skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
(The following are all for genetics, others can chime in on other areas or bioinformatics in general.)

-- I'm bias, but I think the best entry level book is still from 1998 - Genome by Matt Ridley [1]. It's what got me interested in genomics as a CS undergrad (I read it in 2009). Another decent one is The $1000 Genome [2], it gives a good cross section of genetics in 2010.

-- Our group has a series of intro lecture videos from last academic year [3]. They are fairly up to date, and this year's videos will probably be posted soon.

-- Genomes Unzipped is great if you prefer a blog [4]

-- I think the best way to actually learn this stuff is to just play with the software tools. They all point to open data in the tutorials. Biopython's tutorial is particularly good - just google the biological terms as you go. Bioconductor has some good (though more targeted) tutorials too.

-- Going to talks can be a great way to get a broad overview of the space. Drop me a note if you happen to be located in Boston.

-- Finally, this goes without saying, but don't take articles in the mainstream media at face value. (Including, and in fact in particular, the NYT.) Every time I get together with relatives I have to argue against the latest grand prediction.

[1] http://www.amazon.com/Genome-The-Autobiography-Species-Chapt...

[2] http://www.amazon.com/The-000-Genome-Revolution-Personalized...

[3] http://www.broadinstitute.org/scientific-community/science/p...

[4] http://www.genomesunzipped.org/
Many entrepreneurs dip into personal savings in the initial startup phase. This can be stressful, which is one reason I focused on creating a passive income stream after my own YC startup shut down. So, I'd recommend either accumulating a nest egg or creating a passive income stream (or both) before rolling the dice on a startup.
Reality check: LOTS of businesses use such filters. It's normal practice, especially in this litigious "sensitivity" age where one stray "objectionable" page could cost a company a whole lot o' money from which one "offended" person could get rich. Ergo, if you're trying to reach out to a broad professional technical audience, don't use terms which widespread common-usage lawsuit-avoidance filters will block. You may not like it on principle, but that's the reality out here in the business world.
Reading Jordan's full diary will take you at least eight hours but it is well worth it. It is one of the best stories of making a game, runaway success when success wasn't runaway, determination (not to get screwed legally/financially) out there. About ambition and leaping the artistic gap into film making when being a hit game maker was not enough. Jordan wrote POP in 6502 Assembler and he writes well (with off-hand notes - oh a royalty check for $65k - time to go to class) and inside observations, sometimes about his life.

> We chatted for an hour about peripherally related topics. Broderbund, corporate America, the rat race, capitalism, freedom. I was seducing him.

At the critical psychological moment, I remarked: "You know, all my clipping is done on the byte boundaries."

There was a pause

http://jordanmechner.com/old-journals/page/33/

April 3, 1989
Widespread usage of self-signed certificates might have the unfortunate effect of training people to click "allow invalid certificate" when they shouldn't (such as what happened with Vista's UAC).

I would also argue that unless your users are technically inclined, a self-signed certificate is as good as (or worse, due to the scary browser warnings) as an unencrypted connection.
It just depends on your definition of tightly coupled. By your definition Opa's implementation isn't tightly coupled either (the http server doesn't depend on the database, etc.). A better term is probably tightly integrated, and as far as I can see they also use this term on the rest of the website.
And it's still missing out. My girlfriend was told that she was "in the wrong room" for one of her comp sci exams, back in the dark ages of... 2000 or so, in one of the most progressive countries in the world.
Exactly. But by continuing to debate this, we're perpetuating the doing nothing aspect. If you were really concerned about efficiency, you wouldn't be debating this on hacker news.

Compassion is not an algorithm to be optimized.
I had already been playing Quake for a year by then and Goldeneye was an extremely slow game in comparison. I've never really been impressed with any console FPS since then (actually I really like the first Gears of War).
Really nicely written post, thanks for sharing.
How to Make It as a First-Time Entrepreneur
With PBKDF2 (Rfc2898DeriveBytes) sitting in the base class library for years now, I'm not sure why Microsoft have neglected to have it implement the normal hash algorithm interfaces... it's just a few lines of code, and much, much better than the SSHA1 / SSHA256 that remain the default for SQL user databases.
I hope that his friend is not just someone with a usb 3.5" disk drive, as I think just shoving these disks into a drive will end up with them erased.

