skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The pain of removing jquery is indeed a problem. So I can see the point from that angle. But the bigger point, about how much less assuming they are just by virtue of being included... that's the distinction I cared most about.
The FDA is not trying to prevent you from doing this with your own genes. They are trying to prevent unlawful marketing of a medical device. Despite the similarities that you point out, these are in fact quite different things.
Would you consider publishing in an actual ebook format, that reflows? I read on Kindles, which usually don't do well with pdf's. That the pdf's also have some sort of "security" makes me think I can't convert it myself as well.
Magic sentence: "For entertainment purposes only"
> Am I the only one this seems completely reasonable to?

No. I'm not actually a big pro-regulation kind of guy. But there is a knee-jerk reaction favoring tech-ish companies getting regulatory compliance letters that I don't share. Most of the time, it just seems like the agency in question doing its statutorily-sanctioned job. It's not like sympathetic cases where a company falls into a Kafka-esque quagmire of obscure regulations that only tangentially apply to what they're doing. When I see cases like this, or AirBnB, or Uber, they fall directly within the scope of the relevant agency, and the action being taken is justified on the same basis that justifies the agency itself.
As the author of the guide in question, I feel I should speak up here. Neither frequentist or Bayesian statistics is "just right". It is 100% dependent on the user and whether they use/interpret the quantities correctly. There are both really good and horrible Frequentist and Bayesian statisticians. To imply one or the other is "better" is incorrect and disingenuous. Just my 2 cents.
> If they get an approval from FDA, is it going to change their data processing logic or data set?

It (or the marketing) would have to change if they don't get an approval. That's the whole point.
I worked at a large computer chain (R.I.P. Softwarehouse / CompUSA) from 1993 - 1996 and had been building clone computers for businesses from 1990-1993. I remember how this played out very well.

At the time, IBM had sent in scores of company reps to train up our floor staff on the advantages of OS/2 over the always-soon-to-be-released Chicago. They did a good job getting all of us to "drink the Kool Aid". I received a free (not pirated, promotional) copy of blue OS/2 Warp 3.0. It was a fantastic operating system for running a DOS based multi-node Telegard BBS and it did well with Win16 applications.

The impact of Windows 95 coming on the scene, though, is difficult to fully appreciate unless you were there. We had been selling pre-orders for months and there were a myriad of promos. I remember some of those preorders were sold under the threat that there wouldn't be enough copies to go around on release day. I had been playing with pirated copies of the betas of Windows 95 for the prior two months. Even in its beta form, it ran circles around Windows 3.0/3.1 in terms of reliability. I even remember reloading my PC with the most recent beta after release because a DOS application I used ran more reliably in it than in the RTM code.

Then launch day came. It was unlike anything I had ever seen in terms of a software release. We closed up at 9:00 PM and re-opened at 12:00 midnight to a line of customers that went around the building --- A line of customers ... for an operating system. We joked at the time that "Windows really was that bad". There were tons of additional promotions to ensure people came and lined up--Some RAM / hard disks selling under "cost" and others. And the atmosphere of the store felt like a party. We had theme music playing (start me up?) and some Microsoft video playing on our higher-end multi-media PCs. It was obvious to us, on the floor, trained by IBMs marketing machine, that Warp died that day.

As an anecdote to the stories about IBMs marketing being a little off: I remember around the release of Warp 4.0 I saw an advertisement at a subway station something along the lines of "Warp Obliterated my PC!"-- that tagline, evidently, meant to be some hip new use of the word obliterated.
WRT to libertarianism, you can't have a free market if virtually all of one side of a contract are too ignorant to participate rationally. If its designed to not be a free market and doesn't involve rational decisions, there's not much libertarian commentary on the topic. That political stance is orthogonal to the discussion.
Technology didn't kill middle class jobs, public policy did
That's what some people say, but the bible is rather clear about abortion not being the same as murder. The punishment for killing an unborn baby is a fine paid to the parents.
Government books $41.3 billion in student loan profits
> Wallets are incredibly poor judges of medical efficacy.

