skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I don't think your argument works. I mean, we've all seen the experiment where you stick metal strips into a lemon and it becomes a battery. Just because lemons exist doesn't mean we shouldn't be able to patent batteries that work the same way.

I think that the weakness in the gene patents is that a patent is necessarily an invention to accomplish a particular purpose but the pharma companies are filing patents as quickly as the genes can be identified, without the slightest idea of that it does, let alone what it can be used for.

My understanding is that the fig leaf that they hide behind is to simply say "it's for fighting cancer", but they have no idea if that's what it would eventually be used for. And the patent office makes no judgment about how effective a patent actually is for its stated purpose.

So here's my idea. It needs to get some specificity, but basically we should say that a patent must include a specific statement of what the invention's use is. And the patent would only protect that stated usage; creating another thing that's composed of exactly the same pieces as the patent mentions, but used for a different purpose, would be OK.
Not really. Tons of web dev jobs in Los Angeles. Sure, I just got laid off, but I found another job paying even more than my last job in less than two weeks.
Thanks for the tip. I tried a piece of software last week - can't remember the name - but I just heard the disk clicking repeatedly while the software was trying to access the disk - it didn't get anywhere, so I didn't think a pure software solution would work. But I will take a look at Spinrite - I hadn't heard of it. Maybe it works better than the one I tried already, although I'm skeptical. I have a hunch that what I really need is some kind of hardware solution along the lines of whatever they use at these commercial services for copying a failed disk. But I'm expecting such a device to cost an arm and a leg.
If you specify a non-GPL'ed app, they seem symmetrical to me; they're both information that the sender may have put a value on the recipient not distributing. In both cases, the sender is welcome to not send it, and to not receive the benefit of doing so. But in both cases, once the recipient has the information, it should be theirs to do with as they wish (absent specific contract).

Given that you have to give your SSN for all kinds of miscellaneous stuff where you don't particularly trust the recipient, these days (credit apps, etc), I don't think anyone has the illusion that their SSN is private, do they? Still?

Privacy is effectively dead, and the only substitute we have is secrecy, which can be destroyed by any party to the secret. This is the world we live in, now, and I can't see any way to reverse course, no matter what the law says.
"I voted for Robot for new versus old Yahoo. #nar #hashymchashyhash bit.ly/zombies" That's bizarre, yet descriptive, enough to invite a click. I'd say Ninja is old, Robot is new since you have old on left and new on right.

Pick a night. I'll get shitfaced with you. Ask the Pollers or Thomas or any of the other folks: it's how I roll.
Any Flash AS3/smartfox devs in St. louis 
A friend is looking to hire 3 as3 developers for their virtual world project. Just thought I'd put a buzz in the HN community...
Google has been doing simple things like unit or currency conversion, ticker symbols, basic geographic facts, arithmetic expressions, etc for a long time now. WA is nothing more than just a very, very advanced version of that, plus charts. Well, it is certainly impressive at least in terms of human work that made this amazing service possible. But from the engineering perspective... don't know, not impressed that much.

I'm not sure who started the hype about WA as A.I. or Google killer or iPhone smasher or an immortality pill, it's certainly less than all these things. Just a pedantically well executed service. We'll see.
prewett, which are the tools that you think already exist, exactly?

Many Mozilla developers make good use of valgrind. Leaks that can be found that way often are, and rarely cause problems for long.
It would be interesting if all of the "new" stuff was scoped to showing "new" stuff submitted by other people who have accounts approximately as old as your own (maybe within a month?).

This would limit "new" items to your hacker news "start class", which may make the content more relevant.
Even the base-model Amiga had almost double the CPU speed of the IBM (7 MHz vs. 5), four times the RAM (512 KB vs. 128 KB), and a full 32-bit processor (albeit with a 24-bit address space). The Amiga was also released four years later than the PCjr. That's an entire generation in personal computer hardware.

