skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
What I find fascinating is how he is always quick to get back on his feet - and he isn't known for having a frugal lifestyle, yet there is always money.

(A hilarious take on this are his 'Kimble goes to Monaco' movies (German) [1][2], probably one of the most easily accessible stunts he did back in the days. His Usenet trolling [3] eclipses 4chan and gives an interesting insight in his mind…)

I probably wouldn't like him, but I'm quite fascinated by his lifestyle and ego that at least matches his size.

[1] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S5ZBZV8hFb4
[2] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dzuGrK-ZFA8
[3] http://babsi.de/KIMBLE.txt
Fair enough. I'd much rather have 3-4 breaks in an episode to surf around online/make popcorn/whatever instead of stuff like this in every show I watch: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oQYwFND7rHE
> Amazing post. I feel like CS courses should have requirements that make them take up some of this duty.

This is amazing post. I believe CS courses should require students to help moderate Stackoverflow.com posts.
There is a long, long history of other companies and products closing down, too.
March gSchool class open for registration
The next installment of gSchool, a 6 month developer training program, is now taking applications. This class will be star March 3, 2014 and will be taught in Boulder at the new Galvanize space at 1035 Pearl St.

For more information check out http://gschool.it/ruby.
That was my trick too, except it was moving in with my girlfriend instead of having a kid (knock on wood). She gets up at 6, and after 45 minutes of her stomping around getting ready for work there's no way I'm getting any more sleep. So I've just embraced it, and now I'm getting up at (around) 6 too.
Marketing iOS Apps Just Got A Lot Harder
Arguably this attitude is a contributor the problem of antibiotic resistance.
> Same reason you'd feel bad for anyone?

Do you feel bad for everyone that something bad happens to?

> Why feel bad for someone that suffers a natural consequence of inherited genes?

You feel bad for them because usually these people are dealt a bad hand in the cosmic game of cards. But this woman was dealt an unimaginably good hand, and then some bad things happened to her that tend to be correlated with the benefits of that fortune. But on the karmic balance, she still made out like a bandit.
How far has artificial intelligence reached
1. NO.

2. No.

3. no.

4. No

5. no

Only number 2 is correct grammatically. You can expand the list with other versions of no (nope, no-no) and with other punctuation (exclamation mark, ellipsis). There are easily 20 different versions of "no" I can think of from the top of my head. Clearly being able to pick the "no" that fits best is an expressive advantage. I agree that there are ways to express yourself precisely in correct/formal English, but it's a lot more verbose.

Language is really pliable. It's quite strange that "fuck no" offends only puritans but "uhm... no." can set off fireworks with nearly anybody. I guess we all just have to adapt.
Rejected from Y Combinator W13
The Pace of Technology Adoption is Speeding Up
OK, the language was inflammatory and I apologize for that bit. But the point stands: it's not a "marketing" problem that they are providing pseudo-diagnostic results. That's what the market wants, because they can't get it from the existing products under the existing regulatory structure.

One way to see this is yours and the FDA's: it's a fairness issue, and they need to play by the same rules. The other is the liberstartuptarian line that the regulatory structure is the thing actually at fault here. In this case, I tend to agree with the latter.

I mean, I had fun with this service, and I wasn't fooled by its marketing: they told me in essence that they'd give me their best guess at my traits and disease risks and drug susceptibilities, etc... And I bought it. A product that just gave me a bunch of genes and markers I could look up on wikipedia wouldn't have gotten my money.

So what's the answer here? Where's the regulatory answer for those of us who want to spit in a tube and get a fun HTML5 experience out of it? It doesn't seem like the FDA has one.
Please no. That would be worse than the existing situation; many of the problem cases on SO are CS students.
I think this was supposed to show the crap Stack Overflow power users have to deal with, but I think it more clearly shows some of the worst qualities of the Stack Overflow moderation system.