So are bureaucrats who are subject to the influence of lobbyists. Snake-oil salesmen and peddlers of alternative medicine do sell their stuff under the current system, while true innovation is crushed, as is evident in this case.
> The work that they're doing to show how genetic features correlate with the observed tastes, behaviors, and propensities of users of the site seems remarkably useful.

Oh man are you going to be upset when we regulate all that out of existence. Trying to correlate genetics to tastes, behaviors, and propensities, while scientifically interesting, is a total political non-starter.

> The FDA is doing exactly what it always does, stifling innovation while justifying its existence using the voluminous laws created by politicians justifying their existences.

This action is the FDA acting within the core of its jurisdiction, and within the core of a law that was passed with tremendous public support. This is not to say that agencies don't do what you're describing, but in this case, it's pretty much the FDA's job to control this sort of "innovation."
I find it disturbing that everyone in the demo has a shortage on sleep.
Which is the same for most (if not all) of my colleagues. They all sleep (much) too little for it to be healthy.

Sleep and excercise are easily forgotten or given up when 'free time' gets harder to achieve, while both have so many benefits (or rather, none of the disadvantages that too little of both have).
No the FDA is saying that they need to see proof that the test has a high level of accuracy and isn't just snake oil. 23andMe tried saying "you shouldn't actually use our test for diagnosing disease" to which the FDA said "then stop marketing it that way."

23andMe both wants to _say_ they have a totally accurate test, but doesn't want to pay to do the testing to prove it is totally accurate. The FDA is saying you can't have it both ways.
503 on the code for me.
+1 for the MacGyver reference.
Try 'Scid vs PC' or ChessX. You'll get a good-looking GUI, plus some cool database features.

http://scidvspc.sourceforge.net/

http://chessx.sourceforge.net/

A cool feature people may not know about - many of these GUIs allow you to play two engines against each other. It's fun to watch two strong programs slug it out. :)
> Every country has a single education system

The UK doesn't.
Great! I think I have a couple use cases for this, and I like how small it is. I notice that it doesn't do too well with the ' character. I think its probably an escaping issue. I commented on a github issue.
If you trust Yahoo!, you can try proxying requests via Yahoo Pipes for Cross-Origin support. Not that I recommend it, though.

[1]: https://gist.github.com/psychemedia/316660
No, that's not the null hypothesis. The NSA does not dabble in digital currency, nor does it release vast complex systems with huge bugs in them
What we learn from computer science about making the best decisions
This sounds like a false dichotomy:
"The government has a legitimate responsibility to ensure that medical technology is used and marketed responsibly"

So either the government ensures the above or it does not get accomplished? There are no third parties that could take this on? I find that hard to believe.
Yes, I know it's only a lmgtfy away, but what's GPA? Some American thing?
The Reluctant Programmer: Feminism and Tech
Of course they are lucky. Luck is not the only thing, you really do need something useful and it has to work so you need to know your audience, but luck is a big part of it.

You have to be in the right place at the right time. That is all luck.
For every user of 23andme who is well-informed enough to know that the information is not reliable, experience shows that there will be another who is not.

The funny thing here, is that barring lab errors, which I think are highly unlikely unless they are being incredibly shoddy, which would take effort, the information that 23andMe provides is very reliable. Now it is debatable as to whether the individual's interpretation is (for example in the Alcohol Dehydrogenase gene, many, many, many caucasian users don't bother to read that the test is only informative for asians, but it's definitely there, in bold letters, etc.)

