skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Actually creating most of the viral vaccines is more like theming a computer interface, you just need to plugin the new virus into your already well defined research work flow. That's the only reason we even have so many vaccines for so many viruses (even considering mutations and unknown strains).

Drop in one virus (AIDS, H1N1) which is out of the well known workflow and every thing goes haywire. I think the main reason for this whole mess is that, out of all the STEM fields, biology is the most trial and error prone.

It's the equivalent of trying to prove a mathematical formula every single time you want to use it because there are no axioms. Until some one discovers some standard good for everything axioms in biology, it will continue to be retarded cousin of all STEM fields.
> If you need bridge financing, just ask ... your neighborhood bank (that Facebook offer would have served as pre-approval).

Total BS right?
FBI: Foreign students and researchers could be spies
edited from "FBI: Many foreign students are spies" as per comments some made.
Correct. However many funds do not distribute returns that are less than a certain amount (1.5x is typical, I think)
Facebook and Instagram: Largest mobile-app deal ever?
They are often able to recycle low returns. I think 1.5x and lower is typical.
So you're saying this is the most valuable Django application ever? :)
Behold the power of the cloud.
No. It's just the most expensive ;-)

I'd never trade my URL shortener or my podcast+connected-TV-backend for a photo sharing app.
> But if you do this for enough billionaires, the common elements in the problem will start repeating and the researchers will learn a repertoire of common hacks.

No, they'll at best learn nothing, or more likely think they learn something and send the entire field off into the woods for a decade or two. Crack open "the Emporer of all Maladies" for a glimpse at just how difficult it is to judge effectiveness of treatments and preventions in even extremely controlled studies.

And your idea that somehow embracing quackery will lead to effective cancer treatments is just frankly insane.
The thing about that is that you would be competing with a company that is entrenched but properly doesn't "dig" tech at the level people here do -- and that can be used against them because the internet is the greatest single distribution channel ever conceived.

The biggest issue is that these a Christian theme calenders so they will be purchased by little old ladies who are afraid to use their credit cards on the internet, because the hackers might get it and steal their identity.
Fair enough. I injected the "borderline" qualifier in there because it hasn't proven to be an effective strategy at price fixing.

I just pictured a violent "photographer's guild" gang, riding across the countryside on their penny-farthing bicycles in matching vests and destroying the cameras and/or memory cards of those who would dare try to undercut them.
Really could have used this at Ultra...
Ah, I see what you're saying. Though even going with the best treatment in the nearest match is a huge leap forward over what we can currently do. I see two ways forward, using the current class of chemotherapeutics + small molecule/antibody targetted therapies. As straw men, they are:

1) come up with a totally complete model of what everything in the cell does, how the mutations affect those interactions amongst gene products, and change the cell, and then designing some treatment to selectively kill that tumor population and to also block off obvious avenues to evolve resistance.

2) the "dumb" approach, figure out classes of disease, and try to use induction from the results of previous patients in that class of disease to figure out the best treatment for the current patient.

Right now both avenues are being pursued as best as possible. The first straw man is far from being approachable; we know so little about molecular biology, and when physics can't even figure out how to fold a protein, how are we going to be able to figure out changes to protein-protein binding dynamics, etc? Not that it can't be done eventually, but it's a very tough road.

The second approach is probably the best we can do now, and corresponds very well to the type of machine learning that is being researched these days. Even without full understanding of the biological system and the effects of all possible mutations, we can combine what we currently know with machine learning to construct a black-box for the parts of molecular biology that we don't yet know. I think that this is probably the most reasonable path forward for the time being, though we clearly need some intelligent way to guide studies into the combinatorial effect of targeted therapies.
CISPA Bill Lets ISPs Spy On and Report Pirating Subscribers
So what? The real dissidents, ones who were actually heroes and not just fell in love with a nice word for their nick, were harassed because they were claimed to be CIA mouthpieces.

