel).
The second image, not the first.
> 23andMe’s paper includes a new estimate that the heritability of Parkinson’s Disease is 23% (suggesting that 77% of the variance will never be explained by genes, but that missing genes yet to be discovered account for a further 16%).

That's not correct. There is more to heritability than just genes, so it is not at all guaranteed that the extra 16% can be accounted for by sequencing the rest of the genome.

Also, the headline is rather sensationalist as none of this is particularly surprising. GWAS studies have produced underwhelming results for many years.
You are both correct and very blessed to have such a good connection. In my experience, even people with decent internet speed seldom see that speed sustained for the entirety of a large download or stream.

A Blu-Ray disk holds 50GB. At a 10Mb/s connection (fairly common in the US), that would take over 11 hours to download, assuming no interruptions. Even at 100Mb/s it would take about an hour. Assuming you're streaming 2 hours of content you only have a 2:1 ratio of play time to download time, and that's still assuming no service interruptions. Most consumer ISPs promote their max burst rate in their packages, but for larger files kick the actual speeds down.

But again, there's no reason to assume the situation won't improve in the future, even with the exponential growth in number of devices online and increased usage per device.
> There are Computer Science problems that need to be solved every day to keep the site running

This part is beyond awesome.
It took me reading that it was oscillating between L3 and L4 before i "got" the animation, I was assuming it was between L4 and L5 at first...
> [1] Wouldn't it be worth funding this company just to find this out about Parkinson's disease?

Only if they plan to branch out from genotyping into other areas of science, as the article describes how their research shows the limits of this approach in Parkinson's disease.
New tools for managing screen sizes on Android devices
"this article is written with the obvious intention of bashing google" i agree, it is way faster to develop for just 1 browser, plus we should be celebrating people are trying to break ground doing this awesome videos, i can only begin to imagine all the impressive work that what went into this video, good one google +1
I really wish someone (Red Box, Apple) had built kiosks with local cacheing and good down speeds to sell movies at 1080p with a bit rate higher than Blu-Ray. Plug a flash USB in and away you go.
Lightfish.net create your own web applications without coding knowledge
This website allows you to create your own iphone app, playlist or "race" for free without any coding experience
... and just a proposal/graphics render at this stage?
All the VC funded startups I've seen compensation for up close are in the 90-120k for what I'd consider junior to middle level non-founder engineers (half that for founders), and maybe 130-160 for individual contributors of great but not legendary caliber (i.e. not hiring Guido to do python dev for 160k, but someone who is quite good, and who could easily be a top tier consultant in that field).

These salaries (for VC funded companies after a big A, B, etc,) are about 2x of what I'd consider reasonable (which is a view based on salaries 2001-2005), but being on the employer side, if you have the money, not being willing to pay market is a dumb reason to not get the best talent. Paying market itself isn't a differentiator, but it's reasonable for an employee to be unwilling to take a substantially below market total comp package. If you don't have the cash, obviously you need to build in other parts of comp to make up for it (flexibility, being in lower cost areas, higher equity, ...), but it seems like angels and VCs value equity a lot more than employees do, and value cash a lot less, so raising more money to pay the bigger salaries isn't wrong.
I think you are dramatically overstating the risk at 0.01%. Suppose past performance predicts future results. AirBnB has had, what, 10 million rental deals? And this has only happened, as far as we can tell, once. That's not an 0.01% risk. It's more like 0.000001%.

Overstating the risk by a factor of ten thousand is a very substantial exaggeration.

It's hard for human beings to understand very large and very small numbers, so to put that in context, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Road_traffic_safety says about ten people are killed per billion vehicle kilometers in most developed countries, so perhaps five people per billion passenger kilometers. So you have a one in ten million chance of getting killed by riding about twenty kilometers in a car.

Surely you would not advocate making laws to "protect" "the average person" "from unknowingly gambling with their family's future" by traveling tens of kilometers by car, thus possibly orphaning their children?
> Those who enjoy Fox shows such as Family Guy, Glee, or The Simpsons will soon have to wait an extra eight days if they want to watch new episodes online

Oh, no, not a whole eight days! I'll literally be a full week behind the latest pop culture phenomenae!
This doesn't seem to be through the main humble bundle site. Are you reselling the bundles or something?
It is very likely he was informed on. (Grassed / Snitched)

One of the better broadsheet newspapers here in the UK had an article on Lulzsec/Anonymous, and one of the best comments they made was:

"Hackers fear other hackers more than law enforcement."

In this community it seems there is no honour amongst thieves. I very much suspect they grabbed a bunch of people around the world who were less talented at hiding themselves, and one of them knew enough to plea bargain in return for information.
Agreed, it would be nice to see the bug. AFAIK they take standards compliance pretty seriously. I'm sure someone would look at it, especially if Chrome is behaving differently from FF/IE9/Safari.
But without the link-bait, why would anyone ever post them to HN?

