skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
the structure of DNA, the function of neurons

Crick, Hodgkin and Huxley were all physicists poaching in other fields. In fact, relatively few of the people who laid the foundations in molecular biology were trained as biologists.
Is it really surprising or disappointing it took 'so long'?

I think your understanding of how easy it is to locate people is influenced by fiction and dramatization.

One man is tiny compared to an entire city. What can you realistically do if that man decides to hide in a covered boat in someone's yard?
The problem is that neither the government nor the opposition have ever produced their original costings nor any audit of those costs. In the government's case we're promised that audits were done. But we can't see what was audited and we can't see what the instructions are.
Wow, that sounds pretty terrible. Hopefully stackoverflow isn't hit that hard with a takedown like this. Did your friend blog/write about it at all at the time?
Which hosting company?
Not sure why you'd think benefits are involved here. And a $125k salary does not cost $250k.
You're wrong. The saddest thing is the loss of life and limb.
I am interested in knowing what extra expenses were taken to ensure the safety of bystanders. Please share. I did see a few reports of peoples' homes and property being shot up in a similar style as LAPD a-la Christopher Dorner.
#1, #2 and #5 just mean starting with Zillow, Trulia, or any other site that lets you search using a satellite map. You enter your price range, # of bedrooms and other requirements, then zoom in and start scrolling the map through neighborhoods you'd consider. The price tags appear above the houses that are for sale/rent, and you can easily see what direction they face, whether they're on the corner and whether they have a garage.

You can pan through the map of an entire county in under an hour.

http://i.imgur.com/IGqE2Zg.jpg -> http://i.imgur.com/o1CJbiv.jpg

This is the easiest and most enjoyable part of the home search IMO.
Who says it wasn't? Having infrared and having it be easy to find someone who doesn't want to be found with it in an urban environment are different things.
I fixed my misspelling of third...

I think for us the biggest thing is that often we don't know what approach will work best until we try, and often we have to balance more than just readability or performance. Memory usage issues meant that we prototyped one way for getting all the words in to memory, proved that we had enough information about the words for 99% of what we were going to do, and that we could get the other 1% later, and then re-wrote with a different "loader" and different information about the words loaded.

I like functional programming but it made sense to make parts of the code object oriented not just for readability or ease of programming, but because it was more performant.

So our rewrites are partly for performance, partly because the end goal moved slightly, and partly for maintainability. As we stack on new features often the way we should do things changes drastically.
Okay, and why is killing someone who is risking their life worse than killing anyone else?
I would downvote you if I could because the comparison is certainly not stupid; just because you fear more the will of the others over accidents does not make it stupid.

If for example cars were allowed (mechanically and legally) to only accelerate to maximum 50mph many of those accidents would never happen, but people are not willing to loose their freedom to drive at crazy speeds but somehow they are willing to loose other freedoms for extremely rare events such as terrorism attacks just for the emotional effect it haves over them because it is an attack (and not an accident) with nothing rational backing it up.
Interesting that it has a Linguistics section, as in the International Linguistics Olympiad, but not seen on a modern SAT or high school classroom.
http://www.ioling.org/problems/samples/

I suppose that morphed in to the "logic puzzles" found on the modern LSAT.
Saw Watsi's presentation at Demo Day. Watsi is pretty special.
Working as a Police Officer is considerably less dangerous than many other labor-intensive professions. http://open.salon.com/blog/richard_rider/2010/11/08/police_f...
Oh and while this huge distraction was going on - no background checks or database for guns.

Background checks are already required for almost all gun sales, including ones at gun-shows. This whole discussion is a red-herring. And what the f%!# good do you think a "database for guns" is going to do? You think the terrorists buy their guns over the counter, with legit IDs and happily register them with the authorities? You expect the terrorists to register their pressure cookers? Maybe we should have background checks for buying those?

And then what? Background checks for buying nichrome wire, because it can be used as a bridgewire in a detonator? A database of Arduinos, since they can be used as timers for bombs?

Or how about a national database of people who guy gasoline, Drano, nails, ball-bearings, lithium-ion batteries, soldering irons, solder...

Better still, let's implement a Great Firewall of America to keep people from accessing subversive content like Inspire magazine, the Unabomber manifesto, the writings of Timothy McVeigh, the Koran, Cryptome, Wikileaks, Paladin Press, Justin Bieber songs, Anarchist's cookbook, Poor Man's James Bond or the Federalist Papers...
Why the Lucky Stiff is brilliant, so much so he is completely strange. But you can see the brilliance a mile away. His Ruby comics were technically brilliant and artistically brilliant at the same time, and they did both effortlessly.

