skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
A lot of people see opposition to GMOs as irrational, but I don't think it is. It's perfectly rational, especially if you don't really understand genetics (which most people don't... it's an esoteric subject).

The reason it's rational is this: were GMOs to be found to be unhealthy, it would be a continuation of a well-established pattern. Nearly all food "innovations" of the last 100 years are unhealthy.

- Trans-fats (hydrogenated oils) are basically artery plaque in the form of fake butter or shortening.

- Nearly all additives such as MSG and artificial sweeteners are either unhealthy or suspect.

- Bleaching and other treatments to improve shelf life denude food of its nutrients. Re-enrichment only replaces macronutrients, leaving micronutrients and minerals unaccounted for.

- Preservatives enhance shelf life and reduce the likelihood of food-borne illness, but many are themselves suspect and many have been taken off the market.

- Nitrites are possible carcinogen.

- Google: brominated oil, arsenic poultry.

... and so on. The only beneficial modification to the food system from a nutritional perspective has been fortification with certain key nutrients, namely iodine and vitamins C and D. But we're talking two successes out of dozens of failed experiments.

In every case, the "experts" told people it was safe or even good for you before the experts proceeded to change their minds. Margarine in particular is illustrative. It was recommended as a health food.

As a result, people have become rightly ultra-conservative about food, viewing any modification to food as guilty until proven innocent. "GMO is safe" means "we haven't figured out how GMO kills you, yet."
These have been my exact thoughts as I've started working with Arduinos and looked into starting a robotics shop -- I can learn to do everything, etch frame solder code make each component myself, but I get passed up by teams of specialists like the Spark Core [1], who are focusing solely on that component.

Thinking of times when I've worked on teams, I've succeeded because I could leverage the synergy of my multiple disciplines, excuse me, because I could take ideas from different fields and use them together. But teams of generalists are just wasting their time, as each generalist will just be specializing in one area or another, and a specialist in that field would be more effective.

Generalists do make good managers, teachers, librarians, etc.

[1] http://www.sparkdevices.com/
Unless you have a system with 4-8 cores and SIMD, and you want to leave a multiple of performance on the table: http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2013/05/native...

For example, 1200% slower in Mandelbrot rendering with asm.js vs OpenMP C code.
You're confusing knowing the contents of the .git directory with knowing the semantic model of the revision history.

All DVCS systems involve creating and editing a series of changes to a directory tree, including metadata about each change. Those changes and their metadata are basically just a shared document that you're collaborating on with other people.

On other words, the revision history is a document that you're trying to edit. Git's document format it a bit like HTML: you can edit it blindly using a WYSIWYG editor, but it's going to seem confusing unless you at least understand concepts like elements, attributes, and entities, and maybe some CSS. Those concepts map directly to the HTML wire format, so in practice, you'll end up learning that, too.

Mercurial and bzr (I can't speak about fossil and veracity, since I haven't used them) are more like Flash or MS Word: They're easier to use for beginners, but they're more fragile and their internal formats are more obscure.
AirPair charges $20/h to not make the video public. That's completely nonsense. And $60/h for NDA. Outrageous.
Hiring contractors with irrelevant fps experience and a lack of understanding of core halo flow at $11 an hour, now I understand how Halo 4's multiplayer failed so hard.
Maybe QA testers should, but not software developers at large.
I've actually been toying with the idea of having a private facebook account to hold all this data and more. Facebook's pretty much become the default social layer these days and almost every app can publish data to your news feed.

Facebook also has a pretty cool Timeline UI to boot which will probably only get better as time passes.
It's hard to see headlines like this and not think it's deriding the wealthy. It could have been put in a much more innocuous way, like "99% of the world's population controls 61% of the world's wealth". That just doesn't seem to have the same punch, though.
Just to make to make what I'm saying more clear:

I'm certainly not disagreeing that the highest zoom levels in major cities are aerial photographs. The city-block level imagery available globally is from satellite, though.

