skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
It appears to be hodgepodge of technologies but mostly Matlab (.m) ...

Downloaded code zip file and unziped to to "WholeCell" directory

find WholeCell -type f | awk '{FS="."; print $NF}' | sort | uniq -c | sort -n

...

2 java
2 lib
2 log
2 mexa64
2 mexw32
2 pdf
2 swf
2 vbs
2 xlsx
3 exe
3 fsa
3 mexw64
4 jpg
4 svg
5 desktop
5 license
5 sql
5 TXT
6 col
6 sh
6 tmpl
6 tpl
7 ico
7 xml
8 bat
8 pl
8 z
9 json
15 dot
16 gif
18 map
19 css
23 dll
24 dat
25 p
52 mat
62 txt
114 jar
238 png
277 js
427 php
531 m
1096 html
1. Self-affirmations

"I can fly." "I can fly." "I can fly." "I can fly."

2. Brainwashing your self.

Theory of Flight, Richard von Mises. Dynamics of Atmospheric Flight, Bernard Etkin, et. al.

3. Who you hang out with.

Pigeons. Check.

4. Digging to the root.

Well, there was that one incident where I jumped off the balcony, aiming for the sofa, and broke my leg.
Overlapps iPhone app - Discover the best apps in an amazing & simple way
…everybody needs an app to love. Discover the best apps everyday, in the most simple and fascinating way.

Immersed daily in an ocean of new apps, Overlapps offers you an exclusive list of emerging apps that will take a privileged place in your iPhone. With Overlapps you will be the first to discover the new apps that everyone else will soon be talking about.
http://boingboing.net/2012/07/20/how-to-prepare-for-googles-...
With a data base consisting of hundreds of largely independent findings, it'd take one hell of a systematic bias to not get at least something right. Granted, they're obviously abstracting here, but we should avoid underplaying this achievement as much as overestimating it.
> Desktop software is going out.

I'm inclined to disagree. I use no web apps that I don't have to. We use google apps at work, and I use Mac Mail, Calendar, and Contacts. The web app is a good option if I'm nowhere near my phone or laptop, but it's my absolute last choice.

Ever since the days of Yahoo Mail and Hotmail, I've preferred local desktop clients. I've never enjoyed web apps, and I can't imagine I ever will. It's always a lowest-common-denominator option, and on OS X and iOS, there are too many good desktop clients for the web services I use.

I didn't care for Sparrow, but if Google is going to throw all their work away and put them to work on something else, it's a shame. They did the same thing with the author of Quicksilver, canning that in favour of their own, dramatically inferior, clone. Instead of people switching to Google's version, they generally stayed on Quicksilver until they discovered Alfred, and now his talent and the work he put into it is wasted.
This might just be the quote of the decade! Yes, I know I'll get downvoted.

Not to bring my sour notes from the discussion on the just announced Sparrow team acquisition but the Acrylic blog post mentions that the products and services remain and the wording makes it appear to be a hire(not an acquisition) if that makes you feel any safer.
Start small and iterate? If built by knowledgeable engineers, I could see it being decent. It won't be awesome at version 1.0, but what ever is?
On the one hand, a human cell is many times more complex than the cell simulated here (you could say that each of the hundreds of organelles in a human cell are closer in size and complexity to a bacterium than the whole cell). On the other hand, you could throw a datacenter at the problem, and get quite a leap over the 128-machine cluster used by the researchers.

You're probably right about the hierarchical simulation though. I have trouble believing that it's actually useful to model an entire body at a macro-molecular level. It would be like modeling electrons in circuit design software, rather than using the abstractions of voltage and current.
It happened to me the other way round: they were looking for someone to build a replacement for them.

They were more interested in simplifying their order processing routine, rather than getting a nicer website.
One case does not prove much, but you might try focusing more on the fact that you can ease their work.