For extraction he should be contacting this guy:

http://ascii.textfiles.com/archives/3191
Put 'em together, and perhaps that 5 degree increase will balance the we're-due-for-it 5 degree decrease.
The fact that an IQ test worked favourably for someone from a disadvantaged background doesn't demonstrate anything about their appropriateness as an assessor of intelligence. IQ is just a metric. I'm glad employers aren't using it to replace human judgment.
This is a great development! Higher education has all of the marks of an 'industry' ripe for Napster-like disruption.

Related: If you are not taking advantage of the free Coursera and Udacity courses then you should soon; they won't be free forever!
Searcher publishes specs for real Linux-powered Star Trek tricorder
If the default behavior of a program is to throw an AcquiredException after a few iterations, I wouldn't call it an Exception in the first place. imho, the real exception here is the monetizeException.
For what it’s worth, the test was probably IBM’s Programmer Aptitude Test, I can find references to it going back to 1950 or so.

http://ed-thelen.org/comp-hist/IBM-ProgApti-120-6762-2.html
The biggest challenge to the model mentioned in the article is "Will employers value these degrees?" but that's already being solved. The academic system is a great set of hurdles, and most of the time clearing those hurdles is enough of a proof. But employers are already supplementing with other hurdles: programming tests, for example, either homegrown in the recruiting process, or off-the-shelf tests like Codility. The only thing that surprises me is that the shift hasn't already happened.
Fully conditioned (filtered, redundant, battery-backed, and generator-supported) power is going to run you more than 11c/kWh. Though if you're talking raw power cost, that's not a bad starting point.
I think this is the best illustration I've seen of what makes Dropbox so great: http://xkcd.com/949/
I have a business idea
I have a couple of questions, maybe someone can answer.

First, do these techniques work on (modern) car doors? It'd be useful to be able to save the $30 fee if I lock my keys in the car..

Second, on Terminator II, Sarah Conner was able to unlock her straightjacket with a paperclip. I thought this was plausible enough, but I couldn't believe it would be possible to open her cell door since it appeared to be secured with a heavy bolt mechanism. Am I correct that this would be physically impossible to pick with a couple of paperclips?
The amount of stuff that lies hidden in video game codebases for decades never ceases to amaze me.

See http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/DummiedOut

If this kind of thing interests you, then you will very probably enjoy the story of the legendary Ocarina of Time Debug Cart

http://www.assemblergames.com/forums/showthread.php?23285-Or...

http://tcrf.net/The_Legend_of_Zelda:_Ocarina_of_Time_(Debug_...

Also, I'd just like to take a moment to show some appreciation for Rareware, one of the greatest game dev houses ever. They're responsible for so many great childhood memories, as well as breaking many technical and artistic boundaries.
This came up as an pre-interview employment challenge that I did a few months ago. I've uploaded my code here: https://gist.github.com/2242816.

I could make good arguments for both "most likely to be present" and "most information gain", so I implemented a mixed strategy. I calculated the information gain (in bits) and the probability of a correct guess, then used a linear combination of them to determine which letter to guess. Additionally, the weights changed over the course of the game so that correct guesses were valued more as incorrect guesses became more scarce.

To determine appropriate weights, I ran a crude Monte Carlo simulation. The final weights I ended up with were 0.60:0.03 with no incorrect guesses and 0.54:0.69 once there aren't any strikes left. (bits information gain : p(correct guess))
Dance.js: Take your data for a dance
I saw it too, just before the last <style> block.

Edit: the string that is showing is "nee".
Why Is Twitter Such A Success?
Being a startup in NYC makes no sense
It would be workable if browsers stopped loudly complaining about self-signed certificates and gracefully fell back to using something like TOFU/POP [1] or Convergence [2].

