skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
You raise another good point here, that the allowable side effect profiles for cancer drugs are much less stringent than for drugs indicated for less life-threatening diseases.
>But it's obvious that you can't fight an exponential battle with linear weapons.

Well sure, but actually fixing the way our society runs to stop exponentially expanding our energy requirements would require, frankly, some minimal dose of social democracy. Can't have that!
Absolutely- in the case of the tech industry you're right.

But we have to remember that not every other industry works the same as ours.

Imagine an average mother working at the tills at Walmart. Is she ever going to be good enough at that job that she is going to earn 'bargaining power' by virtue of her merit?

No. Some jobs can be done without a huge amount of training, talent or skill. It is in the company's interest to push down pay and working conditions as much as possible (as the employee is easily replaceable). Therefore it is the state's job to set minimum standards.
Was he really using 100% heart here or capitalizing on the gravity of the situation to slingshot himself in to the limelight and boost his app sales and reputation? That's the feeling I got from this post at least.

Surely there were other developers who had "side projects" they really loved who happily went with Zynga. I really have to question why this guy was the _only_ one who didn't jump ship. Sure you can write a post claiming to be the white knight and not another corporate zombie like the rest, but that's very rarely the case.

I see this as a power play. Instead of being a "Zynga acquisition", I think he saw it as much more beneficial to be the David vs. Goliath. Good for him, I guess.
> Gangsters existed before prohibition and existed after, they just moved into different rackets.

Sure, but it's not like there's a fixed supply of "gangsters", like "continents" or "elements" -- some constant number of people floating around out there spending their time committing crimes. Prohibition is the perfect counter-example -- it turned half of America into gangsters or customers of gangsters for a little while.

On the flip side, if you increase the cost and decrease the benefit of earning money illegally, then a portion of the labor supply will move to legal markets. The war on drugs started with exactly that plan -- increase the cost and decrease the benefits of selling drugs, by locking people up when they do it. It made intuitive sense. But since demand for addictive drugs is inelastic, prices rose proportionally to risk and that plan didn't work. It just increased the revenue available to organized crime.

So I mean, maybe I'm not saying anything too astonishing. It's obvious that changing the incentives to commit crime will change the level of crime. But it's also really important, because when you assume there are a fixed number of gangsters in the world, you're labeling real people as inherent "gangsters" who will always be "gangsters." But that kid slinging crack in the projects because it's less work and more money than his other options, and it's what his friends are doing -- he's not a lifetime gangster. We don't win if we lock him up, stamp "gangster" on his hand, take away his right to vote and let someone else take his place for a little more money. We win if we turn him back into a citizen.
Well balanced arguments with a very reasonable tone. Rare, and appreciated. Respect to this dev and I hope Connectrode 2 does change his life.
Right, what I meant was that this particular group of people here on HN doesn't seem prone to that, not that people in general don't do it.
Yes, and the way I understood the article is that the problem--not for the next generation of chips but two generations down the line--is that cog architecture scales up to 10s or 100s of processors but not thousands due to synchronization delay. That I believe is what David Ungar is attempting to address in his research.
Other things which suck as a business - hiring staff, renting an office, paying taxes, advertising, getting legal advice ...

The argument is, contributing to open source helps solve your problem in a more sustainable way. Maintaining your own fork of Linux isn't feasible, so you contribute patches back to the mainline. But doing this can be ... daunting, so you might be better paying some third party to handle this for you. Thus Red Hat.

Now, your competitors get a free ride on your patch, but presumably they didn't have your problem or have sunk money into an alternative solution, so it's not like they get the same benefit you did.
Full disclosure. I'm a Zynga employee. I run the Boston studio, which was built out of a startup acquisition and is responsible for Adventure World. This comment is 100% my own opinion, not that of my employer. I'm an engineer and entrepreneur at heart, a long-time hacker news contributor, and now a GM / product guy. Above all else, I'm not evil. I claim that no one I work with is evil either.

It's a shame Shay didn't join Zynga so that he could see how we really operate and how we really think about our players instead of taking on what is essentially an uninformed and cliched conventional wisdom opinion about the company.

I don't know anything about contracts, so I have no opinions about that part. I just take issue w/ the last half of his article that slanders me and my team without any first-hand knowledge in order to market his new dev shop.
Newton is a famous mathematician in the same way that Jesus is a famous Jew.
I like how they made it really easy to get in. No signup just name your guy and go. I generally don't have time to play games however I appreciate the amount of work that goes into them. Good Job.
The UI is the language with which people communicate with the computer. UI patents makes as much sense as a patent on "WTF". Having such a patent is the same antisocial behavior as trying to own the "ceiling cat" meme.
You're assuming he has a ticket.
I want to pay for a social network
I look forward to trying this out with a few friends from college who were mildly addicted to simple games like Dwarf Fortress and Zelda. Any excuse for old school multiplayer gaming is a good one.
Carberp Trojan still alive and well, security company finds
The other day, I was thinking about an SMS based MUD for cheap feature phones - text based of course. An online game for places without much 3G adoption but where there are lots of Nokias, so to speak.
Poll: What text editors do you prefer?
Inspired by the recent polls on which programming languages people like and dislike, I decided to put together a poll with the most popular editors and IDEs to figure out what text editors people prefer.