Also, in my case they were a bit afraid of depending too much on a particular system, so you might want to point that out too.
Facebook just acquired Acrylic Software
Ah yes, Study Tech, I had a total brain freeze on that one. :)
No, really. There's a press in the closet. It's kind of a pain to get the paper, but, heck, it beats work.
Let's put it like this: it deserves some praise, but not as much praise as someone donating a kidney, wouldn't you agree? Yet this is newsworthy and earns praise from all over the world, while people who actually do donate a kidney barely make it into local news, if at all.
According to wikipedia (http://bit.ly/SLQDiT) there are between 215 and 411 different cell types in the human body. I would expect each of those different cell types to behave similarly (maybe one order of magnitude difference to account for environmental effects around the specific cell). This means we should be able to do a human simulation much sooner than 80 years.
Nvidia  DevZone password breach
> They clearly had the product and following (IMHO) to become something massive.

What exactly does 'massive' look like in this case? One-time payments don't offer dependable growth.
Running a Kickstarter project early on in a product's life allows anyone to see what kind/size of audience they'll be dealing with.

I don't believe all products should do this, but they'll receive valuable feedback, and if they don't meet their goal, they'll be better off with decent feedback from potential customers.
I once contacted bulksms.co.uk after I received some spam on an email address dedicated to their site only. They also identified the leak as being from a third party provider they used for mailshots. They promptly found a new provider.
I can't help but respond:

http://www.indeed.com/jobtrends?q=java%2Cclojure%2Chaskell%2...

Having any "most in-demand functional programming language" seems to be a bit silly. In the larger view, there simply isn't any demand.

I REALLY want this to change. I think if Clojure can make some inroads to the enterprise, there will be trickle-down effect that will help increase opportunities to work in Clojure. I think increasing working opportunities is what language evangelism is for.

As a hacker who loves the repl, functional programming, weird languages, and was at the first Clojure/conj, it is not clear to me at all that immutability and pure functions are wins in general - lots of excellent working systems are out there that don't bother using this stuff at all (no silver bullet is kind of what I am driving at). I might instead argue that in the hands of good-to-great hackers, that immutability and pure functions offer some benefits that are hard to quantify when you normalize across raw hacker abilities.

PS - Thanks so much for the book. A large part of Clojure's success is directly attributable to the high quality and number of books that have popped up so soon in its life as a programming language.
Snapguide launches website redesign
"You may have noticed Snapguide’s website is looking a little different these days. We recently completed a sitewide redesign focused on making it easier, faster and more enjoyable to view guides. We couldn’t have done all this work without the awesome feedback from the Snapguide community, thank you!

Now that the new site is live we’d love to hear what you think about the changes. After checking out the details below we hope you’ll consider shooting us an email at feedback@snapguide.com with your thoughts."
Yes, but it needs security updates and possibly bug fixes. That's the very least you'd expect when purchasing software. I bought Sparrow for the iPhone and Mac directly after they were released and really never used them.

But imagine that you just bought either Sparrow a few days ago, or even worse, made it part of your workflow.

It sucks.

On the other hand, it's always an inherent danger with proprietary software. Open software gets maintained by Debian for like forever ;). I learnt that lesson after the demise of Be Inc.
All of their customers (myself included) invested

No you didn't. You bought. There was no investment, you should not expect a 'return'.
I wonder if an organ could be simulated taking a smaller selection of cells, determining their characteristic interactions and extrapolating from there.

Sort of like a Hashlife[1] for real life, as it were.

And let me just say that I sure hope we're not still coding in 80 years. Fun as it may be, we'd probably be better off letting machines handle that sort of thing. Get started on that AI!

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hashlife
Ahh yes. The "testosterone" fueled view of capitalism that thinks optimizing your own wealth and profit must always be associated with a combative, gladiatorial narrative. In this individuals particular situation spreading that money to reward employees is likely the smartest way for him to optimize his own wealth. His employees love him which secures his ongoing wealth accumulation (who fires a popular CEO). I assume he has a significant stack of stock options that continue to increase in value through motivated retained employees.
Again, betaworks paid 500K for domain, code (which they're throwing away), and data (and I'm not optimistic that they'll keep anything but the user accounts). What's left of the team went to WaPo, and LinkedIn bought some bullshit feature patents.
> the code in Matlab seems like a disaster as far as ever
> making this or similar approaches modular and so usable-
> by-others goes.