Could you explain a scenario where basing life and health decisions on 23andMe's product could lead to sickness and death? Maybe it's "because I'm sophisticated", but this biochemist can't really see that happening.
0 and 1 are dangerous probabilities in science
Indeed... I typed the project's description, and this is what I got:

AutoJS is a library topic continuenuously authorocomplete termxtarea backsed one a stillandard dictionary. Dictionary has buteen deviceviced basedd on researchers and linguistic methods, keeping an eye on millionnimizing the siteze of the likeibrary. Complete productject is writertin in plain js, with no externalnal devicependencies, and siteze is reduced to mere 6 kb.
You would think that before putting in so much money, time, and effort into 23andMe they would have had discussions with the FDA and actually responded with more information. I'm amazed that it didn't happen.
> Are you seriously suggesting that the assumptions behind Cox's Theorem can reasonably be challenged?

Sure: probability is continuous.
There's no rule that js has to go in the head. It's more common for it not be these days.
That's what happens when you're working on a product that is, for all intents and purposes, still in alpha status nevermind beta. Google can't offer guidance because the API and best practices haven't been nailed down yet.

You can't even argue that Google perhaps debuted Glass too early, because it's still an invite-only device. It's the chicken-egg problem with bootstrapping a new device ecosystem. Google needs testers and developers to finish the product, but testers and developers need a finished product to work with.
Planning Your Mobile App In Four Easy Steps
Investigating Lunar rhythms with a Zeo sleep tracker
"A Few Useful Things to Know about Machine Learning"
FDA Tells 23andMe to Halt DNA Test Service
I grew up in a tiny village in rural Virginia (maybe 50 houses in total) and we had no address. Mail got delivered to a post office box that was conveniently in the post office next door. For UPS deliveries, we would literally give them the address, "Next to the post office, on the east side."

Every so often we'd get a delivery driver with a poor sense of direction, and he'd give the package to the people on the other side of the post office instead. Aside from that, it worked great.
23&me isn't particularly innovative...They just took existing genotyping and made it available to everyone in pretty graphs
No.

There are always questions of why the startup failed, what your role was, and what could have made it succeed. Your answers could save you or sink you. But most people have at least some sense of the ups and downs of startups, so it will not automatically remove you from consideration for almost anything.

They will want to see that you have learned something. They also will want to know your personal reaction to the experience, and whether that will make you a more or less stable hire. Maybe your failure made you hungry for another startup, more fired up to succeed. Maybe it burned you out on startups, and you now want a stable corporate gig for a few years. Maybe something in between.

As long as your answers, your personality, and current desires match their needs, you can get a job. Maybe you are not a match for every job out there, but nobody ever is.
Neat design indeed. I believe there's a room for design in health reporting for patients so they can understand the situation better. Did you submit this design to Dribbble? I think designers can learn from your work.
sxsw? More for pure design but they had some good tech talks last year.
Well I suppose that now that all the food is safe to eat, they've got time on their hands to take down the sinister corporate bad guys behind 23&Me.
I don't believe that's coincidental: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/50_Cent_Party
I dumpster dive because I think its utterly criminal to throw away perfectly working equipment. Revive, recycle, re-use!

{A whole lotta oil-debt can be paid back with a return trip from the dump and a bit of patience..}

The info-gathering nature of dumpster diving still impresses me, 40 years later. Peoples' trash-cans are an open door to their rear-end, if ya know what I mean .. Don't forget to WIPE, people!
"I am a great believer in luck, and I find the harder I work, the more I have of it."

-- Thomas Jefferson (apocryphal; see [0])

[0]: http://www.monticello.org/site/research-and-collections/i-am...
Without Module Definition "re-use" in JavaScript is just hand-waving. It amounts to re-use of HTML, and nothing more.
It's generally considered good form to read the article before posting. It's clear from the notice that the FDA known about 23andMe from the outset.
Awesome. Thanks for the suggestion.
If the FDA were useful, it would be helping 23andMe rather than trying to take them down.

