skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Also, fatty foods, seriously?

I could understand correlation with obesity, but correlation with "high-fat diets" just seems misleading and irresponsible.

I mean, presumably most of whatever correlation there is is coming from their level of obesity. They want me to believe that something like the paleo diet, of all things, is supposed to reduce sperm count in people of healthy weight?
North Korean ship seized in Panama - carrying weapons from Cuba
Which isn't possible at the language level, so why are we even discussing impl with jlujan's shitty attitude.
Put simply, large companies are inefficient at almost anything not utterly core. Look at Microsofts famous "the start menu took a year".

I would guess that projects of all stripes need some sort of escape velocity to fly by themselves. Things like initial enthusiasm, number of people who might be affected, likelihood of them complaining or ability to veto, degree of risk, reversibility - all of which means gravity at a large company is much higher.
Here are three polls that show between 41% and 58% disapproval: http://www.imediaethics.org/Blog/3984/Why_3_polls_on_nsa_sno...

Sure, that's far from unanimous, but "widely disapproved of by the general public" doesn't seem like a terrible stretch.

On the subject of polls, this article also shows the meta trends that this discussion is a part of: http://fivethirtyeight.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/07/10/public-o...
Eh, its probably more of the same "everything gives you cancer" nonsense, only now its sperm count.

3 weeks later and we find out the study was somehow horribly flawed.
(I'm strongly in favour of legalising drugs.)

There are a few studies showing links between cannabis use and infertility in men. Smoking cannabis is a double whammy, because tobacco use is a leading cause of erectile dysfunction.

> what I would assume is pretty consistent pot usage over the last, say, 50 years.

That's a big assumption. I'd be interested to see any numbers to support it. Certainly in the UK it feels like people smoke more, smoke more often, and start earlier. But I don't have any numbers, this is just my opinion. I'd also be interested to see if modern cannabis actually is stronger than cannabis used in the 60s, 70s, 80s, etc.
gotta jump on that shit: http://img.gawkerassets.com/img/18tg6h0u2nds4png/ku-xlarge.p...

(from http://valleywag.gawker.com/snapchat-had-the-frattiest-creat...)
Imagine if something like this allowed them to quit their jobs, so that they did need this money, and work on open source projects full time. That's the goal.
Mobile phones?
Apple & Yahoo: Turnarounds Take A Long Time
I assume you are talking about iCloud? Not sure most would agree that it beats Dropbox on ease of use.

Everyone who uses a computer to store any kind of unique content at all is a potential Dropbox user. Many people just don't know it until the first time they want an older version of something back, accidentally delete something or have a hard drive give out.
have you thought about using your single switch with an onscreen keyboard? I am not sure if OSX will let you automatically show an onscreen keyboard for the login screen (not sure why they wouldn't), but this would be as secure as you typing in the password via a real keyboard, and you wouldn't have to deal with all the other things that can go wrong.
Also, have you tried to use a Quadjoy mouse http://www.quadjoy.com/ this gives you full mouse use, and gets you out of jams when Dragon decides to stop working and your PCA isn't immediately available.
It's interesting seeing people form and then support their cognitive biases.
I've long felt conflicted about accepting tips through Gittip, but John's nice argumentation here persuaded me to give it a try.

On the one hand, working on open source software (especially many years after the original projects have shipped, and you've moved on to other things) is really about the love -- a hobbyist's satisfaction of polishing a well-honed tool.

But on the other hand, when so many successful businesses are able to use that open-source tool to great effect, it can create a bit of a financial dissonance.

I'm not sure if I'll keep the account open for very long -- for one thing, if I end up back at the NYT towards the end of the year, I'll probably have to close it -- but until then, let's see how it goes. Maybe it'll feel good in a kind of dirty-capitalist-but-gift-economy kinda way.
Especially not if he also has a killswitch which will go off once he disappears. The question is if said killswitch exists will it release the data or destroy it?
Congrats and good luck with sales!
Right, but I assume they block those other ports for a reason. What is different about websocket that makes that reason no longer apply?
As a current Lean Black Belt and 6Sigma Green Belt working in QI... I cannot agree with you more.

