skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
It's a bit of a shame that the "just hotlink the css" thing doesn't actually work very well - it actually means that some parts won't function (such as the Dropdown menu). My partner and I have just spent the better part of half an hour trying to work out why this didn't work (the documentation didn't mention any javascript necessity).

Docs could use some serious clarification - which parts are CSS-only and which require what js files.
I'm sorry to hear about your current struggles, fwiw from an internet stranger, I wish you the best of luck.

I too suffer from pretty severe depression, and, like you, am going through a particularly acute bout at the moment. I'll likely be checking myself into a clinic at some point in the next 24 hours regardless, but I'd be really interested in hearing more about the 'mental safeguards' you mention in your first paragraph.
Disclaimer - I am not an expert.

The title might as well be "What not to say to someone being burnt alive at the stake".

Reality - 90% of the time, there's nothing you can say that will make a depressive magically get better. You can offer support ("I love you", "You're a great friend") or suggest they get help. You shouldn't say very destructive things (suicide jokes are a no-no). But most of the things you say will not, in themselves, make much of a difference. Worrying about whether you are saying the right thing is a waste of energy. It's better to address the real problem, which is quite often their lack of activity (which magnifies their underlying worries).

You can't help a depressive, simply by talking at them. It does help a bit to have a friendly chat. It helps to invite them out for a meal, or some exercise, or whatever else.

But the idea that someone else's depression is something you can control purely by talking at (not to) them is mostly rubbish. Perhaps sometimes they do need a shoulder to cry on. Just make sure you are available when they do.
Back when my insomnia was really bad, I'd be up most of the night watching generally dull television. One of the most interesting shows was "How It's Made", which is an entirely narrated view following a camera through various production facilities for common(ish) products.

http://science.discovery.com/tv/how-its-made/ and https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/How_It%27s_Ma...

Most of the production is heavily automated, but there are always a few humans in the loop somewhere. In a lot of cases, it is exclusively loading the machine with some odd-shaped component, again and again as fast as they can.

Sometimes there's a bit of excitement (poorly designed safety guards or practices), just waiting to trip someone up after they zone out midway through their 12-hour shift.

I don't know what the failure figures would be like, but it's quite possible you do need that engineer on call, with his lateral-thinking brain and dexterous monkey-fingers, but otherwise, robots can do the lot, it's just a question of cost.

See https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Lights_out_%2... for examples.
How to charge clients: flat fee vs. hourly rate?
HN now comes with HTTPS?
The Firefox addon HTTPS Finder just alerted me to the fact that there was an HTTPS version of the site at https://news.ycombinator.com/ - I tried it out, and it worked. Nice work.

EDIT: Session cookie needs to be set as "secure" and Strict-Transport-Security should be implemented in order to protect against certain attacks. End users can just add this HTTPS-Everywhere ruleset:

https://raw.github.com/mikecardwell/https-everywhere/73241d1...
My ideal version would be something like

parallel for(item in source)
log(write(process(read(item))))

And let the compiler/runtime figure out how to do that. It could generate something similar to your code for instance.
That's not quite comparable I think, with RPS being a game of skill and all.
This is the only book I was going to recommend.

great summary.
- It dehumanizes the spirit and makes the receiver a dependent of the state; later to be vilified by an ignorant society at large when it suits them.

- Comparing apples to oranges is patronizing at best. Being better off is contextual and you cannot compare a child who won't eat broccoli to a Biafran baby.

- A vast majority of people live, work and die within a relatively short distance of where they're born and outside of famine and conflict, you're not going to get them to move away from of their family and/or community networks. The chance that they're even able to do so severely declines with the absence of solid education or an established, dependable contact in another city. Yes, there are plenty of people who do it, but there are usually mitigating factors that affect the decision-making process outside of those who have chosen a career that requires a move. We'd like to think that we're a society on the move but the reality is quiet the opposite.

- That's an even worse suggestion than moving to another city or out of state. Outside of high-skills, training and education protected jobs, there isn't much need for labor in other countries. As a matter of fact, most countries have a surplus of labor, not to mention a wage differential that would basically wipe out any future earnings potential. The suggestion is so ludicrous that I won't even address legal, language, cultural or distance problems that would turn away most people who even dream of doing it. And I say that as someone who spent ten years in a foreign country where English isn't spoken. That's asking the impossible and has very few benefits for anyone involved.

In conclusion, the "love it or leave it" crowd can stuff it.
If you truly believed and accepted that what you do in life does not matter then you will also believe that whether you live or not does not matter. And you will also believe that whether other people live or not does not matter. Your philosophy is dangerous because you do not make what you are trying to say clear.

