skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
As an employer I'm quite cautious about hiring people who previously ran one or more startups. The chances they've got the "Entrepreneurial Bug".

The obvious advantage is that it's quite likely that they'll be well rounded, knows different stuff and got lots of experience in the world, there are tons of great skills especially found in founders.

At the same time the chances are he/she will be leaving the company after 9 months, because she just discovered "the next best thing" and want to work on that because she saved some money in the last 9 months. I try to talk the person and understand what's the long term plan, whether they are actually committed or just want to take a breath and get financially better in between projects.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but the average user buying $1 apps on a whim is a different audience than the user willing to spend >$5 on an app.

I've purchased $5+ apps that I've binned after not being impressed (even after being swayed by reviews). But I'm regularly buying strategy games that are priced that way.
By the author's logic, once you're done with building your website, you should remove the browser from below your website.
Sure, lets make emergency responders only available to people that can afford it.

Your husband is beating you, but you don't have your own income? Sorry, out of luck. You're poor and unemployed and having a health emergency that will probably already bankrupt you? Lets throw an extra charge on top of there just for you.
Oh man are you going to be upset when we regulate all that out of existence

I guess you're being sarcastic, but it's not that I fear progress will stop. What I see instead is a great deal of needless friction that prevents efficiency. When you consider how innovations and businesses build on one another over the years - any friction in the process compounds the amount of time for "the future" to be here.

I doubt anyone here on HN doesn't realize that in the future our genetic code will be understood and manipulated like we do with computers and software today. Will this golden age of genetic self determination be 50 years from now or 500 years from now?

Roadblocks we put in front of progress now will mean many decades of delay for the advances down the road that are dependent upon today's advances and the intervening thousands of others.

law that was passed with tremendous public support

Doesn't at all make it right, good, or mean I won't bitch about it.
Eating outside? You mean like eating at restaurants/fast food instead of cooking it yourself?
The Register on Salesforce hackathon
As you said, we don't know.

I moved to ghost 2 days ago and for the moment, it works quite nicely!
Show HN: lsys - realtime lsystems on canvas
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

That's the point of certification - is the process reliable? Are the warnings clear? I won't cast any aspersions on the product (because it's pretty awesome), but I do see these as risks and requirements.

Could you explain a scenario where basing life and health decisions on 23andMe's product could lead to sickness and death?

"I've got all these symptoms of diabetes. But 23andme said I had a low risk! It's probably nothing. Guess I'll eat another pie."

If 23andme has shoddy lab practices, or unclear explanation of the limitation of their testing, then that's a risk. The process of certification involves managing that risk.
Hey! You should check out Elixir Sulfanimide! It prevents infections, but it's available over the counter. So easy! And it's from a Massengill, an established pharma company, so you can trust it!

So actually you can't buy elixir sulfanimide anymore. Because it was poisonous. It resulted in more than 100 deaths in 1937. This was before the FD&C Act, requiring safety tests. The founder of Massengill refused to take responsibility for the results: "We have been supplying a legitimate professional demand and not once could have foreseen the unlooked-for results. I do not feel that there was any responsibility on our part." It should be noted that there was a sulfanimide craze on at the time, as the first commercial antibiotic, so there was much money to be made.

One woman wrote to President Roosevelt, about her dead daughter: "The first time I ever had occasion to call in a doctor for [Joan] and she was given Elixir of Sulfanilamide. All that is left to us is the caring for her little grave. Even the memory of her is mixed with sorrow for we can see her little body tossing to and fro and hear that little voice screaming with pain and it seems as though it would drive me insane. ... It is my plea that you will take steps to prevent such sales of drugs that will take little lives and leave such suffering behind and such a bleak outlook on the future as I have tonight."

Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elixir_sulfanilamide

Massengill paid a minimum fine and continued on until it was acquired in 1971.

I don't mind that we have set up an agency to make sure that medical products and devices are safe to use and do what they say they are going to do. It's far more efficient than having to do it individually. And there's always, evidently, people who won't, because they trust their doctor or the brand. And, being medical products and devices, sometimes those people or their loved ones die.
Here's one I've run into a lot that I haven't seen mentioned yet:

- Any location within a US state will also be within a county.

Virginia treats incorporated cities as county-level entities which are not part of any county. It looks like Baltimore, MD is the only example of this outside Virginia, and so it's not encountered often.

When people ask about county, giving the independent city is generally the "correct" answer, but sometimes it leads to confusion. I remember having to explain to a loan officer, who you'd think would be up on the details of the states they operate in, that my "county" was in fact "Alexandria City" and there wasn't any other sort of answer they could get.

