skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Bioinformatic startup snags $3M; focus is DNA sequencing for all species
> The number is more like 1/4 than 1/2.

Great. So the number of people that have been profitteered into bankruptcy is only 1/2 of what I mentioned.

It doesn't change the basic fact: Profiting handsomely from the sick and dying used to be considered unethical. Now, it is "just business".
I have 15 minutes a month to run my own shit. What solution do you have?

No, really. I would rather spend that five hours making sure shit works with my boyfriend, or my family, or my friends, or learning something that will make me money, or working on a pretty cool hack I thought of while in the museum last week, or working on my unfinished novel that has been languishing, or work on proofreading a paper for a friend, or just relax.

Yeah, system administration is under those priorities.

I am more than willing to pay. I just want to pay one person for everything. I want that integration. I want webmail. I want to be able to access it from my phone without issue. I like integration.

I may be a geek, but I have better things to do than figure out why my email isn't getting to a friend because someone's IP address ended up on spamhaus.
This is great. I love the idea that people can take the effort they would put into casual gaming and learn coding skills. Also an interesting point that doing some of these courses can get your resume viewed more even when applying for non-coding jobs. It seems like Codecademy has found a niche helping people who are not full-time computer science types get benefits out of coding.
This is so awesome. Sometimes it feels like we're barreling towards a monarchy with the executive branch wearing the crown. It made my afternoon to see that there still are operational checks and balances still functioning. I would love to see the judiciary start to rein in the executive branch.
One of the main points of the U.S. constitution is to provide checks and balances so that one branch of government cannot ac t unilaterally without oversight. For the executive branch to argue that in this case there is no way to challenge it is disingenuous at best and at worst, as this judge pointed out, unconstitutional.

It's frustrating to me as a citizen that if a government agency decides it has a problem with me, I'm pretty much screwed unless I have plenty of cash to hire the best lawyers.
Please go back and read my comment again.

My point is not that this is okay [0]. My point is that FSF is claiming "Google is doing this on purpose and this link says so", and YOU said "this link says so", and that's not what that links says. So stop making shit up. Stick to what you know, and/or to your opinions.

FSF could have avoided my complaint by changing "According to this thread, Google is doing this on purpose" to "Based on this thread we're guessing Google may be doing this on purpose". You could have avoided my complaint by leaving your whole last sentence off.

[0] Supposing that this IS what's happening, I'm not defending it (nor opposing it, I'm not forming an opinion). But as a side note, my understanding is that nearly all email providers DO do this thing for email; if a given domain is spamming hard enough, eventually email providers start dropping mail silently. Don't they?
Great work by the EFF here. There is a delicate balance between the power of the executive and the power of the courts and trying to chill the telecom's access to the court system by claiming that the company was interfering with an investigation by challenging the NSL is a deeply troubling action. Abuses can be fixed, but not if they can't be challenged in court.
I'm one of the authors of the Prosody XMPP server, and a member of the XMPP software foundation. Prosody operators have been reporting this for more than a week now.

Google users have apparently been flooded with subscription requests from spammers, and the flooding suddenly became massive. The problem is, there are a large number of jabber servers out there which have open account registration without captchas. Most jabber server software doesn't come with a captcha module included by default, and of course, most admins don't bother changing defaults, even while running a public server with open registration.

Unlike some other comments here, I don't think Google has any malicious intent in this. This seems like a stop-gap measure, while they figure out and implement a proper solution.

As to the proper solution, the XMPP community is largely moving towards having captchas, or other forms of verification, and there are a number of proposed standards.

The thing to understand here is that the XMPP community has historically not had a spam problem. Due to the nature of the protocol, spoofing wasn't possible from the start, and there were no large lists of JIDs for spammers to abuse, so things worked out fine for a decade despite a lack of captchas. The good news is that the XSF was already preemptively working on the spam problem, and the speed with which XMPP specs (XEPs) get defined, implemented and deployed in servers and clients is far faster than any other large scale open protocol that I'm aware of.
Any time you have closures you have threading issues. Think: if two threads call the same closure concurrently, how do they synchronize access to closed variables?

I don't know if Chicken Scheme allows multiple distinct instances of the run-time in one process -that would be very cool, and if anyone knows please do tell here-, but it can't safely support multi-threading any more than any standard Scheme can.

