skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I'm not entirely convinced this ruling is a win...making cDNA patentable is, from my view in academic research, not a good thing. I also don't understand why the Court is under the impression that cDNA is something magical that is synthesized originally by some complex thing (OK, it's complex but not groundbreaking and has been used for a long time now).

cDNA is synthesized by reverse transcription of mRNA, which already contains the exons yet for some reason the court finds that "exon only" DNA is patentable. There are millions of cDNA fragments with a good proportion of known relevance. There's nothing inherently "unnatural" about creating cDNA using reverse transcription; it's how retroviruses like HIV work!
Top off my head (though people have already negatively voted my opinion) here are a few:

1. File uploads on iOS is not supported as per standards. Android is making a difference here.

2. HTML5 Full-Screen API is not supported on mobile browsers. On the iPad, Safari doesn't switch to full-screen mode at all, whereas on the iPhone it does.

3. Available memory is very very limited. About 5mb or so. So you can't load too many images on the same page or it'd crash. Not even a complex webapp to be frank.

4. Number of ports per connection on mobile browser are fewer than on a desktop browser. So a complicated/heavy webapp isn't going to make a cut.

There are other serious limitations too.

Like you can't tell the browser to remain in landscape or portrait via your site if you wanted to. CSS properties like position:fixed or z-index and binding of events on the layer with highest z-index is buggy or simply doesn't work.

Other options like raw in-line base64 images inside CSS are not rendered properly etc. etc. etc. The list could go on ... :)
Ask HN: Outsource IT or in-house IT?
We are a small company near San Jose, about 40 employees, running both a small manufacturing operation and about half a dozen web facing applications (12 or so servers). I'm the CTO, have a programming background, and am remote (on the east coast) from the company.

We used an IT outsourcing firm for number of years at $4000 a month (which I suspect is WAY below market rate for a dozen production servers, and 50 or so workstations). They covered monitoring the servers and emergency response, server backup, server upgrades, infrastructure consulting, physical phone and network infrastructure, helpdesk, email, and employees' laptops and desktops maintenance. Basically they did everything IT.

The company is getting out of the physical side of the business. It's a little company which has an Indian office which does most of the maintenance remotely. About two years ago they realized that the business doing remote maintenance of servers was a better business for them and focused in on that. So now they are shutting down the physical side of their business to focus on that remote server monitoring, backup, and maintenance.

So now I'm looking at three major options. First use the company for their remote server monitoring and maintenance, and add an IT employee (a jack of all trades type) to handle the physical stuff. Second look for a IT outsourcing firm that probably covers everything that the old company and not use the old company for anything. Third embrace owning more of IT and putting together a network of freelancers who can cover our needs.

Is one of these options a terrible idea? Is one of these options a great idea? Am I leaving out super important details?
A purchase order-o-matic would be a great addition too.
> The bodyguard had a licensed shotgun, locked inside a safe.

Both false according to your own link:

“Dotcom did not have licence for the gun, and neither did his bodyguard.”

“the gun found in an open safe in the "panic room" with Dotcom”
To 10 developers add a few dozens of Business Analysts and Managers. Outsource some work to India. Oracle licenses and IBM fees. That will easily get you over 100M.
If you have connections, use them. That's some money. Plus your own and from your family/friends. Office, employee #1-3. Start shipping. You have the appearance of a startup. Now getting a return on the money and time/work is another thing. Good luck!
For 23andMe, The Real Value Could Be In Its Data
Camjacking: Click and say Cheese
I imagine next generations paying the Monsanto(s) of synthetic DNA...
It's ridiculous that a patent system exists that would allow someone to even try to patent the result of billions of years of evolution.
And they're not alone: mixpanel Django site admin: https://mixpanel.com/admin/
thanks. Is there a specific referral you could pass on?
IOS7 GUI PSD
> Inextricable from this evaluation is the fact that the guy who saved 1% of the electricity used at Facebook could probably have a tremendously larger impact on the environment if he dedicated his skills entirely to the public service.

That's not "fact". At all. Some people certainly have great impact in public service, but most are pushing paper around and navigating bureaucracy and a brand of office politics unheard of in all but the worst private corporations. Years are wasted being an intern to the guy who gets coffee for the guy who gets coffee for the guy who answers the phone for the guy who sometimes has a meeting in the same building as the guy who makes an important decision every once in a while. Some build PRISM (obviously a public service project, undoubtedly build by people who are certain their project ultimately advances the human condition), other engage in countless other less nefarious but ultimately still worthless or even damaging projects.
It is amazing how competitive it is to get a job in the public sector. I tried for over a year to get a job at the GAO, only to find their hiring process almost impossible to breach.

One of my friends, a recent law school graduate, wants nothing more than to work in the public sector. He has been out of school for the past nine months applying for various jobs with the local counties, only to realize that there is MASSIVE competition for these jobs -- he just lost out on one position to a person that had 10+ years experience in a lateral county; there were also over 50 applicants.