Just recently, I recall checking out some project linked here on HN which needed to know what county I lived in. I currently live in Fairfax County in a zip code that also includes the City of Fairfax. After giving it my zip code, it then gave me two choices for county: "Fairfax" and "Fairfax".
Xylophone was the one for me where negative space was most helpful; notice how most of the letterforms are bordered by a straight edge on one side and a curved one, always at x-height, on the other.
>>[...] 80 percent of MOOC students come from the wealthiest and most well educated 6 percent of the population,” the authors of the paper write.

What about the 20% that didn't have undergraduate degrees? No doubt there's a lot of skew here, but the focus should be on this 20% that (now) have the opportunity to take a variety of free online courses. Perhaps this 20% wouldn't have had a chance otherwise.

Otherwise, the article is right that MOOCs could expand their reach further, but I think this is a great start and optimistic news. If people thought that early-adopter MOOC audiences would be primarily comprised of non-degree holders then now would be a great time to re-examine assumptions.
True, but I wouldn’t doubt most facilities already have this information in a spreadsheet.

I believe hGraph is just taking a stab at presenting this data in a different way, one that could be more useful to patients that shudder at the thought of having to look at a spreadsheet.

If good explanations are shown along with the factors and questionable factors – such as weight – have enough context, this could be more than just a neat way to show the health of someone.
My brother once sent a letter by post to a friend; from Yokohama, Japan to suburban Sydney, Australia. He couldn't remember his friends address but he remember the directions to walk from his friend's local post office; so that's what he wrote as the address, the instructions to walk from the post office to his friend's house. The letter was delivered just fine. In fact the story of its delivery made the front page of a national newspaper (Column 8, Sydney Morning Herald, national edition).
Byutifu - A Kaleidoscope for SoundCloud. Built by a friend (Firefox/Chrome)
It's not a prototype. It's a business that makes money.

Yeah, if it makes more money, some day, I might consider dedicating some of it to replacing the CSS framework. But it's really, really far down on my list of things to do. There are lots of improvements I could make to the UI without ditching the framework, for instance, that would add real value to my customers, and/or increase conversions.
Crap... I better buy the test for an older relative (84) like I have been saying I would, pronto.

Before the FDA gets its hooks into it and the price goes up...
I've posted this here before, but a 25-year old Amiga 2000 still provides background music at home (when the wife is away). A couple hundred megs of Mod files provide hours of nostalgia. Some people meditate with incense, Amigans ruminate to the sounds of 80s tracker beats.

Here's a sample of a great mod: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dZWgXiVJbpI - albeit from a lame demo. There are thousands more available at aminet.net.

I've tried replacing the machine with emulation, but there is something comforting in seeing the old girl in the corner singing as well as she ever did. Perhaps devices living beyond their natural lifespans comforts man's worries over his own perishable nature.
Find the $8.5 Trillion the Pentagon Can’t Account For
>Hell, didn't Angelina Jolie have a prophylactic double mastectomy?

The placement of this in your post seems to imply you think she was being stupid with her decision, or thought it was in some way "hip" to do. She has a family history of breast and ovarian cancer and has a defective gene that made her chances of getting breast cancer 87%. As she's pretty wealthy, I'm going to guess that she has pretty good doctors and didn't make the decision on a whim. Also since it was major surgery I'm going to also assume some doctor saw her at least once before the surgery and s/he didn't just take her word for it that the surgery was in her best interest.

Yes there are plenty of people who don't have a clue when it comes to medical issues, but I'm not sure why you felt the need to lump Jolie in with your other examples.
It is only reasonable in the context of the standard operating procedures of the FDA. As this is essentially prior restraint upon speech and/or trade, it is unreasonable, but no more unreasonable than anything else the FDA does.

Ideally, the FDA would have independently-generated evidence indicating that the product in question is unreasonably dangerous or ineffective for some intended purpose before issuing a cease and desist order. Instead, they simply assume guilt and place the burden of proof upon the vendor.

Given that the FDA has vastly more resources than 23andMe, and companies like it, this makes the FDA seem like bullies against microbusinesses, and like the captured servants of agricultural and pharmaceutical megabusinesses.
broostoryco, you are hellbanned.
I used to belong to the IEEE, I've not been overly impressed with them of late, especially some of their pro-patent nonsense, like when they were saying that software isn't math. They then went on to describe what is essentially the successor function while claiming it's only meaningful in programming and not math... Anyhow, as you point out, expert witnesses are valued largely by their credentials, so at least that guy has done something worthwhile in tech, which is more than I can say for the plaintiff in this case.
I wonder if it _does_ apply. I am not certain if it doesn't.

In general, products sold to diagnose diseases -- including software products -- may be subject to regulation. See this article (on WebMD cause I found it when googling to answer the original question, heheh)

http://www.webmd.com/news/20130923/fda-sets-rules-for-smartp...

> The U.S. Food and Drug Administration on Monday drew a line between which smartphone medical apps it will regulate and which ones it will not, saying it will focus only on those that turn the phone into an actual diagnostic tool.