As always, it depends. I've seen very well maintained MATLAB code bases, and I've seen the opposite (with the latter greatly outweighing the former). We should give these guys the benefit of the doubt. Somewhere Karr mentions Hudson CI, so they don't seem fully removed from good practices. Interfacing with MATLAB from C is reasonable.

In an ideal world, this would be a NumPy/SciPy prestige project, but neither the community nor Python for that matter are quite there yet.
I am actually slightly tempted to start using Opa for this. Not enough to actually do it, just now, but wow, that's a nice feature. Would that all static type checkers gave error messages at least that useful.
> how are they gonna survive in the long run?

In theory: By building the next thick client app and pitching it to their existing customer base. I loved OmniGraffle so OmniFocus was an obvious choice, etc...

Apart from games, are there any examples of this business model left?
Simply put: that's a risk you take for being an early adopter. Deal with it, there's a good chance it will happen with any/all early adoption startup products out there.
The source code is available.

https://simtk.org/project/xml/downloads.xml?group_id=714#pac...

I went to a talk by Dr. Covert a few months ago and it was fascinating, all the moreso as a chalk-talk with an animation flip-book handout.

As an aside, since the topic of CS folks helping with biology research comes up often: apparently a Google engineer went on sabbatical to the Covert lab and helped re-architect and optimize the system to the point that it was feasible for this research. There are many other projects that would benefit from this type of expertise.
First, I'm pretty sure you can use a keyboard with gmail.

As far as doing work offline, <a href="http://www.whatwg.org/specs/web-apps/current-work/multipage/... Cache</a> has you covered, assuming that by "answer," you mean "compose responses to," because if your software actually lets you respond in those situations then hot damn, I'm totally sold on it, hook us up with a link.
Human's have 23,000 genes, vs 525 in this organism. On the assumption that complexity increases with the square of the number of genes you would need 245,000 computers today to simulate one human cell. And it could be more than that because of RNA etc.
Mark Shuttleworth (Canonical/Ubuntu) is quite good on this idea. Shuttleworth sold Thawte to Verisign for quite a lot of money. He is on record as suggesting that there is only so much you can actually buy. Money should be used to make things happen.

Whatever you think of Ubuntu, he has certainly done that.
More than 1 worker, sure. More than 10,000? Not likely.
I have tricked myself into achieving ambitious goals by breaking down the next few days' objectives into small, doable tasks. I will even go as granular as 'make cup of tea and fix typo while kettle boils'. I've found that if I can get into an automatic mode where I'm constantly checking off tasks, repriotising and refining what is still to be done then success creeps up on me. At some point during most days I realise I have made significant progress; at some point during the project it occurs to me that I am done.
We've been working on this app for like 2 years, our much talked 'iris' app was just a off shoot from the friday IP. We're feeling so happy/relieved after the launch :)
I interviewed at iFixit, and I took the grammar test.

iFixit is a great company with a solid mission, and a reasonable grammar test considering the nature of the company. It was a local radio interview a few years ago featuring Mr. Wiens which reignited my ambition to move out of the manufacturing/shipping sector by learning to code. I am still learning to code, and still have a long way to go before I'm ready to earn a paycheck doing so. However, I applied for a position I was well qualified for in the ifixit shipping department in hopes of further immersing myself in the 'culture'. I traveled six hours by train for the interview. I was left scratching my head when only a few minutes of the lengthy interview centered on my relevant experience, or the requirements of the shipping position. A far larger segment of time was spent on grammar tests and logic puzzles (and no, they were not sku, or 'shipping' themed puzzles).

