skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
“The gun in question [...] was a type never seen before by arms experts in New Zealand.”

“She said a police arms officer said the weapon must have been modified. "It couldn't be cut off any further back because of the position of the magazine," she said. To get a license for that type of gun in New Zealand it would have had to be granted a permit.”

http://www.stuff.co.nz/auckland/local-news/6298389/Judge-res...
I agree that amazon suggestions are not great, but Amazon have a fairly limited set of information to go by - only your previous purchase and search history on that site. If Amazon had the same amount of information that Google/Facebook has, they would be able to make much better recommendations.

As an aside, Amazon should really have an 'I already bought this somewhere else' button. 6 months after searching on Amazon for a watch but then buying it elsewhere, I'm still getting watch suggestions...
System76 Unveil New Haswell-Powered Ultra-Thin Ubuntu Laptop
Their patent isn't on technique ("method" in the ruling), but on the actual cDNA sequence itself. As such, it's specific to the two BRCA genes.

Of course, that just makes it even more ridiculous.
Looks good. Good to see someone just getting on with it rather than endlessly bitching about it.
I think it's really the whole philosophical "create vs discover" thing. Only things that are created (with other restrictions) can be patented, things that are discovered cannot be.

The problem arises, when do you draw the line? When you spend thousands of man hours in a scientific lab and millions of dollars to piece together a bit of understanding, was it discovered or created?

The answer is often somewhat obvious. But I imagine that, behind closed (or semi-closed) doors, there are a lot of very persuasive people arguing for a very permissive definition of "create".

While it's probably hard to properly classify everything accurately the first time you see it, hopefully time lets us get a better perspective and quickly re-classify.
US military recruits are typically exposed to tear gas as part of their training on "NBC" threats (nuclear/biological/chemical).

A major point of the exercise is to instill trust in your gas mask and your ability to use it correctly.

When I did it, we put on our gas masks, entered a little building full of gas, stood around a bit feeling the tingle on our exposed skin, then one-by-one were told to take off the mask and try to say something (I think it was our name and rank), then run out.
Out of interest, would something as easy to find as this qualify for the bug bounty?
If I understand the situation correctly, it seems fairly similar to the status quo with drugs, for better or worse. You can't patent chemicals naturally occurring in plants that have medicinal uses, but you can patent synthetic versions of the same drug.
Geniuses Are Made, Not Born (2012)
This post illustrates that building a responsive website, while cheaper than building apps and easier than maintaining a separate mobile website, still involves quite a bit more work than a desktop-only site.

We're just about finished with a responsive redesign, although one of the owners doesn't understand why we're "shrinking the website" instead of building an app for her phone.
Ask HN: Aren't you bored by "NSA news"?
Believe it or not, they do open source some of their stuff, sometimes. See, for example, Accumulo.[1][2]

[1]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apache_Accumulo

[2]: http://accumulo.apache.org/
I'd like that, but drawing a diagram for this is hard :)
Something of the sort is expressed on many Ayn Rand books - yes, her books are full of cartoonish cliches, one-dimensional characters and straw man attacks, but I get the same spirit from this comment than from the descriptions in The Fountainhead.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Fountainhead
From human tissue to leather and meat: The future of 3D Printing
So, being moral and having self-interest isn't mutually exclusive.

There's a false dichotomy between seeking to enrich yourself and doing good for others (one that typically tacitly presumes the fixed pie fallacy). Division of labour still applies: If you're a good software engineer, but suck at politics and want to influence policy, go work on some ads, make a ton of money and give (some of) it to a think tank or activism group that is good at politics. They'll probably achieve more than you'd ever do, waitressing on the side, looking for a rare opportunity to get a non-profit job. And you get to have a lunch budget and an office with a view at the same time.
How apple did it: They copied what Microsoft had done, exactly like Samsung copied them, and Apple previously copied (poorly) what Google had done with Maps.

I say this not in spite but in awe of what Apple is really good at. They are good at copying things but then doing such an amazing job of presenting their copy that you, the elite of the industry, think that they invented it.

They've been doing this since they copied the Xerox interface and I've always been in awe of it.
Supreme Court blocks patenting of genomic DNA
Construction destruction
I have hundreds of ideas written down, and I am so quick to discard each and every one of them as silly because who the fuck would use any of these apps I came up with.

I think the only way to know the answer is to ask people. I've made the mistake of spending time building a product that I and my co-founders really liked, but we never actually asked (in one way or another) if anyone else would pay for it, or even use it. We assumed that because we wanted it that others who were (we thought) like us would want it too.

I have some other ideas for products but before I put too much effort into them I want to go talk to potential customers and see what they think.