I think I got most of the popular editors, but if your favorite one isn't here, ask in the comments and I will add it.
E Text Editor
Emacs (or derivative)
Nodepad2
sam (or derivative)
ScITE
Vi (or derivative)
Visual Studio [Express]
I believe the author just has a technical misunderstanding of the way APNS works. In no ways is APNS aware of accounts logged in or logged out of a service - all of this happens on the app developer's server backend. The author's case is properly laid out, but the fault is of the app developer rather than APNS. Developers should take note - this is indeed a valid race condition.

APNS is simply an exchange between a remote service (ex. Twitter) and an application that has registered for remote notifications (ex. Twitter app). APNS knows nothing more than the key that it provided to Twitter to identify this device in a remote push context.
Bah, I can't be bothered to read the whole thing. Before the request was closed, if I understood correctly, the argument was about whether or not `xhr?` needed to return a boolean rather than what it's doing which is aliasing a regex match.

Hmm, call it bike-shedding if you want, but I have to be honest part of the beauty and value of Ruby is how semantic it can be made when you follow some conventions. How hard or awful is it to just actually return a boolean here? I mean is anyone expecting or relying on the clearly undocumented feature that it also returns the offset of where `/XMLHttpRequest/i` is found in the request?

The problem with throwing out the 'bikeshedding' defence is that it goes both ways. It's their choice to fight a small, trivial pull request that appears to make logical sense, and arguably reduces the potential for cognitive friction.

It's debatable who's actually bikeshedding here.
Find a small project you use for something you're building. Do you run into any issues with using it, that could be improved? Improve those and send a pull request. Make your first commit small and obvious.
I got a ticket, but every time I try to pay for it I get "We couldn't complete your purchase because of a technical issue." Anyone else having similar issues?

(It did tell me "declined" once, but I called my bank's fraud department and had them remove the block.)
Find a "small" project is probably best. I've contributed to probably over a dozen opensource projects on Github in the past year or so. I highly encourage you to find a few that you use and like. They don't even have to be really small, but I'd probably avoid projects like Ruby, Rails or the Linux kernel for now.
Red Hat proved that one company can make money using the support business model, but it doesn't look very replicable.
I think it's more about culture, not respect for rank.

A guy is supposed to learn at least the basics of the next higher-up job, sometimes two. Team leaders are supposed to reach down two levels, ensure juniors are properly schooled to step up.

Obviously this is so if one's leader is zapped, juniors can step up and carry out the mission.

But this works out well in nominal peace-time and non-combat jobs, too. And the better trained and schooled one's juniors are, the better the unit can carry out the mission.

Example: one week into a three-week field exercise I was given 20 minutes to pack and report to a new, temporary, job, far away from my parent unit.

We could do this because everyone under me (all of three guys, but still) knew what I did and could do the job. The only problem it caused was that they suddenly had one fewer person to stand watch in the server CONEX.
It sounds nice, but in places like Israel you end up with governments headed by a party that took just about a 15% mandate, coalescing with two partners that took a 13% mandate and a shit-ton of small single-issue parties that got something like 3% each. One Member of the Knesset deciding to swing can topple the government or force a coalition realignment.
Just to clarify, I dont think that its impossible for a lean-startup to be successful in mobile payments, but I doubt that they can do that just by emulating m-pesa.
Ask HN: Is anyone seriously working on a space drive?
There are plenty of serious companies looking at "rockets", and alternative launch and propulsion methods to get us somewhere more or less in the "local" space of our solar system, but are there any serious attempts at creating and testing anything that might lead us to travel to the stars?

I've seen a load of crackpot stuff but very few genuine efforts. Is there even anyone looking at challenging the science in a significant way that might lead to something?
More like: the more processors we add, the more performance can be gained by switching to nondeterministic algorithms for problems where getting a solution that is within 99% of the perfectly correct one and arrives in 1 second is better than getting a perfect solution in 2 hours.
Why is that? You don't need root to pirate games. The only thing it does is marginally improve security for apps like Netflix.

It wouldn't have to be rooted by default. The ideal solution would be a USB tether + dev tool connection required to turn this on, so unsuspecting users aren't compromised by malicious apps.
Sure, but as someone on salary I tend to find disposable income and then calculate that spread evenly over time. AKA I have 1,000$ this month to spend however I like that's 1000/31 = 32$ a day or 1.30$ an hour.

