skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Everyone is so fixated on the price.

What I want to know is, who they share the data with? Do the insurance companies get our genome?

Come on people, there should be no more precious data to you, than the genome of you and your family. Yet facebook users seem more concerned about their social network privacy than HN members are about their genome privacy.

For insurance companies, this could be a total actuarial GOLDMINE and it would probably even be worth them paying us for the data.
Not hard at all if you take the time to study the subject.

If you really have a good grasp of the concepts sometimes the hard part is the drudgery of possibly having to write all the device drivers for the various devices and peripherals that the RTOS has to service.

In the case of the OP, he seems to be talking about rewriting everything from the most basic device drivers on up to bootloaders and even the GUI. That's a ton of work and it requires knowledge across a bunch of areas he is not yet well-versed in.

Also, when it comes to the idea of writing an RTOS, there's a huge difference between an RTOS for, say, a non-mission-critical device of some sort and something that could kill somebody (plane, powerful machinery, etc.). That is hard not because the concepts require superior intellect but rather because you really have to understand the code and potential issues behind how you wrote it very well and test like a maniac.

I have written RTOS's for embedded control of devices that could take someone's arm off in a fraction of a second. Hard? Extremely, when you consider what the stakes are and particularly so if it is your own business, your own money and your own reputation on the line. There's a lot more to programming that bits and bytes.
He reminds me of Sheldon Cooper.
True, but in my experience U tends to decrease sharply as M increases.
Effective anti-missile defense probably increases Israel's ability to absorb attacks, maybe try to use sanctions/blockade, etc. for longer.

If there were large numbers of Israelis getting killed, I'm confident Israel would bomb the shit out of Gaza and send in troops. I guess I trust technology to prevent this more than I trust Israel-Hamas peace process to prevent this.
I think you're giving them way too much credit.
Way to miss the point. It's just as broken as any other DRM!
There is much that anyone can say about Kickstarter.

The problem is that all this discussion started from much different topic.

Here we are talking about someone, Massimo Banzi from Team Arduino, that wrote on the public blog of Arduino, which have for sure hundreds of thousands followers, if not more, that a company doesn't exist and that another person, stated with first and last name, was claiming something that he didn't.

Reading the Kickstarter page, including the bio, the faqs, the comments and the huge quantity of updates, can see very easily that this person always made very clear he's living in China so, why publish something so unfaithful?

When then it came out that the problem was on the table since October 29th, few hours after the launch of the Kickstarter project, why wait almost one month to complain.

The registration certificate went public so, the company exists and this is proven. Nobody heard about any apologize for the false statements.

The only think Massimo Banzi tried to do, here as well, was to try to change the topic.

The question is: is it right that the owner of a so popular blog write false statements, but when become clear to everybody that he was wrong, he try to change topic, instead issue the owed apologize?

This remember me when Steve Jobs (R.I.P.) is supposed he stated: "there is nothing wrong with iPhone 4, they are holding it not properly".

Massimo Banzi is for sure member of a group of very clever peoples that created such a good thing like Arduino, but he doesn't have the right to attribute to others the false and pretend that nothing happen here.
I've been wanting to do this for ages and got the $49 on the second try. Much thanks to the poster for this!
Wow, they are charging $115 shipping to Australia for two kits.
I wonder what their threshold is for offering this as the permanent price? I know I've never considered it before b/c of the price. Heck, I didn't consider it when I got the $99 offer. But when I got $49, I ordered two.
I think this could be a silent Cyber Monday sale. I saw $49/$69/$99/$199/$299.

Got mine for $49. Note once you get $49, you can order multiple kits at that same price point.
Note that in 13 months (in the US) pre-existing conditions will no longer be excludable (subject to a few complexities, yada yada). That rules out the worst potential abuse. It's unclear to me how "insurance company" access to this data would even be an inarguably bad thing. I can see a lot of good resource planning that could come from a large body of genome data.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brain_Trust
I am available, with a solid background in Lamp and iOS development. Feel free to contact me (info in profile), or check me out at JoeCortopassi.com
Seems like the deal's over. I've now hit the homepage ~50 times with a new incognito window each time and the price was always $299.
Too bad, it would've been nice.
Reusing one-time-pad keys means you can often very easily recover the plaintext simply by XOR'ing the two encrypted files, since it effectively takes the key out of the picture, see for example http://www.cryptosmith.com/archives/70 (where the key is literally taken out of the picture)
Mark Zuckerberg, the new dictator of Facebookistan
I think you guys have two different definitions of "work". jrockway seems to be arguing from a technical perspective, but you're likely arguing from a practical perspective. Sure, DRM can "never work" in that there's always the analog loop and all that. But it's absolutely possible to make it so insanely complex and difficult that no one will ever break it; DirectTV has shown that angle works, without a doubt.
If you make an API, please don't do this. If you have to include indexes into a Unicode string, then make them indexes into a binary string in a known encoding. This works equally well for all encodings, and won't tempt people to do something as preposterous as using UCS-2.
What goes on at these meetups?
It's OK. Nobody gets your genome. It would be suicidal for them to share, plus there are laws on the books (GINA at the federal level, a stronger law recently passed in CA).

