skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Gardening feels healthy though. We live of our own fruit/veg almost whole year round. I think it's fun and besides my dogs, we can almost live on what we create ourselves.
Isn't there far more coherent rants than this one that we can use as the launchpoint for today's Google+ 2-Minute Hate?
World's smallest superconducting quantum interference device (SQUID)
> That's what the market wants, because they can't get it from the existing products under the existing regulatory structure.

The market can have that, all 23andMe has to do is stop selling their product as a diagnostic test.

They sell it as being able to predict your risk of some diseases. They're not a tiny little startup battling against the industry, they have some pretty big money.

They need to either sell it as a novelty ("Not designed to treat or diagnose any medical condition") or step up and get regulated.

Unfortunately we're in a weird situation where 23andMe get regulated, but wingnuts like Sarah Myhill (in the UK) don't. http://drmyhill.co.uk/wiki/Nutritional_Supplements_-_what_ev...

So I definitely agree that something's wrong.
15 years?! I didn't know moderators could set arbitrary dates for a "temporary suspension". A month would be reasonable for a first offense I would think.
There seems to be a common point of confusion in this discussion.

It isn't the case that using a period implies hostility or anything else, it's using a period in a context where it's unexpected. In other words: if you avoid using periods in most messages, then use a period, it conveys just as much information about your tone as ending with an emoticon.

If you always use a period, it's meaningless - but people don't, and therefore it has meaning in those situations.
Watsi x Goldbely Holiday Gift Package
I too received this message. I can no longer right click - copy on ANY cell in a spreadsheet or text in a document. I must use the keyboard (which I prefer), but it's just weird.

Debian/Iceweasel
Debian/FireFox
> The bigger question is why is the FDA having a seizure over this?

Um, they aren't having a seizure. 23andMe was informed of the regulatory requirements in a letter in June 2010 [1], and (as discussed in the Warning Letter just issued) submitted required documentation to begin the approval process in July and September of 2012. The FDA sent letters identifying issues with the submitted documentation and requesting additional information in order for the approval process to move forward on September 13, 2012 and received no response from 23andMe.

The FDA set follow up letters in March and May of 2013 indicating that due to 23andMe's failure to address the issues raised in the FDA's earlier letter, the applications submitted in 2012 were deemed withdrawn -- which meant that 23andMe was not only not in compliance, but no longer considered to be actively working toward compliance -- but still took no substantive action, giving the company time to begin working toward compliance again.

Now, more than a year since raising issues with 23andMe's original submission, more than 3 years since notifying them that they needed to come into compliance, and 6 months after notifying 23andMe that their failure to respond to the issues raised with their initial submissions had caused those submissions to lapse, they've given 23andMe notice that they will face regulatory action if they don't either stop marketing the products or provide an acceptable plan within 2 weeks.

That's not exactly "having a seizure".

[1] http://www.fda.gov/downloads/MedicalDevices/ResourcesforYou/...
KilroyApps: The Academy Of S.S.D.B.
Actually I think it's quite surprising. Why would a well-funded company pursuing a business model that clearly falls into a regulatory gray area gamble with its future by simply not complying?
How does Somalia represent classical liberalism? (If you assume that libertarianism is a subset of classical liberalism.)

Also, how does saying that the federal government doesn't have the authority to create the FDA or manage healthcare imply that I'm against traffic lights? (To reference another commonly said argument.) I like the FDA and federal healthcare services but I believe, technically, there should be an amendment to the Constitution for them to exist.
All tests carry risks of BS results. People taking any test need to be aware of the risks of false negatives and positives.
Out of curiosity, what mobile do you use?

I am not a fan of the iphone and being in the tech field it feels difficult to go back to a nokia 5110. Guess ubuntu or firefox OS is the way?
It's interesting you blame the Nazi Reich for "the bad eugenics", as you name them. The Nazis got their eugenic ideas, whole and entire, from the United States[1], where a eugenics movement born and nurtured in California was remarkable even among the well-meaning but disastrous social engineering movements of the Progressive Era. I strongly encourage you to read the linked article, and given the evident depth of your interest in the subject to further study the volume from which that article was drawn.