Your message "look beyond meaning" I agree with. But it is clouded by and runs counter to most of what you wrote. to people without the context of your thoughts. It took effort to extract the message in order to ensure I was replying to what you wrote. My top paragraph was my initial reaction.

Note that even whether your decisions are yours or not does not matter. You can draw evidence from philosophical, to genetics or neurobiology to show why you may not be choosing. But so long as you make them in a way that you think leads to the best you it does not matter.
> but why would HP care at this point?

The GPL would ensure their competitors can't keep their improvements to themselves. But I agree - the odds of a former SAP kahuna understanding how to leverage open-source are very close to zero.
I cut my teeth on WebGL shaders by digging into the source of glfx.js: http://evanw.github.com/glfx.js/

I needed to add a shader to allow a mask to be used for video with an alpha channel, like this: http://jakearchibald.com/scratch/alphavid/

It's definitely helpful seeing everything laid out tutorial-style. As simple and well-written as glfx.js is, there are still some quirks of WebGL and shaders that are not at all obvious to the uninitiated JS hacker.
Ok, so the real problem is that Germany is forcing it's citizens to subsidize doctors and the Swiss, rather than that the Swiss are freeloading.

The obvious solution (for Germany's citizens, if not their politicians) would be to charge market rates for medical education.
Your premise does not necessarily grant your conclusion without more elaboration. How it does research necessarily not have a benefit for 'real life'? Or, to put it another way, why is it basic research is, by default, divorced from 'real life'?

Presumably if there were a more efficient character encoding with sufficient advantages there would indeed be some 'useful' aspect to it. However, and I'd like to drive this point home, you have no business deriding the well-intentioned questions of others if you have nothing to contribute. Thus far you've outright dismissed even the validity of raising the questions--'who cares'--and, after being confronted, backpedaled somewhat but still dismissed the question's utility--'not terribly useful in real life'--without being so kind as to explain why, as if it were self-evident. Perhaps to you, but this somewhat the point of my last harangue: innovation starts with questions, even those which are seemingly naive.

You have been, to this point, not uncommonly, sadly, but rude indeed. If you have thoughts to share on the subject I would love to hear them. To contribute only blase dismissal tends to make individuals of less than adamantian character cease or hide their well-natured questioning of the world about them. I do not mean to suggest, of course, that every question posed should be met with twee praise: no, indeed. Rather, explorations should be met with good faith, disagreements elaborated such that rational observers might find in the conversation new ideas, or strengthening of their own. Our individual actions steer the culture in which we find ourselves; I hope we can both agree that it is a better world in which basic exploration is the norm; neither dogged travel in a well-worn rut if indeed a better road might be found.
You're right that future liabilities are a mess. In Australia in the early 1990s the government introduced a program of compulsory superannuation. Already something like a trillion dollars has been saved by Australians against their retirement under the scheme. Singapore does something similar. Australia has also put away tens of billions of dollars against the future liabilities of public service pensions.

Will it completely do away with government liabilities? No. Australia too will face higher health care costs. But some of those costs will be defrayed by the superannuation and taxes levied on an economy that grew faster without the taxes than with them.

I am ambivalent about the Euro-US situation. On the one hand, it sucks that you face a period of painful adjustment to inescapable economic reality. On the other hand, your politicians have steadfastly refused to face up to those realities. As an Australian I find it annoying that profligate governments in Europe and the USA are hurting my prospects, even though here we've largely enjoyed fairly sensible economic policy for the past 25 years.
If they didn't detect user agents they would break the possibility of doing short link expansion with repeated HEAD requests following the chain of redirects. Which a wide range of services need to do efficiently.
It creates precedents. And just as in real life people will still be assholes, regardless of any naming policy.

I had hopes that Google+ would be a better Facebook in regards to my privacy.

It isn't, so why should I switch from Facebook? Is it because it's newer and shinier?
Search engine for Documentary films
Health and Tech, what are we waiting for?
Health is the one area in tech everyone is shit-scared to touch and can you blame them? Nobody wants to deal with it; far too much sensitivity and responsibility. Instead we’re all too concerned with creating the next social photo sharing app. Fuck me, a dog could have put that $41 million to better use. Why not do something meaningful yeah? Let’s not forget how lucky we are.

It can costs me anywhere between €60 – €80 to get a piece of paper from my doctor that says I’ve had the shits for a week; and all because I’ve told her so. For her luck, she doesn’t need nor want visual evidence of this fact, she just takes my word for it, prints off a piece of a paper and signs it. In fact, when you consider how similar we all are, I’d wager a large percentage of visits to the doctor are roughly the same. The doctor listens, asks a few questions, listens some more then recommends a few meds and plenty of rest.