To get what you want in a Lisp you need to apply either Erlang concepts (threads with distinct global namespaces, exchanging serialized data via messaging) or Clojure concepts (immutable state + COW techniques + special top-level, mutable variables with synchronization for all mutable state; but I repeat myself, since that's roughly what COW implies).
Often they invest it, so that their net worth goes up rather than down, while perhaps supporting a company or cause they believe in. It's true that when you put your money into something, it's no longer liquid.

Your wealth is no longer liquid - but of course, someone now has that money instead, and it's liquid for them. This seemingly minor confusion happens in the article as well:

But we live in a situation where very nearly all the wealth in the world seems to be tied up in destructive forms. If the money is fluid, why is it not able to simply flow from destructive forms to creative ones?

He just switched from "wealth being tied up" - wealth is often quite illiquid - to money in the second sentence. Money is by definition (we all hope!) liquid.

There are a lot of interesting issues raised in this article and the subsequent discussion, but it's all very muddled to me that I don't really know where to begin to respond.
Saw this last night when I tried to setup RVM on a new machine. Quick fix is to do the following (from: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/6414232/curl-certificate-...)

echo insecure >> ~/.curlrc
Oh you've used it! Well, I take back all the other points I said! And the documentation from Coro that I cited explaining how it works, how it requires different I/O patterns, and that it's just a GOTO that doesn't do anything about synchronous long running code problems one might have when trying to interface with the rest of Perl! You're message is read loud and clear, I get where you are coming from now!
The Key to Education Reform
Great pitch, but the product and the news article seem to be low on details.

The "how it works" link says that they get read/write access to the data on s3, they massage/process the data, and allow queries on it. But I'm confused how this helps in A/B testing.
Yea, looking at OGinparadise's comment history, OGinparadise is the one who posted that Expedia has lowest prices, despite it's problems (I basically just ignore him now): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4965868
This is perfect, otherwise I would have to wait in line for another three months to get the app. I don't care who owns it if I can't even use the app.
Good thing I never gave up my @jabber.org address… To think I recently held them up as properly working with the XMPP consortium to add official features unlike facebook.
I guess it's a sign of maturity when Google realizes that their own employees are not representative of the general Internet market that Google is targeting.
Will Authors Get Compensated for Used E-Book Sales?
The real question is what percentage of medical patients go bankrupt at all.
Sadly the Supreme Court has been a bit to pro-government to my tastes lately.

I'd have to disagree. We've seen GPS tracking thrown out and other curbs on invasions of privacy. This court seems very interested in broadly defining privacy.
I guess I don't agree with your use of "rational". Motives such as selfishness and greed are perfectly rational. They may not be altruistic, but they sure as heck make sense. I associate irrational behavior with children, the insane, and mentally handicapped. These are people who are not capable of reasoning. Corrupttion, cronyism, and greed all make perfect sense.

Saying free markets aren't effective due to mans selfish nature is a reasonable observation. I agree that markets would be more effective with more altruistic agents. But then again, what wouldn't be? I believe whatever shortcomings in human nature that voluntarily interacting people face (ex, selfish agents in a market) will only be magnified in a Statist society. A "bad guy" trying to game the market with anticompetative practices sucks. What sucks more is this bad-guy gaming the government, and everything government regulates (hint, everything).
I'd say the chances are approximately zero. Reader was a niche product with a user base orders of magnitude smaller than GMail. Do you have any evidence that gmail ads aren't effective? Or that the other information Google gleans from it isn't valuable? Besides, even if it were profitable, it would obviously be PR suicide to shut it down. Hackers care about RSS, and can easily find another reader. Everyone cares about gmail.
I guess what I was referring to was more that, if you wanted to measure someone's musical ability, you can look at the hours they practiced as something that correlates. Which is what the researchers did. For skills like creativity or critical thinking, what hard number would you look at? I don't know, and I have a feeling that if you looked at time spent, you wouldn't get these same results.
How I got mugged and what I learnt from it
RSS and Google Reader itself has an awareness problem. These are just anecdotes, but I introduced Google Reader to multiple profoundly nontechnical friends and family members over the years. Literally every single one of them immediately fell in love with it, and never stopped using it. My mother, who completely lacks understanding of the idea that she can save a file to her computer and get it back later, for whom the web IS the computer, uses Google Reader daily to follow dozens of blogs.

