skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I work in an area tangential to MD; I would say that a list of 'experts' would include: DE Shaw, Benoit Roux, Vijay Pande, David Baker (and associated people in their labs).

You say: I'm sure I can't just email these professors and say "hey, want to chat?"

I am not yet a graduate student and I do exactly that relatively frequently. It has very often led to great talks about science. You should be informed and knowledgable about the work you want to discuss (and be specific with your queries), and I think you'll find that most academics are more than happy to talk about their own work. You can learn a lot about a subfield this way.
I am a professional mathematician and number theorist, who has studied work closely related to Zhang's.

I had never heard before of an older (40+) mathematician, who has done essentially no meaningful work in the subject before, and has virtually no publication record, coming out of seemingly nowhere and proving such a big theorem.

This is in no way a slight against older mathematicians, indeed many spectacular results are proved by people over 40, but they typically accumulate an excellent track record on the way.

Indeed, I fully assumed that this guy was full of shit. However, I have heard that well-known experts in the area have closely read Zhang's paper and found it to be correct.

This is enough to put a smile on my face. There is something wonderful about skepticism and cynicism being proven wrong, especially when the skepticism is my own.
Bloody Night 2013 Official Trailer (HD) - Video Dailymotion
My understanding is that consumption taxes (we're talking about things like sales tax right?) disproportionately affect poorer people, who spend more of their income, as opposed to rich people who tend to invest more. I'm not 100% sure of the science, but it makes sense. I'd rather just see a simple income tax.
Are you thinking of sweetened condensed milk? Condensed milk uses added sugar as a preservative.
Gluten free means contains no gluten. What are you talking about?
Note this story is from almost a month ago (date stamp on the linked article is April 29th). Previous discussions on Hacker News:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5624163

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5663072
DigitalOcean DNS/ARP Exposure
I'm not sure if this is an issue or not, but I noticed that running tcpdump on a DigitalOcean droplet shows you ARP and DNS requests. This lets you get a list of machines hosted by DigitalOcean... I might be way off here, but could this make DO vulnerable to ARP spoofing?

Made a quick video to demonstrate what I mean: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gmNaJCkGFOw
Why Hobbies Are Important
Pure CSS3 Star Wars Lightsaber Checkboxes
It makes sense to make removed copyrighted content inaccessible. However, that doesn't mean you need to delete the entire history: just hide the part that was copyrighted. And in any other case of deletion (e.g., "non-notability"), the entire history could be retained.
First, we would need some time to get the experience to reach that rock.

Then, considering the effort spent acquiring experience, it would be better to focus on a large asteroid.

In fact, it would be even better if we could find a way to spare some of the effort to put it on a stable earth orbit.

Wait then, couldn't we put this big rock already in stable earth orbit called "the moon" to some good use?? It's not like we've never been there tens of years ago!!

EDIT: gravity and chemical composition are valid reasons to mine an asteroid, you are totally right. Yet if we wanted not to mine but to have a colony to edge our bets for a meteor strike, IMHO the moon seems to be a better choice. However, I should have been clearer with my thoughts, I stand corrected :-)
In terms of the situation on earth, you don't need a large amount of survival from an extinction level event. Even if it was a few thousand diverse people in underground nuclear powered bunkers we would eventually build back up.
Sometimes it's subtle. Look at the second picture: what kind of cereal is on a low shelf within that child's reach? And what kind is higher up where mom is reaching?
chocolate milk: yes.
regular milk: no.
I just got around to trying Stringer. Great job. I've said this before, but right now, this is my favorite!

First, I can confirm the install on Heroku was indeed only a 5-minute job for me — an intermediate-advanced OS X/Linux command-line user, but not (yet) a developer, and not a previous Heroku user.