For example, compare this (probably satellite, little building lean and ~1m resolution): http://goo.gl/maps/mJadH

To this (definitely aerial, lots of "lean" and ~10-20cm resolution): http://goo.gl/maps/WYnvE
How does this compare with existing solutions like: http://adaptive-images.com/
?

Obviously this is client side, does that make it better? Timing my page load around a set of loading images seems counter intuitive; there's lots of other stuff to worry about.
More big players than the mobile OS industry:
http://www.theecologist.org/News/news_round_up/625294/reveal...
Interesting arbitrage...
Store2.js - a better way to use localStorage and sessionStorage
Marcus Westin's store.js is fine for fixing the old browsers, but if you are looking toward the future, this is the API you'll want for web storage. Simple, clean, highly functional, with JSON, namespaces, and multiple available extensions (even including one to help with the old browsers for sticklers).
> The sad thing here is that there is a real war on terror, no matter what you hear.

No there isn't. That's the whole trick. It's a mind thing, as long as enough people believe there is a war on terror there is a war on terror, when they stop believing they'll resort to good old police-work and the judicial system to back it all up.

See Spain and the bombings there, the UK and the bombings there, India and the bombings there and so on. Everybody else seems to treat it as a series of acts by loosely organized and funded individuals that don't seem to have a common goal or even coherency about their deeds.

And the best bit: it doesn't work. You can't declare 'war' on lone wolves or small cells if they're careful enough. Any idiot (you, me, any other visitor here) could turn around and become a terrorist tomorrow, there would be no other outward distinguishing factor, just that bit that flipped in our heads. And by the time there would be an outside observable factor (objects going 'foom') it would be way too late.
Do you know what the occupy movement is about at all? I don't think so. It is not about Wall Street.
New Mexico's 'Atari Dump' to Be Excavated
Or not that the market is likely to support at the moment, but that is simply possible to build with today's materials and processes. Like the Apple Newton, perhaps.
I also use my Pi for music but I just do it in the form of Podcasts because I am lazy, and mostly listen to multi hour long mixes anyways.

Basically just have apache running and I connect and download the music from a podcast app on my iPhone, it's pretty sweet.

I also use it to remotely power on my HTPC so I can watch movies from my iPad while I am traveling with work without having to leave my power hungry HTPC on all the time.
That article is well written but that's concealing a lot of logical fallacies. Hard work might not be a perfect predictor of success, but it's a lot stronger than the relationship between baldness and height.

I also enjoyed the vague, there but not quite, threat of violence that you quoted the beginning of.

Also, the fallacious audacity of claiming to speak for the 99%. If the 99% had any kind of common ground to their concerns, they could elect a vast majority in every single elected body in the US and get their way, almost overnight (in practice, it'll take four years).
> This site is filled with knuckleheads

You did not have to go and prove the point so extensively.
>didn't control the entire industry

While this is obvious hyperbole, I agree with your general sentiment. In fact, GMOs, perhaps more-so than any other modern technology, have an unprecedented potential to save billions of lives. Golden Rice alone could save the lives of one million children every year.

As a biochem major, GMOs are something I'm passionate about, and it really aggravates me when I see armchair scientists (read: people who watched a youtube video) decrying them as dangerous and calling for their banning. I would say these people are partially to blame for the regulatory nightmare that Golden Rice advocates are facing, meanwhile one million children go blind and die terrible deaths each year from vitamin A deficiency.
Fair enough. This thread started with "Why not 2-clause BSD", and I understood your comment as defending the use of "2-clause BSD" in a non-standard way.
Which side do you want to be on? The side that controls the greatest piece of the pie or the side that is the pie?

Does that sound too cynical to you? It's just my opinion, but I'm not going to hold it against mankind that some people have A Lot More Stuff. Wealth is not a finite resource, it can be had in a variety of different ways for the creative. Inheritances aside, if getting rich is the side effect to booming innovation, I'm not too bummed about it. It's business, and the rich have no compuctions about selling you something to feel better about mankind's slow devolution into hedonism, so why not get on board with them?