With a large caveat that moderators have the ability to scrub context from a problem question (e.g., comments) and user (e.g., deleting their past submissions), this is what appears to the outside world:

* A new user asks what they think is a dumb question.

* They get an answer. Still thinking it was a dumb question and not knowing how Stack Overflow works, attempts to blank out the question and request deletion.

* A user with 22k rep (i.e., a power user) goes in and rolls back the question.

* The asker rolls back the rollback.

At this point, the appropriate thing to do is flag the question for a moderator (important addendum: and move on). That doesn't happen. Instead:

* The power user—who really should know better—gets into a petty rollback war with the asker, and the question gets reverted 15 times in 5 minutes before another power user steps in and reverts it.

* The roll back wars stop, but an hour later a diamond moderator steps in and locks the question anyway. (Correction: I originally said it was unlocked 45 minutes later, but child comments correctly point out it was unlocked automatically a week later).

* The asker, who by all appearances has asked a single question, gets banned for 15 years.[1]

* The question, while not the best question ever, is decent enough and gets interesting answers but somehow gets a -35 score (edit: now down to -41 in the 20 minutes since I posted this comment), making it one of the worst questions on the site.[2] The comments[3] speculate that it was due to the edit war. So much for voting on a question instead of the person.

It's stuff like this that drives people up the wall when it comes to Stack Overflow and Stack Exchange, and it happens way too easily (I know I slipped into it a few times during my time as a Stack Exchange power user).

[1]: http://stackoverflow.com/users/2398036/user2398036

[2]: The questions page, when sorted by votes, only goes to -27 on page 410,195: http://stackoverflow.com/questions?page=410195&sort=votes

[3]: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/16630713/is-it-true-in-py...
>The people who get incorrect results and who then go and...

From a $100 test? I hope not. In my father's case, he wears sun block now. What he didn't do was run out and have every mole on his body removed because he's at greater risk of Melenoma.

>Just the stress of "shadows" is considerable.

I lived with that stress for a few months. I'll admit it was in the back of my mind, but I was fine.

Afterwards I was telling a friend about the ordeal and he actually said "Man, is there anything worse than being told you have something terrible wrong with you, living with that, then finding out it was a false alarm". Uhm, yeah. How about finding out it wasn't?
A friend of mine (who is a huge VMS fan) wrote this: http://www.freevms.net/
You may be getting too much light at night, which inhibits the amount of melatonin you generate. Try taking melatonin supplements. http://www.gwern.net/Melatonin
Are there analogous racks of equipment supporting the use (vs mining) of BitCoin for e.g. purchases? If so, where?
We interviewed a guy who had a startup and he definitely got rejected for it. I didn't agree at all and thought he'd be good, but other guys thought he "wouldn't be able to take directions since he's not in charge now." Bullshit. Oh well. People are dumb.
NZ Startup offering online communications platform
securing existing financial systems is useless so long as central banks can print money, bailout TBTF banks for brazen theft, sheer criminality, money laundering the whole lot and seize the assets of honest bank customers and investors to keep them afloat.

The growth of Bitcoin is nothing but a symptom of the lack of faith most of the world have in the policies of the US Govt, the Fed, their politicians and other Central banks in general. They have proven that they simply can't be trusted.
Richard, thanks again for the article. I posted a comment there regarding a recent goof up between two banks that resulted in "free money" for me. I'd love to get some insight into what might have really happened, and what, if anything, I might be able to do about it. Please feel free to reply here, there, or directly if you are interested.
BBC signs Memorandums of Understanding with open Internet organisations
When a doctor misinterprets the results, it can be mentally destructive for everyone, even if you're completely stable. When my dad's doctor told him he had cancer, it completely changed all of our family gatherings. Thankfully the diagnosis was wrong (it was some hospital paperwork mess-up), but in a short period of time, all of us were contemplating about losing him. I considered quitting my job so I could stay with him.