I dread this because I'm not naturally gregarious, but I cannot count on my gut feelings about what people will pay money for.
I know this is great mythology, but if those people ever existed in the first place, they've been pushed out over the last 15 years of effective budget cuts (compared to costs of employment like healthcare) in most domestic public service roles.

It kills me to see people who get free sodas and 150k while commenting on Hacker News presume that a workplace they've never been is some wasteful USSR-esque bureaucracy. Yes, inefficiency scales with organization size but most local depts are pretty small, and local, state and domestic federal depts have been under budget pressure and salary freezes for years while still having the same job to do.

If you're looking for a corporate mess with no cost accountability, look at the big government contractors.
Looking to fill various positions - SoCal
Jobs open in the Los Angeles and Orange County areas.

Feel free to contact me if you or anyone you know might be interested.

michael.schembari@prosum.com
> 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 at all clear. I would expect that work in public service is far more likely to go off the rails due to perverse incentives, so that such a worker would find themselves working very hard at something that doesn't create much value. One major benefit to working in a lucrative job is that you have a direct measurement of how much good you're doing, since someone is willing to voluntarily part with your high salary to have you do it. Maybe geeks are just better at personal cost-benefit analysis than liberal arts folk. ;)
Sales Safari in Action [video]
Maybe you are prone to valueing the quantifiable and direct impact a hacker can make higher than the indirect and non-quantifiable impact of someone else. Just imagine the influence someone could have through a conversation with an influential politician at a dinner party. The aforementioned hacker might not have the rethorical abilities, broad academic background and social network to do this. Still, it could have finally had a much bigger impact on the environment.
Of course such a conversation does not occur frequently, but I guess reducing Facebook's electricity usage by 1% doesn't either.
"How do you know it was suicide."

"There was a note. Jimmy, have they found the note yet?..."
MooresWellian Law
There's something special about private enterprises making them reconsider their approaches, though - the fact that they lose their own money (which is often combined with having a smaller pool of money to begin with). Few enterprises can spend $150M and fewer will keep spending upon signs of things not working out.

As to private contractors doing a poor job when paid with taxpayer money - makes some sense, as long as said money keeps flowing. In a different setting the flow would stop more quickly.
How 'Sailing Stones' Move Themselves Across Death Valley
It sounds totally believable that your friends are having trouble finding work. It doesn't sound very believable that they are turning down six figure jobs left and right, though. Unless you just meant that they chose a career path where there are no six figure jobs?
How Financial Arbitrage Explains the NBA Finals
As it happens many, if not most, protests are held in locations where carry is heavily restricted if not banned entirely. For example, Washington D.C. effectively has a blanket ban on citizens carrying weapons in public. New York City is only slightly less restrictive.

Even in other areas, there are myriad restrictions on where a person may carry. For instance, nearly all federal buildings, many "sensitive" locations identified by the state (such as within a quarter mile of a school), national parks, etc...

And those who carry legally are well aware of how fragile their rights are - one run-in with a policeman having a bad day can cost you your right to ever touch a gun again.

The reasoning behind gun ownership is more like this: if the government institutes martial law / comes to take my guns or property / commits some huge atrocity against me or my family, gun owners will be able to defend themselves. This isn't a completely accurate view, obviously, but it's the general feeling I get from growing up in the US.

One thing to add to this - the point of the second ammendment is not only to ensure the rights of individuals to protect themselves and their property from both other citizens and the government. It's presense is also intended to act as a reminder to those who wield the power of the government that they are the servant rather than the master.

"The beauty of the Second Amendment is that it will not be needed until they try to take it."
The NSA doesn't actually do much data mining
The question(s) I have about the NSA aren't "Do they use Hadoop, Spark, S4, MPI, OpenMP, etc." but rather things like:

1. Do they already have a functional quantum computer, capable of rendering most modern encryption useless?

2. Do they have a mathematical breakthrough that allows them to factor products of large prime numbers multiplied together, far faster than anyone suspects - which would render most / all modern encryption useless?

3. Have they planted backdoors and vulnerabilities in popular, widely distributed hardware / software platforms?

etc.
Wow. This seems like a great and interesting product...

But it also seems like the kind of thing any programmer with a decent music collection could throw together as an MVP in a couple of weekends (ignoring music distribution rights, of course).

But it's got quite the large team of people behind it -- I'm very curious to see if this can monetize well. It just seems like such a "niche" product -- like it should be just another channel on Pandora, instead of a whole company in its own right. Seeing that margins on music streaming are generally already so low, I wish I could see their monetization strategy...
Ban this link. The author ("CoFoundersLab") spammed their entire mailing list to beg for upvotes... twice.