He's a very bright guy, but I can see the life sort of draining from his eyes with each rejection. He doesn't go a week without one of his friends from law school calling him seeing if he'd be interested in private sector work, and sooner than later I think he's going to have to take something like that just to get a job.
Right, he's implying that the implementation is not as complete, or is incorrect because the problem space is more complex than that.
Supreme Court rules against patenting human genes
Especially after the NYT's disclosures in December 2005, which included mention of email. And an earlier disclosure by a U.S. politician (this is from memory) about intercepting Al Qaeda satellite phone calls, which was probably a disclosure that was actually damaging.

Sometimes claiming, without proof, that revelations will "hurt America" is simply a way to justify secrecy.
A tenth of 12B would be 1.2B. This is a hundredth.
I think you would find a lot of competition that would be willing to provide the required service at zero cost.
I don't know the details, I only browsed through the front matter/syllabus, and I've certainly not read the patent in question.
What matters is how much money is eventually spent for the cause.
See http://www.ted.com/talks/dan_pallotta_the_way_we_think_about...
Doesn't this imply that 76%+ of all co-founder meetings are either people you already know or one-step removed? How does this support the Cofounder's Lab business if only 12% of co-founders meet through external events or "founder's dating sites"?

I love the idea and concept of Cofounder's Lab, don't get me wrong, but doesn't the research here support more the fact that it's probably people you already know versus those you don't?
Google compiles your Java and Go, I guess it is just a matter of hooking uo their two workflow components, the ingest and serve, and the compile plugin. I would guess that Google doesn't do a special precompile of your py/php before letting the regular py runtime compile on first access, so those langs were easier to launch. Yay for agile dev in dynamic languages.
I wonder about the situation where you didn't pre-arrange it. You just start cold-calling companies and asking them on a regular basis. Assuming you found a company that started out giving you a straight answer, then later moved to "no comment" due to receiving such a thing, which one of you would be liable?
PyCharm does this. In addition to doing type inference while you have your project open, you can while debugging it run it and make it collect type information. That's quite a bit slower than usual, but once done you will get extra type hints of possible types passed to your functions.

http://blog.jetbrains.com/pycharm/2013/02/dynamic-runtime-ty...
NSA Leaks Suggest Microsoft May Have Misled Public Over Skype Eavesdropping
Do you think any decent consultancy is going to be willing to invest millions of £ into building a system where they will most likely be able to recover none of it?

OTOH , more uk government code is being released as open source. So in theory any developer could study the source and offer to fix bugs/add features and give a more accurate estimate. This might increase competition.
I believe there are two powers for seeing the umpteenth smiling kitten-apps getting funded.

One reason is the team behind the app has already proven its worth. So while the angel or VC probably won't be crazy about the idea, he/she will count on the fact that the team will either get acquihired by another, bigger fish, or will pivot into something with better chances of success.

The other power is that for every smiling kitten-app you see on TC, there are hundreds that won't make it. You just don't read about them, so you're biased. It's comparable to aspiring actors moving to LA, where they end up serving meals.

The truth is getting funded is hard, even harder if you're new to the game, and damn near impossible if you're new and haven't got traction (read: users) yet. I suffer from the same idea-overload as you. But I force myself to write the ideas down, and keep working on something until I finish it.

So my advice would be to pick an idea you're passionate about, keep working on it relentlessly, and cut down on reading tech news.
There is interesting stuff about notation (in my opinion to do with parsing but perhaps thats my bias speaking), but people being "picky" about notation is theoretically dull.
TIME magazine's cover: Snowden, Manning, and Aaron Swartz.
Calendar.app in OS X now looks pretty much exactly like it does in iOS 7. Same color scheme, same typeface, etc... Notes is still yellow, but the top bar is now polished grey to match in with the rest of the UI, so it really isn't that bad. Game Center looks like it does in iOS 7 as well, and Reminders... haven't checked that out yet.
I have written a configuration plug-in that I think is slightly better (for example allows local overwriting of the settings, not just per-environment):

https://github.com/jaroslawr/dynamic_configuration
Open back door for project Prism
I too had a terrible experience. For a minute after I first searched, it gave results that were all twice as expensive as Kayak ($1100 instead of $5-600). There was no indication that it was loading more. I would have bailed at this point, but I returned to the tab (out of curiosity of their design) and saw it updated with reasonable flights.
Yeah this is actually a pretty poor news source (hopefully it will be updated).

For more comprehesive coverage info see http://www.forbes.com/sites/danielfisher/2013/06/13/supreme-...

