skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The 300 was far from useless - it was in fact the vehicle that enabled the Methuselah Foundation to do any of what it did: gain enough social proof and funding to invest in Organovo, boost SENS research far enough to gain funding from Peter Thiel and others, ultimately enabling it to spin off into the SENS Research Foundation, work behind the scenes to make the research community much more accepting of aging research, build a network of sympathetic researchers willing to speak out publicly about human longevity as a goal for science, help the Supercentenarian Research Foundation get started, and of late work on the New Organ initiative.

None of that would have been possible without the 300, and more importantly without people like you and I believing in the goal.

On cancer: there are new ideas and promising signs if you know where to look. I'm not a fan of WILT, but I haven't see anyone mount a good claim that it won't work as advertised, which is to say no cancer, ever:

http://www.fightaging.org/archives/2011/10/accumulating-the-...

An effective cancer treatment is all about finding a commonality to cut through the enormous variation in cancer biochemistry, so I watch for signs of that with some interest. The latest possible cancer commonality is CD47, for example:

http://www.fightaging.org/archives/2013/03/more-on-cd47-as-a...

There's also the suggestion that maybe we could extract the global cellular mechanism that makes naked mole rats cancer-free, or the different global cellular mechanism that makes blind mole rats cancer-free, and safely introduce one of them into human biology. That's much more speculative, not least for the concern that what works for 20-30 years in a mole rat might not be good for 100 in a human - there are plenty of examples of things working well in rodents but not being all that applicable to people.

http://www.fightaging.org/archives/2011/03/revisiting-naked-...

http://www.fightaging.org/archives/2012/11/the-mechanism-of-...

But even without this, I think that targeted cell destruction therapies (via nanoparticles, or trained immune cells, or viruses, etc) will evolve into a robust cancer cure for near all cancers caught early enough within the next couple of decades:

http://www.fightaging.org/archives/2006/10/cancer-cells-are-...

http://www.fightaging.org/archives/2007/01/to-what-degree-is...
> It wouldn't be surprise if their Next Goal were to built the Entire ( or Most of ) Browser with Javascript.

Firefox is that already, the UI is XUL (that's one of the reasons why things like Firebug could exist as a plugin, when Chrome and Safari plugins are essentially glorified greasemonkey scripts). But you still need the core engine to run that javascript (and a bunch of other stuff) somehow, and one of the ideas behind Servo is that you could do so with much more concurrency and reactivity than is currently done.
Except for the part where the building blocks are not common between drugs, and the protocols to assemble them are neither uniform nor few in number. Tooling up to synthesize a drug can draw on thousands of different techniques and tools, even when working with small quantities.

Amateur drug synthesis does occur (particularly for recreational drugs), but it's neither safe, nor efficient, nor flexible.

It will take a new platform technology to allow for distributed drug synthesis, and a likely a better understanding of those drugs to get there.
Why can't you short bitcoins?

Part of me suspects it's because a lot of people intend to sell their bitcoins as soon as the market shows a significant downturn, and so they don't want to lend their bitcoins in the first place.

Although given how large the percentage swings are right now, I have no idea what such a "significant downturn" would have to look like.
This is pretty similar to the approach that many predictive modelers already use: compress data down into 'dummy variables', where each variable represents some attribute. For example, you could convert the variable state into 51 dummy variables, one for california, one for DC, etc. Hashing makes the programming a little easier and helps avoid throwing out data in the long-tail of the distribution when the number of possible values is very high. It's common in NLP exactly because of this.

Hashing comes with costs though. It's much harder to interpret a model with hashed variables because the variables lose meaning. Also, some information may get thrown out; as OP mentions integers may have continuous meaning and categorizing them can really damage the model. If you have a very large dataset it probably won't matter because most modeling methods asymptotically converge (i.e. as you have more and more data the model can learn that 333 and 334 are similar just by seeing enough examples that this is the case), but if you don't you could be throwing out valuable information. In a case like this I suppose the modeler could manually go in and convert his integers to floats to 'tell' the algorithm the data is continuous.
Why every artist should write
As much as I like Golang, it is not a replacement for C. The major reason C is so popular because it's the only portable medium for performant code which can be shared across many languages because it doesn't impose any runtime on you.

