skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
By closed I mean not available for free use and distribution, for example in open source projects which can't pay any royalties. May be saying free format would sound more clear, since you are right, closed is a bit ambiguous, as it can also mean a format without published specification which needs to be reverse engineered to be used.

Also, I don't think that H.264 forbids only commercial use. Can you freely distribute their decoders and encoders? What about putting them in hardware for non commercial use?
It's not just one country in terms of language. There are lots of little variances here and there which provide certain signals. For instance, the big freeway is just "101" around here. However, in Southern California, the same route is frequently called "the 101". They tend to use "the" in front of the numbers for whatever reason.

There are many of these things which can give you some insight on someone's background. Is it soda? Or pop? Or "coke" as a generic term?

Do you use "hella" or "wicked" as a modifier, as in "hella cool" or "wicked fast"?

There's the whole "ya'll" thing, and don't forget "all ya'll". Are you "fixin'" to do something? How about "ain't" and "busted"?

This is just word choice. There are all sorts of different ways to pronounce the same words, too, and those also give you some idea of where someone might be from.
A diff visualization for ingredients should be pretty easy, you could show left and right and the delta between them as three distinct columns.

As for other distinctions, such as "mince" instead of "dice", that would be tricker, but you could probably do that with a human-friendly strikethrough coupled with a handwriting typeface to indicate what was changed.
For me, $5 is a lot of lentils.

The main issue is that the cost barrier stops people from signing up just to try it out, in in that sense that app.net really ought to have a 'free' tier. Even if it was particularly restive, it would let their users get a feel for it before paying.
I have some experience working at a genomics research company and I'll broadly +1 Fred's experience about the industry, although in less negative terms. I got out before I got jaded, so my perspective is a bit more "oh, that's a shame" than his. I really like genetics, bioinformatics, hardware, deep-science, and all that but the timing and fit wasn't right.

The tools are written by (in my experience) very smart bioinformaticians who aren't taught much computer science in school (you get a smattering, but mostly it's biology, math, chemistry, etc.). Ex:

http://catalog.njit.edu/undergraduate/programs/bioinformatic...

http://www.bme.ucsc.edu/bioinformatics/curriculum#LowerDivis...

http://advanced.jhu.edu/academic/biotechnology/ms-in-bioinfo...

The tools themselves are written by smart non-programmers (a very dangerous combination) and so you get all sorts of unusual conventions that make sense only to the author or organization that wrote it, anti-patterns that would make a career programmer cringe, and a design that looks good to no one and is barely useable.

Then, as he said, they get grants to spend millions of dollars on giant clusters of computers to manage the data that is stored and queried in a really inefficient way.

There's really no incentive to make better software because that's not how the industry gets paid. You get a grant to sequence genome "X". After it's done? You publish your results and move on. Sure, you carve out a bit for overhead but most of it goes to new hardware (disk arrays, grid computing, oh my).

I often remarked that if I had enough money, there would be a killing to be made writing genome software with a proper visual and user experience design, combined with a deep computer science background. My perfect team would be a CS person, a geneticist, a UX designer, and a visual designer. Could crank out a really brilliant full-stack product that would blow away anything else out there (from sequencing to assembly to annotation and then cataloging/subsequent search and comparison).

Except, I realized that most folks using this software are in non-profits, research labs, and universities, so - no, there in fact is not a killing to be made. No one would buy it.
Most people would rather this, yes.

You have to understand that people are, despite economics, not rational maximizers.

Most people would rather have a fair deal than a better deal - for example, if you offer to split "found money": split $100 with someone 90/10, they will probably turn it down, whereas if you offer to split $10 50/50, they'll probably say yes.
> Being from the South, I would be interested to see the same study performed on how much it costs one if they sound "redneck".

The article did examine "sounding south" as well, with results similar to "sounding black".
That's interesting, I like how `slice` lets you concat sequences of arguments, but worry about building functions which have too many convenience features. Thought experiment: what if I wanted to pass every other argument?
Testing with a single not very representative clip is a poor idea, See the comment on the github: https://gist.github.com/4645784#comment-756444
Hi, I'm a bioinformatics researcher. Apparently I work for this guy's ex(?)-employer although I have never heard of him before.

My single most limited resource is programmer time. My time and the time of other people who work with me. I have access to loads of computers that sit idle all the time, even if it is on nights and weekends. There is zero opportunity cost to me in using these computers more fully. I have enough human work to do that I can wait for the results without having any wait states.