[EDIT: typo fixed]
They had a "Try it anyway" link for "3 Shades of Black": http://ro.me
As I was reading the article, it became clearer and clearer that it had increasingly serious issues. I got to thinking to myself, "Please, whoever wrote this paper, please don't be physicists stepping outside their domain and making the rest of us in physics look like fools."

Then I saw. Physica Review E.

=(
Doesn't the 'D' in KDE stand for 'desktop'? Which desktop users know what a 'software compilation' is?
Certainly not I. But there is a line somewhere between "biased reporting" and "juvenile pandering" that I keep seeing sites prance back and forth over, perennially indecisive about whether they want to be real grown-up news or not, to the detriment of the whole enterprise.
HTML5 Fullscreen Video
"The house upon completion shall become the narrowest house in Warsaw, measuring an interior that will vary between 122 centimeters and 72 centimeters in its narrowest spot."

Key phrase: "In Warsaw." Was there any discussion of it being the narrowest in the world? Or did I miss something?
As always, John has awesome insight into how Apple competes.
New Mobile Apps Monitor UCS, Reboot Servers from 30,000 feet
Or rarely submit or comment. I am logged in and on HN everyday, but do not show up. Maybe with this comment I will.
Keep you eyes open on Merchii.com - launching the beta soon. Enables secure e-commerce on any website in a few minutes. The pitch on the site now is not the entire picture.
Actually, that's debatable. First, most 80 columns cards had the last 8 columns ignored (or used for metadata). Second, it is much more probable that 80 columns limit comes from 80x25 text resolution of EGA/VGA displays.
I was told once: "If it is dictated by the universe then it is science. If you get a vote, it is not."
They put the spotlight on the widespread disdain for security exhibited by major corporations regarding their client's data?

That was the core message between the lulz. That said, dumping the full data was not necessary to make that point, even though it probably increased the media coverage, hence the spread of their message.
correct me if I am wrong, but the debate which started at about and around [1] didn't quite finish.

Would you trust the output of this chip, as it has been presented/used in the paper [2]?

1.Katsanis, S.H., Javitt, G. & Hudson, K. A Case Study of Personalized Medicine. Science 320, 53 -54 (2008).

2.Konstantinopoulos, P.A. et al. Integrated Analysis of Multiple Microarray Datasets Identifies a Reproducible Survival Predictor in Ovarian Cancer. PLoS ONE 6, e18202 (2011).
Ask HN: What if everyone else is right?
What do you do when this thought enters your head "what if everyone else is right"?
not sure if any of the Nebula guys are lurking about, but if they are, you have a broken link on your "Learn more" button to nebula.com/product (/product/ works fine)

Might wanna check your urls.py so that slashes are automatically appended for this particular pattern :)
Mobility in the Datacenter, UCS Android App
BR disk: 50GB. USB stick: 64GB

Do you know what a 64GB USB stick costs? For now, USB sticks are not a cost effective way for Sony et. all to deliver their content. I'm sure the price will come down in the future though.

For ahem personal (non-DRMed) use, USB sticks are fine, since you can use and reuse as necessary.
Rogue Academic Downloader Busted by MIT Webcam Stakeout, Arrest Report Says
if AirBNB kept a drivers license scan on file to confirm the credit card was the users

Don't credit card companies prohibit this?
"I'm not sure if it is SOP, or the Secret Service thought they were dealing with violent criminals"

seems possible the bulk of them had first learned about hackers at the same time they learned about the raid -- perhaps from someone who exaggerated the average size of a hacker's fangs. in any event it doesn't seem likely that in preparation for sundevil they'd have consulted with anyone that would have urged a relaxed and moderated view of what was at that time an unexplored frontier of law enforcement.
Maybe that's what they are going to use the intended 340 new hires to build. I think that a much higher priced enterprise version that included client-side encryption & much more storage than currently available could be a game-changer for the business. Wouldn't be surprised if they were already working on it
>>Fox's president of affiliate sales Mike Hopkins told the Wall Street Journal. "If this works, you're going to see a lot more content online."

And if this doesn't work, you're going to see a lot more content online. These companies just don't get it. It has less to do with money, and more to do with ease of viewing. If I want to watch Family Guy or Glee the day after it airs, I will google "family guy episodes online free" and find plenty of free options. Or I will go to torrent sites. Fox just lost me as a customer. I gladly watch the shows legally on Hulu when that's the easiest way.
Out of curiosity, why? Wikipedia mentions a constantly-delayed 2.2 update, but from what I've heard, the Droid/Milestone is a very good phone, updates or not.
http://www.quip-art.com/3RP
Enabling multiple sign-in for Google accounts