Still, some people just can't look at a rubric to help you organize your thoughts/analysis without dropping to their knees and worshiping it as the second coming of Christ.

Lean, 6S, TQM, CQI, not a single one of them has conclusively been shown to actually work long-term (post-6 months). But, on the bright side, it's a fantastic job for getting to see every last corner of operations in an organization. I'm using the position to learn the pain points of my preferred field, before going into start-up land to address their needs.
In general I agree with the author. I used to be a patent free advocate but when we started our medical hardware startup that dream sort of came crashing down. In the medical space it is almost impossible to work without patents, there are huge giants who would not hesitate to snap up your idea. I've heard similar stories from others in the hardware space around Brisbane. This coupled with the face that any sort of large scale manufacturing takes a large amount of time and capital makes it very difficult to continue in the hardware (and medical) space without some sort of protection on your idea. Perhaps yes 20 years is too long but I think for now patents still have a place in startups.
This post feels unfinished. There a number of places where sentences hang and thoughts don't feel completed. Is it just me?

In general your article seems to be more about software patents and software startups but by omitting those words it comes across an over-generalising (e.g so what if 6% of AngelList companies mention patents? What am I meant to take from that?).

Sure, you do mention 'hardware' startups but you talk about them as though this is something new. The 20 year time period only looks like overkill when your experience is in shipping code on a daily basis. If hardware startups only had 5 years to run, the only innovation created would be large incumbents copying the tech 5yrs after launch (instead of, say, trying to buy the company).

I think software patents stifle innovation but I also see that there are benefits to patents as a whole.
Woah this is actually a pretty brilliant idea.
Could make for a decent SaaS with a nice income as well. Keep it lean guys!
You using a quote of a quote to launch a personal attack, while explicitly doing the thing that you're accusing me of. That is, you assume that the motivation behind my comment is to feel superior to certain other people by excluding some things from the realm of "good art". Yet your comment explicitly divides people into "snobs" and "not snobs", makes a fairly obvious statement about superiority of one group and hints at the fact that you belong to the other group.
We are a relatively new company that has technology that is patent pending. The patent has taken a bit of time and may have held us back some. On the other hand, we do have enabling technology and it seems like prior art doesn't hold up too well in this broken patent system. So, being taken down by someone using our own technology would be a horrible feeling.

In the end, I guess only time will tell if our worries were founded.
Truly incredible that two probes built and launched 35 years ago are still functioning at all, let alone extending their mission and literally expanding our sphere of scientific understanding.

When I see NASA spacecraft doing such extraordinary things, long beyond their expected lifespan, I always feel a little guilty when a simple function I wrote can't even process a test file without crashing!
I'd like to add PulleyApp (http://pulleyapp.com/) for digital delivery.
Well, the uterus is a pretty caustic environment for sperm to be in. I have no specialized knowledge about this topic, but my guess would be that a large percentage of sperm don't make it to the egg, and so a drop of 2/3 would reduce the probability of a few making it that far by a lot.
This looks great! I'm really trying to use it more, though last time it did feel heavier than sublime. I'm glad that was addressed. Can anyone point me to a good tutorial/example regarding clojure and clojurescript projects in lighttable for windows and mac?
The must have feature in every app: Send Feedback
For that matter, the pro-abortion^wpro-life movement could be in here as well, do we really want everyone to know that the GF you had on the side was emailing to/from an abortion clinic?
7 min: A web-based timer for the ‘Scientific 7-Minute Workout’
You get to work with smart people? How is that unique to bigger companies? In fact, I'd say it's more unique to smaller companies, that have to be more selective with their hiring process.
Has anyone created a IIS cluster?
I'm looking for some resources on creating a IIS cluster for serving web applications. To be clear, I mean multiple servers, kept in synchronization by some process, with a load balancer managing traffic between them, and managing failover if one goes down. If its not obvious, this is something that's all new to me, so your insight would be appreciated.
This seems like something Gittip.com could offer as a feature: employees can log in and pick who to contribute to, and the company account they're associated with automatically makes the payment.