Regardless, I'm not sure where you picked up a sense of "parody" from the original article. I see an almost touching devotion to make something useful out of a dead, useless platform. It's ridiculous, silly, and probably a waste of time, but it made me smile anyway, and brought back memories of all the time I spend playing with my own PCjr in my parents' basement 20 years ago.
Under Legal Pressure, Craigslist to Kill Erotic Services Ads
This may seem to be OT but it's going to affect most people deeply. What does it mean when most goods are very cheap or meaningless. We have been edging into post-scarcity since the 1960's, but we dont realize it yet. We shouldnt need two income families just to tread water. We have a lot of surplus, but it has been sucked away. The biggest offender has been housing. Not just that houses are larger than we need, but that speculation has driven land prices to outrageous highs. Now we are at the point where we can live anywhere and telecommute. Does the value get sucked out of the suburbs? Does the value of a university education become meaningless because we can learn off the web? What to the whole automotive/energy industry when cars are electric and long lived, may be one or two cars last your whole life? Do we all become service workers or do the service industries collapse, because we can do it outselves? What do we do with 20-hour workweeks?
If you are selling anything you want to do repeat business on, lying will make it much harder if not impossible.

The best product managers and salespeople I know will advocate the hell out of their products but will not lie. I have seen customers ask for product managers by name every time they call to buy a new version or product and sometimes go with a product that has less features than the competition because they know the person they are dealing with is honest.

More to the point of TFA, it is true that Apple's hardware prices are very high. However I have never seen a kernel panic screen on my Mac for the past year that I have used it (really used it).
What a fantastic summary of OLPC's failure. Thank you for the link.
memcmp is not the way to do it.

A much faster solution would be the same approach rsync takes with its "rolling checksum." To calculate the weak checksum of each block as you roll along the length of the file, you only have to do a calculation involving the bytes rolling out and in. http://samba.anu.edu.au/rsync/tech_report/node3.html

Then, for only the blocks that match this weak checksum, do memcmp or a strong digest check.
Sweet, exactly. Feel free to throw that up there! http://ninjasandrobots.com/throwdowns/new
Slow startup time has been an Achilles' Heel for JRuby for a long time now. Being able to get <100 msec startup times could help a lot in making JRuby a reasonable option for short-lived systems automation scripts, cron jobs, etc.
but, inexplicably, they charge upwards of a thousand dollars for a seemingly basic service

If it were actually inexplicable, someone would have started a business to do it for much less. The fact that no one has (or has, but failed to stay in business) indicates that it's probably an expensive and high risk business.

What is the problem exactly? This makes a big difference in how you go about getting data off of it.

Does it not spin up? Maybe this will help: http://web.archive.org/web/20080207080550/http://www.deadhar...

Does it spin up but have lots of errors? Try mounting read only from a Linux live CD and use dd with the noerror option (this tells it to keep going even if there are errors) to mirror the contents to a new hard disk (same size or larger). I've used this technique many times over the years, and usually gotten most of the data restored.

Freezing is a method of nearly last resort, IMHO. After freezing comes "take the platters out and put them in a whole new, but otherwise identical, drive". This one is entirely last resort (and assumes you don't plan to use one of those expensive services, since this will be the last thing you ever do with this drive), and assumes your data is worth the cost of a hard disk to be thrown away at the end. I don't actually know if you can even get the platters out of modern disks, but I've done it in the olden days...maybe 10 years ago...and was able to recover some data, but nowhere near most. The disk gets eaten up with errors within a few hours of spinning up after using this technique.

The expensive services presumably have clean room conditions for performing the last technique without the resulting destruction of the drive. They also probably have variable speed enclosures to allow slow reads of data (I'm guessing, but if I were building tools to operate such a business, that's the kind of thing I would be working on).

And, of course, the best way to fix a broken hard disk is to replace it and restore from recent backups.
Your argument doesn't work either, because in that case you could patent the invention of a battery consisting of metal strips and lemons. Lemons would still be free to eat for everyone.