When you become rich, you will have more power, influence and resources to Save The World. Start there?
Don't forget to include cowards in your list. Many people justifying waterboarding as "not torture" are simply vastly, deeply afraid of terrorism and are willing to justify terrible things so they can feel safe.
Edge of the abyss (2012)
benjamincburns was referring to a barrel with a tap "somewhere near the bottom". The point being that it's very difficult to get stuff out near the flat bottom of the barrel, especially if you can't move the barrel itself. The other option with buck/boost converters is if the barrel's bottom tapers into your tap, so that there's no way for any liquid to avoid gravity's call and leave through the tap.
> the United States--are at war with whatever seems to be most profitable to the powers-that-be at the time

This is a good example of a knucklehead comment. There is no profit in fighting cave dwelling extremists who want to make sure girls don't go to school. Instead of wishing for the demise of the US you should be saying thank Christ the Americans are in charge. HN can be a bag full of stupid on non-technical issues. I am going to start actively campaigning for the US to stop paying for the EU's defense.
actually, I might use this thread to ask a noob question - I've been trying to fiddle around with some data that is relatively schemaless (i.e. I have a list of medical research subjects, and each of them have varying numbers of prior medical conditions, medication allergies, and list of current and past medicines).

Naturally, I thought JSON was better than relational DB's for this, but I wasn't sure how best to store this data. The relation data that I do have is stashed in .csv files that I'm transitioning over to sqlite, so I was wondering if there was a sqlite-esque DB for JSON - I was assuming something like Couch or Redis. But am I missing something, and that JSON itself IS the database?
After a bit of research, I believe this also may be an ethnocentric view, it seems solitary confinement
is only banned in Europe and still used in many other places (including the very liberal Canada).

Even the UN has only made it torture if it's some <18yrs old.

But that being said, I'm all for ending it. Or ending most imprisonment and moving towards restorative justice.
I agree with your assessment that "write once, run anywhere" will always be beholden to the lowest common denominator when it comes to games that try to push the limits of performance. However, with regard to your statement "shared memory model in JS with concurrency primitives would be a radical change to the semantics of JS, so I don't see it happening", it isn't entirely hopeless. Intel's Rivertrail[1] and Mozilla's Parallel JS[2][3] efforts might not pan out as well as they expect, but at no point has either entity thrown up its hands and declared the situation as impossible as you imply.

[1] https://github.com/RiverTrail/RiverTrail/wiki

[2] http://smallcultfollowing.com/babysteps/blog/2012/01/09/para...

[3] http://smallcultfollowing.com/babysteps/blog/categories/pjs/
That position definitely does not seem to pass the "independent contractor" test.
I have known a number of people that work in Quality Assurance for games and they all have pretty much the same story. Though treating employees like this may not be ethically ideal, it is certainly not to be unexpected when considering a few points:

* The gaming industry has far more people that want to work in it than there is need for. This gives the employer a LOT of leverage.

* The type of Quality Assurance that this individual speaks about is not a position that could be considered "highly skilled". Though there are QA positions that require a higher level of expertise and knowledge, the people doing regression testing on a game are not them. Because of this, there is a mentality within the industry that "if you won't do the job, it will be trivial to find someone else that can".

* This type of QA the writer speaks of tends to have a productivity curve that is concave. The difference between a really great QA tester and an okay QA tester is probably less than 2x. The type of management style described in this article tends to be pervasive in professions with the aforementioned productivity curve.

On a personal level, I do feel for the individual. That being said, the best solution to his problem is to gain a skill set that gives him more leverage in the work force, and get out of low skilled quality assurance testing.
No, but Wall Street is the biggest success (that I know of) of that movement.

I'm not saying your ideological stance is wrong, I'm saying it doesn't seem relevant to this article.
I've thought about this many times before. But, this is the easy part.