For example, you may have heard of Buck v. Bell, a 1927 Supreme Court decision which affirmed the constitutionality of involuntary eugenic sterilization. (Holmes: "Three generations of imbeciles are enough.") The Nazi eugenicists, when brought to account at Nuremberg after the war, mounted a defense which revolved around the American eugenics movement in general and this Supreme Court decision in particular.

For further example, perhaps you share the common misconception that the idea of mass execution for eugenic reasons, and the particular method of using gas chambers for this purpose, originated in some uniquely twisted mind among the Nazi eugenicists. This is not the case; that purpose, and that method by which to achieve it, were first postulated in a 1918 Army textbook, which drew inspiration from a 1911 Carnegie Foundation-funded "Preliminary Report of the Committee of the Eugenic Section of the American Breeder's Association to Study and to Report on the Best Practical Means for Cutting Off the Defective Germ-Plasm in the Human Population."

As you see, the United States has made this mistake once before, even to the extent of enshrining it in our highest canon of law. The Nazi regime, far from originating these ideas we now recognize for the horrors they are, merely took them to their logical conclusion; in judging the entire Jewish race an intolerable blight upon the genetic purity of a nation, and acting in accord with the vanguard of then-modern eugenic theory to prevent that blight from spreading further, the Third Reich demonstrated conclusively and incontrovertibly the fundamental inhumanity of the entire eugenic concept. In that demonstration, the modern objections to eugenic ideas find their origins and their vehemence -- this latter, in particular, perhaps all the more telling in a society whose disinterest in the hard-won lessons of history seems to grow by leaps and bounds.

Consider, too, that the leading exponents of eugenics in decades past were every bit the equal of anyone today in their conviction that they were the intelligent and enlightened wave of the future, and perhaps you may find it easier to understand how your "ghost from the past" could -- given enough arrogant confidence that we know enough not to repeat past mistakes but may this time rely upon ourselves to do it right -- turn out a vicious revenant after all.

[1] http://hnn.us/article/1796
Since when does choosing your own partner in a way that minimizes the risk of your children inheriting genetic diseases "Eugenics"?

For god's sake, it's like saying you're a proponent of Nazism because you think model rocketry is a good hobby. And you wonder why people are confused?!?!?!
Shifting Sources of Artist Income: 1999-2012…
What he fails to realize is that the site that just helped him depends on Google for a large portion of their traffic (and thus, revenue).
The P2P has the potential be quite disruptive to Paypal.
If you only look at the business-customer transaction, it's the same. But otherwise it's totally different.

If a bad driver can't get insurance, they are taken out of the pool of people who are driving. Everyone wins. There are fewer accidents - even the former driver is less of a danger to themselves. It makes the former driver's life a bit more difficult when they need to get around, but they have alternatives like transit. Other people see what happened to the bad driver, and modify their behavior accordingly.

People who have pre-existing health conditions are not immediately taken out of the pool of people who are healthing (i.e. euthanized). There is no alternative to living. If they don't get insurance - or it's harder for them to get insurance - they go on living, with increased misery, until the costs hit everybody with trips to the emergency room. It is very unclear whether that example will influence others to be more healthy - most diseases are effectively random, or strike with the kinds of probabilities that most humans are bad at integrating into their decisions. Even alcoholism has a component of genetic predisposition, and some people might even become addicted as children.

This is, of course, setting aside the moral argument, but this is is HN.
Perhaps to gain new customers who can't (or don't want to) use their phones at the checkout? Isn't the card good for stores that don't have means to use your phone as a means of payment? A more "traditional" way of paying if you will.
>It is not possible for a non-physician to be an informed healthcare consumer.