If they use the gene in a process, then that process is an invention and I have no problem with them patenting that invention. But just patenting the gene IS like patenting lemons.
That little learning for technically literate (small percentage of users) could be a show stopper for the rest. Many people are scared of even the simple maths (sad but true).
Ask HN: Free or cheap Flight Data?
I was thinking of making a little web tool where you enter your flight number, and the email address or phone numbers of people you want to be notified if your flight is late.

Do you know if there's a free or cheap data source to get flight information like estimated arrival time (in close to real time)?
Following Your Startup Dreams
Isn't the subservience part of what many employers are looking for? I think some are even looking for it legitimately.

It is.

Even more astonishing, at least to me, is that it is what some, maybe even a lot of, employees are looking for as well. Without an employer, or someone who they can submit to the authority of, to tell them what to work on when, they would be miserable and directionless. They crave structure, but need someone else to define it for them. They also become quite incensed when someone wants to remove that same structure because it gets in their way.

Some jobs allow or require a certain amount of this. Generally, it is jobs that are part of an established process, like manufacturing, that just needs someone to repetitively perform a particular step with reasonably consistently. This might be true of most jobs.

Other jobs do very poorly being treated as part of an established process. But people will select candidates for that anyway, because it works in the average case. The result of this is attempting to swaddle process around something inherently without process, just so the people involved can feel comfortable with the structure that guides their work. It does mean that productivity tends to suffer as a result of all of the process requirements, but many employers and employees consider it a worthwhile trade-off.

I get the sense that it's not that the line is fine, but that so many people toe it so tightly that, to someone who doesn't, it looks fine by comparison.
Calculating that stuff on the fly is simple and fast with a single hard-coded algorithm vs using a custom view per user. You would also need to store a lot more information to be able to recalculate this stuff. Granted HN does not seem to cache it's pages, but it's one of the first options when looking to increase speed.

PS: Even just limiting sorting to the top 1000 overall stories and top 1000 new stories could be a major speed bump.
Global data can be bad, but a function instance variable isn't global - it's simply public. Using closures to simulate private variables has always seemed like overkill to me, but I tend to prefer Python's approach to private variables. Also, being able to manipulate the cache from outside the function could be helpful in certain cases where a full fledged cache object would be overkill.

I do agree that namespace collision is certainly an issue, but it's traditionally resolved by mild name mangling (again, see Python).

In my opinion, the advantages of a less clever (read easily understood) public implementation outweigh the disadvantages.
http://blog.makezine.com/archive/2008/07/weekend_project_har...
oops! sorry didn't know that.
I agree with your comment. I /do/ trust drugs like Advil, on a daily basis.

What I'm most excited about is that this sort of technology will hopefully free dependence on overpriced pharmaceuticals and bring the capability for invention to the masses.

Thanks for the thought-out comment. I heard Kurzweil speak a few days ago and the convergence of technology and medicine has been on my mind since.
I guess it's because it requires various bits of hard-to-get hardware and uses a separate modern PC as a kind of IMP (Interface Message Processor - in other words, an Internet router). http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interface_Message_Processor

But if this had been a C64 (I had a C64 once and never had a PC Jr) I guess I would have been kinder. ;-)
I was wondering about this too. I've been looking it up and have come to the same conclusion.

Personally, I liked seeing conversation fragments. If the reply looked interesting I could easily enough click on the other person's username to load their tweets and get the question/conversation.
If you specify a non-GPL'ed app, they seem symmetrical to me

Yes, but remember, I'm talking about the situation in Stallman's world. No one would use non-open software, and no one would send their personal information.

As far as privacy being dead, "dead" is a misleading term here. Privacy is a concept, and as such has no vital signs. It can be alive again as easily as a comic book character. The transition from the time before universal suffrage is just as big as the change from the current situation to privacy as a right.

