skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Ok, while I understand that this sort of article might be interesting, honestly it's only scratching the surface of the current state of the art (and the idea of TE's acting as fodder for evolution isn't exactly new).

Short reply -- Get Martin Nowak's book Evolutionary Dynamics

Long reply -- Even Nowak's work is just the beginning (disclaimer: my current Ph.D. thesis work is building off of Nowak's start). Let's start with this notion that TE's are vital for evolution. Real answer: sort of. You see, there's an awful lot of species that don't have an overabundance of "junk" DNA, yet are still able to adapt and evolve. The reason that TE's at least seem to be more important in higher order plants and animals is because of how such organisms organize their genomes.

Ok, before I get carried away on a long rant, here's the heart of the matter for the hacker audience:

Proteins fold into domains. These are compact structures with a rough upper limit to their size that typically can carry out one biochemical function. In E. coli, most genes code for proteins with only one domain. So, E. coli can evolve by grabbing new genes, turning genes on or off, or in some circumstances, evolve new functionality from existing domains through random mutation. (In reality, random mutation takes a long time to produce anything useful, and the creation of novel domains appears to no occur. There's a theory growing in prominence that all of the protein domain folds that exist today were present when life began, and may even represent independent life originating events...but I'm getting off track.)

In humans, most of our proteins are multi-domain. Not all of these domains, however, are catalytic. That is, in a human protein with 5 domains, maybe only one actually has biochemical activity. The function of the rest is to modulate that activity or localize the protein to one part of the cell or another. Also, the mechanisms controlling when genes get turned on and off in humans is much more complex than in bacteria. Therefore, evolution in higher order plants and animals is much more likely to occur through a "shuffling" of domains and regulatory elements. Because TE's are good at "shuffling" DNA, it's not surprising that having a healthy dose of this sort of "junk" DNA is advantageous. Of course, that's not all...there's also neutral evolution and pseudo-genes and epigenetic inheritance, etc. Biology is really on the cusp of exploding (oh, and I'm writing a book about that too ;-).

tl;dr -- The genetics of higher order plants and animals is not unlike a program which relies heavily on many libraries. If you swap out one XML parser for a better XML parser, you'll get better performance (and more customers!). Transposable elements function (sort of) like biology's equivalent of a linker, and can help organisms swap in and out libraries/protein domains.
trying to implement the feature set of an existing CMS in a slower language?

Got any data to back up that FUD?

Because Yehuda Katz does. Watch the first fifteen minutes or so of the Yehuda Katz keynote from Merbcamp:

http://www.merbcamp.com/video/katz3.mp4

Whose language is slower, again? Show me the real-world benchmarks!

(If those results are true, and Yehuda didn't forget to carry a two or something, the people who you should be questioning are the inventors of CakePHP.)
It's fairly well-established that non-coding DNA regions are important for biological function. From regulatory elements that work via DNA and RNA bending, to the catalytic RNA molecules that are essential for genome maintenance, the portions of the genome that don't actually code for genes are full of interesting stuff. So the title is a bit sensational, really.

That said, transposable elements are really not the more interesting parts of the non-coding stuff -- we understand them well, and they don't do much of anything except disrupt genes during reproduction. To draw a rough analogy: if you have a chunk of code with lots of changes in whitespace, it's probably also under heavy development. You would be wrong to conclude that "whitespace is essential for software evolution", but you might well be able to quantify the software development progress by tracking only the whitespace.
Black is an expert. I saw his Moyers interview, but here's an essay of his from December with more detail:

http://www.cato-unbound.org/2008/12/04/william-k-black/adam-...