Go comes with a VM. It lives in its own world, it cannot live in the worlds of other VMs like C can. It's more like high-performance Python (or simpler+slower C++) optimized for concurrent network services.

I'd say that Rust and probably D are good candidates for replacing C.
While the internet has liberated many aspects of humanity (communications, publishing, artistic and scientific collaboration, etc.) there has been diminishment of meatspace freedoms, in some cases as a direct reaction by the former captors.
I don't think it's necessarily true that only projects that need ASM.js's speed will target it. There are already several languages or tools in increasingly common use that target vanilla JavaScript, like Haxe or GWT. Developers don't use those because they can't make JavaScript perform, but because developing in another language is more convenient in some way: better syntax or easier code sharing. If these compilers could be modified to target ASM.js, you'd get the performance bump for free without sacrificing the existing state of usability in browsers that don't natively support it.
crumbling? median api response times are 1.446ms at the moment and basically all our servers are completely idle. Any issues would be new bugs for us to track down!
To be fair, with Rust it's more like

C++ -----
\
OCaml ------> Rust
/
Erlang --
...not yet, anyway.
Interesting to see the creator of 4chan working on a more conventional forum platform...
This is a great announcement and adds some much needed support to Servo/Rust. I've been pretty impressed with Samsung too. Clearly they want to have their own seat at the table and they are executing quite well on that desire.
Samsung teams up with Mozilla to build browser engine for multicore machines
The reason people are uncomfortable with talk of paying for immortality is that it can lead to obscene scenerios potentially thousands of times worse than the 1% debates we are having now. You think accumulation of power is bad when people pass money on to their children, think about how much worse it is if they simply live forever and accumulate it indefinitely. And now imagine what happens if only the top ecehlon gets to live forever, and the less wealthy or simply poor just die.

Immortality is not something our society can simply add to its current socio-economic make-up. Some fundamental changes would have to be made in order for the situation to be at all morally satisfactory and not utterly revolting and depressing. And no doubt any attempted change would take at least 50 years for the wild oscillations to even out.
> I don't think there's any useful way in which Euler's identity is a 'metaphor' for anything.

Euler's Identity isn't itself the metaphor, it's the equation we use to teach and understand it that is metaphorical. The letters themselves only mean "Euler's Identity" when imbued with the extra meanings that come from the symbolic framework of mathematics.
The idea is intriguing. What if we think about tying a language to a library rather than the other way around? Lisp and Forth both had the idea that you should be able to build your language around the needs of your application, rather than the other way around, and this kind of source compilation feels like the extension of the idea.

(Yes, we could always do the same thing, and often have, but not in web-world.)
Currently, Rust cannot go without its runtime either. The plan is that it eventually will be able to.

(EDIT: VM -> runtime)
Stanford to collaborate with edX on development of open-source edX platform
Adventures in Caffeine Addiction
I have been dreaming of such a thing for long. The issue that comes is which features to keep; I have heard that everyone has their subset of C++ that they use.

The above system must be able to allow handling legacy code, which seems doable.
Considerations when adopting a new tool or practice
I hope this means Rdio is going to be a more sustainable long-term business, and not that Rdio is pivoting away from music; Rdio seems to be the best of a shaky lot when it comes to subscription music services, and I'd hate for it to get worse.
The Bayesian stuff that I'm going through has zero pretensions to being the latest and greatest.

I only know "Promises" because I saw that on HN recently. However the concept behind JavaScript promises is one that I've seen before (I first saw it buried in a sideways way inside of http://search.cpan.org/~karasik/IO-Lambda/) and the name "promises" already has a spot reserved in my brain for their use in infinite streams. Therefore if someone mentions JavaScript promises to me again in 6 months I'll draw a blank.