Also, quite a few people have been posting their data openly, for example here: http://opensnp.org/ . So far I am not aware of any adverse effects. Not saying there won't be any ever, but I would be a lot more paranoid about my browser history.
Einstein didn't directly kill anyone, but he did sign a letter to President Roosevelt urging him to fund research into nuclear weapons.
This is the single most significant difference between Smalltalk and other languages. Several Smalltalk dialects use images that were last bootstrapped from scratch sometime in the late 70s. If you insist on using git for version control, yes, this is a nightmare. On the other hand, there are several high-quality version control tools for Smalltalk, and in practice, it's not a problem.

It is pretty weird for nubies, though.
I actually switched my (low traffic, low performance needs) blog comments database from MySQL to SQLite purely because I could not make MySQL and Unicode get along. All I needed was for it to accept and then regurgitate UTF-8 and it couldn't even handle that. I'm sure it can be done, but none of the incantations I tried made it work, and it was ultimately easier for me to switch databases.
>What I want to know is, who they share the data with?

Did you read the privacy policy? Specifically:

https://customercare.23andme.com/entries/21262376-how-is-the...

23andMe research may involve collaboration with external parties; however, these external parties will only have access to pooled data stripped of identifying information. 23andMe will never release your individual-level data to any third party without asking for and receiving your explicit authorization to do so.
As part of our commitment to protecting the privacy of our research participants, we have also obtained a Certificate of Confidentiality from the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. This certificate allows 23andMe to protect research participants’ data from involuntary disclosure, including subpoenas from federal, state, and local authorities.

>Do the insurance companies get our genome?

They're not allowed to discriminate based on genetic predisposition, and based on the privacy policy, they're not going to get that info anyways.
> Computers can compile things really fast nowadays.

Not if you're working on a large project. Firefox takes about 15 minutes to build from scratch on my fast Linux box. Getting that down by a factor of 10 or more would be fantastic.
The idea is that no matter how small the scene may seem, we all need a good excuse to get out and meet more awesome people.

This event will give us all a good opportunity to talk about projects, expand our network, and hopefully learn something cool.
I did a lot of reverse engineering back in the day - you'd be surprised how many "virtually uncrackable" DRM protections used by companies like Adobe (at the time - Macromedia) that were just stupid XORs of magic strings.

Ahh..the good old days of SoftICE and w32disassm.

Oh man, the worst was the md5 of some salt + whatever you put in.

If you ever want to see some gems of misuse of cryptography for DRM management, let me know - email's in my profile.

Some examples: Using RSA 1024 bit keys, with exponent of 3...
This reads exactly like an employer/employee relationship. [1]

-- Whether ironically or obviously ... is harder to tell.

________

[1] eg, no sexual expectations of a colleague (ie, harassment), no disturbing a colleague's work/space, no insulting in public manner (of a colleague in front of clients, etc).
It used to be back when the $299 price was offered that you had to pay $99 for a year of subscription to their annotation updates, not sure what's going on now.
Offenseless
Old Spice Saves the World
Be careful not to confuse UTF-16 and UCS-2. UTF-16 is a variable-width encoding, so using it doesn't actually make counting anything easier. UCS-2 is fixed-width, and evil. With UCS-2 you can easily count the number of code points, as long as they fall in the BMP (!), but this is not the same as counting graphemes.
Yeah, you're right. Though I'm generally curious and I'd like to know more about this part of me, scientifically. Is there some other way I can find that?

And as for insurance, I think that applies in the US where insurance companies are, well, evil. In AU, or CAN or some other country where medicine is provided to everyone, this actually seems like GOOD information to have on hand.
Such an API could easily indicate bytes in a UTF-8 string instead.
Yeah, he only helped to build the most destructive weapon ever.
I ordered one for $300 a couple of weeks ago :(
Awesome...more meetups in Bay Area!
Twitter (not Facebook) Will Be The Brand Advertising Platform of The Future
BTW Full Privacy Policy is here

https://www.23andme.com/about/privacy/#Full

It's pretty clear on what they choose to share.
Hmmm...not sure I'd care about the updates nearly as much as the initial profile. Does anyone see value from the updates? What kind of information do those provide?
If we delayed the investment, the investors would lose money. The investors are counting on indexing to generate returns. If they invest at the start of the YC cycle, all the startups take it, including the one that will later turn out to be the star of the batch. By Demo Day, though, there is a good chance that the star will have started to emerge and already have enough money. So this strategy would cause the money to go to the medium-good startups, which is not good in a domain with a power-law distribution of outcomes.
I'm interested to find out what your format is and what has been working for you guys. Please find me when you arrive so we can chat. Your site looks great, btw. Happy to have our Shanghai HNers represent!
The Genetic Information Nondiscrimination Act[1] was passed 4 years ago. It makes it illegal for insurance companies and employers to discriminate based on genetic information.