Are you sure, because I used webMD to diagnose my spontaneous pneumothorax. Went to the clinic told them as much, they laughed. Finally ended up doing a chest x-ray after which a very stern faced doc walked up to me and said, "Sorry, we've never seen this here before. You need to go to the hospital right now."

That was the longer part of the story about the ct scan which was done post-recovery to look for blebs.
"Yes, it's horrible that these people took advantage of her, but I find it very difficult to get that worked up over it."

E-gads. That had to have been a mistake.

You are not supposed to get worked up over it, any more than you would get worked up over a poor person getting taken advantage of.

It's a bad thing. We observe it and learn from it. We treat everybody equally regardless of whether they "won the cosmic lottery" or not. Getting worked up should be the furthest thing from your mind.

Now perhaps you find it all boring. Fair enough. But to be proud of your own callousness towards others? Not a good thing to be advertising.
I think the point is that this can (and does) happen to anyone, but we never hear about it because they aren't rich. Sometimes it takes particularly egregious violations to call our attention to a broader class of wrongs - like the recent spate of cops raping people during routine traffic stops, or arresting a guy for trespassing at his workplace 63 times in the span of a few years.
Not only more money, but more time, and potentially more distance (which can be described in terms of time and/or money).

For example, Whole Foods bought and closed a Wild Oats store in the same shopping complex as a Walmart. Less than a year after closure, that Walmart no longer carries organic produce. The closest store with an organic produce selection is 4 miles away.

Whether or not you think organic food is better or worse is irrelevant - Walmart offered a product to compete with another store, and once that competition was gone, they dropped that selection from their store.
My point is that we tend to look at the shutting down of companies/products/services as some sort of exceptional and underhanded decision. Rather, we should see it for what it really is: the norm.

Most startups die and most products fail, eventually. It's not some sort of habitual bad behavior that companies selectively choose to participate in. So judging Google as a repeat (and thus untrustworthy) offender is unfair, and unrealistic, too, because you're just as likely to get burned elsewhere.
The same argument could be made for an advertiser peeking into your windows at night and watching you in your spare time. Eventually you have to draw the line.
mmm i think at this point in the Bitcoin community, stating that practice on your homepage would actually get you more customers.

"In the event of an obvious attack, we disconnect from the network and begin diagnostics after __ minutes of sustained activity."
Everything You Learned in Your DBMS Class is Wrong [video]
/laywer question

Is a persons biometric signature something that can be legally compelled to be used by a company, if that person quits or go AWOL?

If an employee/agent has ownership of a text keyfile (assuming no company controlled backups exist), the company could look to police/courts about property theft. But biometric seems a bit different.
So get this: my name and some level of my DNA results are shown to complete strangers, and not only that, but they are shown before I even get the information.

This isn't true at all. Nobody sees your name unless you specifically set the privacy setting to that which I can't imagine anyone doing.

Nobody has ever seen my name on 23andme and I see maybe 1 out of 1,000 people's names when they say that they've found a possible relative. Those 1 out of 1,000 people have set their privacy settings to allow that for some weird reason.
no mention of DTC/Gray screen?
New Google technology writes 'personalized reactions' for you
My first thought was along the lines of how great a service like this could be when abroad.
Seems to be not-too-rare practice with startups -- don't comply and hope the rules adapt to them rather than vice versa (either by legislation or litigation.)

AirBnB, Uber/Lyft, 23andMe previously (with then-current California regulation requiring tests of the type they provide to be physician-ordered) have all done this with varying degrees of success.
Ugh, Hacker News you are better than this. THIS was posted yesterday: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6792225.

It links to the original source. Why are we not giving the original author credit, instead of linking to blog spam on tech.pro?
> Or ... are you using their services while moaning about it? No, I'm sure you wouldn't do that.

It makes a lot more sense to moan about something you use than to moan about something you don't. For example, I don't moan about how bad Katy Perry's album is because I don't own that album. I don't moan about how uncomfortable the seats in my old car were because I don't drive it anymore. I do moan about poor pick-up time estimates at a restaurant I frequent because I am actually their customer.