There are some code samples linked in the articles in http://elem.com/~btilly/ab-testing-multiple-looks/index.html if you want to look. I wasn't writing that code for anyone except myself, so it isn't particularly pretty. (It did get the job done though.)
That discussion is very old.
Go directly to... dx.h, a modern C++ library for DirectX dev
I still think this takes the cake.

http://pipeline.corante.com/archives/2010/02/23/things_i_won...

The heater was warmed to approximately 700C. The heater block glowed a dull red color, observable with room lights turned off. The ballast tank was filled to 300 torr with oxygen, and fluorine was added until the total pressure was 901 torr. . . And suddenly O2F2 aka FOOF.

Which as you might guess is just all kinds of nasty. Explosive reaction with water at 100 Kelvin etc.
They've offered refunds on delivery charges and a full refund on the Instacart Express subscription fee for people who don't want to come along with them to their new pricing model.
"They didn't nail Aaron because he violated the terms of service, they nailed him for STEALING FROM JSTOR"

Nothing was stolen, he destroyed or returned all copies of the scientific articles he downloaded, and JSTOR decline to press charges. He was then charged with computer crime for violating MIT's terms of service, which is a dubious legal standard that was already shot down by the courts years ago.

Aaron Swartz was the victim of an overzealous prosecutor with a history of civil rights abuses and who had previously driven another alleged hacker to suicide. The CFAA is shockingly broad and puts the public in legal danger by its very existence. There is no defense of the government's actions in the Aaron Swartz case.
Depends on the size of your company, we'd like to explore this a bit further. Shoot us an email at business@aerofs.com and we'll follow up ASAP
But it does say that Samsung is responsible for Servo for Android.
I'd suggest not starting with the Culture novels. The Algebraist is more accessible because it's not constantly referring to a mysterious super-organization that's driving the plot.
'for Rubyists' means I assume you don't know anything about systems programming, there's very little that's Ruby-specific.

Then put out the same book with a new title, "Rust for Pythonistas". Two books for the price of one!
All I'm saying is that right now, while it's being adopted, growth and volatility are the same thing.

Sentiments along the lines of: "For bitcoin to be adopted, it should be stable first" don't make sense, because adoption (demand) drives the instability. That statement is the equivalent of saying "For bitcoin to grow, it should not be growing."
Ugh that page is terrible, must rewrite.
Short Survey for school project involving real world client
> Ever noticed how the devil doesn't actually feature in the bible anywhere?

Sorry? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Devil_in_Christianity#Sources_o...
> C -> Go

Most of C's use cases, Go can't even remotely be used for. It's basically limited to the "network server" use case. It's not portable, it's not a linga franca (via FFI for non-C languages), it's not low-overhead, it's not runtime-less, ...

> Erlang -> (Go or Scala)

Yeah... no, especially not Go. In Erlang's inception, concurrency was first and foremost a tool for reliability (from its telecom roots where 1 = 0, so 1 server means the same as not having a server). Just about none of Erlang's reliability mechanisms are present in Go.
I'll be danged. They sure don't do they?

The whole website is static, a templating engine which runs in f# on mono generates it. I haven't rebuilt the side in, gosh, a year? Two?

Looks like I had some bad data. Thanks for the heads-up.

Note that you can still use the "AnswerQuestions" page to create your own book lists and share them. So, for instance, if I wanted to give you my top 3 books for smart people, I could link like this: http://www.hn-books.com#B0=29&B1=161&B2=133&BC=3...

So the home page is working. Must be something else.

Thanks again.
Why would I hold BTC in a bank that charges me for that service? I can hold them with complete safety in my wallet. The reason interest rates will rise is that there is essentially a base interest rate paid to people who hoard BTC due to deflation. In order to attract investors, I would have to offer an interest rate that exceeds the risk-adjusted return on capital for simple hoarding. Since that risk is effectively 0, and the deflation rate may be high, the interest rate I offer would need to be very high.
Thank you in advance for the help. I just need to collect some data, the data may not even end up being presented to the client, but it is still required that I collect some data.