I need to use it for a few days to make sure, but at first glance I love the simple interface. It's like Google Reader's full-screen mode, but with a decently narrow reading column. The font size and line-height aren't my absolute favorite, but since I'm self-hosting I can just change the CSS! (I will have to learn how to update the stylesheets and still be able to keep updated to the current version. Maybe a good time to learn git?) Mobile web works OK and hopefully will get better: https://github.com/swanson/stringer/issues/7
Unless of course it contains a few arbitrary words.
I still think this is a bad acquisition. I mean don't get me wrong, Tumblr has potential to be something great but at present it feels like a more modernised version of Geocities complete lots of animated GIF's, memes and soft pornography. It's definitely not worth $1.1B (but what do I know?).

They have the traffic, but it won't be easy to monetise. It might be good for Yahoo! to tackle a large challenge and let Meyer truly show them she has the moxie to turn the fledging company around.

Considering Yahoo! have a nice cache of PHP based websites, it makes sense the purchase of Tumblr is as much as a talent hire as it is an acquisition of a high-trafficked website with potential. Will be keeping an eye on this, if and when Yahoo! buy Tumblr. The deal isn't even concrete yet, but it's still highly likely given Tumblr has months left to choose a buyer and finalise a deal.
Ah, I did not realize he had not really published before. I suppose that is very surprising. Also, the way your post is written seems to suggest that most results out of nowhere are "crankish". Are there really people who spend their time working on these things that aren't professional mathematicians and who submit flawed papers to math journals? I would think that would be an unproductive use of one's time...
On a side note, another billion dollar exit (in terms of acquisition) for Sequoia. Their hit rate is phenomenal. In last one year, they have got Instagram, Kayak, Meraki and now Tumblr. Not to mention slew of other companies going public or ready to go public.
> Start with files, iterate from there.

I agree so much with this. I run a small service that looks like it would be a perfect use-case for a database. Even though all the data is beautifully normalized and instantly searchable, using a database directly would be impossible. Instead it starts as a series of flat text files. From these flat text files, the database is automatically generated. Three big gains here:

Version control on the text files works perfectly as expected.

Creating ad-hoc and one-off columns (while figuring out how to best normalize unfamiliar data) is trivial and painless.

Comments! It is so easy to write in-line notes. This alone is the killer feature of text files. Normalizing and curating data requires making a lot of choices and comments let me keep track of these.

Of course there are downsides. You must edit the text file to add data. (With some exceptions, such as updating live prices/inventory.) If you have equal numbers of writes and reads, this system is not for you. But if you have infrequent (daily) writes then it is no problem.
Actually, reading through the article it never seems 'circle-jerking' or a 'cannonball' fired at Wikipedia. The article explains what happened. It then goes on to discuss how Wikipedia airs its dirty laundry and on balance things generally work out OK - pretty much exactly what you said.
Because I think social networks are the future, they will be to future generations what the world wide web has been up until today. Ignoring social networks today would be like ignoring the www in the mid 90s (aol online, msn).
Sources? I would be dismayed, and even shocked to find out if milk had added sugar in it without consistent labeling.

At least in the United States, milk must be sold with pasteurization, homogenization, and no additives. If it is different in the U.K, please enlighten us.
Hey guys. This is my first post, but anyways, here's a fun little code snippet I made today bored that demos the CSS Checkbox "Hack".

The Checkbox Hack basically allows you to create simple click events in your HTML document without the use of JavaScript. It's done, like this:

input[type=checkbox]:checked ~ div {}

Pretty interesting, but not really practical for cross-browser support (IE9 and below).
Automatically add superfluous comments to C code
It was only IMAP, not SMTP, so I doubt it. Then again, if they can get this wrong it's not so unlikely that there are more vulnerabilities.
Ditto PHP:

php > var_export(preg_match("/\d/", "1"));
1
php > var_export(preg_match("/\d/", "۳"));
0
> It's just an arguably poorly chosen operator (Pascal gets this right and uses ":=" for assignment).

That's one potential takeaway, but when I turned over the complaint in my mind, this was arguably another way of complaining about mutability.