It's definitely a good thing to get a second opinion from another doctor, but misinformation does have the capability to crush everyone's lives.
More School, Less Spirit: Why Young People Are Drinking Less Alcohol
For what little it's worth am somewhat surprised at the naive misrepresentation shown by many here of what the FDA does, how they do it, and what they are actually expressing in this case.
That's a very interesting statement that can be read many, many ways... It may pay to clarify your background a little.

I'm a recent law graduate (- but I now work for the NSA...) researching warrant canaries (- and looking at ways to deal with these companies)

It may be a bit conspiracy-theory, but current affairs suggest it is certainly not outside the realms of possibility.
Given by background was UNIX, it certainly felt quirky, but it was very consistent. The "why the heck are there 4 of the same file" moment is a little odd. It was a good OS.
It's a reddit rage comic thing.
At the time many were wondering why the Amiga just didn't seem to catch on. The most common speculation was that it was marketed and perceived as a gaming machine. For some reason this was mutually exclusive with being a serious business machine.

It's really fascinating how far hardware acceleration was able to take that machine. It took a long time before I felt that a PC was even close in responsiveness to my Amiga. Though to be honest at the end it was equipped with a MC68060 which was no slouch. Using a metal cutter and some force it was also possible to squeeze a 3.5" hard drive in an A1200. But eventually the controller hardware broke down and would fry any hard drive connected to it. This was in 1998 so by that time it was pretty difficult to get spare parts if I remember correctly and to be honest the Pentium II I had at the time was a lot faster. So the Amiga went back into its box where it still lives today.

Some of my best programming memories are from assembly coding on that machine. It taught me so much and I doubt I would be here on Hacker News today if not for its creation.
So you're saying my app that helps hamsters connect via foursquare has a chance?
How SlidePay Built A Swiped Payments Service for Developers
Windows phone overtakes iOS in Latin America.
Magnus Carlsen - Flynn Effect
I suppose with an incrementing system, you could doll out the search space more efficiently. I imagine the more hash power you have, the more likely any two engines could randomly try the same nonce. (Assuming they were working off identical blocks). But it could be that there's a relationship between the way difficulty ratchets that keep the chances of testing the same nonces twice somewhat constant relative to the chance of finding a block.
Force yourself to do it a few times, and make sure that you wake up and get straight to doing your tasks. 11AM will come by and you'll have completed an obscene amount of things and realize that you're not even ready for lunch yet. That's a great feeling. Sure, it's possible at night, but I think one of the major things is the lack of distractions in the early morning. News is slow, reddit/hn is slow, it's more difficult to distract yourself when nobody else is awake.
He tries again at #19. What a shame...
It sounds like you misunderstand the 23andMe service. TESTS aren't conducted "through the internet" they're conducted in the 23andMe lab by analyzing your saliva and hence your DNA. Your RESULTS are available "through the internet", which is the equivalent of a clinic emailing you the results of your blood tests.

I think it's fair to question the validity of their technology (if the Illumina chips and matching algos are doing their job), but that's a different argument.
CP in a single site. Between sites, I haven't considered it too much.
The fact that MySQL and PostgreSQL are not included in any recent benchmarks still removes much of TPC's usefulness.
Oh no! Google+!! It's not nice of google to force it down my throat just because I'm using my Google Wallet Card connected to my Nexus 5!
Also see "Where to file your patent case" by Mark Lemley.
It was unlocked a week later.
To be honest, I think they have to do both things to get regulated under the FDA. The FDA is involved because they consider it a "device" that is "intended for use in the diagnosis of disease or other conditions." If they just did the analysis based on provided data, I don't think that would count as a device.
> 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.

I grew up in Dallas, SoftWarehouse (somebody else remembers that name, awesome)/CompUSA's original stomping grounds and this story kept coming back to me throughout the whole article. Windows 95 was considered revolutionary at the time, even to those of us lined up at the Lewisville, Texas store at 10:30PM to buy an operating system. (Incidentally, the first time I ever talked my dad into taking me to an overnight release of anything.) Windows 95 was the first operating system I ever saw non-technical people set out intentionally to buy and I spent months installing it for friends and family.