It's not that Reader or RSS have no potential value to anyone who isn't "good with computers." It's that Google never bothered to tell anyone it existed! And why should they? Modern Google doesn't give a shit about the open web or decentralized culture, they want to "own social" and keep everything contained within their cancerous Facebook clone.
Anyone know which telco this really was?
Certain medicines which are prone to abuse have mechanisms in each pill that make it difficult to be cut up and snorted. Dynamite has chemical tracers added to it to make its use easier to trace. Photocopiers cannot duplicate currency. In all these cases products have been made more tamper proof so as to resist abuse. How is DRM different, here?
The relevant question is: what is keeping the supply of specialists from growing to meet the demand?

The AMA is essentially a guild. Everything it does in the name of quality is also a highly-effective way to keep wages high for its members. And that's hardly a coincidence.

Could an innovative medical school train a particular kind of specialist to be just as effective in half the time, at half the cost? We'll never know, because that kind of innovation is illegal.

The balance between cost and quality is not black and white. Plenty of patients might very well prefer to trade off one for the other. Today they have no choice -- there is only one standard, and the providers have every incentive to make that standard as expensive as possible.
The Secret(s) to Attracting More Mobile Users
I started out at University studying astronautical engineering.

4 universities and 3 career changes later, I'm a relatively happy code monkey. (are code monkies every totally happy?)

Things change. I'd say it's the very rare individual who gets through life on Plan A (or Plan B for that matter)
I love that you lead off with a 55 year-old woman. That's exactly the right message you want to get in front of people.
In what way is this a move "towards the dark side"? I understand it's disappointing, but whenever someone doesn't do what you want, do you assume they're evil?

There's an underlying sense of entitlement in the tech community that really rubs me the wrong way sometimes, honestly. Sometimes folks are going to make decisions that you don't agree with. That doesn't justify freaking out. "Getting disappointed" shouldn't be filed in the same drawer with "getting cheated" or other such violations.
From what little I've read [1], it does not look anything like a Wankel engine. While they both confer similar engineering benefits (though not claimed fuel benefits) compared to a reciprocating engine, the Wave Disk Generator/Engine,

1. uses compression of air/fuel mixture for ignition (like a diesel engine), not a separate ignition system

2. has an exhaust system that is both radial and circumferential using centrifugal/centripetal forces to clear the gases. Essentially exhausting all the time.

3. has an intake central and orthogonal to the plane of the rotor. Essentially continuous intake.

4. has no "hot spot" fixed housing locations for different parts of the thermodynamic cycle like in a Wankel engine, so, there is no need for a separate cooling or heat distribution system.

[1] http://sites.psu.edu/mitanshshah/2012/12/03/wave-disk-genera...
I'm happy that people like misnome are posting their opinions - criticism is good and productive. I'm happy to make changes, but can't do it if no one complains ;)
Yes, I would also love to see something on all the keyboard shortcuts
The day that e-mail becomes widely irrelevant is the day that Google thoughtfully cancels Gmail. Google is a business. If they lose enough customers, it's not worth maintaining an expensive system just to satisfy the vocal minority who gets up and writes self-entitled articles like OP's. Google has been pulling plugs on services for the longest time; they're not a charity, they're a company. I don't think this makes them evil!
MinoMonsters (YC W11) is looking for engineers
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Make sure you include something you’ve built that you’re proud of.
Agreed. Pretty cool when starting out though
Very insightful, great post.
Mailbox, the app I've yet to use gets acquired.

How can an app like Mailbox make you mad? Here is how:
I'm still waiting in the queue for over a month now to even try the app. Scarcity is the mental mind hack used to increase demand (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Cialdini)...but for me personally its backfired. If Dropbox's resources can help here, I'm all for it. Good luck.

Also, a note to mailbox web designer, try adding more contrast to your text so I can actually read it.
Go Ahead, Work From Home (But You Shouldn't Want To)
Of course, Google deserves to support/sunset whatever products they want.

The danger is that they've tasted Microsoft-level power in their ascendant Android/Chrome business, and want more.

There is a lot to be said about "leaving something on the table" and not maximizing everything. When you're the largest collector of personal data (other than perhaps the US Govt), you need goodwill or (influential) people will revile you.
Entrepreneurship Is Taught Through Life, Not In The Classroom
It also says that they were considering limiting invites per domain per day, which is quite a different thing than blocking all external invites, and it actually isn't all that different from what is done with email from domains that tend to send out a lot of spam.