As I understand it, those securitized mortgages that Fannie/Freddie (and now the federal government) are guaranteeing aren't the marked-down/unpriceable 'toxic' assets; it's other collections of much-worse mortgages and credit derivatives.
Schools can only do so much. If by putting more minorities through college you can increase the average level of education among minority parents (when those students have kids), you may be able to improve their kids' educations as a side-effect.
i like this system of enterance .please vouche away.
harden rock.
I usually disagree with Arrington but found myself nodding my head while reading this. Traditional media's sense of entitlement with regard to the internet is truly astounding.
it doesn't require anything so proactive. simply remove the regulations that prevent competition and the current players will crash and burn.
I wouldn't think so. Your body is made up of more organs and systems than your brain.

Depending on how intensely I exercise, I need more sleep as it's repairing itself, so I think the answer to your questions is either 'probably not' or 'it depends'.

I know that in addition to all this, that apparently sleep also moves information in to your long term memory, and that in certain trades (military comes to mind), that after intense training excercises, it is encouraged if not enforced to get a 'good night's sleep' instead of 'getting stuck into the beers after a hard day's work' in order to properly 'store' what was learnt during the day.

So, if you want to remember stuff, get good a good night's sleep!
As always, demand for developers will be greatest in those markets experiencing the most vigorous growth. Much of the growth in the past decade has been in new markets for advertising and online stuff "as a service".

This will probably continue for another decade or two until the next "big thing", which is anybody's guess. Beyond that my bet is that applications involving robotics, AI and nanotech will start to become mainstream.
This is the same kind of crap that started the housing bubble... social engineers doing what they just feel in their heart is right for society.

The results will be tons of mediocre graduates unable to pay back their loans. That's OK... we'll pick up the tab; no fucking problem!
No, you didn't see it in his comment. But it is the scapegoating behind the right-wing 'regulation alone caused the crisis by putting minorities in homes through Fannie/Freddie' meme he was spreading.

He clearly didn't watch the interview. He dismissed it.
That's incredibly honorable of you guys, and thank you! But the explanation I don't buy. If you dislike a group, and choose not to fund them, their idea still might be pretty good. (IIRC, one or some of your essays mention that the greatness of ideas and the groups behind them are somewhat independent of each other).

In this case, what incentive do you have to keep the idea to yourself, and not tell/hint at it to a funded startup?
It will take me some time to watch this. Anyone able to summarize right now why this thing is like Drupal?

("It's a CMS" is not enough. The word "CMS" has many meanings. And Drupal is arguably a CMS, but it is a specific flavor of CMS. For example: Does BrowseCMS have a module system reminiscent of Drupal's?)
Toxic assets are worthless
you can not reassemble a cdo it has components that have already defaulted. the borrower has long been protected under chather 13 or 11 .
Could FeedBurner Be Replaced by PostRank.com? (Redux)
I think a certain law firm is going to get a very expensive lesson in the meaning of "tortious interference". God, this is such a canonical example of it you might as well print it in the freaking dictionary next to the definition.
"There's a theory growing in prominence that all of the protein domain folds that exist today were present when life began, and may even represent independent life originating events"

Who in the world is advocating for that theory? It sounds silly, on its face...one has only to spend an afternoon browsing the SCOP or PFAM databases to see that there's been a huge amount of recent evolution at the fold level, and that the domains that we know about have appeared over a very long time.
Are the PhDs you know in the sciences? The ones I've met, even the bottom rank, are at least solidly smart.
All you need to have a great four years are 5-10 people like you. In a school of thousands the problem is not are there 10 people I can be friends with happily, but in FINDING those 10 people. Join the clubs that interest you and meet those people and you will have fun anywhere.
"A roommate of a personal friend"... that's pretty much the definition of hearsay.
Check out Olin College. They are built specifically for engineers who also want to get into creativity and design. They emphasize teams with a project-based curriculum. Oh, and there's no cost. They've been cited as one of the next Ivy League schools and have what I've heard to be a very strong engineering program.
Perhaps a Greasemonkey script or Add-On could intercept attempts to examine the color of visited links, and display a warning to the user or report the site to a central clearinghouse?
If you've every worked with any large scale Drupal deployments, you'll know that its module system doesn't scale very well in terms of maintainability. You basically end up with thousands of functions in the global namespace with little to no abstractions. Rails and Ruby in general are well known for their syntactic sugar, allowing for more clear and maintainable code.
Blast. Thanks for the correction. Should have checked those references!

http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/tt/1991/may29/24753.html

You're right, I'm wrong. I'll see if I have time to edit the submission...