There can be a big opportunity cost in trying to rework a workflow so that it is more efficient and then test it thoroughly ensure correctness. Doing this may seem more appealing to someone who is interested primarily in computational efficiency. But I am more interested in research efficiency, and so are my employers and funders.
Thanks for the info; respect.
And? Essentially the same thing happened with C++98, and in the long run it didn't hurt adoption too much. To me, it seems like the compiler are doing a better job this time around.
Ask HN: I'm looking for an Objective-C tutor in the Dallas area.
Anyone have any recommendations? Thanks.
But please don't read "Ring for Jeeves" as your first Wodehouse book. I don't know what happened to that one, but it's several notches below the rest, IMO.
Sounding southern though is (at least for me, living in Arkansas) very different from sounding "redneck".

There are many southerners who speak with a rather sophisticated gentility, then there are those who speak with a quaint but kind country accent (many farmers). Or just those southerners who use southern words, such as "y'all" and "coke" (as a catch-all term for soda).

The redneck accent I speak of his found in rural places, not just in the south. Often condescendingly referred to as "trailer trash" or "white trash". But I suppose that the distinction is pretty arbitrary and not very well defined.
It's not so much race that's being picked, it's linguistic culture or speaking patterns; it just happens that this correlates well with the notion of race in America.

The United Kingdom and Ireland have this kind of cultural picking by ear down to a fine tuned art - identifying an Irish builder that's spent a decade with cockneys or a Welsh lesbian that attends a Scottish knitting circle is a matter of course.
Black people in the US aren't just a racial group - they're also an ethnic group who (usually) speak a very distinct dialect of English.
Extremely tongue in cheek: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HEhrQ4AdCSQ

Somewhat less tongue in cheek: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R_WC9PM6S0Q
Doing a Ph.D. will break you down and build you back up
I mainly meant sounding "redneck" as in "rural/uneducated" rather than a standard southern accent. I am from a large city in the South, so there is a heavy distinction between "southern" accents and "redneck" accents. Even here in the city, there is a stigma against "redneck" accents (but not southern accents).
How can you leverage all of us really good programmers with tons of time, who are dying to work on something "important" and meaningful?
When does sharing code between the client and server actually happen? I can't think of any use-cases.
Resolving Co-Founder Disputes
He's not getting tenure because he doesn't have a PhD. According to LinkedIn, he has a master's degree awarded after four years of study [1], which often indicates someone who did not complete a PhD.

[1] http://www.linkedin.com/pub/frederick-ross/13/81a/47
Basic science moves forward slowly limited by the pace of fortuitous discoveries. I have found that many people from the field of computer programming have unrealistic expectations of what can be done in biology and other sciences.
I have enough experience to know if this is true or not. Many times it was faster to buy more machine, but often it was not. We already had 10000 cores.

I proposed, implemented, and tested an 8 line change to our alignment tool that saved 6% cpu time. It took me two days, most of which was my spare time at home. This one program was using 15 cpu years every month. Nobody cared. It never went into production. I started interviewing for a new job and left shortly after that.
Why is this on the front page or why is it relevant? It's kind of a rant. I did some work on a publication in this field and was published once; I don't think it is a horrible research program. There may exist some of the issues in bioinformatics described here but I don't think it is terribly productive.
You think hotels are hard? We are building software for small local tour providers to help them manage their availability and get their tours online next to hotels and flights.

It sounds like we are doing the right things in terms of implementation (providing api endpoints for bulk data and more fine grained api endpoints for real time availability) and ideally providing a new revenue stream to OTAs and others who are interested in a not yet cut throat margin business.
Pretty sure Google will remain the oddball in the bunch. Nobody wants to reveal all that.
Unlocking Your Phone Is Now Illegal, But What Does That Mean For You?
The same way you can tell someone is from the west as opposed to east. Cultural idiosyncrasies.
It was in 1996-1997 so it was before. They would install the OS and then remove the CD-ROM drive for security reasons. One of which was to make sure no unauthorized software was installed, and yes they had CD Burners back then and saw that as a security risk for copying information.

You will find that not all federal systems are secure and run by experts. Some federal employees are not qualified for their jobs, and that is why federal contractors are hired to make up for it. For example some of our servers and systems were not behind a firewall and had public Internet IP addresses. I agree a shared account is a security risk, and when someone changed the password to the maintenance account we were locked out and had to file a form to learn the new password. In fact to do anything like install software or configure a system we had to file a form first.

Yes the federal government and chain of command requires that I file a request before I use a new software product. Even if it can be downloaded and run in the home directory, if I don't get permission for it, I am in deep trouble. So much as refreshing an IP address, if I do it myself I am in trouble, I have to call their help desk and have them refresh and renew it for me.
Sounding southern though is (at least for me, living in Arkansas) very different from sounding "redneck".

The problem of many speakers of southern dialects of English in much of the United States is that speakers of broadcast varieties of General American English tend to lump all "southern accents" in a category that includes the redneck accents and the plantation-owner-descendant accents without further distinction. And that is why, as the article reports, there is an employment opportunity disadvantage (on average, other things being equal) to sounding like any kind of southerner.