I thought we as a society figured out that this is an entirely wrong reason to shut someone off. First of all, you can be honestly mistaken.

I guess I had this one wrong.
The Commodore 64 is what inspired my career in tech. Many firsts including machine language, pascal and game/utility programming.

The first software I ever created and sold was Disk Ease, which brought low level control of the 1541 to the normal person. Sold it through ads in the back of Computer Shopper magazine; I was 14. Let me tell you, there is nothing more inspirational than people sending money to your post office box from all around the country for something you built.

It wasn't a big seller by any means, but it laid the groundwork for my future.
Airbnb is not a technology business. The internet is simply one of the major marketing and communications channels we have now, that does not mean that all businessess that use it are tech companies.

Dog kenneling businesses did not get millions of pounds in equity investment based on very small revenues and the idea in the past. They self funded and grew. This is a less capital intensive way of providing the same service, so it has even less need for external capital. But it is taking it because the bubble means that its valuation is vastly inflated, because there is so much money chasing startups.
There are a few ways to look at this. The 1% is in cash and shares and we don't know the proportion or I haven't seen that anywhere so far.

Now to put the question in context if you have a small company that is worth, say $500,000, then 1% is $5000 you might spend that much (in cash alone yearly) as "insurance", say for property/casualty or liability. And you would pay that no matter what the business climate if you perceived a risk to your business, right?

But it could indicate a bubble simply because if the market is up people are more likely to overpay for anything because they feel very upbeat and enthusiastic about the future.

So paying a large number (and 1 billion is a large number and not trivial no matter how you slice it) would be more likely to happen in a bubble.

But there are to many variables in this that are not know to draw a definitive conclusion.

That said my feeling is we are in a period of irrational exuberance.
Yes this is correct. The constructor in a singleton pattern is private. I meant the way to obtain an instance is the same. Sorry for my mistake.
Brilliant! Wish list: file transfer.
Mqtt.io - websocket based MQtt client
Mosh works differently and at a different layer. With Mosh, the server and client both maintain a snapshot of the current screen state. The problem becomes one of state-synchronization: getting the client to the most recent server-side screen as efficiently as possible.

This is brilliant!

Combine that with the ability to rejoin your session and it's even more so -- only figures since the major use of screen was to enable this functionality over ssh.
Don't give in to the appeal to authority!
The real first-mover advantage is being the first in a new distribution channel
just how difficult it is to judge effectiveness of treatments and preventions in even extremely controlled studies.

Translation: "just how difficult it is to be absolutely absolutely absolutely * 10^7 sure we're not selling quack medicine."

The treatment of Steveoma is effective if Steve gets better. If not, it isn't. The sample size is 1 by definition.

Obviously, if Steve gets better and he's taking 30 drugs, no one has any way to know which of the 30 worked, which were unnecessary, and which were actually counterproductive. But you still know more than you do when you started - you know that something worked. Lather, rinse, repeat.

And your idea that somehow embracing quackery will lead to effective cancer treatments is just frankly insane.

I love being refudiated in the morning!
Yeah. I think all of the internet companies need to start lobbying like they were possessed, while everyone that can needs to start trying trying at the same time to push for de-corrupting the political system.

It's not going to be a small effort.
> This isn't reddit, please spare us the memes and +1s.

Ok. Yr right, point taken.

> I think the odds of such a contribution being well received are quite low given the hostility to that notion the developers of yesod still display.

Hostility I've never encountered. I think the Yesod is super welcoming contribs (the recent discussion on pipes/conduits being a great example of that).

> Given that I can't see any benefit to using yesod, it seems like a waste of time for me to contribute an unwanted template engine to it.