It's not their mandate to help 23andme, their mandate is to protect the general public. Their enforcement letter clearly spells it out: the FDA had had concerns about the validity of some of their tests, and they gave 23andme opportunity to address there. Since they failed, the FDA is taking action.
Always happy to see new input sanitization libraries, but most don't deal with the especially difficult problem of safe subsets of HTML. i.e. How to accept html from an untrusted source, apply whitelisted tag/attribute combinations, and ensure safe output.
Hey there, very interesting story. Can I ask you if you have any similar ideas (for a web developer)? I am in a full time job (finance) and I can't get any attentions from startups even though I am sure I have good junior coding skills (python). However, I can't seem to come up with anything even remotely interesting to the startup crowd (I guess that's because I am a finance dude?).
I seem to have missed the FAQ - thanks for the pointer. For me, a lot of value would be derived by having the ability for any user to send us a video of the problems / questions they're having (e.g., how do I do X, etc).

I realise that Lookback is mainly geared towards internal testing but it should be easy to aid the support workflow, too. Capturing the status bar is the only private API you actually need to use to fully recreate the screen, although I don't know whether the team behind Lookback is using additional priv APIs for other parts.
I was referring to Carioca's view, which I also learned in school.

There's another one, too, over which I've had internet arguments before. In that one, the USA and Canada are "America", while the rest of the continent is "South America".

The given reason was: it is not called "United States of North America", it's just "America". The rest of the countries are south from there, so all that region is "South America". I don't know how extended this vision is, though (nor I know where it fits Mexico).
> If the control isn't otherwise similar enough to isolate the hypothesis that we actually want to test (e.g. 'art makes you smart'), then it might as well not be randomised, with respect to that specific hypothesis?

No, the randomization still serves for causal inference, it just means the identified causes are a mix of potential causes like direct effect of art and expectancy effects. If one wants to make the claim that the net effect _d_=0.09 (IIRC) was purely the work of the art/tutoring and nothing else, that would only be partially supported by the results, yeah.
If you read the article, you will see the large paragraph outlining the dozens of in-person meetings and hundreds of emails that the FDA has exchanged with 23andMe.

What you are noticing is a government agency that has exercised restraint for years, not one that was aloof.
That is a fairly confusing title.
Well if the 911 system is already broken, maybe an app could try to fix it.

I think the problem with calling 911 is that it is free when it should cost enough money to weed out the noise.

If a call to 911 cost $100, how many people would be calling in about their tooth-aches/loneliness (http://money.cnn.com/2009/08/24/news/economy/healthcare_911_...)? Increase the dollar amount until the number = 0.

An app that allowed you to purchase credit before you had a crisis (or came with $100 of credit and you had to top off after an emergency) might help reduce that noise.

What if the $ went directly to the first responder?

There are ways to solve these problems.
That's partly how they bungled Wave, IMO. Too much hype too early.

But in this case, all they need to do is announce a price, release date, and all the improvements that the consumer version will have, and people will be interested. As long as there's no direct competition, the opportunity remains.
No-one fully understands their programs; even if you understand all the code, few people understand the language implementation, fewer understand the underlying OS libraries, and I'm pretty sure no-one understands every level of the hardware (I've seen guys who were lead on some section of an Intel processor say they didn't understand the whole thing).

Now sure, you can say that when a single code project becomes too big to understand then it should be split up into a bunch of libraries, or a bunch of independent services. Which is true up to a point. But I find there's value in having a more granular continuum of decoupling scales - method, class, package, module, library, service - which OO makes possible. And I'd argue that many of these kind of libraries and services - particularly the REST style - are inherently OO.
Well, you should work on your technical skills because that is the right thing to do and because it helps you in the long run, but the parent poster is obviously right - if you're looking at the effect on actual hiring decision the networking skills will have a larger effect anyways.

Spent 3 years becoming an expert in technology X? Even if the whole job offer is about X, you'll have only slightly better chances than the guy who had a glimpse at X 3 years ago - the interview process simply has no way to find out how much better you are at X.

But if you were at a final round with a few other qualified candidates (maybe better qualified than you, maybe worse qualified - noone can tell, they can only tell that they're qualified) - and you're 'the grumpy one' or someone else has a good emotional contact - then that will be a decisive factor. Even if the decisionmakers deny this; and even if the decisionmakers are informed about such biases and actively try to counter them - research shows that they still do decide that way, it's simply human to do so.