Also, given the timing, it's pretty likely that one of the languages they'd learned was Pascal: that was the language of the first few CS classes at my school in the 90s, it was also the language of any high school curriculum that led to the AP exam, and Borland's Pascal products were still pretty popular PC dev environments.

They could've also been unlucky and received their first exposure by choosing to do a numerical analysis class in Fortran or C, of course. :/
The 11 healthiest foods in the world
hmm googled around but now I may be misremembering so I'll delete the parent post. Thanks for the correction!
Yitang's PhD is in a completely different field of math: algebraic geometry. Number theory is his hobby.

This is a very inspiring story!
A few additions to the above comment.

• I forgot to mention FeedBin. I like it a lot: it's fast in both UI and fetching feeds, mobile web, and the developer is responsive. I don't like the 3-column interface, however, since I don't really read by category or folders. With the mobile web version the 3-column UI makes it slow to skim through all the feeds. If you like There was also some problems with scrolling using the arrows keys (I think it would move to a new post instead). Not open-source/self-hostable is another negative. (It does use Github, but only for issue tracking.)

• InoReader At first I thought this was a Feedly-esque browser extension because all the links I found were to the Chrome store. I finally tried it, and it is a fast Google Reader clone, kind of like CommaFeed. It's visually a little busy, but the UI is fast with less sedimentation[1] than most. All the social features can be turned off with a single option. Mobile web looks OK. Main downsides: No obvious business model and not open-source/self-hostable.

[1]: http://www.tbray.org/ongoing/When/201x/2012/01/22/Confusing-...

I've been mainly using FeedHQ, and I was watching CommaFeed for a mobile version and thinking about Inoreader and how important open-source is in my decision ... but since installing Stringer today I may not need to look further. For my first thoughts on Stringer see this comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5734970
Actually, gluten-free means that there's a very small proportion of gluten in relation to the product, not that 100% of it has been removed.

----

"The current international Codex Alimentarius standard allows for 20 parts per million of gluten in so-called "gluten-free" foods" - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gluten-free_diet

----

It's enough to prevent exacerbation of symptoms for those with gluten sensitivity, but it's not a complete removal.
As a Perl developer that's been making the switch to Go, I've been caught out a few times with Go's no-so-Perl-like regular expression syntax. In fact I wish I knew about your 2nd link before now, because that could have saved me a few hours over recent months.
A substantial problem with a Mercury colony is that the planet is much deeper into the Sun's gravity well than earth - about a factor of 2.

IANARS, but I think the rocket equation is exponential for the gravitation that needs to be overcome. So sending anything back from Mercury would require at least 4x the propellant.
I also question whether the structural integrity of these things is enough for them to withstand centripetal gravity without ripping themselves apart. We haven't even really confirmed that the large asteroids are really even one solid piece of rock as apposed to being a bunch of debris chunks stuck together.
Microsoft and Apple are engaging in similar behaviours.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Double_Irish_arrangement#Compa...
This depends on which angle you're looking to improve.

Which route would make the larger companies take notice faster?

a) Customers picking your 'brand' over theirs. This could be done by addressing the embarrassment side of having to call pest control in, especially with the target customer of first time parents with young children. Are there preventative services you could offer, which is where you get into selling a 'peace of mind' service. Alternatively maybe you opt to have no branded vehicles - is being discreet of value to your customers?

b) Generating unprecedented sales numbers - This could be done by targeting residences around a home you're currently working at, or partnering with food service chains or offering a service to home buyers to do a full report. Even targeting pet owners (I'm sure there are some pests that are harmful to domesticated animals) If you educate a new market then it's a whole lot easier than fighting over one that knows your competitors well.

c) Automate the business side for efficiency - set up systems that remind you to follow up with dormant enquiries, schedule visits on a linear route for operatives, auto-contact your previous customers to remind them of an annual check. This would be changing the industry from the inside out.

d) Could you productise the industry - same as weedkiller & tools are a huge seller for the lawncare industry.