I think the key to success with novel interview tests is to make sure you are filtering for the correct result. You don't want to inadvertently filter out highly motivated individuals.

Overall, the interview was a good experience, and probably results in the hiring of great gearheads & coders.
I will gladly "deal" with any money my boss needs me to
You're giving too much credit to things that people widely agree on.

Going by majority vote, intelligent design is a fact.
Thanks. That's a much clearer explanation.
Summary: The fit method of the distributions in SciPy does maximum likelihood fitting of parameters to data. This blog post gives a couple of nice quick examples.

To see what else is available, one would go here:
http://docs.scipy.org/doc/scipy/reference/stats.html
Thanks, I'll have to check that article out.
BullDash = RunKeeper + TempleRun + bulls
A lot of that stuff is incidental stuff; see .php, .html, .js, and so on. (Apparently there are some web-based tools that he mentions; not sure, though.) The bulk amounts to MATLAB plus Java libraries for remedying MATLAB's functionality gaps.
Talent Acquisitions
I'm all for good commit messages. What I find frustrating is that it seems to go against the "check-in often" mantra. I probably over check-in ... many times a day. A feature might be 3-7 days or work. I try to make my commit messages describe the specific change I made during that particular check in. However, I feel no one would really care about commit messages like "Added extra param to method Foo to remove global X.
I like this reasoning: If NASA was willing to fake such a big accomplishment, why haven't they done another one in the next 40 years?
CEO takes two weeks off. What happens to the company?

10,000 "low-level" employees take two weeks off (all at once.) What happens to the company?

Companies operate without CEOs while boards seek candidates. Companies can't produce product while it seeks 10,000 replacement workers.

As long as we have the chief executive on one hand and the workers on the other, that is.
It will be neither engaging nor rewarding for the person publicly voted "most vapid."
That's true of any simulation or model - it's only as good as the data that goes into it.

The exciting thing is that with this model, they can now rapidly iterate between the behavior of the model and the behavior of the real organism, see where the gaps in knowledge are, and work to fill them in.

(I'm happy to see M. Genitalium getting attention, since I made a Java genome display for it 14 years ago http://www.righto.com/java/genome/MG.html)
Yeah we got screwed. They just dropped the app. They are promising "big fixes" but that's about it. Lovely.

This is the bad side of "trusting" startups and their apps. Pisses me off. I mean (to all you startup guys out there), if you have no intention of continuing your work, AT LEAST OPEN SOURCE THE CODE so some of us can jump in and maintain it!
I would like some help with these:

- Is there support for inapp payments? Built in or plugin based?

- how does this compare with trigger.io and titanium?

- does this version not need xcode to create apps like trigger.io?
Is anyone retransmitting a "real-time" audio feed of the communications between the Apollo 11 crew and mission control?

3 years ago, I took my laptop to the terrace atop the building I worked in and listened as the sun fell behind the buildings. I was one year old at the time of the actual landing and I'm glad I could join in, even if with a 40 year delay.
In case any one else was confused, The DOJ is part of the Executive, and completely different from the Judiciary. As far as I know (and hope), the Judiciary can't actually sue people in its own courts.
Tom, this is exactly what I've been looking for. I've built an internet-connected photobooth and I've been wanting to offer additional prints on my website. It's called Photopops ( http://myphotopops.com ).

Is there a work-in-progress Python module somewhere? If not, I may work on that.
Yes I think you'd want to do a lot of extrapolation, at least for the next 80 years.

You could imagine a hierarchy of simulations which dynamically adjusted the level of detail. Do you simulate every cell division to see if cancer develops, or do you just do "perfect" division with a roll of the dice for a copy error? Depends on your needs.

You could imagine organs like your skin or liver have lots of redundant computations, where you can elide away details more easily. While say your brain probably depends on the idiosyncratic behavior of individual neurons bubbling up to a macroscopic level, requiring a more detailed simulation.
I claim there is no original thought. We're too shaped by our experiences.