The idea that you should only complain about things you don't use is bizarre.
Thanks for sharing!

Small grammar nitpick:
In the last sentence of the "Cheap and risk free" section you use the word "years" twice where "year's" would be the appropriate usage.
> Kim Dotcom, described by Crispin Hunt as a 'chubby Che Guevara'.
Create and customize your own Web browser with MakeMyBrowser
The Ongoing Battle: NY vs. SF Tech Scene
I don't know how they can be any clearer:

"The laboratory may not be able to process your sample, and the laboratory process may result in errors."

"You should not change your health behaviors solely on the basis of information from 23andMe."

"23andMe Services are for research, informational, and educational use only. We do not provide medical advice."

"Genetic research is not comprehensive."

All from: https://www.23andme.com/about/tos/
Since every bitcoin transaction is in public, why don't we build a public blacklist for these addresses with stolen coins (and all addresses these bitcoins further transferred to)? such that the hackers cannot get too much from their actions
Bitcoin will still need to be mined - the whole 'trust' system is built on it, just the block reward will be zero. Miners will then profit only from transaction fees, so either the fees will go up or difficulty will go down to adjust for smaller income from mining.
Space X launch SES-8 | Falcon 9 GEO Transfer Mission
IMO Venmo (which Paypal bought) is an excellent P2P service so Google's P2P is more of a catch-up than anything disruptive.
What's different is that you can still lead a full, productive life if you're unable to afford car insurance, but you frequently can't if you have a pre-existing condition (which you may have been born with!) and are therefore unable to afford health insurance.

One can certainly argue that this shouldn't be the responsibility of the insurance companies, but that is still a major difference.
How to pitch reporters via email
It was an automatically created "session" user (http://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/44557/why-should-i-r...), an anonymous user given an ad hoc account which they can later convert into a normal account. I don't know that issuing this ban in itself blocks that person from signing up for another account tomorrow. Places like Wikipedia get more sophisticated to prevent so-called "sock puppetry", I'm not sure if SO does the same automatically when an account is banned.
I'm going to need a Watsi campaign for the food coma this is going to give me!
Do you know the context of those though? I delete my questions from time-to-time because they're very specific to my setup or they end up being something really basic like a missing semicolon or a typo somewhere.
SpaceX SES-8 launch to GTO at 17:37EST (14:37PST)
This is the first SpaceX launch to geostationary orbit.
> It is not possible for a non-physician to be an informed healthcare consumer.

I never fail to find myself astonished that people in a highly technical field, which is extremely refractory to the layman, nonetheless commonly feel themselves perfectly competent to operate in another highly technical field, entirely orthogonal to their own. The Renaissance man, made obsolete by complexity, is one with history; specialization is the order of the day.

There is no controversy in the statement that not everyone is, or can be, equipped to serve as his own programmer or systems administrator; indeed, the very existence of the field in which most of us find our vocation suffices to demonstrate that fact. Yet many of these very same people consider the mere suggestion, that the same should be true of the field of medicine, as nigh unto an insult direct -- as though it carried some imputation of essential incompetence, rather than being a statement of trivially evident fact. I despair of ever understanding why this should be, live however long I might.
Great, you're welcome to do that on your own. I'd just like to read the report myself.
Why is the coolant boiling? Surely it must be more efficient to cool & retain the coolant than let it evaporate. Or are they using air bubbles to agitate or cool it?
One of my fondest memories of OS/2 (there weren't many, sorry) was finding a media file on one of the diskettes called IBMRALLY.MID which was a little piano rendition of "Ever Onward, IBM" from way back when in the Way Back When Days of IBM.
Accounts are cheap. Free, in fact. Length of suspension should be related to the severity of the offenses (in this case, vandalism and abusive/offensive speech) and the likelihood to commit additional offenses (in this case, high because the user vandalized the question many times).
Vlambeer Clone Tycoon
that's gross
if you could get such a thing in place, couldn't everyone just roll back transactions?