[1] http://www.xmlgrrl.com/blog/2010/07/06/tofu-online-trust-and...
[2] http://convergence.io/
I recently recovered code that I wrote 23 years ago in middle school. It was for an Apple II BBS we ran for a little while.

To read source code (and BBS messages) that you wrote in 1989 as a kid is quite a surreal experience, to say the least.

I got the code running, too, thanks to an email I wrote to a friend on said BBS describing in detail how to edit the code (using the AppleWorks word processor), recompile the code, and operate the BBS from the console. Without that 23-year-old email there's no way I would have ever figured it out.
Another good way to get reputation is to ask good questions.
Linux Distro Dancing (podcast)
Robot jumps on a Roof
It sounds like you could look into charging people for listings, but charging them a very small amount e.g. a 55c standard text message.

I would also recommend Amazon affiliate linking, this is a big one because it doesn't matter if they buy the textbook, anything they buy over a 24 hour period on Amazon you get a cut of.

It was a great day when someone bought a $24,000 watch on one of my links!
Key Ring Launches Rewards Program for BJ's Restaurant, Continues Growth
Rolling restart with Passenger, Ruby on Rails and Capistrano.
And she quit? We've become an oversensitive society of weaklings. When I was in school I was physically harassed daily. I had to fight people because I was into computers. People would come right out and say that they hated computer nerds and that they were going to "bash" me. It was fucking awful and I was miserable the entire time, but at no point did I consider giving computers up. So I have zero sympathy for the fashionable whining about how "hard" it is for some group of people to get into computers. It's never been easier to get into computers. You don't even need talent these days. The computer is practically designed for lazy, factory-style programmers.
I was a GSoC in Summer 09. Don't think of it as a GSoC application. It really isn't. You are applying to a particular group (or two or three at most) to work with them as an intern on their specific project. A less relevant fact is that Google is going to be paying you. Direct your application to them _directly_, and convince them to hire you.

The golden rule of internships is that internships are a lot of work for the people doing the hiring. Convince them that you're going to not be a pain to mentor, and are competent at execution. Even though they're not burning cash (Google is), it still is significant work for them to mentor you. Make it worth their time.
I would be surprised. Do you have an example?
Note that new charter does not, unlike WGU, appear to be regionally accredited. This could affect whether or not credits acquired here are recognized by other schools (i.e. graduate programs at more prestigious institutions).
I also think that current technology also has problems sequencing the bp near the start of a sequence.
DRACO made the rounds last fall. Even the article linked to here was from November.

It would be interesting for the author (or someone) to do a follow-up to see if the same apathy is still predominant.
I doubt I'd be surprised: my mother is a retired school psychologist, and her trainees used me as a guinea pig for lots of different IQ tests over the years. I've pretty much seen it all.

With respect to the content of IQ tests, I tend to avoid the term "biased", as cultural knowledge is relevant in many real-life contexts, but the best IQ tests focus on exactly the kinds of questions described in the OP: math, logic, shapes, etc.
Not that I care, but now the whole world know you got suspended for selling weed. This information cannot be good for you or your company, considering your family-oriented userbase
What paradigms did you think I was referring to? (I didn't actually [mean to] specify any).

To clarify, these are some of what I'm referring to (apologies for the code-style formatting - just trying to produce a list):

- Backbone.Model/YUI App Model:
- Backbone's .previousAttributes vs YUI's .lastChange, used to get the
previous value of a changed attribute since the last "change" event

- A separate, abstracted Model sync layer for communicating with a server
(side note: Backbone 0.9's "sync" event is being introduced in YUI in the
next release: http://stage.yuilibrary.com/yui/docs/model/index.html)

- .cid (Backbone) vs .clientId (YUI), auto-generated id guaranteed to be
unique among all models on the current page.

- configuring how the .id property is populated by overriding the
.idAttribute property

- .collection (Backbone: the Collection containing this model) vs .lists
(YUI: array of ModelLists containing this model)

- Backbone.View/YUI App View:
- .events object literal property that specifies event bindings via dom
event delegation, with the css selector in the key

- .el (Backbone) vs .container (YUI): managed property representing the
view's "container". All delegated events are bound to this element.