However, the problems with this solution are
a) that it doesn't discriminate between domains with a lot of traffic and domains with a lot of spammy traffic (though, again, that's just speculation and maybe they do have that data), and
b) there's no message to the user that is being ignored. I don't know if jabber supports rejection messages, but it would be much better if they could get a message that let them know why they were being turned down so they could pressure their chat server operator to reign in the spam accounts.

It appears from the FSF post that they've actually tested invite requests, though, so presumably they are rejecting all invites, which makes the earlier email even less relevant as evidence of what is going on now. Surely the FSF has a contact at Google?
Another fail of Evil Corporation. However, we need for a new generation of Internet Jedis to smash the Dark Empire of Darth Serge and Darth Larry
The study asked about "preferences of physician-participants for treatment given a scenario of irreversible brain injury without terminal illness", which is a very different scenario than randomly having a heart attack when you're 50 and otherwise in okay health.
Svbtle never ceases to amaze me when I read an article. This was another example of a great article.

I think the author brings up a fabulous point; be grateful for everything you have.

It is so easy to get caught up in our lives and to envy others who have the newest this or the latest that. But to truly be grateful for what you have, material or otherwise, family, friends, doing things you love etc is so important.

We often don't realize how lucky we are to just be alive, in good health, surrounded by people who love us. As long as you have that, you are in my opinion among the few lucky people on earth.

Kudos on a great article.
No, they hoped it wouldn't mater. Unless they've perfected the ability to predict the future they and everyone else won't know for quite some time.
Shopify liquid cheat sheet: http://cheat.markdunkley.com/
A big part of the semantic confusion is that we have been subjected to a concerted campaign going on for at least a century now; that is specifically designed to render some thoughts unsayable, if not literally unthinkable..

If you want an amusing parlor game, ask a group of people to write down the definitions of the words 'capital' or 'free market'; and then compare them.
It's quite funny that I'd have to pay $150/month for the privilege of email support related to "service errors".

It's completely fair to expect customers to solve their own problems, but when the problem is on Google's end, it's beyond outrageous to charge a premium to resolve those.
> how do you do it?

In Capital volume 1, Marx paints the following logical progression. Whether it carries any historical truth, I don't know. (Note: there are many more nuances to it, and you perhaps need to wrestle the original source to get it all)

To establish a single unit of measurement:

a. The simple, isolated, or accidental form of value: Commodities are exchangeable with other commodities, e.g. 20 yards of linen = 1 coat.

b. The Total or Expanded Form of Value: a commodity is exchangeable with any other commodity, e.g. 20 yards of linen = 1 coat or = 10 lb tea or = 40 lb coffee or = 1 quarter of corn or = 2 ounces of gold or = etc.

c. The general form of value: Any of said quantities of commodities are exchangeable with the original commodity, e.g. 1 coat, 10 lb tea, 40 lb coffee, 1 quarter of corn, and 2 ounces of gold, are worth 20 yards of linen.

d. The money form: One, or a few, commodities become either the de factor or the legal "universal equivalent" commodity in which exchange-value is measured. This universal requires some properties (I'm sure I have forgotten several):

* It must be uniform. Not all horses are equal, so horses are no good.

* It must be divisible and capable of quantitative differentiation. Half a work horse is less worth than half of a whole, and two halves of work horses does not equal one. Horses are not good for a second reason.

* As trade expands geographically, the value of the universal equivalent needs to be universally recognized. Horses for seamen? More inconvenient than it should be.

* The universal equivalent should not deteriorate. Horses die. They really are no good for this.

Instead, precious metals fulfill these qualities. And just as we use dollars and cents, gold and silver can be used to differentiate between different magnitudes of value. (Note: gold and silver still has values as commodities, which determine the amount of stuff you get for them. See the initial points.)

Still, they do have some problems. They require measurements and tools to divide. It's not really convenient to go into Starbucks with a lump of silver to carve the price for a coffee.

So coins are minted, containing the proper amount of each metal. New problems arise. Cheaters carve metals from the coins to melt and create new. Wear and tear cheapens the coins. So bills and coins are created as symbols of silver and gold, but backed by them. The actual precious metal reside elsewhere, and the bill is just a proof of ownership.

Now, those countries and owners who control precious metals get significant power. They can withhold or flood the marked at their whim. No good, says the other countries. So when currency is sufficiently recognized as a means of payment, one can remove the actual backing and keep the bills and coins only. And while we're on it, why bother with the bills at all? A balance in a computer is just as good, right?