I do this because I can't work more hours to make up for extra spending I can only wait till more money shows up.
Overview of ARM machines
AppHarbor (YC W11) adds New Relic performance monitoring
Not at all. It's totally possible to dare to do great stuff as a team.

In Silicon Valley, VCs very rarely fund single founders. They fund teams. That's because it takes a team to create the world-changing companies that they seek.

This list isn't saying you can't be passionate about your work. But it is saying you can't be an asshole to your teammates, and that the point of the work is never the code itself, but the effect you are collectively trying to have in the world.
That article is completely wrong from a technical perspective...
Top enemies: Rick Santorum, Westboro Baptist Church and Fox News. Which of the following explains this? (a) Liberals are heavier Facebook users; (b) Liberals have more enemies; (c) Liberals are earlier adopters of new apps. :)
Dude, that's deep. You're bike shedding the bike shed. So meta. Turtles all the way down. Touché!
I would also consider paying and for the reasons you mention. However, how much would you pay? i would want the service to be as good as the free alternatives. In order to drive genuine innovation and great features, the site/business would need the resources to attract the top talent. Therefore, would you be prepared to pay enough considering the competition is bankrolled by big advertisers?
You are not going to eliminate organized crime, but you can reduce it substantially. Drugs are in incredibly high demand, and are quite easy to hide and trade illicitly. Many people get into organized crime because they see that it's an easy way to make lots of money. Take away one of their biggest moneymakers, and you're not going to eliminate it entirely, but you will cut off quite a lot of their money, making it harder for them to recruit and less powerful.

You can also reduce their profits in other areas. The whole reason they are able to make money is that there is demand for services that cannot be provided legally. Now, some of these services really should be illegal, as they are scams or have very harmful externalities, but for many of the more lucrative ones, you need to ask yourself "is banning this really worth the cost of enforcing it and the costs of the black market generated?"

For instance, human trafficking happens due to demand for labor that isn't being met by local markets, and the illegality of prostitution. Could that demand be better met by making our immigration easier, and making prostitution legal, spending the money saved on programs to help people who may be trapped in bad situations rather than perpetuating the situation by putting them into a permanent criminal class?

I don't pretend to know all of the answers. But I think it's a question that we need to consider seriously, and without resorting to knee-jerk "soft on crime" rhetoric against anyone who suggests that maybe this system is incredibly expensive, damaging to liberty, and producing more harm than good.
Last I heard, Israel has a 2% limit.
What Happened When I Got Retweeted By BarackObama
Ask HN: From Software Testing to Software Development
I want to move to software development from my current testing job. I have 5 years of experience in testing. I want to ask my fellow hackers -
1. What are the chances to make this move?
Heh, which I find myself doing frequently. Every time I get to the point where there are no "easy" choices for words to draw, I find myself force-quitting the app, relaunching, and playing a round with someone different, and then coming back to the round I skipped (incidentally, you get offered new word choices in this case). Hard to say whether having a "back" button would end up discouraging people from continuing the game or not without some A/B testing, and I have a hunch that not having a back button probably keeps people in the game a little longer, but I still wish there was a back button. I'd like to be able to return to the same point in the round instead of having to completely restart the round again.

EDIT: something else occurs to me too. When you are presented with a list of words to draw, you have the option to "bomb" the list and get new words. As I mentioned, if you force quit the app at this point, and come back to that round, you will be offered different words, for free (definitely an exploit if you are patient enough to go through the process of force-quitting and restarting). I guess putting a back button on this screen would pretty much obviate the need for the "bomb" button, and would directly impact their bottom line since people wouldn't have as many opportunities to use their bombs. I have a suspicion that that's the reason there is no back button...the fact that it doesn't give players a chance to back out and keeps them a little more engaged it probably just a happy side effect.
This is a particularly difficult problem, one that I actually happen to be involved with at the moment.

The short answer is that crowdsourcing is thus far ineffective, as there is as yet no suitable reward for tracking down where every single obscure product is in each store (and it will vary from store to store, even within the same chains). This means it's up to each individual chain to create their own item locator system.

Walmart is currently working on this.
Cars are responsible for some 15% of carbon emissions globally. Even if we could replace all cars globally (a very long shot already), we haven't accounted for the fact that most electricity generated is by burning fossils. China is by far the biggest builder of new nuclear power, but they can't even keep up with their growth, much less overtake it.

