skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Rapid HIV evolution avoids attack
If you're willing to Paypal me $100 or $200 I'll learn me some Ruby in a few hours and start fixing bugs :D
American ISPs have been doing this with failed DNS lookups for years.
TwistyMol:A minimal molecular viewer in JavaScript & Canvas
The fundamental problem with javascript is that it is not simple to deprecate features and add new ones. Any javascript you write has to work on at least several IE and Firefox versions, and there is no solution for this on the horizon, besides perhaps compilers that emit javascript.
/home/dima: Rails On Emacs (in english)
Choice quote:

"Part of your job is figuring out what your boss is good at and what your boss is bad at, and asking your boss for help with things that your boss is good at, and politely giving your boss help with the things your boss is bad at."
> It might be kind of jerky during the editing stage, but it's better than scrolling around trying to find out where the action is. ;)

With a bit of Javascript I'm sure you could make it scroll smoothly.
Proto-Germanic (the common ancestor of English, German, Scandinavian etc.) was hardly ever written, but its reconstructed grammar is quite complex. Similarly complex as today's Icelandic.

Now I don't know much about this reconstruction process and how error-prone it is. But it's the best we can do for non-written languages of the past.

I don't know anything about the complexity of contemporary non-written languages.
When you go to buy a domain name, if it's available, they just give it to you. They don't go checking if anyone else wants it first. If these guys wanted tapinko.cn, they would already have it. So this is bogus.
In the US, in order to recover the full spectrum of damages caused by the infringement of a federally registered trademark, the infringer has to be on "notice" that the mark is registered. The "tm" symbol is NOT sufficient notice and should not be used to designate that the trademark is registered.
Nice idea--but too long: who would read past the first winning sentences? Consider the potential employer may have dozens or hundreds of resumes to read.
While I'd have to agree the results seem "only logical" or "obvious," the media hype and the public hope for an easy silver bullet mean that these types of results really deserved to be trumpeted aloud to the general public.

To me the bottom line for science is "The real question for researchers, Dr. Sacks said, is what are the biological, psychological or social factors that influence whether a person can stick to any diet."

The next steps seem to involved behavioral sciences, not biological sciences.
No that isn't "all you need to know"

Have you read: http://www.sethroberts.net/about/whatmakesfoodfattening.pdf

What about satiety of the food you eat? Eating fewer calories is easy if it's filling, less so if it isn't.
I associate javascript with crap websites.

You don't like Gmail? Or Google Maps? Or the fact that when you click an up or down arrow here on Hacker News, you don't have to reload a new page?
Does anyone have experience with defense contractors? They are a big recruiter of CS grads in San Diego. I would like to know your experience versus working at a tech shop or a corporate IT shop.
NDA's and work for hire agreements are a requirement for contractors. Otherwise they can end up owning the code they worked on. Happened to a friend of mine and it cost him $20,000 to get rid of the guy.
The words the Germans brought came from somewhere too. They didn't just create a new set when they moved to the British Isles.

Some of those words they brought over might still be around, and some of those really old words were surely already very old even in the 5th century.
I suppose so. It's like that for everything though. If I want to draw a drawing, some part of me is picturing the drawing before it flows out, usually looking much worse than it did in my head. If I'm writing a program, some part of me is seeing the structure and how it works and fits together before it flows out. If I'm playing soccer, I see what I'd like to be doing before it flows out.

I think it helps that the process almost always feels like a cooperative enterprise. Injury of some sort or another definitely will effect it. Something is always in my head out there a bit ahead (sometimes only very little) of whatever my body is doing.

Maybe this is uncommon but I've never really gotten that impression from talking with people or other people's recitations of their experiences. I've never really talked with too many people about it though. "How do you feel your brain and body do things?" isn't exactly the kind of question one asks in the elevator, waiting in line, or on a plane.
I don't recall seeing the word "unfazed" in print before (though google says it's ten times as common as "unphased").

Turns out "faze" is a word, since 1830: http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/faze

The correct spelling was "feeze", but popular usage altered it...
Here is accompanying blog post:

http://baoilleach.blogspot.com/2009/01/turn-turn-turn-twisty...

And here is a newer version (called TwirlyMol):

http://www.redbrick.dcu.ie/~noel/blog/molecproc/twirlymol.ht...

http://baoilleach.blogspot.com/2009/01/twistymol-is-dead-lon...

Though later version uses dojox.gfx [1] instead of Processing [2], which gives better Explorer but worse Firefox performance.

[1] http://docs.dojocampus.org/dojox/gfx

[2] http://ejohn.org/blog/processingjs/
I was also trying to figure out how to roll my own replay on Etherpad. I look forward to seeing it live for all users.