> We had theme music playing (start me up?) and some Microsoft video playing on our higher-end multi-media PCs.

Yep, it was "Start Me Up" by the Rolling Stones. If I remember correctly, the video was a demo reel of everything new in Windows 95 and was highlighted by the huge Start button popping in at the end of the video, then fading to black. It even had a snippet of the waving Windows 3.1 flag and the bear from the "Help / About" Easter Egg hidden in 3.1.
It's not about avoiding the truth, it's about looking for the truth in a specified area but finding something that's not really a truth but appears as such. I think it's important to weigh the pros and cons of something like this. You're likely to gain information that would likely help you improve your quality of life and make informed decisions for possible next steps, but what happens when this information is available to others you don't want to see yet [1]?

It's not just solving a problem of which one is unaware, but it's the possibility of not being able to solve this problem or prevent its occurrence. [Climate change on the other hand is actionable.]

What about the fact that now there's a giant database that's probably not as anonymized as we'd like it to be, which has the potential to be accessed by many government/national/security agencies and hackers that can use the information against us?

[1]https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6796539
False positives can have a ton of very negative effects. There is the monetary cost of further testing, which can be high depending on what is being tested for, and most importantly, telling a bunch of people that they have some particular disease when they don't is really bad. They may become more stressed, which can bring about a whole host of problems, people might start telling family members, and start getting their affairs in order, they might make different financial decisions based on these false results. And its actually very difficult to administer these tests in a way that doesn't results in way way more false positives than true positives.
What you've described is not at all what happened.

> Still thinking it was a dumb question and not knowing how Stack Overflow works, attempts to blank out the question and request deletion.

No, the user rewrote his entire post to

ok i got my answers, we can delete this post now, i am not
helping google users.

He then added

IF YOU GUYS ROLL BACK AGAIN, I AM CHANGING MY NICK TO
" ALLAH AKBAR " AND YOU WILL ALL LOOK LIKE JIHAD CLUB
MEMBERS OF OSAMA BIN LADEN.

That's hardly "requesting deletion".

> a diamond moderator steps in and locks the question anyway, only to unlock it 45 minutes later.

The post was unlocked a week later by Stack Overflow's robot ("Community"), automatically.

> At this point, the appropriate thing to do is flag the question for a moderator. That doesn't happen.

You don't know that. In fact, I'm willing to wager that the user flagged the question immediately but it took an hour for one of the moderators to get around to it. The "review queue" on Stack Overflow is enormous; it takes a long time for moderators to get to some flags.

Disclaimer: I'm a moderator on a smaller Stack Exchange site.
The TOS is irrelevant if they're elsewhere making diagnostic claims.
It's trying to do word-by-word diffing, since English isn't code, but, unlike Word and other tools that attempt to do that, it doesn't have e.g. cursor movement history to make the editing sane. Thus, that's what you get.

This is a similar problem to what you have on other diff programs, by the way. Any sane diff tool will give you an equivalent diff to any other one, and it'll give you an equivalent minimal diff as well, but the human friendliness of the diff varies widely on the algorithms selected. The best tools I've seen use some source awareness to give you a diff that can pick up that e.g. you removed an "if" guard and then unintendented its child block. The worst do a greedy linear scan to make their patches. Most tools I use (especially ones based on a recursive algorithm) are in the middle.
False positives (and even true negatives) have non-zero cost.

http://articles.mercola.com/sites/articles/archive/2013/03/0...
Do you live in the U.S.? If so, it's likely that any property that you or you employer own was also taken from the Indians at some point. Maybe your ancestors even lived off slave labor. Are you offering to give back your own ill-gotten wealth?
One could argue that the credit card companies are more entitled to my purchase history as they are the ones providing the line of credit. Google is simply doing a user allowed MITM "attack" in this case.
ChessBase switches from Silverlight to HTML5/JS
I've never adopted the "bless you" sneeze habit, but people think I'm being impolite. In fact, every time someone sneezes I feel the pressure to say it, but refuse to (it's just too meaningless / weird).
As a layer of security this is great addition. But I would like to see an option to also employ a biometric for identification.