Do you mean "can't see any benefit to using yesod" over using Snap? Because I see quite a bunch of benefits in that comparison. Let me name the ones I perceive as benefits:

* More type-safe

* Write less code to get it done (using template haskell and quasiquoting -- in other general terms they are "small DSLs")

* More vibrant community

* Faster (Warp is screaming fast)

* More like Rails (yups this is an advantage to me as I quite liked Rails for some reasons that Yesod seems to copy)
Man, this could be perfect companion for screen and irssi. I wish there will be an Android client soon.
Did I read 'fork'? If you want the open-source cred, make an attempt to get your patches upstream. Google has done it for MySQL (pre-Oracle).
This reminds me of Google Wave's operation transformation protocol except without the collaboration component [1]. Client edits are reflected instantly and client state is synchronized and reconciled with the server's.

[1] http://www.waveprotocol.org/whitepapers/operational-transfor...
Comcast spent heavily in support of anti-online piracy bills
What I've Seen: 41 days with the Nike+ Fuelband
I’ve been using this for a bit and it works pretty well most of the time (I especially like the prediction). On bad connections, I hadn’t have much luck with it (it timed out just like other TCP connections), but I only had a sample size of 1 ;).

Also note that it doesn’t support IPv6 (there is a quick & dirty working patch in the github issue for that).
It could've gone like this:

Facebook: We'll give you $600M

Instagram: No, we want $1B

FB: No deal

Instagram: Ok we're going to raise our own money

FB: Good luck with that

IG: See, we raised our own money and just closed it too and our Android app has 1M downloads on Google platform...

FB: panic Okay lets do $1B
I'd be careful extrapolating growth based on a photo filter trend. The big benefit of Instagram is making mediocre camera-phone pictures look "better" by adding filters. As camera-phones improve and tastes change (which is inevitable), Instagram's value could significantly decrease. I think you're underestimating the risk in this acquisition.
I think your question is valid and upvoted you for it.
> I use a gun to kill. That's its only purpose.

If that's true, the designers aren't very good because most guns aren't that useful for killing. Seriously - .22 is basically a joke for killing people.

> Hunting/killing and target practice for hunting are the only things a gun is useful for.

Unless you're claiming that hunting is "not constructive", you're disagreeing with "there is no way i can use a gun for constructive purpose."

> I can't use a gun to help me with the crops, to fish, or while working in the garage.

So? You can't use golf clubs or a book on python for any of those things either. Oh, and you can use a gun to kill fish. (You then scoop them up with a net.)
If it was $50M on $500M post, then it's just a bit more than 10% dilution, which isn't too bad. But either way, that $50M buys two things: (1) a floor on near-term future price negotiations, and (2) a strong signal that they were nowhere near needing to sell and instead that they could go another 18+ months growing their walled garden of eyeballs. That second point could have spurred a big company like Facebook to overpay a little now rather than having to risk squelching an upcoming competitor a year from now at a GeoCities-like price.
Mac OS X Lion:
Mac OS X Lion

dyld: Library not loaded: /Users/keithwinstein/homebrew/lib/libprotobuf.7.dylib
Referenced from: /usr/bin/mosh-client
Reason: image not found
I'm sure that the casualties from shootings would indeed go down. Casualties from knife injury on the other hand...

But guns are far superior tools than knifes if your intent is to kill. If the body count goes down, that's a win in my book...

Some models are better than others.

No argument there, but you haven't convinced me that yours is the better one.

how about we stop treating each other like crap and encourage people to cooperate not because a stick is being held over their heads but because they actually want to?

Because our monkey-brains are not wired for that. We're at least partly subject to the whims of the blind idiot god of evolution, and being an asshole has been a sound strategy for a long time and still largely is. Education can help with that, but is no cure-all.

Besides, if violence begets violence then are we even duct taping the wound by using oppression to treat oppression or are we reinforcing those pesky root causes even further?

There are many countries with stricter gun laws than the US, and I'd be surprised if most of their citizens would feel any more oppressed than their counterparts in the US.

How is reminding people who have stepped over that line and taken the inequality into their own destructive hands that they live in an unfair system going to help anyone?