Thanks!
I doubt the public-or-private distinction matters in hiring choices.
But only the first time, after that it's bypassed (even after I clear cookies?). It says "Oracle" on the bottom right, maybe it's some product of theirs...

Edit: oh, every linkedin help center page says "Oracle" in the bottom right? I never understood this kind of branding... does it really help something?
The MPI C++ bindings: what happened, and why?
So...its another pay per item video service? Odd coming from rdio, which I've come to associated with unlimited streaming. Not cheap either, at $15 to buy a movie
It seems to me that Heroku is still failing to understand (or at least cop to) the fact that the switch from intelligent to randomized routing was a loss of a major reason people chose Heroku in the first place.

A lot of Heroku's apparent value came from the intelligent routing feature. Everybody knew that it was harder to implement than random routing, that's why they were willing to pay Heroku for it.

Nobody's arguing random routing isn't easier and more stable; of course it is.

The problem is that by switching over to it, Heroku gave up a major selling point of their platform. Are they really blind enough not to know this? I have a hard time believing that.

It seems to me the real way to make people happy is to discount the "base" products which come with random routing and make intelligent routing available as a premium feature. Of course, people who thought they were getting intelligent routing should be credited.
A Goodreads Spoiled: All Your Books Are Belong To Amazon
Its sure sounds like a bubble. What drives demand for BTC? The ability to transact anonymously? What drives the value of the USD? The US government imposes a tax liability which is only payable in USD. Not gold, silver, euro's, or BTC's.
A few things:

1) There is no uniform agreement about the state of Servo. Some are more optimistic than others.

2) There is a number of unknown unknowns here; that's what makes it a research project and makes it hard to roadmap. For example doing parallel layout of CSS involving floats is an actual research topic people are currently publishing papers on...
Our demo forum is in a sandbox environment separate from our primary network and it's getting traffic and loading (at least based on our logs). The production system is still pushing median API response times of 1.608ms (a drop of 0.2 since I last looked).

As far as redis, we've put a great deal of effort into our redis infrastructure. We heavily shard and replicate data in such a way that memory constraints are not our biggest concern.

In any case, thanks for your thoughts!
I think people new to Bitcoin could be confused by this. Mining difficulty is not "adjusted" by anyone. Only 21 million Bitcoins can ever be found. It's like hunting for Easter eggs. The last egg is hardest to find.

Lots of math but looks like you can calculate the difficulty yourself with an algorithm here:

https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Difficulty
I'm amazed at that a lot of the discussion around Bitcoin ignores one crucial fact - you can (relatively) safely buy illegal drugs with them. This makes it attractive to a lot of people who would like to buy drugs but don't know how to get them, or are scared of being personally involved with dealers and possibly gangs, and of going to jail.

I have never done this (nor even owned Bitcoins) but for the people I know who're talking about Bitcoins this is the main motivation for having them. Indeed, to many of them Bitcoin = Silk Road.
When admitting fault in response to a customer that spends 5 figures/month with you, wise to have a lawyer go over it first.
If they had only replaced ads and not created new ads at the bottom of the page, nobody would have noticed.
He's structured his entire business around the idea that successful startups have values (in dollars) that follow that trend.
I'm a cynic, but I don't think it's realistic that most people would welcome and encourage the homeless to sit near them in restaurants.
Disclaimer: I work at Rackspace. And I love CloudFiles, and honestly prefer it to the S3.

I've talked to a few folks at PyCon this year who used both and the consensus was that:

- CF API is faster
- Akamai is slower to replicate

Look at using Cloud Files with Fastly: best of both worlds.
Mr. Poole has no relation to this.
For someone (me) not particularly knowledgeable on the subject. I'm curious to understand the contrast between this and vowpal wabbit.
Could someone offer an insight into when it would be useful to use this project as opposed to vowpal?
I'm sure Business Insider's 31 posts about Bitcoin in the last week has nothing to do with it... http://www.businessinsider.com/s?q=bitcoin&vertical=&...
Unfortunately, for much of synthetic chemistry, positioning a bunch of reagents in a matrix is not sufficient to produce a target molecule. And even if you do manage to get to your target through a relatively trivial process, isolating it from other compounds is an enormous challenge. Reactionware has traditionally made this problem worse, as solvents and reagents tend to interact with the containers and contaminate the synthesis. There's a reason that most chemistry is still done in glass.