> In essence, those applications include software that enables the phone to read a patient's heart rhythm, take a blood pressure reading or measure a person's health in some other way.

> For example, an ECG machine that diagnoses heart rhythms is "still an ECG machine whether it is the size of a breadbox or the size of a smartphone," Shuren said. "It's not about the platform, it's about the functionality. An ECG is an ECG.

Ah, it sounds like it probably wouldn't apply to the 'symptom checker', they've decided their regulatory regime only applies to devices that... actually directly take medical readings themselves, it sounds like? That doesn't seem unreasonable. And, yeah, a service/process/system that takes your saliva as input seems in that category.
have you actually used 23andMe? All over the place, it says, the information is based on academic studies, these figures are only n star (on a rating from 1-5) reliable, it only is conclusive for ethnicities X, etc, etc, etc. Now, it is not clear to me that people read all that (in the aldehyde dehydrogenase test, a lot of caucasians don't realize that it only applies to asians, even though it says that in bold, font right underneath the title). There is no such thing as a totally accurate test and I don't think 23andMe says that anywhere.
> They keep referring to blockchain.info as the blockchain, and have again scraped the website (referring to 'HTML output') to get their data - even after it was pointed out to them last time that the websites are just a representation of the blockchain.

I'm not sure THIS is really the issue worth debating. Their first paper states:
"On May 13th 2012 we downloaded the full public record of this system in one of its two major forms (1), which consisted of about 180,000 HTML files."
"(1) We believe (but did not verify) that these two forms contain exactly the same information, and even if there are tiny differences they are likely to have only a negligible effect on our statistical results."

That, to me, is acknowledgement that they knowingly chose to scrape the website instead of parsing the 'real' blockchain. If I'm guessing, I'd say they did it this way because they had someone with the skills to do the scraping available to them (when all you've got is a hammer...).

> even after it was pointed out to them last time that the websites are just a representation of the blockchain.

Yes, 'just' a representation of the blockchain. Good enough for all their intents and purposes...

But, you know, we could just email them.
Well, according to statistics (see Kahneman) CEO 'performance' has very low correlation with perceived CEO performance. Also, past success has low correlation with future success. In other words, there isn't really a 'CEO skill', or a 'successful manager' skill. In other words, company success is not repeatable given the same set of people. In other words, yes, luck is extremely important.

There is no moral of the story other than: failure does not mean that you didn't do well.
There is huge value in shared common knowledge, and the efficiency gains you get from using a well-tested, documented and production-hardened framework that has been improved by a hundred other people.

You are reinventing the wheel, slowing yourself down and making maintenance more difficult by creating everything from scratch everytime. I think that's common sense among developers.
I'm a little confused by the standard values they've chosen for exercise and weight. It looks like even the guy with three hours a week spent exercising got knocked into the red, and the lady weighing in at 112 lost points as well. Both of these can be perfectly acceptable/good values, depending on the nature and intensity of the exercise and the body type/build for the weight.

How is this thing making a determination on healthy weight without taking into account other factors like height, age, build, etc?
Among the best, luck is more important for winning than between best and mediocre (where skill is more important).
I thought this was common knowledge after being described in so many pop.sci. books like black swan,etc.
#protip if your going to leave your job, always do it the week before you go to SXSW. You will have fun, renew and make new friendships, get a wide perspective, likely walk away with a bunch of full-time or contract leads and have fun (its worth saying that twice).
The problem is that it is hard to give each project any real chance of success without spending your full effort on seeing it through. A strategy like this will make you abandon your good projects at the first resemblance of a road block.
Cloaking plugin names to limit browser fingerprinting in Firefox 28
Sounds like it's time to write "Falsehoods Programmers Believe about Falsehoods".
I don't work with web dev, can't we get a break from all those ruby, mongo, go and JavaScript posts please?
The fact that Dojo and YUI can be used like a framework (so can jQuery, with jQuery UI, etc) is not the point. The point is that, at the point-of-inclusion, those 3 tools/libraries are far less intrusive to the architecture of your site than including Backbone/Angular/Ember.
> Hell, didn't Angelina Jolie have a prophylactic double mastectomy?

I really hope she had more information than a 23andme result.

As I understand it she has a strong family history, and the mutated gene. Prophylactic surgery can reduce risk in those cases.

Most people don't understand what "risk reduction means" so I hope she had doctors who were able to explain it to her.

This website http://www.cancer.gov/cancertopics/factsheet/Therapy/risk-re... describes it as a 95% reduction in risk.

Very very few people are going to understand what that means for them. Gerd Gigerenzer has a book that's a useful discussion of why presenting risks as percentages is bad.

http://www.amazon.com/Reckoning-Risk-Learning-Live-Uncertain...

And here's an example from the book http://imgur.com/zO4zkl4
If your goal is to learn and become a better developer, I agree, forget about frameworks, learn how things are done from scratch, it's fun!