Reduce that logistical hurdle to a signup. :)
On the other hand, here's one of the comments at issue:

http://marc.info/?l=linux-kernel&m=135628421403144&w=2

And here's a rewrite that is shorter, conveys the same information, isn't patronizing, and avoids the "sins" (quotes because we apparently disagree) of the original:

I'm unwilling to discuss this further. The first rule of kernel maintenance is that if a change breaks userland, it's a kernel bug, full stop. WE DO NOT BREAK USERSPACE.

Additionally, commit f0ed2ce840b3 is incorrect. ENOENT isn't a valid ioctl return and never has been. ENOENT is reserved for path operations. ioctl works on descriptors and not paths; the use of ENOENT in this commit is incoherent.

It appears that this same kernel bug has broken all the KDE media applications. As a result, I must apply the fix directly and immediately myself.

Your incorrect patch which broke userspace combined with the confusion you caused by blaming the breakage on some external program is frustrating, and I expect not to have to deal with similar problems in the future.

The two problems I see with the original are:

(1) It's pointlessly emotional to its own detriment ("shut the fuck up" actually carries less information than "I'm unwilling to discuss this further", because "shut the fuck up" lacks finality) --- and is in this regard written in a way that only Linus Torvalds or someone of his status could get away with. It actually diminishes Torvalds --- as does any tirade in which someone simultaneously uses the words "insane", "idiocy", "crap", "fucking", and then... "seriously". No, really, he really means it!

(2) It calls its target names (idiot, incompetent) and does so publicly in front of the whole team, which speaks to a management style driven more by fear than by a shared understanding of goals.

Honestly I don't care how Linus Torvalds manages the Linux kernel, but as a case study for how to manage a development team, this is interesting, more so because you (among the very most level-headed of HN commenters) appear to approve of it!
Maybe a couple that bones 4 times per month (a lot of couples are this way), some percent of the time with success... Well if the average sex has a 10% chance of inducing pregnancy (this is perhaps the case for certain pairs more than others), then it will take, on average, 2.5 months to get pregnant.

Perhaps the 2/3 drop plays out linearly (since it's simply remarkably rare that a sperm gets thru to the egg...

Suddenly it might take an average of 7.5 months. If this is the case you suddenly have far more couples giving up, separating etc. Perhaps it's a bigger deal than we imagine.

I agree tho: you'd think it'd almost be a plus... less need for birth control! win!
When you're in such a situation, a lot of people don't realize how strange and self-involved it sounds to say things like that.

To me, it feels like "We have the best people! You don't work here, so you must not be very good. Therefore, I'm better than you."

That's obviously not what they mean, but it strikes chords of jealousy and social exclusion when shouted in a public square.

Twitter has always been known for their Super Ego Employees though. Work 12 hours a day, go home, run twelve miles, cook a gourmet dinner, have three dates (sleep with two of them), check email before bed, sleep for four hours, then start over the next day. (with oversharing online humblebrags every step of the way, obviously)
I agree, its the first post on my new blog. I have changed the contrast and its much better now. Let me know if you have any other feedback.
While we're on the subject, what are some good tools for receiving feedback, editing, and incorporating that feedback?

Draft (http://draftin.com) is pretty good for this, but not designed for larger scale projects like ebooks.

Leanpub is awesome for distributing early / unfinished copies and opening the doors for feedback, but as far as I know, does not have any built in tools for collecting and integrating feedback or edits (gramatical, writing structure, etc).

Any ideas?
I hope he is correct that the information that he claims to have extracted from NSA servers cannot be extracted from him against his will, but I don't assume that to be true in the absence of evidence. That's an extraordinary claim, so it requires extraordinary evidence.