When someone blows you away with real ability, and does it while juggling apples and telling dirty jokes, without breaking a sweat, it (rightfully so) makes an impression.

Plus, BACON!
Of course, now that he's been caught, this is much easier to say.
Surprising to resist one kind of massive state power and then support another. If the US government really didn't want mentally ill people to get guns then the homeless would be off the streets and in prisons or asylums. Instead there was an attempt to criminalize transactions by law abiding people, purely as an expression of media animus against gun owners and with zero concern for false positive rates.

As for popularity, I'd bet "90%" of people would support virtually anything after being subject to four months of wall to wall propaganda by the corporate media and government. It is amazing to me how erstwhile supporters of minority rights now champion the most literal majoritarianism when convenient.

And how do you see the kind of extraordinary show of force we just saw in Boston and conclude that the citizenry should be even more helpless, more disempowered? Life is a Rorschach test, I guess.
It's been some time now, but I've been there...

Once you've lost root to a sufficiently competent attacker you can't trust _anything_ on that box any more.

One thing that'll help against (some) script kiddies with rootkits is to have available statically linked copies of every tool you might want to use to see what's happening on your box - for a long while, every colo-ed box I managed had a cdrom drive with read-only versions of /bin, /sbin, and useful bits of /usr - all with the binaries statically linked. They can in handy a few times (mostly to confirm that "yep, we're screwed. Get this box off the network and powered down immediately and implement the bring-up-a-new-server-from-scratch plan right now".

At some stage though, you can't trust the kernel or the hardware - an attacker who's got into your booted kernel or your bios or your network card firmware, if they're good enough, they probably can't be detected by examining anything you could see logged into the box itself. The only way to identify that level of attack is by monitoring the traffic from the box from some trusted piece of network gear upstream of your rooted server (and against a sufficiently talented attacker, even identifying unexpected outbound traffic might be impossible. If your list of likely attackers includes three letter agencies or nation states, I hope your getting your secutiry advice from somethere other than HN comments…)
Thanks for the explaination. Even if this is a protected and valid use of DMCA, it doesn't strike me as a strong move for a company confident in its product.

This isn't what I would consider "technologically sophisticated cryptattack", but instead just looking at some screenshots or slides and doing a quick observational analysis on them.

If the analysis were wrong, it might just come down to "well that's how our designers ended up making the slides/video" (replacing each word with a hash of itself), then I think it might make more sense to issue a statement that the advertising materials weren't exactly matching how the encryption works. Not sure if that would open them up to libel though.
No, look at the logic from the other angle, by RMSs idiotic logic, because the flu kills more people, the correct response to the attack should have been Bostonians gone about their merry business, but in Hazmat suits to avoid infection.
"I am sure I will have a lot of mistakes for the grammar Nazi’s to point out in this post."

I'm hoping this was a subtle and brilliant joke and not just a typo.
To be fair, real, organized terrorists would probably be catch up before the bombing, since they would surely be under the radar of some intelligence agencies.

On the other hand, "lone wolfs" cannot be tracked by agencies, and their actions are hardly predictables.
Came out in 1985 after Microsoft had been developing Mac apps for two years, and was so awful as to barely warrant a footnote in computer history.
Their likely justification is the use of those image snippets which appear to come from their manual. Realistically, those small captures represent fair use (though I am not a lawyer so can't speak legally).
Works fine for me on Firefox 20– plugin issue perhaps?
Yahoo engineers may have verified that none of the users of these products have a vacation scheduled in Yahoo Calendar, which will presumably be the last property to shut down, for this reason.
I heard/read that for homes with inhabitants present, the inhabitants were asked if they would like their homes searched.

I'm not sure if they searched empty homes, but if they did, then they probably believed it to be exigent circumstances.
But try to tell a bunch of tone-deaf nerds that, if you can get a word in edge-wise between their ranting about how many people are killed by automobiles each year.
Plant safety cuts into profits, left to itself management will not encourage safe working practice - there must be meaningful oversight by an outside agency.

Yes, because it's obviously good for business to have your plant blow sky high, destroying the entire surrounding neighborhood and killing most of your employees. If I were a plant manager, I'd make sure to put doing all that right at the top of my TODO list.