If you ask ordinary people about these topics, you'll find that many, if not most people out there have some sort of expectation about privacy. I think that these are rights waiting to be discovered. Just as my downloading a GPL'ed app or marking the checkbox under the Terms of Service means I agree to a specific contract, I think that there should be certain implicit contract going the other direction. Just as no one should be able to, say, sell kitchen utensils that blow up and kill people.

The SSN as a secret is in trouble. However, there are more robust protocols than the secret number.
As a programmer in this day in age, you might as well be a free mason from the middle ages. You can move virtually anywhere in the world and make at least enough money to comfortably cover for your human conditions barring a complete collapse of the information economy/society as we now know it.

I'm 24. No college degree. And I haven't been out of work since I was twelve. Buck up. You picked the right sort of degree/profession.
Couple of comments.

First, it's an awesomely cool idea. Congrats to the Wolfram team for pulling it off so far.

Second, it's a freaking huge project. As much as they have, I can't help but think they're only about a 100th of the way towards something that might be truly comprehensive. Maybe a 1000th of the way.

Still -- kudos for setting it up. I sincerely hope it grows and becomes all that it can be. It will definitely take web research to a new level.
The $45m headline number is a drop in the bucket compared to what Apple makes from selling iPhone and iPod Touch hardware. The crucial point this story misses is that Apple has generated a marketplace worth $50m-$112m in revenue for makers of iPhone apps, with an App Store that launched less than a year ago. This is huge.

Compare that to the $100m "iPhone Fund" that Kleiner Perkins announced in March 2008 (http://www.techcrunch.com/2008/03/06/kleiner-perkins-anounce...). This seemed like a lot at the time, eclipsing the $10m "fbFund" for Facebook Apps from Accel, which itself seemed big at the time (http://www.techcrunch.com/2007/09/17/facebook-launches-fbfun...).

While $100m and $50-112m seem like comparable numbers, the difference between investment and revenues is huge. Think about it, would you rather have $100m in VC money or $100m in revenues (per year!) from customers?

The biggest benefit to Apple is not the revenues they get from Apps. The biggest benefit is from the thriving community of iPhone app makers who are probably willing to spend on the order of $50-$112m of effort (per year!) improving Apple's platform. A platform worth $2+ billion/yr for Apple.
Well I guess I have to post the one I did a while back: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P6nkqqOZKpY

I recorded the music on a midi keyboard then wrote some perl scripts to read the midi file and generate POV-Ray scene files to go along with it.
I know for Philly =]
http://www.phl.org/cgi-bin/fidsarrival.pl
That's the thing. If you are good and have some social skills you can get a job. Even when the job market is down companies still need people to function.
It'll be interesting when companies who have paid for product placement on those shows have direct links to purchase said products, right in Hulu. This can also be extended to show DVDs and other official studio-produced merch. Think of it as "As Seen On TV" infomercial people actually want to watch.
www.pactec.com does custom machining of their enclosures, but I haven't gone through this, so I can't help much with this. Good luck!
Most airlines will do this for you. Check the website in question for details.
What's wrong with being absurd?
I'd have to guess he used some kind of fourier analysis.
This is really cool. I just used it on my site.
memcmp is not the way to do it.

Absolutely. The right way to do it is to use the memmem library call.

A much faster solution would be the same approach rsync takes with its "rolling checksum."

That's one way to improve performance, yes. (But it far predates rsync -- I think it might even predate Tridge.)

In many cases, a "look and skip" algorithm like KMP or BM will outperform a rolling checksum search; but of course if you've got 328MB of data on disk, nothing will make the search faster than the time it takes to read the data into RAM.
I love the comparison to online datnig and usad car salesman...that's not what I want to think of when I think of Apple products.
Response to PG's "How to Do Philosophy"
The eC Programming Language
The engineering used to simply parse the queries is amazing. It's lightyears beyond Google's NLP.
although people here may have an aversion to the word 'anarchy' - "Post Scarcity Anarchism" is a great book on this topic: http://www.amazon.com/Post-Scarcity-Anarchism-Working-Classi...
Techstars founder launches new $2.5M seed fund
Why not just release it as an open-source project?
What exactly did amaze you in this demo?
Honestly, it's a different thing to be in a position where a job is monitoring -- IE, 8 hours of the day are meetings, 3-4 hours a day are tracking and writing email. I can work 12 hours a day doing that because it's not that difficult. It feels like work, it is work. However, it's not banging your head against the wall on a problem, or writing documentation, or...