Of course, this still doesn't refute my hypothesis. We'll leave that for the next commenter. ;)
Yes, in the sciences. In my experience I've noticed PhD comes along with a certain lack of emotional maturity... which plays out in various negative ways (overly emotional technical debates, focused more on blaming people for problems rather than pursuing the simplest solution and so on).
The offer isn't necessarily "over". Withdrawing the offer is probably a negotiating technique. Sun is trying to sell, and IBM is reminding Sun that it's probably the only interested buyer.
I agree, it's a pretty elegant solution. However, I like seeing how many points a comment has, before I vote, for several reasons:

* I often don't vote

* to see how, exactly, the community feels about it

* to see if I should actually read it

* to get a feel for the story's exposure (more votes, more eyeballs)

This wouldn't be an issue if it weren't for the first point... I don't want to have to vote on each comment to reap the benefits of the other items on the list.

The second item on the list allows me to have the "blink" effect. By taking in the vote #'s of hundreds or thousands of comments, I just get a "feel" for what HN likes and dislikes. To me, that's it's important.

I think something in between would be a color-coded and/or normalized indicator of each comment's popularity. Kind of like how the grayed out text is more intense for more downvoted comments... upvoted comments could have some indicator of how popular they are.

If normalized, it would show how popular they are, but only relative to other comments with the same parent as them.

Just my $.02
It's a recipe for law students.
Sun is slowly but surely putting together a strategy to offer a private-label alternative to Amazon's cloud - and the only offering that I find particularly interesting. If IBM withdraws for this deal, I hope they try to placate shareholders by providing an in-depth overview of how this strategy can create significantly more value than $7 billion. Hopefully Sun starts to get really aggressive about this, and even moves into offering a consumer-facing version -- when coupled with the fact that the very creators of MySQL, ZFS, etc are at their company, they are pretty much the only ones able to offer Amazon a run for their money at the moment (something public investors seem to fail to understand).

If the stock dips significantly on this news, wouldn't be too bad of a buying opportunity. There is clear intrinsic value in Sun's support contracts and assets that is being significantly undervalued by the market. That's my take, anyway.
April 1st is over.
I'm a high school senior too and I only recently got accepted at Carnegie Mellon and Stanford (didn't apply to Ivys or MIT). First, you should get over the rejections. Last December, I applied for Cornell ED (36% acceptance rate) and I got rejected! I couldn't quite figure out why but now, five months later, I'm really really happy cos it gave the opportunity to apply for Stanford/CMU during RD. And Stanford had a RD acceptance rate of 7.2%. Only Harvard has a lower rate. So, shit does happen but good things also happen.

Anyway, as an international, I can't get financial aid at most schools (only Harvard, MIT and a few others are need-blind for intls). So, I'm faced with a similar question. Is it worth paying so much for Stanford or CMU?
University of Washington has the best overall CS department of those three by a fair margin.

At least, that was the general impression of grad schools at UMaryland undergrad, and UWashington alumni are noticeable at both Microsoft and Google (UCLA and UCSD, not so much).

From my brief contact there, the culture is like a toned-down version of UCBerkeley. Whether that's a good thing is up to you.

The weather is as bad as you've heard -- worse because the three monthes of sunshine a year are the three monthes you won't be there.
Not being a Flickr or Delicious user myself, other than created an account to try it out, I don't know all the end-user effects of the Yahoo acquisitions. But it seems like Flickr and Delicious have turned out alright!
IANAL, but I think the most important aspect is to give you cover for the kinds of self-protective measures you might need to take -- like disabling/blocking certain users or IPs, deleting certain user content, etc.