Completely stupid irrelevant factors (such as being taller) do have a relationship to the offers you get and how much people are willing to pay you. That's how life works; ignoring it won't change it; denying it won't change it; saying that it's not fair (it isn't) won't change it - you may just learn about it and try to exploit it. And 'work on your "being a guy that a CTO would want to have a beer with" skill' is solid advice on how to try to exploit how reality really works.
I went through the interview process with a major startup and was basically told the same thing. "You will get bored as a software engineer for our company. Looking at your past history, you are probably not a good fit for this position. We like you and are more than happy to support you in any way we can with your next endeavor."

Leaves you with mixed emotions.
PwnedList - Alerts for accounts compromised in attacks
> If the FDA were useful, it would be helping 23andMe rather than trying to take them down.

FDA has tried to help 23andme. 23andme declined the help.
The Bitcoin Foundation should definitely own the TM. I'm not surprised that the trolls have appeared.
A books.google.com search found "fire an event" in the 1979 "La Conception des systèmes répartis" (p.115) at http://books.google.com/books?id=1VogAQAAIAAJ&q=%22fire+an+e... . The quote snippet is:

"Control refers to any set of rules describing conditions under which processes may fire an event or switch to a new state."

Other sources confirm that there is a 1979 book with that title. (Google Books sometimes has a dramatically wrong year.) However, I don't have access to the book to verify it for myself.

There's also a interesting reference from particle physics; "Figure 6 shows the number of tubes that fire an event vs. the number of photo- electrons.", Proceedings of Workshop on "Weak Interactions and Related Topics", December 13-15, 1979. While not the same, it feels like a similar construction.

Otherwise, the only relevant hits for that phrase are post-1990.
It's doing-the-right-things plus luck.

You do need to be good at marketing. You do need to get product-market-fit quickly. You do need to have a good product, and so on.

The better you are at these things, the less luck is required. But you cannot get the amount of luck needed down to zero.
That doesn't actually apply here, though it might if it were worded: 'Are all successful startups just lucky?'. 'No' is not a valid answer to a 'What if?' question.
Tiny ASCII-Fluid-Simulator (video/youtube)
http://ioccc.org/2012/endoh1/hint.html
let me guess, you're an investor in 23andMe?
It's just a reflection of what is happening in the world. Like it or not, Bitcoin is a big deal now.
There is also http://delight.io
Isn't that an effect, not neccesarily a side effect?
Convenience and reliability. Lots of people have stories of cabs never showing up, or taking forever, or barking and grumbling when offered a credit card as payment. Particularly if you're in a hurry, paying with a credit card also seems to take a lifetime – at least with cabs that use the paper carbon copy method (which they do here in Seattle).

Uber experience: you open the app and see on a map where all the cars are. It tells you exactly how many minutes the closest cab will take to arrive. When you arrive at your destination, you just hop out. The app knows what credit cards your account has on file and will just charge the one marked as the default or the one you've selected. There's no tipping. If you're in a hurry, not having to wait around to sort out the payment is a big deal.

I've never had an Uber not arrive or arrive exceptionally late; when I've had a less than stellar experience, customer service has been extremely responsive and offers refunds. On a recent trip, the driver made a poor route choice just because there ended up being a bunch of construction downtown, so it ended up taking longer than it could have. Customer service adjusted my fare to what it would have been had we taken the optimal route.
no. the symptom checker is just a document. it is a not a device or an ingested substance.
AWS re:Invent was a really good one. I attended the 2012 and even got to speak, I missed the 2013. 2012 had good content and was well organized. I didn't make 2013 so not sure about this year.
We're working on a version of the library that is AppStore-safe, e g for the bug reporting use case. It's not nearly as performant, but works good enough, at least in iOS 7.

Thanks for all the private API hints :D