Brainstorm on your customers pain points - what stops them picking up the phone - high cost, too busy, inconvenient process and so on. The best way to disrupt the industry is by doing something that isn't just a 'better offer' as that can be copied - it has to be fundamental to your way of operating.

Good luck with your improvements!
Okay, it's working now. I just needed to bind Gunicorn to 0.0.0.0 so it would be externally visible.
Depends entirely on what you're doing. If you're just saving large sets of data to the disk, and doing nothing else with them, then yeah, don't use a DB. If you're running lots of random queries on piece-mail parts of several dozen sets of those files, then use a DB.

There's a reason it's called SQL: Structured Query Language. If you're interrogating the data, you want SQL (or something like it). If you're just loading stuff / saving stuff to disk, like a Word file, and not performing any sort of random search or query on it, then yeah, using a DB doesn't make sense.
The SEO Mistake That Wiped Out 80% of My Traffic
I need to.find.the article.proposing Venus colonization,.but.in short: Venus has very dense atmosphere, it.was figured out that a balloon filled with Earth air at 1 ATM will float high enough in Venus to have a reasonable temperature, and can.be driven as needed to follow sun and shade as required. The only problem with that setup.is that mining would.require some tether technology we don't have, but that Venus idea is still.better than mars, because it is cheaper to do, have more energy available, and the expected conditions of the balloon is closer to here than anything we can figure on mars
Smite the sounding furrows
Gravity Falls!!!!!!!!!!
While you're general point is true, I don't think it's terribly relevant here. This is definitely a case of the system being broken.

Taxes are a necessary evil to begin with; they're a direct impingement on the freedom of citizens. Making the laws surrounding them so hideously complicated makes it much worse. No one's really asking for air-tightness, just low enough complexity that we don't have to have full-time professionals to make sense of it. Taxes should be easy.
Wikileaks Release: Anakata Docs
As a grad student in a related field, I would love to hear more about semiconductor/hardware startups.
The following seems a lot more likely. From Wikipedia:

Fast Company's investigation brought up circumstantial evidence that indicated a link between an encryption patent application filed by Neal King, Vladimir Oksman and Charles Bry on 15 August 2008, and the bitcoin.org domain name which was registered 72 hours later. The patent application (#20100042841) contained networking and encryption technologies similar to Bitcoin's. After textual analysis, the phrase "...computationally impractical to reverse" was found in both the patent application and bitcoin's whitepaper. All three inventors explicitly denied being Satoshi Nakamoto.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Satoshi_Nakamoto#Identity
Interesting.

Over the years, this is the third or fourth version of this same story that I've read.

Read one on low carbs. Read one on low fat. Now this one.

The assumption here, as it was in the others, is that we now know what works and what doesn't. And that forces beyond our control conspire to keep us fat. In this version, the thesis is that some form of certification system for marketing to children can cure the obesity epidemic.

Beats me. But I'll bet twenty bucks that a decade or two from now we'll be reading the same type of article, only with different kinds of suggested cures.

I'm of the opinion that there is nothing wrong, or rather that the population is acting entirely naturally and appropriately given their adaptation to specific evolutionary conditions, which have changed drastically in the last 100 years. I doubt controlling marketing material will have a long-lasting effect, but anything is worth a shot. It is a very serious problem.

Looking at the recent past, I'd be just a bit more humble about it.
Banning peanut butter would help with that, but it couldn't stop there. Plenty of packaged foods contain peanuts or other nuts, or are processed on equipment which processes those things. Foods are often repackaged by parents such that labels are not available.

My understanding of this type of reaction is that it doesn't require a large volume of the allergen to cause a very serious response. Trace amounts can be very dangerous. So it seems impossible to guarantee prevention by banning foods.