How is restricting access to personal firearms a reminder of an unfair system if it applies equally to all citizens? Also, do you have any data on support of stricter gun control laws by income? It's nice to speculate about the opinion of the downtrodden masses, but some facts would be even better...
To respond to the comments below/above: a digital frame w/ RSS may be a good option - I may try that. It still isn't perfect, but it's better than what I've been doing. (Emailing, and then having to explain over and over again what a "Downloads" folder is, and why you can't print images sized for the web).

Some complications that continue to annoy me, though: she wants to print them. She wants them on her ipad. She wants them on her iphone. I hate manually sorting out which ones she would like to see and uploading them to whatever service.

The holy grail for me? I take a picture with my DSLR, and it knows who to send it based on what I took a picture of. If it's for my mom, it appears on all of her devices, which have "print" buttons on them that will make nice, printed versions show up in her mailbox. I don't think this is that far off, but it doesn't exist yet in idiot-proof form.
I've got the feeling that because of the Google/Apple/Microsoft-rivalry a lot a companies are bought just so that the others don't get them.

Company X wants to buy this popular startup?
Ok, we don't need it but if they want it, they need it and we can't let that happen, let's buy them.
I know some C programmers, and they are hanging out on Usenet newsgroups, not on StackOverflow.
Apple should have acquired Instagram
I love how they don't even mention IE!
Correct me if I'm wrong, but in a formal sense you get the synchronous system inside the asynchronous one trivially. So the two are of equivalent power.

If you imagine that in the case of threading systems, you can implement a multi-threaded system with your own green threads library, which is async on top of sync. You can get sync on top of async with native threads by simply using one thread. Or, if you want to be complicated, by using multiple threads with locks that serialize to a single synchronous ordering.
This was a Geo-Cities-like price - not adjusted for inflation ;)
Facebook definitely had other motives for doing this. One such speculation is here http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3819245

Others have been for their user base while some say it's for a talent acquisition (which I highly doubt). The title doesn't seem to imply that's why they bought Instagram.
You're right, there is no need to be defensive. For some reason though I felt like being attacked here. Maybe words like 'piece of shit' (not from you) have something to do with this.

I am not used to participate in technical debates like this. All I know is that the I like the minimalistic way of OOP in JS and that it works for me. All I tried to do is share my experience. I no longer feel the need to prolong this discussion as I am no longer capable of providing arguments. I am left wondering why a perfectly reasonable way of coding JS is dismissed here so aggressively. For me hackernews has been a big dissappointment (first thread/comments here). I had hoped to either learn something new or find support for my method. Instead I have felt attacked for my opinion. As a natural response I try to defend myself; however this rhetoric gets in the way of reason and rational argumentation.
FYI There is a bukkit plugin that allows you to duel the dragon as many times as you want.
It's also going to be susceptible to some "popularity contest" skew. For my part, I've been known to post the sample code for my questions in C# even if that's not actually the language I'm working in when I hit the problem. C# is the lingua franca of the platform, so the questions is likely to be seen by a wider audience that way.

That said, I've wondered for a long time if the Tiobe index is subject to a potentially much bigger source of skew - namely, I suspect that C, C++ , and Java get a boost for being three of the most popular languages for people who spend more time talking about programming than actually programming.
Don't bother clicking on the above site, is some kinda spam link
same error on OSX Lion. Also tried building from source and got: "No package 'protobuf' found"

Very excited to try this though!
They may have brokered the deal, and at least gave credibility to the investment to make it easier for Facebook to pay the price. Beautiful result for the portfolio - we are in a bubble and flipping this so quickly means that they have $ return in the bank way before the more speculative investments.
I don't think anyone says that mutable state should be completely eliminated; the argument is that it should (1) not be the default, and (2) be made explicit through the type system.
So, what do the Instagram founders do now?
I imagine with $100MM+ in the bank account of each Instagram founder, it's safe to say their lives have changed overnight. So what does one do with this massive, newly acquired wealth?
Obviously Facebook would have liked to pay a lower price (and I'm sure they've made previous offers which were turned down by Instagram). Raising this money strengthened Instagram's bargaining position, which is why it was a smart move for them.
How well does this work for something like vim? Line editing and mass transfer of commands is great if you're sending a long string, but if each keystroke is a command it seems like things would get stickier.
Haskell is more about inverting the responsibility. Just code up whatever in Haskell and it might be slow, but there are a whole bunch of errors that code just can't have.