Creative positions have a maximum output. Sometimes, I've worked more hours because the other time is taken up by meetings, and I don't burn out nearly as quickly as when I'm working to write or debug code.

As such, I wonder if the hiring advice is better for sales/management.
http://www.mininova.org/tor/2588357
Hrm. Maybe he should implement it, and then ask.
Time line: At Stanford University, 100 years of innovation
I think I remember PG mentioning that with the new server everything fits in memory ...

I see your point about speed, but I think that there are a bunch of shortcuts you can take (like your top 1k idea) that mitigate the issue, and if it is a feature you can switch off if you'd prefer to just go fast with the hard-coded, then ...
"We can't" has got to be a blatant lie. It worked two days ago.

Each paragraph was an independent thought.

A) They are lying.
B) I wonder why they lied. I guess it might be hard if...
C) Ok, they might just be stupid.

PS: Twitter is still dealing with trivial amounts of data relative to what many people on HN work with. Plenty of projects do difficult things with gigabytes of data every second and twitter is far from that scale.
Well, he had a viable argument until he got to the "no viruses" part. Then his argument turned into a morality play. Poof, there goes his credibility. Apple wins again!

Unfortunately for this person, most normal users will see more crashes (ie, very few) on Win32 than they will (ie, none) on OS X. That's because 99.999999% of Apple users will never load non-Apple code into their kernel, whereas OEMs will load code into Win32 kernels. If you were going to make a recommendation based on reliability to your non-computer-expert grandfather, you'd go with Apple.

Also: these commercials are funny.
One thing that amazed me was when he searched for that DNA sequence, and then traversed up and down a chromosome. Mapping out the human genome has been done for some time, but I've never actually seen any sort of interface or app that hooks into this sort of data, and this does.

I can't tell you what revolutionary applications or mashups will make use of this data, but I can definitely say I was 'amazed' when he did demo that part of alpha. It's like I'm searching my body!!!
You can't downvote on stories, only flag them, even after you get the downvote button for comments.

And FWIW, I've managed to get 550+ karma without submitting any stories and only posting (what I hope turns are) interesting comments. So don't think you have to submit stories to get karma.
Then, who hires the B people?
Google will probably copy from Wolfram Alpha those things that are likely to be of interest to many users. And it will do so using automated scalable methods.
No it's worse (from what I understand): you don't see if somebody you follow replies to somebody you don't follow. So they filter tweets out of the timeline of your friends, that you don't get to see anymore.
That's oversimplifying.

Based on a metric of producing code that fulfills the requirements, they may be as much an A player as the assertive developer down the hall. The thought of including assertiveness in measuring employee performance has never occurred to them. You say to them that only "A" players hire equally capable people, but they respond by saying that they are an "A" player. It is the start of an unreasonable argument.

Perhaps they should hire for assertiveness, but that's a matter of convincing people that their method of analysis is wrong. That doesn't get solved with platitudes; it gets solved by showing that encouraging assertiveness provide more value that the security of the status quo. How to show this, though, is something I am still trying to figure out.
I had enabled this preference, too.

The ironic thing about Twitter forcing this is that those of us who wanted it this way are going to be screwed, too. People are already prefixing @replies to get around the issue. The preference has moved from the receiver to the sender. If someone wants you to see a conversational reply they'll just do "PR @username" or whatever.

The result is that has Twitter actually removed all choice for people on both sides of the issue. Whoops!
Québec launches VC dream