This will be a great tool for the classroom. Whether it's tracking collaboration on papers or "showing work".
I'd like to see this applied as an embeddable feature in hacker news. see who writes comments, which comments get commented on and what people really have to say before they hit that 'add comment' button
I've found the opposite to be true; when I have cash in my pocket, I spend it.

I'm very disciplined about paying off my credit card every month, which means I have a fixed total budget that I refuse to go over. A part of that I dump into cash in my pocket for beer and sushi and whatever doesn't accept credit cards, and the rest I set aside to pay off the month's credit card bill.

The effect of this is that I have to keep a running ballpark tally of how much I have left in the credit card pile, and since I've conditioned myself to be deathly afraid of going over, I always estimate conservatively, and I inevitably wind up with a surplus that I dump straight into savings and never touch again.

Why a credit card instead of a check card? Because the credit card company pays me that 2% for free, because if it gets stolen it's the credit card's money at risk and not mine, because if an emergency happens I have the flexibility to break my rules, because it establishes a credit score that I can parlay into lower interest rates when I want to buy a car or a house later.

I think the advice to not have a credit card is pretty terrible, actually. There are so many benefits, and as long as you have a little self-control, pretty much no downside.
Valid point, but I think it's worth looking at the potential benefits. The thing I always hate about writing is that I'm constantly saving copies off to the side. At the very least I would think snapshots would be invaluable, but once you have playback, you basically already have snapshots with high granularity.

While solutions like DropBox or Sharepoint allow versioning and collaboration it's at a higher level. Maybe I've been spoiled by VMWare, but I love having branches of specific versions to fall back on and test things out. Why should writing be any different?
Ask HN: What motivates you to keep working despite government bailout/theft 
(sorry for the repost; the thread got killed last night for some reason)

US is 65 trillion dollars in debt (and I am not a baby boomer who mortgaged our great country away), and just spent 3 trillions. The older generations are gonna want us to work extra hard to pay off their debt, or the government is gonna inflate our money away. Why should I work so hard, slaving day and night on my project, when they're just gonna steal the end values?

That's what I want to know. What motivates you guys to keep working? Because I'm on the verge of giving up (I've got 15 years of living expenses saved up, so I can either spend it on the startup, or just live a quiet life)

I feel like John Galt and just want to say 'I will stop the motor of the world', and walk away. What keeps you guys going?
"The investor tells me, "Oh, this is fine. Treat your stock like Monopoly money and give it to the freelancers.""

This has happened to me on several occasions. Where do startups get the idea they can rip off freelancers with worthless stock ?
As someone who lost 70 LBS 3 years ago without a 'diet' and kept it off, this article strikes me as overly obvious. Anyone who has ever actually seriously lost weight and kept it off knows that everything comes to the bottom line: calories consumed vs. calories expended.

Formula for HN: ((calories consumed - calories expended) / 3500) = weight change in LBS of fat. There are healthy ways to lose and gain weight and there are unhealthy ways, but they all come down to that very, very simple formula.
This old lie again? This study just shows that four attempted diets, none of them particularly sophisticated, all work equally well - which is to say, not very.

Yes, the laws of thermodynamics hold, but what if, oh, say, what you ate had an influence on how much you felt impelled to eat? Or how energetic you felt and how much you moved around? If your fat cells are rapidly absorbing what's in your bloodstream, you'll feel hungry and eat more, and you'll feel tired and move less.

The number one experimental result of dieting is that 95% of the people gain back the weight a few years later.

If Seth Roberts is right, all we're seeing from this study is a temporary bump that results from changing your food habits in any direction, which leaves behind the old flavor-calorie association, which makes you less hungry. And if they stick to this diet a while, they'll develop new flavor-calorie associations and gain back the weight. (This is a very elegant theory which, among other experimental support, explains a lot of the chaos in dietary science; almost any dietary change makes you lose weight, but only temporarily.)

Sorry, metabolisms are just more complicated than this. Call me back when they test Loren Cordain's or Seth Roberts's theories.
Pick a project and just start coding. The Python documentation is good enough that you should be able to teach yourself as you go. A coding contest site like Project Euler is a good source of quick problems to hone your skills on. Whenever you run into a tricky situation run a google search on it and you'll be surprised how often the solution is built into python.
Even if you wanted to be particularly good, you should still do it with moderation. Whenever someone becomes successful we hear the same story across all industries: "started with nothing, worked 100 hours a week, etc...". Sadly enough 1 in hundreds is an exception and not a rule. What you do not hear about is how bad it is for the ones who did not moderate their input (physical, emotional, financial). Subsequently years later market crashes, housing bubbles, increase in divorces etc...make the news. What is the source of these problems? Lack of moderation.
Sort of. Consistently making smart comments carries a lot of weight in getting an invitation to YC interviews. It was the deciding factor for at least 3 people we funded: danielha, alexwg, and one other I probably can't disclose because they're not launched yet.