(I have been to all fifty states, having traveled to many states as a Chinese-English interpreter on contract for International Visitors Program of the United States Department of State. I can remember one case of a very upper-crust Mississipian, who was then living in Alabama, having an English accent that to my Midwestern ear was quite nonstandard, even though I was aware that in the south it would be taken to be the accent of an educated person from prosperous family.)
How did the internet get so dumbed down? Cloud this and web app that and now nobody knows how to research or install any normal software. Or do anything that isn't shiny packaged at $10+ a month?
Err... my brain was just malfunctioning. I meant to say 1 bit and 2 bits, not 2¹ and 2² bits. :-)
You know, I'd be more inclined to listen to him if he didn't also completely decry almost all of modern biology, which (in my view) has been to the late 20th and early 21st centuries what physics was to the late 19th and early to mid 20th centuries.
A lot of Ebonics is slang. Is this really about sounding black, or is it just about sounding unprofessional? What if I went to a job interview and said "dude" and "bro" every other word (lets assume I'm not interviewing at a startup)? Infotainment distorting reality to fit its presentation.
Maslow's hierarchy of software needs
I really like his articles on HTTP APIs. I learned quite a lot from them. What he writes makes a lot of sense, except for the "HATEOAS" part.

What he consistently doesn't tell us is why it's necessary and how exactly we're supposed to implement HATEOAS—wouldn't HEAS be a much better acronym?—in our APIs.

I'm guessing the reason why is so API wrappers would be trivial to write. A single library could simply consume a "standards-compliant" API. What that means I do not know.

That's where the how comes in. It seems from the XML example that these links have to in the body of the response. That would mean every single response format has to be dealt with separately. That's not very practical. I also have no idea how something like it would look in JSON for example, let alone how it should be parsed in a meaningful way.
If you want to improve the software engineering quality of bioinformatics software, then find an open source project you are interested in, and offer to submit patches to improve really unsexy but important stuff for bioinformatics user experience. Things like documentation, deployment, user interface, and testing. Some of these things require little domain knowledge but no one wants to do them.

Edited to add: some projects might even have a bug tracker that will already have problems you can tackle.
I used a similar back figuring when describing a co-worker who was in the wrong job... "He's not inept, he is inapt"
I'm from that generation. You forgot The Well, by the way. But Hugh Laurie wasn't an influence for me, not in the same way say, Douglas Adams was.
Not sure though. But top of it you would probably use backbone.js in both server and client. Another advantage is we have UI developers who are now writing server code to be much more. To some level it is giving a path way for one language everywhere paradigm. However, server side coding required much more capabilities like performant code, scaling etc., but for normal websites it is easy to go with node as it kills some amount learning curve.
People don't don't do it because the state is already managed in the Web app itself in general.

Get /widgets
Get /widgets/:id

The app says "view" and then "edit item". We don't expect the API to tell us this.

People are just trying to get stuff done and many design from the UI backwards.

If we start to see more useful examples maybe the herd will thunder. ;)
Ah, I see what you mean. I don't often travel around the US nor do I talk about southern accents to many other non-southern Americans (as I do not have a southern accent, I speak with a more accentless midwestern style), so I am unaware of such a perception. I find many southern accents to be rather endearing, but what is known here as a redneck accent is rather hard on my ears.
My first trip to the west coast afforded me some strange looks when I dropped "pissah" into a sentence.
Are there many examples of websites using client-side javascript cryptography?
I sympathize with the author, but this piece fails because many of the specific criticisms are off-base, and he's not trying to be at all constructive.

For example, it isn't true at all that microarray data is worthless. The early data was bad, and it was very over-hyped, but with a decade of optimization of the measurement technologies, better experimental designs, and better statistical methods, genome-wide expression analysis became a routine and ubiquitous tool.

The claim that sequencing isn't important is ridiculous. It's the scaffold to which all of biological research can be attached.

However:

There is a great deal of obfuscation, and reinventing well-known algorithms under different names (perhaps often inadvertently). There's also a lot of low-quality drivel on tool implementations or complete nonsense. This is driven largely by the need in academia to publish.

The other side of this problem is that in general, CS and computer scientists don't get much respect in biology. People care about Nature/Science/Cell papers, not about CS conference abstracts. Despite bioinformatics/computational biology not really being a new field anymore, the cultures are still very different.
Automate Your News Reconnaissance
2004 Presentation on Marketing at Amazon [pdf]
So here's what I don't get: If you realized that you weren't getting value out of the classes, why did you keep going?