From one email:

"Tomorrow morning, we'll be listing the article on Hacker News, Y Combinator's social news network about startups. We need your help to upvote the article to the top of the list so it gets noticed by other entrepreneurs. The more upvotes the article receives, the more this valuable research gets shared with the entrepreneur community."
> this was political and philosophical dynamite in the XVIII century

No, it wasn't, at least not in England. It was propaganda directed at what were already well-established political norms in the England. Pretty much the whole of the declaration, from the statement of principles at the beginning to the detailed list of particular grievances, was directed at explaining why the upper class landholding gentlemen of England's North American colonies were so upset at the upper class landholding gentlemen of the British Government for not treating them in the way that decent upper class landholding British subjects expected to be treated by their colleagues in government.
It sounds nice, but when I think about what exactly is meant by "long tail" I can't come up with an answer that would be compatible with the idea of the "long tail" in statistics (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long_tail).

It does sounds better than just "in the long run, throughout history, just following orders is wrong". It seems like it's referring to people who are outliers and through which all the change is happening, but technically it's not really saying that. No ?
I guess my question is, do they still have a patent on any BRCA1/2 cDNA or only that specifically created according to their method?
In a word: yes. Why shouldn't I?
Steven Spielberg and George Lucas predict film industry 'implosion'
Yes, that's correct. Also, keep in mind:

"First, the case is only about whether genes are patentable subject matter; that is, are they the kinds of things that are eligible for patent protection under section 101 of the Patent Act, assuming that all other requirements for patentability are met. Even if the Supreme Court rules in favor of gene patents here, every gene patent would still have to pass the tests of novelty (section 102) and nonobviousness (section 103), and to be the subject of an adequately explicit written description (section 112)."

That's taken from this legal genomics blog: http://www.genomicslawreport.com/index.php/2013/05/01/some-t...

Highly recommend all of their articles if you are interested in this kind of thing.
You shouldn't be. This is one of the biggest worldwide threats of our era, and it's specifically one in which the tech industry is a huge part of the problem. We need to clean up our own mess.
As an aside, I recently realized it makes it more difficult for the government / police to quietly 'disappear' you. If you choose to resist with firearms, it won't stay off the news, or at least won't go unnoticed unless you live in the middle of nowhere. You probably won't live through it though.
Edward Snowden's NSA surveillance revelations strain China-US relations
I am not bored by reading such news. I find it compelling and interesting.
They're not on Clojars; the Maven repository they use is build.clojure.org. The project source code for all the contrib libraries is on Github at https://github.com/clojure
Failed acquisitions are pretty common, failed projects too. I'm not disputing that, and that wasn't my argument. I added a clarification to my post.
Hah, I wish. I was a senior engineer there and earned less than half that.
Yes. It's basically a really cool version of an ink jet printer powered by sugar. A few labs will print out your sequence, pack it into a dead cell, freeze it and ship it to you.

Obviously there's more to it than this really simplified statement but that's what goes on at a high-level. There's a number of people writing software for projects to help anyone author synthetic DNA (see http://synbiota.ca/ ) and start playing with this stuff, just as we do with makerbots or the PC revolution of yesteryear.
At the behest of the US government.
I would also have to agree with this. Hackers or technologists in general are simply a group of people that are not any more predisposed to activism. I know activist from many backgrounds and they all are at different levels of activism.

Hackers are seen in this light of activism because computer are just the newest frontier of unknown limits and boundaries. Also, a lot of information is shared through computers now, possibly more so than any other medium in the history of the world (large claim, I know).

This puts technology under a large microscope and therefore when a "hacker" comes out and says anything it is seen as extra important or highlighted more so than if it was not under the broad umbrella of technology.

This is not to downplay the seriousness of the NSA scandal. This is something that is unprecedented for everyone, not just hackers. Just happened to be a hacker that is at the center of it.
I like listening to rain or even white (or pink or brown) noise:

http://www.rainymood.com/

http://whitenoisemeditation.bandcamp.com/
I played with Docker a bit yesterday. Containers really are awesome! VMs look almost stupid in comparison. I'll be using it as much as I can. Being written in Golang doesn't hurt either... Golang seems like a very good choice for this.
You like your trip-hop.
How to Turn Over Your Project to a New Project Manager
When I was at BBC Online ~10 years back they wasted a couple of million on a content management system through a "leading" consultancy that never made it to production.
"I just don't think a large enterprise would engage in an internal $100 million project to build a CMS."

Isn't this a circular argument? If a company doesn't want to build a system in-house then its only other option is to contract another company to build it. At some point, someone has to build the system.
PRISM quotes of the week
I switched my personal projects from linode to digital ocean, for pricing but the performance is out of this world. The pricing allows me to run 4-5 of my projects for the same cost where I was at times maxing out the low-grade linode box that I had.