Further, the reagents and catalysts involved in drug synthesis vary wildly, so it will take a substantial amount of shopping to even get the raw materials you would need to setup a viable reaction.

While this is a cool setup, it's best not to overstate it's capabilities.
His claim was more than a professional. Apparently going rate for a CNC mill operator is something like $14/hr.

Maybe my friend is full of it (and believe me, I gave him a TON of flak for quitting).
... in an optimized fashion. Being valid JS, V8 could run Asm.js code.
Yes, many contractors make very good use of Linkedin to speak with recruiters.
Wow, I didn't realize how little the basic interface has changed. I mean, I know there's been no radical changes, but I still didn't expect it to take me nearly as long as it did to tell the difference between a 1-year-old and 6-year-old OS.

Amazing how much they've improved "under-the-hood" while keeping the basic interface the same.

PS. If you can't tell the difference between the two, look at the dock - the only way I could figure it out is spotting the new/changed app icons (Launchpad, iTunes, etc).
... exactly.

There are 9000 people waiting in line to be qualified to trade at mtgox. When they're let in--if they're even let in before the crash--they'll truly make the growth untenable.
Agreed, I wish we could have done it much sooner. It took a shocking amount of time to sort through all the entangled issues, emotion, and speculation to try to get to the heart of the matter, which ultimately was about web performance and visibility.

Also, we wanted to respond to our customers first and foremost, and general community discussion second. So we spent close to a month on skype/hangout/phone with hundreds of customers understanding how and at what magnitude this affected their apps.

That was hugely time-consuming, but it gave us the confidence to speak about this in a manner that would be focused on customer needs instead of purely answering community speculation and theoretical discussions.
Note that, once again, there is no actual data backing up this assertion.

We like to say that github does this and it seems reasonable, but that is not the same as actually showing it to be the case.

Here's the null hypothesis: nobody hires on the basis of the code you put up on github. You will find that hardly anybody even reads that code, even when you give them the link. It is meaningless unless you are already a big name for other reasons.

If you want to maintain that github is a certificate or something, the burden is on you to provide sufficient cause to reject the null hypothesis.
Show HN: Hacker News clone w/ geocoder & map
Is anybody operating at Heroku's scale offering centralized request routing queues? At what price?
WebKit was open-sourced in 2005, almost 8 years ago.

But WebKit development started in 2001, about 12 years ago.

Safari, using WebKit, was released in Jan 2003, over 10 years ago.

So no, WebKit doesn't count as a browser engine started within the last 10 years. ;)
> Multinational corporations use foreign currencies as a hedge against exchange rate fluctuations

Because they have business there, so in a sense they do live there.

> And while I don't live on the Internet, I do conduct some of my economic life on the Internet: buying, selling, consuming, and creating.

Maybe that's the logic leap I have to take to use bitcoins: I don't consider that I buy things from the Internet, I use the Internet to buy things from stores. Maybe when we have a Snow-Crash-type Metaverse I'll start using virtual currencies :)
He forgot to explain why they won't be refunding customers who were defrauded.
The web is a really weird platform for this though: There are SO many places the lower level language (the one you're translating to) has to properly handle, that DSLs feel like a big risk to many people

I'm personally looking forward to stuff like "CoffeScript, a 5 year retrospective" etc, to show how safe all that stuff ended up being long term
TechStars NYC 2013 Class - TechStars
But if you're cross-compiling from C++ to get asm.js, what would be the advantage? The upside is easier distribution of code, but presumably in the case of node that wouldn't be a big upside.
You don't live in a gold mine either, but I bet you wouldn't mind owning gold. Same thing with Bitcoin, no?
Disney Shuts Down LucasArts
How I hosted a local television contest for $2.37 on heroku