Or, maybe, just maybe, not everybody who owns/runs a business in a capitalist system is a greedy, evil, soul-sucking bastard, and maybe, just maybe, accidents happen, some of which are damn near unpredictable and unavoidable. And maybe we can't regulate our way to a society where nothing bad ever happens to anybody, ever?
This is typical for techniques that try to automatically fix security vulnerabilities or to add memory safety to native programs (so not a deal breaker), but I can spot a few limitations:

* this implementation relies on static analysis which is not guaranteed to find all executable code and it doesn't protect dynamically generated code (think JIT compilers)

* the proposed algorithm doesn't detect sequences where the value loaded from the stack is modified in a predictable way:

pop {R0}
add r0, r0, #1
pop {pc}

This code snippet loads a value from the stack into R0, adds 1 to R0 and then branches to the next address on the stack. Obviously, the effect of the add instruction can easily be accounted for, but the proposed algorithm wouldn't consider the value of R0 as being 'controllable'. I don't know if a similar code sequence is likely to be generated by a compiler, but I can definitely imagine something similar appearing in hand written assembly. I guess a better approach would be to tag data read from the stack as it flows through the registers.

The name of 'vulnerable code sequence' is a bit misleading since this kind of sequences are harmless on their own, if a stack buffer overflow isn't present. My guess is that few functions that contain VCSs also contain stack buffer overflow vulnerabilities, so manually fixing this relatively common sequence might take unreasonably many engineer-hours. However, it would make much more sense to check all executables if an automatic patching strategy would be developed.
In a VC pitch you always include a small easy to fix, minor issue. One you know the answer to. That way they point it out, you tell them how smart they were for mentioning it, and then the solution. They feel like they proved you aren't perfect, and you avoid them poking hard enough to find your real issues.
It's about mitigation too. It's a classic problem. Let's say you have a guy like Ted Bundy, hypothetically, and you have this huge manhunt and you catch him a few days after his first attack. OK, now you look at the cold, hard numbers and you see that you've spent an enormous amount of effort catching a guy who's only killed a few people. On paper that might look crazy. But in the case of the real Ted Bundy he killed over 30 people across 7 states in 4 years. And if he had never been caught he hypothetically could have killed hundreds.

This is why naive numbers comparisons are just stupid.

Edit: Here's another example I came up with. To date only about 120,000 people have been killed by nuclear weapons. Which is a tiny fraction of the people killed by conventional weapons, or even heart disease. By naive logic we shouldn't worry about nuclear weapons, we should worry far more about heart disease, and strategic arms limitation talks should concentrate on the far more lethal conventional weapons.
LOL! Sometimes it's wise not to assume we know what's on the clipboard. That link is to a pile of computer-rendered lesbian porn images!
Yep - if not x, than not y applies to every aspect of the universe. :) But what I am trying to drive home is that (IMHO) there is a huge disconnect between Job's actual talents, and the amount of respect he is given. Wozniak too would have likely been a nobody, sometimes it takes that pairing of people to produce enough drive to create a product (I know because I have experienced it first hand -- I used to work with what you might call a psychological clone of Steve Jobs, but he got me to work at a rate I never have before - only he was never abusive).

Anyway, all of what you say is basically true. :) But I feel like Jobs has stolen most of the respect from all the people who work so hard under him that really have made Apple what it is. I guess I kind of have the engineer's mind set, for better or worse - I admire people who can create things with their own two hands (or at least the people who get their hands dirty), and I don't particularly care for those who can't -- I can't really say that without sounding like an elitist prick, but maybe that is what I am. :)
Cortijo del Mar | FM Consulting Realty Group
I'm not surprised with that company actually, hostgator is a joke and the employees in Austin, Texas are too. I think the one thing that bothers me how did he get the SSH key? The fact that he had it tells me that someone higher up dropped the ball somewhere.
And now it does, I'm happy to say.
Why do we bother to have laws at all if people are going to break them?

I mean look at all the silencers people have to get away with murder - oh wait, they don't - because they are illegal and highly regulated.
People talk about the "90%" or whatever support that universal background checks had among the voting public. However, ignoring the problems of legislating based on shallow polls, nobody seems to be talking about the 90+% of sherrifs and police officers who believed that neither universal background checks nor a so-called "assault weapons ban" would have any beneficial effect on gun crime.
The big picture being that Bostoners should just ignore the marathon bombers so they can convene an emergency city council meeting to discuss the threat chemical plants?

I thought I was pretty jaded, but it turns out I have a long way to go still. After the events of this week I was worried about the hundreds of maimed victims, "Uncle Ruslan", the families of those 4 persons killed and the possible backdrop on geopolitics. But judging from Dr. Stallman's comments I should be most concerned about how the TSA might benefit from what happened.
I guess that it is easy to opine from afar when you have no skin in the game. The government has an obligation to protect public safety, and madmen on the loose shooting policemen and tossing bombs out car windows certainly qualifies as a public safety event.

I suppose if Mr. Stallman's home or office were to catch fire, we shouldn't paralyze the immediate area with noisy fire trucks.