A crucial point is the cDNA is patentable, which still makes very little sense.
Has anyone taken the snapshot of it ? As instagram has fixed it and i have missed a chance to see it.
It might not lead to savings though. Suppose that the normal contract price is $1,000,000. If you have a bunch of small firms try to build the system, each on only gets the reward with probability p = Prob(they succeed and they get picked out of all the successful firms). A firm would only participate if the reward were greater than $1,000,000/p.
They could be jailed and prosecuted. The constitution doesn't protect them against felonies, which these would be.

... of course, that wouldn't be the end of it, but good gravy would that be messy times.
...which it was. One of the big features was the ability to edit video in a lower bitrate (i.e. faster to work with) then send it off to a server to process on the full HD video. Great idea, but apparently it was a total mess to work with.
An mRNA strand that is about to be translated into a protein has the introns removed, so how is the cDNA different enough from the naturally occurring mRNA other than it is a mirror image?

Also, when did cDNA come to mean composite DNA instead of complementary DNA? This seems made up to imply some kind of invention instead of it just being the mirror image of the DNA molecule.
They have very strong institutional motives to be seen as highly-competent. A cynical view would be to think of intelligence agencies as semi-rational actors attempting to capture as much of the budget as possible with secrecy reducing all the costs of getting caught lying (think FEMA with no transparency and machine that prints get out of jail free cards).

The cynical view is never fully accurate, sometimes it isn't accurate at all because organisations always include idealist/true believers/patriots. Organisations which don't include idealists tend to weed themselves out pretty quickly and collapse.
Not arguing but, fyi: the patent was not on the process of creating cDNA, it was on the product -- they patented the cDNA itself, not the process for creating it. It is a composition of matter patent.
It feels to me that a lot of these ideas are hackish and serve only the purpose of getting funded, an easy money scheme. There are genuinely unoriginal ideas. An image host. Like hundreds of other image hosts don't exist? Why did you get funded?

I don't understand. When I think of ideas, the perspective I view the idea from is whether or not it solves a significant problem in daily peoples lives. A lot of these startups, don't solve anything.

I'm interested in your extended response regardless of my stance.

Is it just guys that have too much money and fund startups hoping that 1 in 100 of the funded ones will eventually make them billionaires? That's currently what it seems like.
The founding fathers were no radicals. Whereas the leaders of the French revolution changed everything dramatically, the founders left the basic structure of American society more or less intact. "Life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness" was not an incendiary statement in late 1700's England. The 1688 Glorious Revolution had made Parliament ascendent in England, and the phrase "life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness" is a turn of Locke's phrase "life, liberty, and estate" which he published in the 1689 "Two Treatises of Government" in the aftermath of the Glorious Revolution.

17th century England was a fairly different place than is commonly taught in school. E.g (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dr._Bonham%27s_Case). Consequently, the level of continuity that existed between English rule and independence is usually vastly understated. The Constitution is best understood as a formalization of various strands of thought and practice that was already well-established in England by that time.

And when I say "bloodless" I mean as far as revolutions go--compared to say the French revolution or the Chinese revolution.
Hey,

What was the response time of the old firm? What are the stacks of the servers vs workstations? How many hours per week did 4k/mo get you?
It's quite explicitly a felony; it's questionable whether it's treason but similar things have been treated as such in the past.
I don't think the two approaches are as far apart as they appear at first glance. Later on in the article they talk about removing Rails.env.production? from their code.

The twelve factor app calls for strict separation of config from code. I suspect that 37 signals has that, or pretty close.

Actually storing the config in environment variables is a Heroku-ism. There are other ways of doing it; chef is another good way. What matters is the strict separation.
I assume that gun cabinet was kept locked and you couldn’t get in. Schmitz’s safe was open. Schmitz was hiding in his panic room, refused to come out for the police, and had a shotgun with him in that room. If not technically armed, he certainly created a high risk situation.
The Unengageables
> So my advice would be to pick an idea you're passionate about, keep working on it relentlessly, and cut down on reading tech news.

Exactly this. There is no better advice.
Judging by Amazon's ability to suggest relevant products to my taste those predictive analytics still feel very dull. Maybe one shiny day, but it seems like a long road aheady of us.
"as a Representative, she can't be prosecuted for anything she says in the House."

What is your support for this?
Anyone that has used a genetic testing service has seen that they test you for hundreds of genetic disorders and traits. If not for patents on genes they could test for thousands.

For example, the test at 23andme was only able to test for a couple BRCA1 mutations because most of them are patented. My wife (whose grandmother died at 29 from breast cancer) had to pay $1,500 to get the test done because of these stupid patents.
I heard that some people are pretty much immune to CS gas, the only reference I can find online is here:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk%3ACS_gas#Immunity
It beats coding in my basement covering backend and frontend simultaneously. I'd kill to have a good small team of a designer, backend developer, and front end developer. That would be ideal.
Terms and Conditions May Apply Official Trailer #1 (2013) [video]
NewsBlur is mentioned in the article, but I cannot overstate how positive my experience with DigitalOcean has been. I'm stressing their biggest machines and spinning up dozens of differently configured boxes and they've handled it swimmingly well. Between the price and the performance differences, I'm glad I switched.