This has me thinking, surely — call me insane if you like — it is possible to conduct these kind of minor discussions via a webcam and microphone; followed by an emailed prescription from the doctor.

Let’s get a few things clear, I’m not talking about replacing visits to specialist consultants, breast checks, baby issues and other more immediately serious matters. I’m talking about reordering the politics of minor (common) doctor visits by generally healthy people; it’s these visits which no doubt amount to a large proportion of all visits.

Whoever has the balls to undercut the traditional model is going to make a sick — pun definitely intended — amount of money by saving people a similarly large quantity of money. Not to mention what affect this would have on lowering the price of healthcare while hopefully improving the health of people.
I 've never seen so many "reminds me of" comments on a post before.
the problem with flat fees, is that clients tend to want extras, so you can end up working for minimum wage.
We are not b2b but b2c and accept wide range of payment options including bank transfers, customers in some countries don't want to pay via credit card.

We reconciliate by exporting CSV files from bank statements and mass import them to our administration web interface.
The DMV vs Verizon
The story "Epoch" by Cory Doctorow was commissioned by Mark Shuttleworth (the Ubuntu chap) and really is rather good - it is the story of the first "real" AI and the system administrator who gets the job of turning it off:

http://craphound.com/?p=2337

As with all of Cory's work - strongly recommended!
Well... I keep a couple 8-bit computers in my interesting computer collection and, at least for me, the games those machines are great fun.

Droll, Pac-man, River Raid, Moon Patrol, Choplifter...

To say nothing about solving programming problems with BASIC on an 8-bit computer:

http://translate.google.com/translate?js=n&prev=_t&h...

(sorry for the translation - I wrote that one in Portuguese)
Consider an alternative possibility, which I think is what actually happened: your comment was written in the context of a discussion about a solar tree, and the first sentence, which did not establish any broader philosophical context, was a statement that several people disagreed with. The remaining three sentences didn't make a coherent argument, at least that I can tell.

I don't think that's worthy of downvoting. Still, I think you might get more satisfaction from HN if you framed your arguments more clearly instead of blaming the readers for what you see as their Aspergistic tendencies.
I think a better idea is to charge a flat fee for the project (you get it nailed down before working on it) and then per/hour for any additional changes.
Not really: "What's in your .vimrc?" is a question.

Don't get me started on the idea to have separate "sites" for every topic. It creates a lot of noise, confuses beginners and serves no practical purposes that tags can't fulfil.
I don't have much interest in this dataset, but I can describe what would generally be done.

The data here comes from tiny fragments of the genome. On each end of the fragment, 100 base pairs of DNA are sequenced, and that's what are in the text files, along with confidence estimates of each called base pair. These bits of sequence are called "reads."

The first step would be to take all these fragments and assemble them into a full genome. The page notes that they have 327x coverage, meaning that on average, there will be 327 reads that overlap a given region of the genome. To assemble the genome, you find these parts that overlap, and try to expand out from there.

Genome assembly is complicated by many things, but among them are some regions that get very few fragments, and repetitive regions. If you have a 150bp segment repeated many times, often you won't know how large it is, because your reads are only 100bp, and unless you have really long fragments or varying fragment size, you won't be able to estimate the length of the repeat. Also, if the repeat occurs in other, or likely many places, you have additional difficulties matching what's on the left and right side of all these repeats. This is an active area of research, and people are building new assemblers and new assembler technologies even today, to deal with the changes in sequencing technology. It's unlikely that from a dataset like this that you'd be able to get much of an assembly, one would likely have to perform many more targeted sequencing projects to fill in the gaps.

However, with the beginnings of an assembly, the first thing to do is compare it to the genomes of related species. This will identify both the genes, and what has changed the most in the genes. One could attempt to identify which genes are responsible for interesting metabolism or other features of the species. If you have a trait of interest, and sequence other variants of the species, you can perform QTL to find out which parts of the genome (and which genes) are most highly associated with your traits of interest. This has been used extensively in agricultural genetics.

After that, my interest would be to get gene expression levels, to learn how genes act in combination.

All this is a huge undertaking that takes a lot of manual intervention, either from an expert or a highly-motivated and highly-talented non-expert. DNA sequencing costs are falling dramatically, but the cost of using that sequence productively is not falling much. This dataset probably cost < $20k to generate, but it's going to cost at least that much in person time before anything useful can come from it.
I have never seen this attitude
I had to read that twice before I understood it.