If your goal is to move forward on a complex project adding features instead of re-inventing the wheel for n-th time, use a framework.
Correlating genetics to propensities is astrology?

So, correlating the existence of certain genes to propensity of heart disease is mumbo jumbo?

Not really sure why anyone would say such a thing. Maybe you didn't understand what the word "propensities" means?
This is more of a "single" suggestion autocomplete. A proper autocomplete plugin would offer multiple suggestions and not screw up with the cursor (like this one does)
In English, the legal concept of "real estate" is generally called "real property". Which I guess makes my car and my computer and all my other property imaginary.
> I find your argument invalid. If they get an approval from FDA, is it going to change their data processing logic or data set?

I guess it would depend on if the FDA finds their data processing logic to result in valid and reliable medical determinations, right?

They also might have to change their marketting materials to comply, something specifically mentioned in the FDA letters. Regulation to prevent misleading marketting of medical products is definitely a pretty core part of the FDA's remit.
I am not reinventing "from scratch" every time. I rewrite a bit of light glue code to weave together various bits I copy-n-paste in from previous successful projects. That's hardly "reinventing the wheel".
The Amiga community is still alive:

http://www.amiga.org/

http://www.amigaworld.net/

And many others, but those are the two "main" English language forums.

(EDIT: There's also a few print magazines still kept alive by enthusiasts. The largest one is "Amiga Future", printed 6 times a year in separate German and English Editions: http://www.amigafuture.de/ )

There's also a number of new machines you can buy that can run either classic AmigaOS (FPGA reimplementations - look for Minimig, Chameleon, ReplayArcade) or AmigaOS4 (PPC based) - AmigaOne X1000, and AmigaOne SAM460.

As well as two "clones" of the OS: MorphOS, and AROS. The former run on old PPC Mac's of various types mainly. The latter is open source runs on "anything" from Raspberry Pi's to modern PCs (either directly on the hardware, or hosted under Linux). Here's a couple of AROS distributions:

http://vmwaros.blogspot.co.uk/

http://www.aeros-os.org/

https://sites.google.com/site/arosaspireone/aros-aspire-dist...
This is what 23andMe said about that person's genome:

"Has two mutations linked to limb-girdle muscular dystrophy. A person with two of these mutations typically has limb-girdle muscular dystrophy."

Of course this not a diagnosis in a technical sense, but to a lot of people it will sound like it is. Specifically, I don't see how this is "very clearly" not a diagnosis.
Why is Jolie's decision stupid? If she had BRCA mutations she could have had over 50% lifetime risk of breast cancer. Seems like a reasonable step to take.
Twitter's Verified Accounts a new social symbol
Hah. See, I look at it from the perspective where spending... just about any effort on a single customer makes them unprofitable. So yeah, if someone is a big complainer (and they complain about things that I don't think are problems for everyone) I try to get them a refund and into a competitor as gently as possible. But, I still mostly agree with the article.

For example, there is much price competition in my market. Yes, you increase your resources per dollar over time. Moore's law, and more to the point, your competitors are doing it. But, you can't just give the new, better deal to your new customers, you have to give that new, better deal to your existing customers, first. Linode has been famous for this for a while. Last time I lowered prices on my front page, I actually reduced the dollars I charged existing customers, which is even more unusual. Normally, you keep the dollars the same and just give them more resources. As an aside, I'm way behind, price-wise, right now. My plan is to keep the dollars charged the same, and just give customers more ram/disk, as is traditional. (I've upgraded maybe 1/4 of my customers to my first upgrade level. I suspect I may need to go further than that, though.)

I've watched several (ex) competitors give new customers better deals than existing customers... and it just doesn't work at scale, when your per-customer margin is razor thin.
No, every country I can think of requires new medicines to be cleared with the authorities. The difference is what that clearance entails.
Practice helps if you can learn from the good and bad moves on both sides of the board. The article mentions analysis, have you tried that? Great players draw from a big pool of previous experiences and not only their own.
> I guess you're being sarcastic, but it's not that I fear progress will stop.

I'm not being sarcastic. Any technology that tries to correlate genetic markers with behavioral characteristics will be regulated out of existence. I'm not taking a position one way or the other as to whether this is a good idea, but I'd bet money on it being the outcome.

> Doesn't at all make it right, good, or mean I won't bitch about it.

Sure. But what it does mean is that it's an intended consequence, rather than an unintended consequence as your characterization suggested.
They used to show a "clock symbol", which is still present in the LCD screen. But I suggested them using tilde sign, when those were in beta. I never was quite sure if the clock did mean accurate real time information or time table based information. I assume it did mean time table based info.
> I think most people view their service as fun thing

Cool. 23andMe should sell it like that. It seems most of the FDA letter is about how the tests are being sold.
I will definitely take a look at chesstactics.