Storing, doing simple metrics, making assumptions and returning the data is not a problem. Standardizing input methods is.
Hey, I started Tennis Buddy, thought I'd chip in what we had in mind. Everything we built upon is what what Matt Cohler said last year at TC disrupt to the question that the next big thing in mobile is gonna be that you just "push a button and something amazing happens in the user’s world.". http://techcrunch.com/2012/09/21/great-mobile-apps-are-remot...

That's what the Uber for X is, it doesn't matter if it is cars, services or in our case - people. If you need something, just let everyone know in your area by simply pressing one button and they'll come to you.

So for now, you can find someone nearby to play tennis with you, whenever, wherever you want to :)
This is exactly why we're working on TasteApp[0] which is going to give frameworks a better chance to show of their strengths in medium-sized projects.

[0] https://github.com/tastejs/tasteapp
Google's announcement says

> Once PNaCl is fully released, users will be able to run PNaCl modules on any web page – applications will not need to be deployed through the Chrome Web Store in order to run PNaCl modules.

NaCl has always been enabled only in the Store, and not on the web, while the news in that announcement is that it will be enabled on the web.

If you still think that isn't clear, watch the recent Google IO PNaCl talk, where this is stated as well,

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5RFjOec-TI0

If somehow there is a misunderstanding of the intent of both announcements, then I hope Google will clarify that.
- MSG is fine. Denying this is basically anti-scientific. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monosodium_glutamate#Safety)

- Preservatives -- it's hard to know what you're referring to without you being more specific. Something being "suspect" is basically a comment about human paranoia, not actual health effects.

- Nitrites -- again, weak evidence that they may be carcinogens in some circumstances. Nothing epidemiological as far as I can tell. The alternative (botulism or other contamination) is far worse.
WG Action: Formed JavaScript Object Notation (json)
I don't get why the guy completely stepped out of the music industry. Apart from failing with agency it sounded like he had some musical talent and was at least making a living.. he opened an agency with royalties... he then takes a low wage job as a QA guy... strange. Smacks of mid life crisis.

I don't see what was wrong with what happened. In the beginning it was fun. Then there was pressure to get the game out so the mood changed a little. He got demotivated and quit. Perhaps I missed something.
What system of IP protections would be suitable to allow private industry to subsidize the expense of developing genetically-modified foods that are able to be planted over and over again after the first purchase? I suspect it will at least resemble patent protection, which at least does eventually end.

It's a very old problem, with parallels with Unix (as I understand it you could duplicate the install media after purchase for free; it wasn't until later AT&T would realize the value of what they were sitting on and try to control distribution of SysV to extract capital from it).

While open-source programmers like myself don't mind volunteering time and code, there is not a comparable contingent of "open-source geneticists" that I'm aware of. That means someone has to pay the piper if they want the GM seeds. If you concentrate the cost in the first batch of seeds you make them prohibitively expensive, which would lead to a gray market of fellow farmers selling their excess seeds at much cheaper cost.

So I don't see buying seeds yearly as a tithe, as much as a requirement of the overall business model given the reality of the large capital investment required. Am I missing a superior alternative?
Your phone (iPhone or Android) is with you at all times of the day, which in a sense broadens your market.
I used to really be attracted to SV. The companies, weather, opportunities; all of it seemed great. Then I realized the living expenses, the government regulations set forth by the state, and the overall smugness of some people and it really turned me off.

Case in point. This websites says "work with the smartest people in the world" as if SV has the highest concentration of intelligent people in the world and as if that's even a measurable statistic.
Okay, so if I understand correctly, the benefit here is that I can run some kinds of SQL queries on a large collection of heterogenous JSON documents. Is that right? You're still speaking Postgres-internals-geek, not I-want-to-get-something-done geek.