I later switched all my office's projects there from AWS and cut costs by over 85%. I also saw a significant performance bump allowing me to reduce the number of machines that I had active.

I cannot overstate how pleased I have been, their APIs compete with EC2, their performance is better than what I have seen on any competitor.

I am one very pleased customer. My _only_ complaint is that they aren't delivering on features at the rate they previously were. Though, after reading this article, I can understand a little better as to why.
Tim Cook: The gloves are coming off
10 Quotes To Change How You Run Your Startup
I feel bad for people who can't tolerate this sort of music but wordless energetic-yet-repetitive techno/trance/dubstep/etc seems to work great for me
But there are ways of detecting BRCA mutations without cDNA right? What does 23andme use? Isn't that a chip based method? And straight genome sequencing which should be cheap enough in a few years is another way around it, no?
You don't join the BBC for the money in IT... for the lax culture perhaps.
How iOS 7 can still end up looking
Not that I agree with the concept of the law in question, a private airline does have the right to require that you present any ID of their choosing to fly on their planes. They have the right to refuse you if you choose to not follow their rules.

The ID was purportedly required by the TSA, not by the airlines. And so cannot be justified on the right of the airline to set rules that they want as a private entity.
Your edit: ..having so little impact on it's primary revenue driver..

Sorry, you are still wrong. The BBC is specifically in the business of video content and their failed system was a video content management system. You can not get any more core to a business than that! This is a quintessential big software project failure I do not see how it being in government has anything to do with it or how you have made any kind of case for that belief.
What about non-human genes?

And if I make an exact replica of a gene, would it be considered "synthesized?"
Well, 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. Therefore, the question to ask is whether the cDNA itself exists in nature, not whether the process for making it does.
Number 3 is the most likely, along with pushbutton tools that automate attacking and extracting information from endpoint devices. The market among state actors for zero-day exploits is documented, while the other possibilities are out there with other "secret weapon" theories that are predicated on fundamental scientific breakthroughs.
You need to put yourself in your target markets shoes. You have to close your eyes, visualize their day, visualize their life, and see how it ties into your application and whether your application truly solves their problem.

I have maybe 5 apps I use on a weekly basis on my phone. If another app is to make it onto my phone, it better be a great solution to an existing problem.

Asking people if they would use your app is pointless since there is no prototype, and its hard to summarize all the nuances of a complex application in a few sentences, you'll almost always get a shrug and an "Sure, I'd use that" which I really don't think suffices as a basis to build your application on.

People will almost always say "Yeah, I'd use that" because it doesn't actually exist yet.

Find an idea, see what problem is solves, and fly with it. Better yet, just try to solve your own problems, don't think about whether it will make you a billionaire. Worst case scenario is you have a cool project you were passionate about and can add to your portfolio.

"The very best startup ideas tend to have three things in common: they're something the founders themselves want, that they themselves can build, and that few others realize are worth doing." - Paul Graham

Great essay by Paul: http://www.paulgraham.com/startupideas.html
ERPs are a great example. but I don't necessarily agree with your view that a large enterprise's existing workflow is superior. My take:

Most large enterprises have workflows which could be vastly improved by automation of ANY kind, even one that is imposed by a minimally customized ERP. ERP implementations are most successful, on both an ROI front as well as success in implementation, when they are brought in and the existing workflow, at a high level, is redesigned to fit the tool. Why?

The other path is chaos, because you are essentially asking people whose jobs revolve around doing things manually to "build their own replacement." A simple way of putting it is getting the assembly-line workers to have input on a new, highly automated assemblyline. They don't want the robots to do their jobs for them. Instead they will all insist on the value of their interaction in the process, and the robots will simply be tasked with helping them do their job instead of simply replacing them.

When ERPs succeed, they lead to lots of admin people getting laid off or reassigned. These are the same people that have to be consulted if you want to customize them for a company's existing workflow. They fight tooth and nail to keep everything the same as it was.
RelateIQ Launches With $29M To Be Your Next-Gen Relationship Manager
Just as an FYI, those attacks are fully automated. There wasn't really some guy on the other end doing this. Had a client have this same thing happen to them and the request to re-infect kept coming in long after the initial issue was resolved.

Another good thing to do which will disable 99% of these kind of attacks, is disable the following PHP functions:

disable_functions = exec,passthru,shell_exec,system,proc_open,popen,curl_multi_exec,parse_ini_file,show_source

There's very, very few scripts which actually need these, and if you run across one that does... you probably shouldn't use it anyway.
Does this mean we'll soon see 1000s more SNPs available from 23andme? What are the biggest new SNP's they can test for?