The background check issue is a completely separate, legislative one. Democracy is a messy thing -- the democrats killed the bills so they could come back and fight another day.
> I really do not get all the celebration and back-patting, it's disturbing.

This is way less about a real accomplishment, and more about what people need to feel. After the bombings, people felt vulnerable and scared. And for the police, I'm sure also embarrassed and angry. Catching this kid is the vindication they all needed emotionally. I'm just glad they didn't get overzealous and kill him, as most manhunts end.

Cops were sending around a photo of the first suspect after he died, saying that seeing it was "cathartic." Apparently another is circulating of the second captured suspect, with the caption "WE GOT HIM." It's like a locker room after winning a football game.

It's true there was danger and violence here, and the death of innocent good people. But the response today was largely about ego and fear of vulnerability. There were literally thousands of SWAT units in Watertown today, going from door to door, publicly demonstrating America's reaction to terrorist attacks. It was about sending a message to the citizens and police of Boston, as well as the rest of the country.
I think you'd need to equip the helicopter with precision grid-flying software/hardware such as is in SAR aircraft and Crop Dusters. FLIR can indeed see "through" some things, but the successful FLIR uses that you see on youtube and TV are usually cases where the pilot has a very small area to search. A comprehensive search of more than a few blocks would need multiple craft and lots of fuel. I agree that the authorities seem to lack awareness of the Bill of Rights.
Maybe, but I've read about Chechnya.

I'd bet on the religion angle. Especially the young generation can be very motivated as they seek their identity.
I really don't see what this has to do with the Boston bombing or people's reactions to the events of today. I took a different argument to the Holocaust extreme in another comment and it applies just as well here: why should we be "bent out of shape" today about plant safety when genocide kills millions times more people?
A large percentage of the records made in the 50s and 60s are not available on CDs.
> There is no expectation of danger while spectating at the Boston Marathon.

There also is no expectation of getting struck by lightning while spectating at the Boston Marathon, yet that is much more likely to happen than getting hit by a terrorist's bomb.
> I think for us the biggest thing is that often we don't know what approach will work best until we try

Absolutely--and I think pretty much all software is like this. Engineering/optimization is, in a vague sense, all about how much shit you can throw at a wall and how well you can tell what sticks. The faster/easier/more accurately you can do this, the better. If you're going to be bound to the first pile of shit you throw due to business constraints or whatever, you're not likely to end up with something very nice.
Busted NinjaVideo founder freed from prison
The whole point of those rights is to avoid massive loss of life and limb in the long run.

I think there's a reason the us has been relatively stable over a long period of time, and it has everything to do with civil rights that serve as another check to the power of the government. As the balance is tipped in the favor of government power over civil power, the chances for large scale loss of life and limb (civil wars, internal power grabs etc.) increases.

History provides good examples of ever powerful governments, spectacularly collapsing, and crushing way more people than are killed from individuals abusing 'lax' civil rights.
Yes, I can definitely see absolutely no possible way that a bunch of people leaving their houses to go to work or run errands in the morning could possibly have made it any more difficult for the police to find Tsarnaev. And there definitely would have been no additional risk of police getting antsy and shooting the wrong person, nosiree.
That is a true statement, but what is your point?
Suppressors are legal in all but 11 states if you fill out the paperwork.
Carmen Ortiz (Same DA who prosecuted Aaron Swartz) said that because of some public safety exemption loophole they didn't read him his maranda rights.
You've not been paying attention to RMS; and the houses riddled with bullets are probably shot with errant police ammunition.
They should be restricted to 4mph and be preceded by a man with a red flag. That would be much more effective than limiting them to 50mph.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Locomotive_Act#The_Locomotive_A...
It less of a "manhunt" and more what I can only describe as dress up. Most of the cops I saw on TV weren't doing anything. I watched a group stand around in the middle of the street. I watched another different group stand around. I watched a group dressed in full Batman-looking-black body armor hang onto the side of the civilian version of an APC and ride it around town. It honestly looked like dress up. They could have quadrupled the number of boots on the ground and it wouldn't have found him faster for that reason—most of the people weren't contributing.
It's only obvious to cultures that eat meat. I grew up vegetarian in a Hindu family (in the US). Until late college, I would not have been able to tell you how filet mignon, sirloin, chuck, rib differed -- or even what animal they referred to.
There are probably lots of people who are within 2 degrees of separation of this guy.
Ask HN: Cheap or free realtime web analytics?
Can anyone recommend something like Woopra? It's for a hobby side project site that I've just been messing around with (around 2m-3m pv/m), so I really can't afford $tons for analytics.