That's actually not an extraordinary claim. It is standard operating procedure to teach people in the military how to do this, and the techniques are widely known. Here is how my brother (who received this training before serving in Vietnam explained it).

The first thing to realize is that you will break. When you break, you will say whatever you think will make the torturer happy. Once you have broken, you will no longer know what reality is.

So be a wimp. Pretend to break early. Feed the torturer enough interesting false information (with some truth mixed in) to get them interested. When you break for real they will continue to ask about the false leads, and you'll tell them whatever you imagine they want to hear. Nobody - including you - will have any way to sort out truth from lies.

This is, of course, just theory for me. However I'm assured that it works. And our standard training procedures include practice being tortured to drill in the point.
This is the principle of the air curtain†. The local Whole Foods Market operates air curtains as invisible exterior doors. When you walk through, you feel a strong down-rushing air current. Flying insects can't negotiate it.

†http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Air_door
It takes, on average, 3 months for a healthy couple to conceive. If the limiting factor is the number of sperm, then it would take 3 times as long if you produce 1/3 the sperm. That's nine months, but it could conceivably take over a year.
Nobody's saying it's impossible. The point is that news.arc is more or less just a little project that Paul Graham works on in his free time, and the amount of features that could be implemented vastly outstrips the supply of Paul Graham's free time, so not every possible feature is going to be implemented.
I hear a lot of people who reflexively disbelieve anything Obama says too: it's because they've decided he's a liar, not because he lacks the moral courage necessary to turn himself in for his admitted drug use.

Digression:

I do not myself care that Obama used drugs. I think those drugs should have been legal. I think it was courageous of Obama to admit to drug use even if he did so in a way that did not lead to legal repercussions.

But I also do not care that Snowden violated the law in his whistleblowing. I think his whistleblowing should have been legal. And I think it was courageous of Snowden to blow the whistle, even if he did so in a way that did not lead to the most severe legal repercussions possible.

End digression.

But no, I do not think that I made an analogy, nor that my observation was flawed. People who say, "I won't listen to Snowden unless he turns himself in" are not making an argument about Snowden's facts, they're making an argument about his character. They're saying, "I won't listen to Snowden because he isn't willing to suffer every possible negative consequence of his actions." It doesn't matter if his actions were related to the spying or not.

Those same people never demand the same of Obama (or any of the other government representatives). Those representatives can, and do, in fact, grant themselves and their allies full immunity from negative repercussions, and are still treated respectfully. This is hypocrisy on the part of those who demand that Snowden turn himself in.

And finally, if you want an example of Obama's less-than-perfect moral character that directly relates to the matter under discussion, there is his claim that he was against warrantless wiretaps, and campaigning as someone who was against them.
Even Windows 95 (and up to at least 7, I think, although I don't use them much) still have a window control widget on the left side. The app icon, when it was still drawn, would invoke a control menu or close if you double clicked. I'm pretty sure that behavior continued to work in Vista/7 even after the actual control (the icon) isn't being drawn.
what payment method besides CC would you like to see? Bitcoin? ACH?
No disrespect to the students involved, but that experiment has not been reproduced in a rigorous test environment as far as I'm aware. It would be an extraordinary result so I would be disinclined to accept it without extraordinary evidence.
Dropbox made a move to be the photo/video syncer of choice, so it's not completely out of the question that the next set of photo albums that proverbial you might be sending to proverbial parents is hosted on dropbox.com domain.
What's "it"? He's very carefully not saying what he "got wrong."

It also reads like someone trying hard not to just flat out say "I apologize." You've got two sentiments: 1) "if we get it wrong I would offer an apology" and 2) "we got it wrong", neither of which are an apology, but together imply an apology without actually saying it. Why? All it serves to do is make your apology seem not very ... apologetic. It's the "mistakes were made" approach.
Wow. I had no idea they were moving that fast (relative to us).
GERDA investigates the identity of the neutrino
I completely agree. I just wanted to put out one file from our framework and get some early feedback.