It's not simply a function of karma, though, but whether we recognize the username as someone who seems smart.
Braitenberg vehicles
This is interesting and timely for me, as I just had exactly that experience yesterday, Ash Wednesday. I found it strangely comforting to hear "Remember you are dust, and to dust you shall return." Interesting to see that this is a known psychological phenomenon.
There are many American tabloids. The National Enquirer is a staple at every checkout counter, along with others like The Globe, the Star, and Weekly World News.
I would guess about 1-3 hours a day between all the editors combined. But it's not too painful, because the editor UI is designed to make it easy to kill crap as you come across it while reading the site.
How strong is a chimpanzee, really?
While I agree with the overall premise (it's very "duh"), there are some things worthy of more exploration:

The people in this study really didn't lose all that much weight. Do certain diets promote faster weight loss?

Also, I find it ridiculously hard to believe that a study that uses obese people, who have trouble controlling their weight in the first place, can maintain a strict caloric deficit for two years.

Additionally: It doesn't really say much about body fat % - does eating certain ratios promote muscle growth, yet fat loss? (this is a premise in the high protein diets)
> You didn't read the post you replied to did you? I'll re- quote the relevent parts.

Actually I did. Room temperature fusion actually proves my point that trends exist. The fact that the room temperature fusion one ended doesn't change that fact.

Funding is political. I'm not saying that it's wrong for it to be political, but denying that it is is a serious error and often leads to scientific ones.

If you want to argue that funding isn't political, feel free to explain why certain diseases get lots of funding while others don't. (For example, guess why we know a lot about tobacco plant diseases. Does the relative funding for breast and prostate cancer make sense?)

> You don't seem to understand the level of scientific agreement with regards to global warming. If it was as obvoiusly false and many deniers say then it would be - by far - the most significant failure of the scientific system in memory.

Whenever someone says "scientific agreement" or "scientific concensus", I'm reminded of 5000 German scientists.

When I hear "scientists" arguing that folks should be put in jail for disagreeing with them ....

When I hear "scientists" say that they're not going to release data to folks "who want to prove them wrong"....

I've no doubt that bogus arguments are being trotted out on both sides.

However, one side wants to use force to change my behavior.

It's somewhat interesting that their "recommendations" line up with a belief system that predates this round of falling sky and that they reject any solutions that don't line up with that belief system. They wrap themselves in "science" to stifle debate and to support conclusions that have no basis in their actual data.

I'm not saying that those non-scientific behaviors prove that they're wrong, but ....

> You don't seem to understand the level of scientific agreement with regards to global warming.

Are you claiming actual relevant personal expertise?

Or, are you going, as I am, by "monkey sign"?
The playback feature reminds me of the master Etch-a-Sketch artist:

http://gvetchedintime.com/gvetchedintime/videos.php

This site shows how some fairly good illustrations are drawn (brushstroke playback). Unfortunately, not all drawings can be animated and the ability to search for playback-capable drawings is limited:

http://www.ratemydrawings.com/

http://www.ratemydrawings.com/drawings/animation/428912.html

It would be interesting to have the timestamp data (if it is recorded) of the keystrokes (adjusted to author's timezone - privacy withstanding) so you can see a clock/calendar [day|night icon] when the author wrote it (was it 3am in the morning? did they put it aside for a couple hours or was it a period of days?).

EDIT: Didn't see this comment. http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=495812
Can a musician sell their music online?
I only hope part #2 addresses the scalability problems #1 has before the site becomes a hit... ;-)
I don't think you can conclude that because "young entrepreneurs are asking for NDAs more than older ones" that the older guys are successful due to their openness, or by talking about it it creates a buzz that makes it successful.

When you're young, inexperienced, and (most importantly) have a limited business network it is much harder to execute on an idea. A successful older person has a trusted network that they can approach with their ideas, and therefore worry less about NDAs. Younger people -- and those with less experience -- are often cold contacting angels, or setting up meetings with potential investors they have had very short business relationships with. The potential investor probably won't steal their amazing idea, but the process of starting up is much more difficult and the time cycle of idea to launch could be significantly longer for this group of people than those with experience, which could explain the paranoia.

I'd expect those with a smaller, less "powerful" network to more often ask for NDAs on new ventures, regardless of age.
Right, so the older version of those words would be found in Germany.
> Doesn't regulation limit the power of the politicians, too?

No. Regulation is an opportunity to pass out favors.

> And the taxes would have to be increased for specific spending, not for stuff the politicians might prefer to spend the money on.

No, spending doesn't have to be for specific things. (What fraction of alcohol taxes goes to alcohol treatment?)