When you need the big unsafePerformIO hammer, it's there for you.

Anybody can write fantastic threaded code in any language if they think real hard about it. Haskell just makes you say, "Yes indeed i did think really hard about it. I'm not just checking this in on friday afternoon so the boss doesn't bug me."

I'm not real familiar with erlang, but IIRC it has very similar appeal to a higher power semantics.

This may or may not be useful, depending on the kind of work you do. I ,for one, am often undisciplined but occasionally very clever. Given that, the Haskell model is very enjoyable ; I've never used it to make money though. So there's that.
> gave up on yesod because it is so railsish

So what exactly do you feel is bad about "railsishness"?

I think Rails brought a lot of sane defaults and best-practices to a web framework.. I'm not surprised to see nearly all web frameworks that came after it borrow from it. See for instance "Play" on Java/Scala -- very new, very Rails.
One metric is job postings containing the language:

http://www.indeed.com/jobtrends?q=java%2C+c%2B%2B%2C+ruby%2C...

edit: fixed spelling of clojure ;)
I recently had video content I created licensed for use in a motion picture.

My compensation included a small % of profitability of the film, payable as long as certain milestones were met such as ticket sales, etc.

This documentary video was a huge success virally online, it was bootlegged and shared, and discussed.... in fact it was great; the message in the film was able to spread, and that potentially created a huge impact on our society.

The industry-standard contract I signed had no way to measure the reach of my footage to compensate me accurately. I accepted that when I signed it.

But what if we could measure it?

The MPAA isn't going to do it. They're much too caught up in the way they do things. But a startup that could would be the filmmakers best friend.
What I find especially interesting is how they explicitly decided to design the site like a startup's. I always think it's cool when philanthropy learns from commercial enterprises.
I am wondering about the opposite case: how do they emulate graphics when there is no GPU support? Do they emulate the GPU device, or use a software library? Which library if it is done in software?
Please try the new PKG (mosh-1.1.3-2.pkg) -- should be fixed. Thanks for your patience!
3 Ways To Capture A Screenshot In Unity3D
"Professional" in the context of visual design is about the aesthetics of business (as opposed to the aesthetics of, say, amateurs). I didn't mean professional in the sense of "money-earning," as you would use the term applied to participants in a certain field.

Exec's launch website is unprofessional because it is unpolished, visually unresolved, and appears to have taken little time to create. I don't want to break down into a detailed argument over specifics, but the biggest problems have to do with spacing, type size, the crappy icons, and the hyper-generic elements like the buttons, background tiles and color palette. Also, the logo (which isn't very distinctive in and of itself) isn't even used throughout.

The redesign is very carefully proportioned and arranged. It uses somewhat less generic colors and buttons and so forth, and some simple visual ideas are repeated throughout to create a sense of continuity and harmony. Each section flows well from on area to the next.

Again, I think you might be projecting a little bit. Who's "hung up" on "unreasonable standards" of professionalism? The post is about a person redesigning Exec's landing page. The redesign is more professional, looks more polished and refined and careful, than the original. I don't think that's a huge deal, and I don't think that makes Exec a huge failure or something. I'm not insisting that they raise their design to any standard.

EDIT: FYI, I'm not really much of a web designer myself. Kyro can probably define the problems with the existing site in much more detail than I could.
A New Look at Nature’s Role in the Titanic’s Sinking