In the long-term, it's unlikely that you'll be able hide your genome. Sequencing technology is only going to get cheaper and more advanced. People slough off cells like crazy. You'll have to live in a spacesuit if you want to avoid leaving your genetic information everywhere.

1. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genetic_Information_Nondiscrimi...
Not necessarily; their mothers were sisters, and their fathers were cousins on their father's side (so both Albert and Elsa had the surname "Einstein").
To be fair, the charge includes both shipping the kits to you and for you to ship the kits back to them, so the price isn't as bad as it looks. But I do agree with you that it can be lower.
I hope some enterprising journalist works out some way to wiggle in there and try to figure out exactly what all these administrators are doing, because to me, it's not a merely a rhetorical question. What are all these administrators doing? I'm 100% serious. Really, what on Earth are they doing?

A great deal of the truly hard work of running a University, like scheduling several thousand students into several thousand classes, is done either entirely by or with great assistance from computers. In the absence of prior knowledge of the situation, had you asked me whether a university would need more or fewer administrators today per student or professor than in 1960, I would have immediately answered "fewer".

Moreover, to be clear, I'm not trying to make an implicit argument here that they must be doing worthless things. That argument, if I were to make it, could only come after this question is answered. Further, I'm not asking for people to conjecture what they may or may not be doing from the outside; I can do that as well as the next guy. But if you have direct experience, I'm all ears. I'm especially interested in hearing about the experiences of people who are deep down in the system, removed from direct student or professor interaction, not a lab assistant or counsellor whose contribution is obvious.
yeah, you're totally right man. Heroku, Dropbox, Airbnb ... those guys are all flops that never got anywhere coming out of YC ...
Btw can you change the name of FB group from San Francisco to SF Bay Area..since most people don't live in the city but surrounding areas?
Assuming they are willing to keep up with all needed paperwork, credit checks, repair expenses, etc.
Escaping flat land in information design
Very impressive and well-documented. I wonder if this could be the Bootstrap of the WP world (although much more lightweight and not actually a framework). Did I mention the well-documented CSS.
The headers still exist. This proposal is not about eliminating them. All this proposal does is bundle groups of headers together and give you a simplified way of including them.

If you have a look at the proposed ".map" files, the headers are still fully enumerated. I assume the IDE/debugger will still be able to find definitions in the original header files via the .map files.
Still worth it at $300!
No, it's still working. I just bought two for $49.
I did 23andme a year or two ago. I found out I have a really boring genome. No real diseases or unexpected ancestry (I guess I was secretly hoping I was adopted from Russian/Jewish royalty or martians or something?).

It's certainly worth $49 to me to know this (I think I paid $99 under a FNF deal a while ago; I know one of the founders, who is awesome and a great entrepreneur).
No, we're global, and welcome #realworldsex video submissions from anywhere in the world :)
The batches usually grow, but we also hire more partners, so the ratio of startups to partners stays pretty constant.
I think this is a rational thing to do -- after all, he was fearful of what would happen should the Germans have completed their nuclear program first.
Yeah, just noticed this when I saw the reasonable $49 price. Really sucks.
Isn't that nice. This isn't the most concerning aspect about the use of drones though. The concerning part is the extension of the definition of "battlefield".

Currently the definition of what is a battlefield is little different than "wherever we decide to put a drone". However, this leaves a lot to be desired from a rules-of-war and civil liberties perspective. The thought that merely visiting some city in the developing world and hanging around with the wrong folks could result in you dying in a battlefield via remote drone attack is more than a little disturbing, especially when compared against all of the normal heuristics a sensible human with good-intentions would typically use to avoid being involved in a war and especially being killed in battle.

Certainly there are risks and downsides to operating under rules-of-war which are too limiting or too strict but the solution is not to throw everything out and create effectively unlimited power with almost no safeguards, limitations, or accountability. And that is the road we seem to be heading down. As history has shown, power without accountability and limitations is never a good idea and will inevitably lead to intentional abuse.
As far as I can tell, this is just their usual SNP array product. Wake me up when they offer $49 for 30x coverage.
most other content on HN isn't newsworthy either
This makes him sound like a jerk, but man was life tough for couples who stopped getting along back when men did all the income earning and women did all the child care and housework. This actually seems like an OK arrangement when you think about it in that context, they were both holding up their ends of the bargain. It just makes me glad that both men and women are more independent these days.
The specific problems the author describes don't seem to be present today; perhaps they were fixed. That's not to say this conversions aren't a source of issues, just that I don't see any show-stopper problems currently in Node, V8, or JavaScript.