I think you'll find most "original thoughts" are a) reversals of commonly accepted arguments for the sake of being contrary or b) bad ideas. Hence why most of us tend to held unoriginal thoughts—because the common beliefs are [often] the least-bad. Only occasionally does someone strike gold.

Then again, increasing the attempts at original thoughts should increase the quantity of good original thoughts, if not the proportion. I'm rather intrigued.
Just based on the Times article, I think the idea is, define a simulation of a cell and subject it to a bunch (100s) of simulated experiments, based on real experiments that have been run on real versions of the cell. If you get the same results from your simulated cell that other researchers got from watching real cells, then your simulation is potentially accurate enough to run new experiments on that will generate useful information about the actual organism. The fact that it predicts the outcome of previous experiments we were interested in suggests (hopefully) that it has sufficient resolution to predict new stuff we're interested in.

So in this case, it sounds like they're simulating the interaction of genes and molecules, since they think that's sufficient to model cell behavior (and/or it's the best we can do). But it doesn't really matter what technical level of detail they went to -- the only useful definition of a "proper" simulation is whether it behaves the same as the real thing in the context you care about. For example, this simulation would be totally insufficient if I wanted to model a hydrogen bomb -- but totally excessive if I wanted to model gravitational forces on independent objects in space. If it's good enough to tell us anything new about the actual cell, that'll be pretty cool.
I'm glad to see that they are considering longer periods than a semester: I started the course and enjoyed the ability to view the lectures at a high speed and the exercises were to the point (Even if rather easy but it was expected for an introduction course). But I couldn't finish it due to real life university load.

I would like to see more flexible deadlines such as 2/3 weeks since the last assignment for ex. but I understand it wouldn't be manageable when taking midterms and finals into account or provide significantly more work having to make a few of those or delay if they were at constant dates...
why are you using URL shortening? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_distinct_cell_types_in_... is better.
> The last remaining hurdle is 'on-orbit refueling'.

Nice. I often like to point out that a 2nd rate country like Iraq was developing the means to launch bulk cargoes to orbit for only $600/kg back in the 1980's.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Babylon

High ISP plasma and ion rockets would also lower reaction mass requirements significantly.
It's the Cathedral and the Bazaar again. The reason-for-being of the consoles is to establish their brands as delivering a /reliably/ high-quality experience for the users. Users don't worry about variations in hardware, drivers, install requirements, background processes, etc... They pop the game in and it works. Even though it's a huge, complicated, AAA game, it's not going to crash. Can your PC run Crysis? There are a huge number of cross-cutting issues that can screw that up. Can your Xbox run Crysis? Yes. Yes it can.

When you submit a game for approval as an Xbox retail game, it goes through a long, expensive testing process. Any failure means you aren't shipping. Changing one bit on the disk restarts the testing process. So, you are highly motivated to test for yourself very, very thoroughly before submitting.

Contrast this with a very open platform like Android where anyone can do anything with minimal, if any, quality assurance. It's wonderfully liberating. But, you have to accept the fact that with so many changes from so many people being mixed together with minimal, if any, comprehensive test coverage, a lot of stuff is going to be busted a lot of the time.

Microsoft, Sony and Nintendo spend a huge amount of time, money and effort on quality assurance for their consoles because if they didn't, you might as well play games on the PC. They are doing all of this work to establish confidence in their audience that the $60 they spend isn't going to be buying a game that crashes on load on 5% of devices.

Meanwhile on mobile, users demand free apps because they never know what they are going to get. Investing non-zero money to install a mobile app is too much risk for a user. Lots of apps crash frequently for no obvious reason. Instead of up-front assurance, the mobile space relies on freemium, reviews, refunds and other after-the-fact techniques to eventually, statistically, push most problematic apps into areas of less visibility.
It baffles my mind, anyone would actually believe this.

This whole, Google, is evil for hiring the authors of an app you like. Either they will put them to good use, or make less money.