Let's say we can get all cars replaced (meaning we fix range, cost, the sophistication required to service, grid capacity etc.), you've maybe shaved 5% off emissions - and that's a one-off, not a continuous improvement, the growth in carbon emissions keeps soldiering on.
Also, not all apps have an explicit "delete account" option. I've experienced scenarios where I've received push notifications when I'm actually signed out of the app (I've seen this behavior on the Google+ and Airbnb apps, for instance) I guess it really is up to the application developer to send push notifications only for active sessions.
And when you get a professional, they're often better at it than you are. It's a little like comparative advantage.
Amazing DARPA projects (Regina Dugan, now at Google)
"What would you attempt to do if you knew you could not fail?"
Hi Derek,
Loved your book, two quick questions, (1) Up to today, how far did you get in using RoR for your new projects and (2) what is your "Kimo's advise" on speed learning it ? (coming from the Microsoft world).
That's very strange. My girlfriend's iPhone 4 handles it just fine.
> If that code is in there without at least a comment mentioning that, then you have bigger problems than handling people's egos. This kind of thing is precisely what comments are for.

Comments are a poor substitute for collaboration.

> Tell that to people who came up with 15% "innovation time" at 3M and 20% at Google.

As far as I'm told, 20% projects always had to be approved by your manager. So I suspect that they are not quite as open as you are thinking.
Interesting. Grats on the announcement. Will Riak CS support range requests on binary objects? Aka. give me bytes 100-200.
Awesome thread.

I had two massively influential mentors like this in middle and high school.

Both were teachers who cleared the path for me. Instead of the curriculum other students did I was given one that challenged me. 95% if I got the new computer lab setup over the weekend. I was pushed to help integrate technology into all the schools clubs, which in turn required me to join a whack of clubs I never would have, nor made diversely interested friends.

While I was in school, much of this did happen outside the classroom. By saving my school 50 to 80,000/year in network administration costs. By creating (or saving) this much value I was supported with my own office, phone number, expense account to buy books or things for learning, attend conferences, and generally have my run of the school, including a pre-signed pad of late slips to use when I ran late from my commitments.

There was so much that got built as a byproduct of my time because I was going so fast. The difference 10 or 15 years later? I had far fewer responsibilities to other areas of my life (and others) back then.

Age inevitably eats up more time and it's a reality, if you want a balanced life with more than just work in it. This might be a kiss of death to some startup types, but it presented a new challenge to me and I ended up pursuing a consulting business to forever float me while chasing startup ideas.
Sublime Text 2 for me. Very powerful and easy to use.
If you rooted your EVO on day 0, then you probably used some of my Unrevoked work. :)

I can say with absolute certainty that we've held previously back active, root-level exploits in the OS or supporting Android libraries that we've found to a later date, solely to ensure that users continue to have access to root.
A NLP Module for node.js
TouchOSC - cool MIDI control surface (iOS/ Android)
The current Series E £5 and £10 note are due for replacement anyway. The £20 and £50 notes are already Series F.

Traditionally the famous person depicted on the banknote is changed with each series: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Banknotes_of_the_pound_sterling...
How many options are there for an open source cloud storage product you can run at your own site now?

I'm sure I've overlooked a few, but the ones I'm aware of (roughly in chronological order of when they first became usable) are:

Eucalyptus's Walrus http://open.eucalyptus.com/wiki/EucalyptusStorage_v1.4

OpenStack's Swift http://swift.openstack.org/

SpiderOak's Nimbus.io https://nimbus.io/

Basho's Riak CS http://basho.com/products/riakcs/

Glad to see so much interest in this space.

I think Basho made a good strategic choice with what they call "Per-Tenant Visibility", which will facilitate other cloud hosting providers that compete with Amazon reselling Riak CS as a storage service.
Waiting for ideas...
Realm of the Mad God is even better on that front: it auto-generate a name for you, you just hit "Play" and you're in the game ready to rock (you can edit the game once you're hooked of course, and create a formal account, and start paying your dealer, but the initial experience is "hit play and you're playing")
Clever, and very well done.
Yep. Two programmers enter, one programmer leaves.
You mean like demanding employees return their stock options? Yeah, nothing totally despicable about the management of your company, they are all GREAT GUYS!
I'd like to see see gain some traction and give Runescape a run for it's popularity.
Some of the positive cost/benefit factors will arise as a result of the data necessary to create such a system.

By knowing where every single item is in a store, you can create efficient routes through that store to make your shopping trip only as long as is necessary.

Also, in some big-box stores an employee may not be familiar with items outside of their assigned area. They may only be able to direct you to the general vicinity, or have to call in some additional help.
Announcing Advanced Merge Requests for Git
They should not give away anything this year, so those that didn't get a ticket will get a similar streaming experience and those that got one just for swag will get nothing for their "investment"

and I got a ticket, so I'm not saying this out of spite...
ZeroRPC
(d) Conservatives are more centralized.

Quick, what's the most influential Libral TV station?
This is the second time today that I hear about Askolo, seems more then a quincidence (heavy PR going on?).
How are they different from Quora?