Why not quit and go do something else?
Ok, everytime I read about Node it's usually made clear that is perfect for websocket type of apps that can network and have multiple users interacting between each other. So, in this case Myspace, seems to me like a regular app/site that does normal operations. So, Hopefully someone can explain to me if Node is also being considered as a replacement to the popular backend languages to build regular sites?.
I think it would be interesting to do a follow-up comparison h264 vs VP8 for mobile. 1080p vbr targetting ~7 Mbps, 480p vbr targetting ~2.5 Mbps, etc.

It's important to explore the space a bit for discussion's sake.
Northern redneck accents are actually a lot different than southern redneck accents. I'm from rural Minnesota and "redneck" people there really do sound like the movie Fargo, and not like Honey Boo Boo.
You are precisely pointing out the idea of the article. African American Vernacular English (often referred to as Ebonics) is just another dialect of English that is studied by linguists just as any other. Much of it is influenced by slang and pop culture.

The conclusion one might draw from your comment and the research is that to most Standard American English speakers, AAVE sounds unprofessional.

I suppose I don't see how there is any distortion going on.
My situation was different to this, but when sharing C# between a backend server and an iPhone app I found it tremendously useful to use the same models, and just JSON encode/decode them to transmit between the two.
The reason I allow myself to make my claim as such is due to a combination of things, including personal experience: experience of friends and family (intelligent people with excellent marks in popular fields, unemployed or barely getting by), $1 trillion plus debt that doesn't seem to be going away anytime soon (you'd think that students receiving a good education would be able to land good jobs to help them pay their bills), and albeit anecdotal, Ivy League students who are singing in the rain.

Which universities are you referencing? And more specifically, are they state or public universities that the average family can afford to send their child to?

Despite a narrow scope, I thoroughly believe that universities in general have evolved into a means for subduing the general public. It's an immaculately designed mouse trap that masquerades as a positive future. A great parallel would be diet pills. Just pay three installments of 49.99 and you'll be thin (read: drowning in employment opportunities) in no time.
Your onset because of work stress sounds very much like Operator & Things, a fantastic book I saw suggested on HN and which I have just read. Definitely with coworkers who would later bully you it should have been a stressful environment for anyone (though I'll assume management didn't help at all either).
current car companies don't produce user interfaces well. All the other software that runs in a car (or an airplane, or a mars rover) is great
Instead of writing these rants go and build a WAMP like package with PostgreSQL or other alternatives. That might actually do some good.
It can be. Have you tried Trello, Geekli.st, Klout, Prismatic or Clipboard? They're all Node too. It's had frameworks for developing web applications for some years now.
Seriously, I suppose there's a market for terrible "mash-ups" considering the DJ scene at local clubs, but I don't understand how fans of the original songs can appreciate Glee's novelty-based compositions. Mash-ups should work based on harmonious choices, not song title, band name, or plot device.
As a general rule, the people on the short end of the stick are the people least capable of producing change. Worse, change that they bring about tends to be good from a strict, technical viewpoint but has huge negative side effects that go unnoticed or deliberately ignored until it becomes difficult to distinguish the resultant system as a better one.

Rants like this, and providing interviews to third parties, are actually one of the more positive things that he could bring to the table: it provides information to people who aren't aware and inspires motivation in people who aren't entangled.
Awesome, Padrino is the nicest web framework I have worked with so far.
Off the top of my head:

Data types - Both concrete classes or helpers for manipulating data.

Input Validation - Do it client-side to do it fast, but double check on the server.

Formatting - Larger web apps often need to format things from dates to users to numbers on client-side generated data without the server hop.

Templates - Many templating systems are compatible with multiple languages, but its easier if there's just one output type.
That's a shame. I just finished a uni module about bioinformatics. It seemed like a cool field where progress was being made, and as an undergraduate I could generate meaningful looking results by following very recent papers. I hope the field has some saving graces even if this is all true. The idea of CompSci folk working with biology folk to solve human problems inspired me a lot.
Hype vs. Hope - San Jose State + Udacity vs. Linn State Technical College
> In the realm of bioinformatics, lets ignore the work done on the human genome and the like.

He discusses this specifically in the rant. Are you saying he's wrong?
>not very representative clip

I chose the clip based on what Dark_Shikari (x264 developer) had to say about it[1]:

It shouldn't bias too heavily towards any one encoder like many of the other standard test clips will:

a. It's relatively high motion, so it won't bias heavily against encoders without B-frames or qpel (as, say, mobcal does).

b. It's not so high motion that it would cripple video formats that don't support motion vectors longer than 16 pixels (e.g. Theora).

c. It's not something that benefits an unreasonably large amount from some of x264's algorithms (which is why I picked this and not parkrun).

[1] http://forum.doom9.org/showthread.php?t=154430

I could have done multiple test encodes, sure, but the problem in this case was that downloading several gigabytes of raw source material isn't exactly instant. And even if I tested with multiple clips, I doubt the conclusion would be that much different.