In my opinion, kids need to be aware of what they can and cannot eat, and the school must be prepared to actually deal with a reaction situation instead of just saying 'look, we banned peanut butter, what else do you expect?'
The definition of conjecture says they are basically 'guesswork': http://www.thefreedictionary.com/conjecture. Someone will say 'I think that there are no values of x,y and z can solve x^n+y^n=z^n for n other than 2' but doesn't prove it. This can be due to lack of time, space, or a supreme insight on the part of the conjecturer[1]. The conjecturer has said some important and correct things in the past, so many people will take this experience and look at the conjecture and say 'this is probably right because this guy was right before and we see no errors with this conjecture so we will use it in as a theorem', which is to say they will use it without proof because it makes sense.

Then, sometimes 100's of years later, somebody does prove (or disproves) the theorem and get's some press, and for some very important conjectures, prizes. If the conjecture is disproven, then all the math based on it falls down.

Conjectures interesting because they are puzzles left by people that they can't answer but they want them to be true, so it is up to future generations with their advanced minds, tools and insights to prove them, leading to progress in the field with the advancements of techniques use to prove these conjectures and make them actual theorems.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fermat%27s_Last_Theorem
I guess the confidence comes from having tried it with a bunch of numbers. I'm sure there are people that have written programs that just tried to show the identity holds for all numbers up to n with n very large.

Of course the problem is you can't show this by exhaustion. And you also can't currently prove it, hence why its a conjecture. But it's interesting because it means you might be missing some integral property that would prove the conjecture.
The confidence comes from two things, really:

1. The conjecture has been found to hold for a large number of trial cases, and

2. The conjecture has an intuitive aura of rightness.

A good example is the 3n + 1 conjecture:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Collatz_conjecture

Anyway, obviously point two is extremely subjective, but I think it's the crux of why long-standing conjectures are interesting. Why should something feel correct without necessarily being so? If it does turn out to be correct, what about its nature put people on its scent trail? Mathematics so often seems to be a kind of hermetic universe unto itself, so part of the beauty of conjectures is that they're kind of a contact point between that universe and human congnition.
>That's true of a lot of foods. Definitely true of meat, especially red meat.

I'd definitely be interested in a citation if you have one! I find this really interesting, especially since I've accidentally cut red meat out of my diet recently (despite enjoying it quite a lot, so I don't want to be ill next time I have it!), so I'm wondering on what sort of timescales these effects happen (both losing and gaining the ability to digest a certain food group).
The last time I read a story about reclusive Japanese mathematicians putting out government-confounding cryptosystems -- it was the terrible Dan Brown novel Digital Fortress.

Reality is getting Hollyweirder by the minute...
Your example is flawed.

C++0x is easy to learn. For example, autos is just the ability to say "auto myFloat = 5.0;" and it will default to float.

Lambdas in C++ is fairly easy. right casts? trivial [especially with auto].

Templates of templates of templates are easy as well.

64-bit? ARM? The whole point of C\C++ is to make yourself not assembly. You shouldn't worry about 64-bit vs 32-bit as long as you use proper things.
It's called gluten intolerance (or sensitivity), not "self-diagnosed wannabe celiac stuff" and last time I checked it affected something like 5% of the US population (some state the incidence rate is as high as ~20%).

Most people just live with the stomach discomfort because it's difficult to try a gluten-free diet. And dismissive comments like yours also aren't helpful in motivating people to experiment.

I lived with stomach issues for 30+ years, and after trying a myriad of solutions, from eliminating dairy to exercise, I finally tried eliminating gluten from my diet. That did the trick.
"Also, concentrated uranium deposits are probably less common [on Mars] than on Earth because they depend on sedimentary and hydrothermal processes which are much more prevalent on Earth."

There is some evidence otherwise: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natural_nuclear_fission_reactor...

To me, the obvious reason to look outwards rather than inwards in the solar system is that it is easier to heat an environment that is too cold than to cool an environment that is too hot. The possibility of underground areas on Mercury being the just-right temperature is intriguing, though.
I've tried watching it. It seems that I fall asleep whenever I start watching the first episode. The same thing happens to me when I watch "Fringe." Both are shows I'm fairly certain I would like.

I'll give it another try when I'm well-rested.