- Backbone.Collection/YUI App ModelList:
- .model specifying the underlying model type by referencing the type's
constructor function in the prototype definition directly (I've seen
it referenced by global name before, never by constructor reference
as Backbone does it)

- .getByCid() (Backbone) and getByClientId() (YUI): get a model out of a
collection via its auto-generated client id

- Backbone.Router/YUI App Controller: class that maps URL changes to methods
on the instance. They're also renaming "Controller" to "Router" in an
upcoming release, following Backbone's doing of the same in 0.5.3.

These are possibly too small to refer to as "paradigms", but the point still stands: they're borrowing these directly from Backbone. If they existed prior to Backbone, my apologies.

Also, this is not necessarily a bad thing.
This is essentially an IQ test, and what they discovered was that Gwen was highly intelligent. They then did the smart thing and judged her based on her demonstrated aptitude rather than on the prevailing prejudices of the day

Actually, if you read the whole thing, they didn't believe her "demonstrated aptitude" because of their "prevailing prejedices". She had to fight to get them to see her demonstrated aptitude. Many people would be tired of fighting and would have given up then (or earlier in the process). If the applicant was in the privileged position, they would not have had to fight.

it is illegal in the U.S. to give IQ tests to job applicants

That's because in the past, the IQ tests were not fair, objective and colour-blind, but were set up in such a way as to bias against poorer people (which will be mostly black in the USA). This is easy to do with IQ tests, just ask lots of questions that require good schooling and education (e.g. word questions).

Companies used to use IQ tests, and hence claim not be racist, and then be racist. The ban on IQ tests in job interviews stems from this US Supreme Court case http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Griggs_v._Duke_Power_Company and has hence probably improved equality.
There’s a long history of discussion about what exactly intelligence is, how whatever it is is measured, and why some social groups have statistically higher scores than others. Here’s an easy place to start looking into it:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Race_and_intelligence
Right now when I search for something like 'reddit logo png' I only get links no inline embedded images in a gallery like format.

Would be awesome to Not leave DDG and preview the image (jpg/png/gif) results in a gallery.
thanks for sharing, a really inspiring story.
Will then need to correlate with VimGolf score.
Only trouble is, they knew how to maintain that DSL in the administrator's room. You won't be there when something goes wrong with the wifi.
Google's Self Driving Car Takes Blind Man To Taco Bell (VIDEO)
The biggest lesson I see here is how much family solidarity and positive expectations makes in a childs education and life. Without her male tribe, and presumably the female tribe who sent the male tribe along, Reg's mum would have taken a different path.

As a father of a young family with a spotty family past I wanted to focus on things I knew for my children. Perhaps I need to focus more on building that kind of supportive family or pseudo family.

Inspiring stories have a tendancy to inspire things not first thought of.

Thank you
Hi Wisp. This is Wesley - you might be right. It's something I did a long time ago and in the past. I have changed and people that know me know that. It may be something that will turn some heads, but I like to live very honestly and transparently. I hope people won't read too much in to it and only see how much I've grown.
I got tired of the thankless task of doing other peoples' work, along with the overzealous mods shutting down my questions in the most condescending tone possible.

In particular, I recall going so far as to read vendor-specific documentation for someone, and providing example code to parse the binary data in question. It was probably an hour of my work and I didn't even get a 'thank you', much less any reputation bump.

Talk about devaluing yourself and your industry...

(incidentally, I don't know exactly how much rep I have, since the myopenid login I was using just stopped working one day. No idea why, and there doesn't seem to be a mechanism for fixing it. Edit: I managed to log in again. It appears that if you log in to MyOpenID.com for account management, any subsequent attempt to log in to SO will attempt to use that account's credentials rather than the intended user account credentials, and the error results are absolutely useless)
Gmail fluke: The Knights who say "nee"?
If you miss you just need to make an account and install the..