Passwords and keys are great, but their weakness is that they can be shared.
I wonder why people carry all that plastic around instead of just entering their phone number at the register. The cards are mostly unneccesary
Is Twitter Stock Poised for 80% Plunge?
Coursera: Creative, Serious and Playful Science of Android Apps
If I may drool a little, you guys represent the heart of Hacker News. Insightful summary, mentioning that somewhere somebody gave such a talk. As I was reading the first comment I was silently cheering for "a librarian's follow-up", and there it was!
If your basic take-home pregnancy test is FDA regulated, why should 23andMe be exempt? Or would you prefer a world where all of these tests were unregulated?

That's an outstanding comparison, one I wish I had thought of.
Other than the absurd "cash for clunkers" program, the government here is fairly friendly to us old car drivers. For example, a couple days ago was the last time I have to have my truck emissions tested. At 25 years of age it drops off the radar.

My 40 year old Dodge now qualifies for "collector plates" where, for a one time fee, I never have to pay the annual registration fee again.

And, of course, there is quite an industry in the US providing repair/maintenance parts for those old machines for far less money than parts for new cars. It's really quite nice if you like having those cars.
Does anybody have a recommendation for a win/linux IDE that supports: c/c++/c#, java, python? I've considered Code::Blocks or one of Jetbrain's IDE products but never had the time to try them out.
above link is NSFW

Did not know that when clicked.
I had a moderator change the wording of my writing because they didn't like the way I was doing it, it looked a lot like what was going on here. They revised it such that it partially lost the meaning of what I was saying, but also just didn't come across the way I had intended to write it - so I changed it back. Then they changed it back. Then I changed it back again. Then they changed it back. Finally I changed the post back to my own wording, and I guess the moderator said "fuck it" because the changes stopped.

The mods seem a little power hungry. If you're a SO mod, I'm sure you've got better things to do than correct tiny grammatical quirks that make people who they are - try focusing on the bigger issues.

Edit: Ahh, mine wasn't quite this dramatic - I didn't notice how many revisions there were. This is hilarious and sad.
Really? Fraud is simply lying for gain. I see a ton of that in the article. Maybe it hasn't been prosecuted, but that doesn't make it legal.
Ellipses are a really good example of a case where the meaning is much different in chat than in standard written English. My favorite is the double dot, .. , which I often use with some friends because a period seems formal or angry, whereas a double dot conveys a thought/sentence but in a more open ended sense. I wouldn't chat with someone in a professional context in that way though, and I have no idea how common that particular usage is even. I think it's kind of like handwriting where people and groups develop a style and then it becomes second nature and hard to explain.
> I'm assuming tpc.org doesn't include them because open source OLTP isn't as performant.

That assumption is incorrect. The open source databases are not included due to nobody having spent the time and money necessary to be included there. Sun did it for PostgreSQL many years ago and got decent results.
Appearing to be incompetent in some circumstances may be a pretty good cover. If you are a security guard at an art museum, and buddies with some art thieves, then it might be in your best interest to get yourself a reputation for sleeping on the job.
Because Microsoft/Dropbox/etc don't want your info?
Good point, though home births are less than 1% of all US births. And, home births may still involve a later check-up with a doctor or hospital where screening happens. (Those who choose home birth for reasons other than genetic privacy might be happy to have the screening.)
Kickstarter Seasonality with Kicktraq and awk
So if he gotten over 50% of stolen funds as his `fee` he could end up ahead? But yeah, given that he paid back half of stolen funds this angle does look weak.

Is it possible to launder stolen bitcoins on Chinese exchange?