That is:

- you can take heterogenous JSON documents, and then make them appear to the Postgres world as separate tables. (Which they have to be, because they're not uniform)

- you can then take some kinds of SQL queries and distribute them among these tables, as if they were one big SQL table. If some pseudo-tables have missing or extra columns, no problem.
MacOS had a built-in web server. You could've used that.
If I were in the U.S., I'd be more worried about the San Andreas fault and the "big one" due on San Francisco any time soon:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/San_Andreas_Fault#The_Universit...

"The 2008 Uniform California Earthquake Rupture Forecast (UCERF) has estimated that the probability of an M ≥ 6.7 earthquake within the next 30 years on the northern and southern segments of the San Andreas fault as 21% and 59%, respectively."
This is a red herring. Rather than control of wealth, we should be concerned with control of consumption. Poor people make lousy capital allocators (they don't have the right education, they don't have access to industry contacts, and they don't have a history of successful investing).

We constantly talk about redistributing income, taxing the high income earners. We have to stop this. We have to start taxing the high consumers, we need a progressive consumption tax. If someone makes a very high income, but saves it all rather than buys that flashy (frankly, worthless) car - then they should be allowed to keep all of that.
ES6 Generators and Suspend
Linux? Same here.
Thanks for the compliment! As for the question, see what Elessar said.

Also:

In the typical water/electric circuit analogy the volume of water is synonymous to the amount of electrical energy stored (Joules). The pressure of the water is synonymous to the electric potential (Volts). Pipe diameter can be thought of as resistance (ohms), flow rate through a pipe (meters per second) can be thought of as current, and flow volume (cubic meters per second or litres per second) as power (watts).
Beyond Planes, Trains & Automobiles: Elon Musk's 'Hyperloop'
a) is a much simpler solution to generate, design & implement than g). From an engineer's perspective, I can appreciate how g) feels like the correct solution, because it's solving the underlying technology problem. From a business perspective, pursuing g) could take a lot of time which could be used to build other parts of the service, which might make the issue disappear.

Really, it's a cost-benefit question -- which takes more time, writing a) and dealing with lots of rebooting, or having someone pursue g)? Or maybe c) is cheaper than g) -- how many programmer-hours equals an extra 16GB of RAM? And if the memory leak isn't that bad (let's say 20 hours between these reboots), then a) can be said to make your service cheaper for your customers too.
Given that bitcoin is a public ledger, and you can't let people just create their own addresses and vote with them, you'd need some authority to hand out verified but anonymized addresses. If they're doing that, they could make fake addresses which cast votes the way they like.

However, you may be interested in these simple secure voting methods invented by cryptographers. (Google cache, site's down.) http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:http://...
The herbicides Mosanto's GM plants are resistant to aren't exactly H₂O.
From Wikipedia:

"He also co-developed the Blit graphical terminal for Unix; before that he wrote the first window system for Unix in 1981. Pike is the sole inventor named in AT&T's US patent 4,555,775 or "backing store patent" that is part of the X graphic system protocol and one of the first software patents. [1]

Over the years Pike has written many text editors; sam and acme are the most well known and are still in active use and development.

Pike, with Brian Kernighan, is the co-author of The Practice of Programming and The Unix Programming Environment. With Ken Thompson he is the co-creator of UTF-8. Pike also developed lesser systems such as the vismon program for displaying images of faces of email authors."

Yeah, some amateur engineering right there. My point still stands; heuristically I have every reason to believe an extremely competent arquitect and designer who is involved in good faith on this project over a random commententer who can't be bothered to assess the evidence.
I'll vouch for the awesomeness of this exact laptop as well. I run linux in a VM inside it, though.

It's small, the resolution/screen is great, and has everything I need. I also upgraded the RAM and put in an SSD.
Actually its a legal gray area. The prosecution would have to prove that you knew that you were selling to known criminals. This means you would have to sell to someone that literally told you what they are going to use it for.
5 Major Takeaways from the Quantified Self Conference in Amsterdam
He probably felt he'd get a bad reaction. Link aggregators like Reddit and HN don't generally like Gawker articles. Due to some of their content being blogspam.