Dropbox should be a feature of the OS. Otherwise it can only get one part of the UX right, drag and drop.
The Mysterious Google "nee"
As BS as I consider business school to be, the Porter Five Forces model is an excellent way to look at everything Google does. Android doesn't exist to make Google money. Android exists to keep Apple honest with the threat of competition so that they don't circumvent the access route to Google.

This is why Google funded Firefox/Built Chrome --- to prevent a monopoly browser from somehow blocking access to Google.

In B-School they relentlessly push the idea that you should "commoditize your complements". Joel has a post on this from 2002 (http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/StrategyLetterV.html).

In the really high level view, everything that Google does that is not search is in service of this goal. That is why it doesn't make money. Commodity markets are _supposed_ to be near-unprofitable. In the larger goal, they exist to prevent supplier-competition.
Link Click Tracking: You’re Doing it Wrong
Tim Cook Might Abandon Steve Jobs' 'Thermonuclear War' On Android
Wow, thanks! That's one of the things I've always wanted but never knew I wanted.
I was really not sure about Unity when it came out, but now I'm more than comfortable with it. It feels wrong to use Windows now..
mysterious nee in the body..
For fairly simple organisms we have 'cold booted' DNA and swapped a cells DNA with artificial DNA from a closely related organism and it still worked. So, while humans have a lot of Genetic information I suspect you could get it to work if your willing to accept fairly low success changes.

As to read errors that effectively just a 'mutation' which are generally fairly harmless. If you stay below say 1,000 mutations, which would still take vary high accuracy, you have not significantly reduced your chances for success.
Here's what i find annoying. There are so many StackExchange sites now. I have been participating in SO for about 2 years (15K). One tag i like to watch/answer is "machine-learning." ML questions are now spread across so many SE sites: Cross-Validated (Stats), Machine Learning, Computer Science, Computational Science", Numerical Modeling & Simulation--and more on the way, Information Retrieval, Bioinformatics, Computational Linguistics*. Because of this, SO is a lot less interesting for me. It's time consuming to track down the Questions from across all relevant Sites; about half of the questions have comments telling the OP to post elsewhere ("maybe this belongs on ....") and/or multiple votes to close.

And the worst part--as a programmer, i would much rather have the computational linguist answering ML questions on SO than on a specialist site (of which there is one). Maybe those guys benefit by becoming better programmers, but i certainly benefit from their deep knowledge of how to solve ML problems. Their answer is code, just like mine, but from an entirely different perspective, more often than not it's humbling.
Brackin,

That's actually how most of our gifts are sent. You can make a gift public or private. If it's public, it's posted to the recipient's Facebook wall (and you get all the social gratitude that comes along).

We make everyone login before seeing their gifts, so people can send gift cards to the wall, and we make sure only the recipient can view it.
Force Group Policy Object Updates Manually
Google trends, innovation vs profit
Call me new-age whatever. Maybe its the end of the shareholder era we're seeing. Watching a bunch of stuff on 2012 and what it implies. Call me out for being wrong, and I want you to, or at least try, but the past years have marked a shift in thinking. I'm thoroughly enjoying a pleasant shift of focus and how new values are being laid upon good product over profits.
Ah, true. I wonder if it wouldn't be best if, by default, browsers would only complain when a site switched to an untrusted cert it hadn't used before (i.e. if Facebook.com is suddenly self-signed, that's a problem, and if a site switches from one self-signed cert to another, that's a problem as well). This would prevent most MITMs while still making self-signed certs useable. A site with a self-signed cert is better than one using no security at all, so it shouldn't get more flack.
Medeco locks can be bumped open in a few seconds by a child with a $30 tool[1]. With the popularisation of bump key and plastic key attacks, no pin-tumbler lock should be considered more than a trivial deterrent. A "high security" pin-tumbler lock opens just as easily as cheap locks - often more easily, thanks to finer tolerances.

The only mass-market lock mechanisms with any real security are disc-detainer designs, specifically Assa Abloy's Protec. Unlike any other door lock in common use, the Protec mechanism has no known non-destructive attacks.

[1]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D1LH7lrftKA