In the absence of any TOS, a litigious disgruntled user might portray your actions as unfair according to some implied standards of continued service, etc. By making your scope of actions explicit before the fact, their argument becomes weaker.

That is: you're unlikely to be able to hold a TOS violation against a user for any damages, but it will provide cover for your own self-defense actions.
one must be a tad careful lest they disclose to too many entities

The more people you talk to about your idea, the better it gets. Open discussion is a great product design tool. There are good cases for secrets and taking care.

But I'm afraid your comment will reinforce a bad idea in many who read it. A better mantra, though not exactly true either, is "your idea isn't worth anything".
What other things might legitimately make a difference?
BrowseCMS itself doesn't seem to have a module system, but since it's Rails, you can use any of the existing Rails plugins out there.
well, duh. minorities and underprivileged individuals get lower sat scores. colleges that take into account sat scores prefer students with higher sat scores, all else equal. why did they need to do a "study" to come to this conclusion?
I'd like to recommend "Startide Rising" and "The Uplift War", by David Brin. Aside from being very enjoyable books, they're a big source of new ideas -- these books singlehandedly made me appreciate the goals of the Internet Archive.

Also, I've never understood the popularity of "Stranger in a Strange Land". I've always been a big Heinlein fan, but Stranger in a Strange Land always struck me as a book that was important and shocking and ground-breaking once upon a time.
should probably standardize that test, so that students across the country could be judged based on the same benchmarks :)
That's an extremely interesting point and makes for good debate.

And I'll surprise you by saying I subscribe to the school of thought that believes ideas are cheap. I honestly do.

However, over time, i'm assuming you develop an ability to subject your idea to fairly rigorous evaluation based on experience; and confidentiality might then mean much more to you.

It's really amazing though, the feedback and the varied points of view.

I must compile a list of disclaimers to be prepended to the article. 'Don't be naive about your idea' definitely will be one of them!
Another view http://www.strategypage.com/htmw/htintel/articles/20090403.a... as the "annual magic missile announcement"
Oh! I see. I thought you were responding to something he'd actually said. But it sounds like you just made up something you wish he had said, and then slammed him for having been the kind of person you think would say this kind of thing.

There's more than one 'right-wing' explanation for the crisis. So far, the folks who claim that it wasn't regulation-driven haven't explained why so much of the crisis happened in the most regulated and most subsidized sectors of the economy.
The definition:

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

That should save everyone who reads this a few clicks.
I think the bar scene is FAR less courageous than AFF.
This does seem terrible. Can anyone suggest a way that we can help this guy? (assuming this can be validated - though I'm not suggesting it's not true)
What a snooze-fest and illogical article. Because countries have solved such disputes in the past therefore the idea that these disputes could turn into shooting wars is a myth? Really? That's the logic they want to use. The author even states that such conflicts have led to serious tensions.This just seems like a slow news day for someone.
Yeah, in my totally unprofessional opinion, if he can prove those are his originally there's a pretty compelling countersuit there. This sort of thing is why we have those.
Are you an iSteve reader? He talks about how affirmative action wrt getting minorities into law school does many no good when it comes to the bar exam. And by then they've wasted their lawschool time.

http://isteve.blogspot.com/2006/09/sacrificing-smart-black-k...
the very creators of MySQL, ZFS, etc are at their company

The creators of MySQL used to be at their company, anyway.

they are pretty much the only ones able to offer Amazon a run for their money at the moment

I'm not so sure; IBM, Microsoft, and Google all have the technology and the personnel to be a pretty compelling alternative to AWS, although they've failed to deliver so far. What does Sun have that any of these companies don't?
This should probably be retitled; after playing with it for a bit BrowserCMS is really nothing like Drupal, nor is it meant to be a Drupal clone. Instead, it's a powerful general-purpose CMS that will easily manage both static and dynamic content. If you've looked at Radiant but thought it was too simple, take a look at this.