In JavaScript, a string is a series of UTF-16 code units, so the smiley face is written '\ud83d\ude04'. This string has length 2, not 1, and behaves like a length-2 string as far as regexes, etc., which is too bad. But even though you don't get the character-counting APIs you might want, the JavaScript engine knows this is a surrogate pair and represents a single code point (character). (It just doesn't do much with this knowledge.)

You can assign '\ud83d\ude04' to document.body.innerHTML in modern Chrome, Firefox, or Safari. In Safari you get a nice Emoji; in stock Chrome and Firefox, you don't, but the empty space is selectable and even copy-and-pastable as a smiley! So the character is actually there, it just doesn't render as a smiley.

The bug that may have been present in V8 or Node is: what happens if you take this length-2 string and write it to a UTF8 buffer, does it get translated correctly? Today, it does.

What if you put the smiley directly into a string literal in JS source code, not \u-escaped? Does that work? Yes, in Chrome, Firefox, and Safari.
By this logic app developers shouldn't publish books because some turn out bad. I think 37signals might take issue with that, rework or not.
Fyi, I just received the offer.
I'd like to think the "everything is a file" mentality would've been taken a touch farther, and the command line tools would deal with networked resources better (eg cp ssh://example.com/~/somefile ~/localcopy)
As an ugly last resort, you could store Unicode as UTF-8 in BLOB fields. MySQL is pretty good about storing binary data. (I dread the day that I'll have to do something more advanced with Unicode in MySQL than just storing it.)
I remember when web design was a topic. Hasn't been for a few years, and it shows.

I don't zoom my laptop-sized screen much; I usually have to run my minimum font-size at 20. Works fine on about 3/4 of pages; so long as I'm maintaing proper posture.

Poorly-designed pages use lots of small, fixed-size DIVs to segregate spoonfuls of text; because of my font-size they spill text all over. Worse still are the pages that use color:#666 or higher; I just turn away. Printers have turned to that, no doubt to save the cost of ink; otherwise it's a measure of the sanity of the producer.
Maybe I've been watching too much Dexter, but isn't this a law enforcement agency's dream? Never again will they fail to get a match on DNA, just subpoena 23andme and competitors.

Right?
Of course, though it's still half of what they'd get before. That is better for the startup. Don't take more money than you need, unless you're getting a really good deal - though then you could burn and piss off VCs and may look bad during future rounds.
You will never define an unambiguous way to index into a Unicode string by "characters" with less than 10 pages of specification. When two sides of the API interpret this contract differently, a security vulnerability is a very possible outcome.

Use unambiguous delimiters, JSON, XML, or even byte offsets into normalized UTF-8 instead. But don't do this please.
I don't really expect OP to succeed, but I'm sure it'll be educational. And really, the more enthusiasm for a project the better.
And customs duties. They are not trying to gouge you, AFAIK.
To be fair, that is for return shipping on two kits (you have to send the kit back to them for testing).

That said, hopefully they do some A/B testing on shipping prices next ;)
Perhaps reconcile was the wrong word . . . I was looking at it more from the "here's a perfect person" image that some historical figures seem to have, versus the fact that everyone (no matter how history makes them out), is still just a flawed human like everyone else.

He may have been one of the most brilliant minds in the last 100 years, but apparently he had a love life that was just as messed up as the rest of us =)
Most of these demands relate in some way to staving off a meaningful emotional connection, keeping things "all-business" etc. There's significant evidence that Einstein had a form of high-functioning autism (likely Asperger's). A signature symptom of Asperger's syndrome is discomfort with emotional intimacy and a lesser capacity for empathy.

I can't say if that's true or not, but if you combine these symptoms with the state of women's' rights at the time, this really isn't surprising at all - and in any case, there are far more explicit examples of sexism from this period.
Well, Dan Ingalls did something a like that. He implemented a Squeak VM in Java. It's six years old, and even then it didn't run a current Squeak image, but it works pretty well.

Announcement here:

http://lists.squeakfoundation.org/pipermail/squeak-dev/2006-...

JAR file here:

http://weather-dimensions.com/Dan/SqueakOnJava.jar
Can A Mac Book Pro Retina 15 Battery Last A Full Day?
Holy crap. I went to Purdue from 1999-2004 I was out of stat and I paid around $17k in tuition and $4k in room+board, so it did nearly exactly double since I went there. It's one thing to hear that college costs are going up really fast, but it puts it into perspective when you see the actual school you went to.

I picked Purdue partly because I could go there without incurring any debt, which wasn't the case with a lot of private schools. Had I been born a few years later I would have had to go to an in-state school to do this.