Moreover, controlling more spending is typically more interesting than controlling specific spending.

To put it another way, dollars are fungible wrt political power.

http://dotearth.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/02/25/climate-debate-...
Reading the manual once (at least the part with the examples) is indeed a good idea to get an overview of the possible constructs but once you have them down it quickly becomes a no-brainer. Under the hood YAML is surprisingly complex (can do full blown object serialization if you want to) but the everyday stuff is just perfect for typing it into an editor without thinking about it - and without matching up braces all the time like in JSON.
Bayesian analysis on not just the content, but the way the content was written. It'd be fakable, but not easy.
Cheating is a difficult and important problem, but I'm not sure this solution would be worth the inconvenience it would cause. If it only inconvenienced cheaters that would be fine -- but I think it would also cause some honest students and teachers a lot of trouble.

First, there's the simple privacy issue. If a professor told me to install a keylogger on my computer or if she told me to use etherpad to write an essay - either way I'd feel like my privacy was being violated.

Then there's the practical issue of how this system would affect writing ability. I personally do my best writing when I'm able to ignore the critic in my head and focus on the words. Being self-conscious about someone seeing all the stupid things I wrote along the way would make it much more difficult to get into this state of concentration.

Finally, there's the issue of making teacher's not only read two dozen boring essays but also watch replays of them being written. I personally think their time could be better spent.
When can we have a playback of HN posts showing a time-lapse version of comments and up/down votes?
> I don't really see enough incentive for the governments of the world to be paying for biased research in favour of global warming.

Then you don't understand monkeys. (Govts are groups of monkeys.)

http://dotearth.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/02/25/climate-debate-...

> In fact I would argue that the previous US administration demonstrated a significant bias against the global warming case.

And, you don't understand large organizations. (The president and/or congress doesn't actually have strong control over the bureaucracies.)

Even Louis XIV was probably wrong when he said that he was the state.
>Some of those words they brought over might still be around

A lot of those word are still around (in one form or the other). For example at least those written in italics:

The words the Germans brought came from somewhere too. They didn't just create a new set when they moved to the British Isles.

"They" is of Scandinavian origin, by the way.
HP Abandons Its Online Storage Service
Why do you say that writing has no effect on complexity? The longer a writing tradition a language has, the more complex its grammar is. And complexity can be measured objectively.

By complexity, I mean having additional words for particular things, instead of describing with more words. For example, changing words to indicate future or past tense.

If children learn this or not is completely irrelevant - a child is capable of learning extremely complex communication forms - this has nothing at all to do with the history of a language.
No. Patents are required for certain kinds of development. Places where there are extremely high costs of R&D, and easy reverse engineering. Take pharmaceuticals. It costs several hundred million dollars for the studies to prove that the drug works, and more for the research. Furthermore, it is easy to reverse engineer drugs (the compounds are printed on the package!).

This means that there is little incentive to develop a drug unless you can guarantee exclusivity for a period (everyone else can always undercut you because they don't have the R&D costs).
The reconstruction is as likely to be flawed as not - we cannot base an opinion of a result that we are not sure is accurate at all.

Particularly when there are lots of modern day samples we can use as our comparison basis.
Building Quake Live : John Carmack
http://www.popcuts.com/
Look at the attention this is getting Etherpad. I'm pretty sure this was a pretty high ROI day of work!

To further drive that thought home, my company hereby offers to add any 1-day-effort feature request made by any popular tech figure, provided they're willing to share our work with their audience. (Sites for those would be http://bug.gd or http://www.yumbunny.com or any other site in my profile.)

Seriously, they'd be silly not to have taken pg up on this even if he wasn't helping to back them.
I think it would last an even shorter amount of time if he never talked anyone in the YC program into anything.
"at least $10,000 more", not "at least $10,000 or more". That's at least $10,000 more than the $50,000 he already mentioned, or "at least $60,000". Which is not an extremely low starting salary.
i'm just observing. he didn't come up with the idea for facemash (his friend recommended that to him), and the winklevoss brothers asked him to help build the harvard connection (which is as the rumor goes, where zuck started building facebook).
More info on Flower:

http://playstation.joystiq.com/2008/07/16/its-awesome-flower...

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB122972605155122665.html
Funny, I have an Airtel broadband connection but have not seen that. However I suspect the reduction of bandwidth on unlimited schemes is correct.
While I can perfectly understand you I'd suppose that the older generation also spent some of the money for your health, education, security and relatively carefree childhood. Many of them were in an undoubtedly more desperate situation during and after WWII than we are today. They pulled up their sleeves and ... you know the rest.
I'm glad that it was in jest; you may convince someone that you'd work just as hard for them as you did for yourself. I doubt that is a situation most people would enjoy, especially as the first job after a folded startup.