Grab the source at http://github.com/browsermedia/browsercms.
So the big question is: I've invented a logo. Where do I submit it, along with my identifying information, in order to get a certification (backed up by something that will hold up in court, like a notary's signature) that I uploaded and claimed it on a specific date?

One obvious answer is "The US Copyright Office":

http://www.copyright.gov/eco/index.html

But that's $35 per registration. Seems like one of those online entrepreneurs I keep hearing about might be able to offer a cheaper service, via the web, to every designer in the world.

Of course, a lawyer may tell me that this is useless. Or it might be that the correct answer is "Flickr", and to do more is overkill.
dude he said he was in INDIA, not INDIANA.
That is why most sites have a line that says something like: "XYZ Company reserves the right to update and change these Terms of Service from time to time and without notice. Continued use of the Site after any such changes shall constitute your consent to such changes. It is YOUR responsibility to check these Terms of Service from time to time."

As it has already been said the Terms of Service on a site are for your, as the site owner, protection mainly. They should outline the responsibility you will take and the responsibility your customers are required to take. Additionally, a good Terms of Service will have a limited liability clause, a warranty clause, termination clause in it.

Now to answer your question there are several ways sites handle this. Mainly it is a trust though and the burden of proof lies on the end user. That is why sites will have a line like "your continued use of this service" signifies you have accepted the terms of the site. A good example would be if you got pulled over for speeding. You figure you are going to get a ticket and be on your way. But unfortunately there is a new law that says you will be arrested. While you probably will hear about it on the news or online somewhere, the state doesn't send a letter to every person that has a driver's license informing them of the new law. The state changed their terms and didn't notify you. But by having a driver's license in that state it is your responsibility to know the driving laws and the consequences for not following those laws.
Study: 'highly engineered explosive' found in WTC rubble
Heh. State of Georgia, near S. Carolina.
github.com speedyrails(rails VPS)
Do nothing. He doesn't need an Internet cheering section. He needs a lawyer, and an extraordinarily straightforward civil suit.

Anything a net groundswell could possibly accomplish is only going to complicate the very simple "They falsely alleged copyright over my works. They ignored my reasonable attempts to correct their misunderstanding. They then contacted my clients and called me a thief. I have suffered demonstrable damage to my business and professional reputation as a result. This behavior is tortious." narrative his lawyer will be telling the court.
Just upload it to flickr, they should store the uploaded date.
I imagine it would be his clients who copyright their logos, not him. It's a rare day that the designer has any claim of ownership over a logo s/he does on contract.
Yes they were. And since we're dealing with post-singularity stories, I'll add Simon Funk's novella, "After Life".

http://sifter.org/~simon/AfterLife/index.html
Have been reading the recommended "On Beauty and Being Just" by Elaine Scarry. She argues that there is a continuum from physical beauty to mathematical symmetry and elegance to traffic laws to a representative democracy -- which is related to ancient Greek naval warfare, fwiw. It's vaguely utopian, in the sense that she seems to suggest that universal is enough, and the cranky shadows in the basement don't really enter the book. As a programmer into the aesthetics of code, I find this absolutist view sort of inspiring, though mucking around with steampunk Ruby makes me think that perhaps beauty and fun don't always share the same trireme...?
If he has a work for hire relationship with his clients (pretty common for logo work), it is up to them to submit the logo for copyright, unless he chooses to submit it on their behalf as part of his services.
I know that Black is an expert. But he was also there to sell his book. He didn't explain the mechanics of the problem, instead the interviewer kept stressing words like "fraud" as to dramatize the discussion. I am not putting Black's expertise in question, only the way the interview was carried out.
In this case I would suggest creating a "sucks" website for the company in question to shame them. It has been upheld by the court system as a 100% legal thing to do... (for examples see paypalsucks.com and riaasucks.com)