I also have a shadow site running in parallel on EC2, so I get to compare dollar for dollar. EC2 is strictly an apocalypse host at this point.
Because the best aren't going to put good work into a project that will probably just get thrown away.

If you entered a bounty project with two hundred other entries (all of which have systems similar to yours), would you put hundreds of hours and all of your effort into the project in spite of the fact that there's only a 0.5% chance you'll get paid? Not if you want to stay in business.

The size of the project is barely even relevant, take a look at bounty programs that are up now for areas like design (99designs, etc) and how they are chastised for pumping out bad products from designers who are only putting a fraction of effort into the projects.

This type of system sounds great for those looking for cheap labor, but in practice it falls apart.
sweeeet... sanity prevails!
Actually large private enterprises don't usually make this kind of mistake.

counter-anecdotes, 24.4k hits

https://www.google.com/search?q=lawsuit+failed+erp+implement...

4M hits, but lots of dups:

https://www.google.com/search?q=lawsuit+failed+crm+implement...
I just assumed they didn't feel threatened by it due to its paltry sales, and if anything hoped it would distract potential Android customers.

But I've been reading this stuff for so long I remember when Gruber was railing against Mac OS X for straying from Aqua and embracing brushed metal, now apparently we're not allowed to criticize iOS 7 because, unlike Mac OS X, even though that's the cited precedent they give for their argument, it's guaranteed to simply get better with no potential for mis-steps along the way.

You just get jaded by this stuff after a while.
Technically an overflow on a signed variable results in undefined behaviour so it could crash out, but all the compilers I've tried just wrap around.
I don't know about that. I've seen a few tech jobs around the £70-80k mark at the BBC, which is about $120k. Throw in the additional benefits and it's probably not far off.
> In such a hypothetical scenario would the police then be required to return the cocaine?

No. They don't have to return illegal contraband found during an improper search, but it cannot be used as evidence in a trial against them.
And it could be greater if we allow genome patenting and license fees.

Someone spent that $1trillion too.
Moving money is not the same as creating value. What is the end-user market price of stuff we simply didn't have before HGP? The QALY increase for the human population?
Massive write-offs for failed projects and acquisitions are pretty common in large enterprises.
But perhaps that is because nobody has developed a theory to explain why some notations are better than others!
The Softer Side of the NSA
Fixing Sign-in
Separate from the morality/public service bit (which I agree with rayiner about), I think it's interesting that public sector work is often the most demanding and rewarding (not in a feel-good sense) work out there. Usually this is equated with law/diplomatic positions, but I think there's something about the low-budget quick-turnaround nature and general sense of gravitas that brings out the best work of people. I hope Code for America (http://codeforamerica.org/about/) expands and starts to fill the same role that Teach for America does -- sacrifice two years of your life that you'd otherwise spend working for BigCo, get a great credential and pick up a tremendous amount of skills along the way.

I'm reminded of a really interesting post by Kyle Rush about the challenges he faced developing Obama's 2012 fundraising platform: http://kylerush.net/blog/meet-the-obama-campaigns-250-millio...
It probably is. I've experienced the fact that DDD scales up only until the consultants have gone :)

Same as NserviceBus only works until you've paid for the training.
But the information in the cDNA already exists in the mRNA. The justices seemed to argue that removing the introns was the step that makes cDNA patentable, but the introns are already removed from an mRNA molecule that is about to be translated into a protein.
IIRC, their CMS was supposed to be the Holy Grail of video management. Centralized and decentralized storage, processing farms, search-by-image, advanced tagging, etc. Sounded quite impressive but from what I understand, there are now commercial solutions that have some of those feature sets. The way they explain it, when they started no one had these features.
I doubt he or she was aware it was 3500 lines long. While not the same as 15000, it isn't all that far off.
No.

They feel that way because they believe in the ability of a government to protect them, without making any mistakes.

I would give them credit for thinking this way, the idea that they could be protected, or that it's good.

What makes them stupid is thinking such a system is so infallible that it wont end up putting them behind bars one day because of a clerical error.
U.S. Constitution, Art. I, Sec. 6, Clause 1 [1] (emphasis added):

The Senators and Representatives shall receive a compensation for their services, to be ascertained by law, and paid out of the treasury of the United States. They shall in all cases, except treason, felony and breach of the peace, be privileged from arrest during their attendance at the session of their respective Houses, and in going to and returning from the same; and for any speech or debate in either House, they shall not be questioned in any other place.

[1] http://www.law.cornell.edu/constitution/articlei#section6
How building a tech company is like playing jazz (from a guy who's done both)