But Q.getter for example is just that easy. Try this:

1) Include Q.js

2) Take any function that gets stuff from any web server and calls one or more callbacks, let's say function X

3) Do this: X = Q.getter(X)

Now use your function :))))

See how it improves efficiency? It caches the result, it prevents multiple requests to the same thing, etc. Next you can tell it what to use for the cache, by another parameter to Q.getter. And finally you can hook up socket.io to update the cache on a push!
There's an odd series on youtube called H+[1] that is about implanted computers (and a killer virus) that has some interesting scenes that could apply to Google Glass and its ilk. Some are amusing but dangerous (husband watching sports while driving), and some get a bit creepy. Sadly, their picture of how the media would handle it is accurate[2].

The virus and information "appropriation" fears for this type of device are very real. If you think people went batshit crazy over some startup uploading address books or Apple keeping an unencrypted list of cell towers, then you haven't seen anything when the first glass virus or "they're tracking us scare" hits a congressional committee[3].

Its one thing for the twilight zone object on my desk to freak out. Its a lot more personal when I carry it in my pocket. Its beyond scary when its on my face.

1) http://www.youtube.com/user/HplusDigitalSeries sponsored by AT&T

2) Pundits with much fury and noise communicating no information

3) I suggest using OpenVMS as the OS
>that we've removed ourselves from so many evolutionary selective pressures.

we can't remove ourselves from evolutionary selective pressures. Some old go away, some new come, ie. the nature of such pressures just change, yet the selection continues. And as result there will always be the "fittest" specimen, it will just look and behave differently than the one for the previous version of selective pressures.

>the mean of our reproductive ability will drop.

with IVF, cloning, etc... that specific selective pressure may go away. On the other side - the ability to make money to pay for the best set of genes would make for nice new selective pressure.
Using Python to Teach About Finding the Digital Root
Can StatusPage.io, when it detects an outage, automatically have traffic routed to a static "emergency mode" page such as was discussed here (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6033147) a few days ago?
> Plant sprouts won't germinate when placed near a wireless router. Also sleeping with a cell phone next to your head apparently affects concentration the next day.

If I germinated a plant sprout in my room near a wireless router, would you stop going around making this claim?
Read this first as 'parents'
which is likely more of a true promotion than a lateral, all things considered.
That plants and wireless routers news article you refer to was bad reporting, nothing more.
Is the electric thing a gimmick, or is there science behind it? I sometimes dispose of annoying houseflies using a racquetball racket. No electricity, but fast moving nylon strings take care of the flies nicely.
Gistblog – a blogging platform for Github users
Top Considerations When Deciding to Partner Up
'not even our own'

Odd choice of words. Maybe he doesn't consider himself stateless after all.
Google Chrome on Vista doesn't have the app icon on the left hand side, but clicking in that area does drop down that menu.
Disney Research unveils augmented reality books
The increasing cyberization of the NDAA
Why did you feel the need to patent your technology?
Because two years ago Twitter raised at $8 bil valuation http://allthingsd.com/20110801/twitter-confirms-funding-with... and private market transactions have valued them in the neighborhood of $10 bil, which might have impacted the FMV for new hires.

If you're joining the company today, there better be significant growth story to justify 4x-5x growth from $10 bil baseline. If it's just 2x-3x, heck, joining GOOG, YHOO or AAPL might yield the same results if you timed it right.
It takes about a week to prepare for a vacation and about a week to recover. Trying to fit "okay, everybody: three, two, one, FORCED FUN TIME" into short time periods is more annoying than entire trips are worth.

Companies strip away between 1/3 and 3/4ths of your personhood (depending on the person) and autonomy in the world.

Try not to get stuck.
This campaign is highly hypocritical, since they don't care about users' privacy any more than Google does.