I've heard of basic science research (and funding) being likened to growing crops (albeit with different timeframes). You have to spend a lot of time and effort sowing seeds and about 20-30 years later you get to harvest the benefits.

Edit: I think other commenters might be missing the irony in the OP. The author mentions LCD monitors, prescription glasses, medicine, clean water, medical technology, the internet, satellites and computers. After all that, he ends with "What have they [scientists] ever done for me?"
1 website built with three diff tools in one weekend? who came out on top?
I suspect the real reason has more to do with the pragmatics of machine code.

It's extremely common to want to refer to some dynamic offset of a fixed location in memory, like if you have an array of equal-length items stored consecutively. If you have two literal addresses called Start and Index, you'd like to be able to say something like "Start[Index]" and have it mean "Read from Index, and whatever number is there, move that many spaces forward from Start, and give me that". It's handy that if Index is a cleared region of memory, you can say "Start[Index]" and have it mean the same thing as just "Start". More importantly, if "Start[Index]" only meant "Start" when Index was 1, that would imply that if Index were 0 that Start[Index] would refer to the spot right before Start, which is not only useless but outright dangerous.
Why Arabic is Terrific
Understandable. The attack, which is DoS-only, requires the attacker to be able to MITM DHCP. An attacker with that vantage point can already disrupt and disable the network. This flaw wouldn't be exposed to an EC2-style deployment, either.
> the speed at what it processes information is only a few MHz i think

More like Hz, actually. Neurons are slow - I am not sure how frequently can they fire, but I am sure it is not in the multi-thousand per second range.
Cucumber's selenium test failed and Firefox ran blank ~version in-compatibility
I haven't seen such an attitude, either. Not stated so explicitly, anyway.

What is more common is the attitude that, for example, we should put off manned space exploration "until we solve all of our problems here on Earth." I have personally witnessed this attitude in high school cheerleaders and DC lawyers.
Clients always have varying project scope and specs, so in my experience hourly rate works well.
Hangman Products Picture Placer
Disclaimer: Biology n00b.

I wonder what sort of structural/symbolic compression[1] techniques will be possible as we understand more of the DNA -> actual stuff process.

[1] I'm thinking of something like Google Courgette, a way to generate symbolic/relocatable diffs for binaries:

http://www.chromium.org/developers/design-documents/software...
Jtalk: a Smalltalk implementation that runs on the JavaScript runtime.
In my case we only accept bank transfers, and in most cases they're for setting up the service for the client so it's a one time thing and reconciliation is done manually.
Fuck their attitude that LGBT people are expendable.
Lua, the oh so nice "rebel" among languages, uses 1 as the first element in its indices :)
I would dare to hypothesize that America history of immigration and cultural cross pollination could be a framework for a somewhat peaceful means of reaching the same ends.
I think the essay is great but i think it applies more when you are already in a happy place where your happiness is confirmed by your own view of yourself.

Its a way to stay happy once your happy. For example, lets say your a poor entrepreneur, you tell yourself, if i can flip for 5m+ ill be happy cause i will never have to work again, i can help my parents i can do so and so. Your dream comes true and your startup gets acquired and you have that 5m+ in your bank account.

You now have a label, people expect certain things from you. Your happy but because of your new found label and because of peoples expectations of what that label means "in this cause a successful startup founder acquired by XXXX" it forces you to try and comply with that label which could possibly making you unhappy again. (maybe you dont like doing talks, maybe you dont like giving advice, maybe you dont like being criticised ... whatever it may be)

However if you dont care and dont classify yourself as "successful startup founder acquired by XXXX" then there is no reason to comply with what that means and because you achieved your personal goal of getting acquired for 5m+ ... you stay happy.

I think for people that are not there yet, its still kinda hard to apply "I am Nothing" to things you are still striving for or care about.

Well this is my interpretation of the essay .. :)
Graphing unleashed. Can statsd be trusted?
Real-time statistics is a big yes. We write web-apps and knowing the delay caused by on the fly image resize will impact usability or not is important. We started exploring statsd for this purpose. To know what works well in the application and what does not. An automatic referendum of sorts where users by pointing there browsers cast their vote about good, bad and ugly parts.
Statsd works well, I feel, in a trusted environment. Where developer using statsd to log counter is sitting next to admin managing graphite. But what happens when developer is not trusted, statsd fails miserably. It has does not enough validations on received data. So many things can go wrong. At best developer is not able to log, at worse, he crashes the whole statsd server. What are the alternatives in such a situation? Hacker news readers, please help.
Consider charging a day rate. Only you know how many hours it takes you to do a 'day' of work.