I feel like having such a system in place would probably end up breaking a lot of the legitimacy (since you'd need over half of miners to agree to it, in which case some sort of "central" entity would exist)
If anything we need high schools to actually teach how to write effectively and concisely, not fill out a 5 paragraph template for 4 years. Too many kids go into college and coast on writing bullshit and fluff.
I can't say I'm a lawyer because I am awaiting MPRE (ethics and professionalism) test results in two weeks. I would be in very big trouble if I did call myself a lawyer before that time so I can say I'm a JD and a law graduate (and bar passer) but not a lawyer or put that badass Esq. (esquire) by my name yet.
How hard do you work for non-paying customers?
This isn't about experience, but ideology. Conservative districts look very favorable on plantiffs in IP trials as they equate IP with real property and are largely non-technological.
FDA orders 23andMe to ‘discontinue marketing’ its genetic testing service
Video Poker 'Hackers' Cleared of Federal Charges
I think they would have to remove much of the product too. The FDA is involved because they consider the product to be "intended for use in the diagnosis of disease." I doubt they could say, "our data shows you have disease X but this is for entertainment purposes only."
Out in the Open: Say Hello to the Apple of Linux OSes
> The market can have that, all 23andMe has to do is stop selling their product as a diagnostic test.

Or, alternatively, perform and submit the studies to show that, used as directed, it works as a diagnostic test as marketed.
eh, no. you might get to work on some interesting stuff that's unique to china/asia, but quality of life is much higher in the US if you are a worker bee, aka a talented engineer.
I'm curious, what would that nook space be used for?
Isn't one of the prevalent complaints from YouTubers about G+ integration that the new G+ system allows too many pseudonyms?
Hmm, a not irrevelant data point.

http://allthingsd.com/20131125/fda-tells-23andme-to-stop-mar...
FDA Tells 23andMe to Stop Selling DNA Tests
The service in no way tells people they have "no reason to worry" about their health. Even if your report came back "clean", that would only be telling you that your genetics don't suggest any particular risk factors spelled out in your DNA, not that you're healthy.
Ah, the myth of the sufficiently redundant network.

http://pl.atyp.us/wordpress/index.php/2010/10/when-partition...

http://kellabyte.com/2013/11/04/the-network-partitions-are-r...
> From a $100 test? I hope not

Look at Morgellon's; Mercury Chelation; Anti-vaccination; etc etc etc.

There are very many people willing to sell tests, and very many people happy to sell quack cures based on those tests. (I'm not saying that 23andMe are quacks!)

> "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?

That's happened to a few people. You get told you're HIV+ (in the late 90s, when this means it's a death sentence.) You lose your job (because people are arseholes), you stop showing your 8 year old son affection (because you're scared of the infection), you have unprotected sex with people with HIV (you're already +, so what does it matter?) and then you get told that there was a mistake with the original test and you're actually negative.

http://www.amazon.com/Reckoning-Risk-Learning-Live-Uncertain...
Opened windows along with box fans (or better yet, a house fan: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whole-house_fan) will help, but you will still be in a worse situation than if you had a house designed to stay cool and the same fans.

Houses designed to stay cool without AC, among other things, tend to have more intelligent window placement, and windows that open much wider than is perhaps normal (you won't find those rubbish casement windows that only crank open to an acute angle in homes designed to stay cool without AC: http://www.choicesil.com/images/House1-16-08%20017.jpg).

Given the option of staying in a house that never had AC, or a house with broken AC, I would chose the former every time. Fans and open windows will help in either case, but they will be more effective in the home that prioritized that usecase.
I think the GP's point here is that we rely on/trust certain institutions to not take advantage of anybody, no matter whether they "deserve it" or not. When they do, it shakes the trust we have in them that they won't take advantage of us. This isn't a story about an old aristocrat; it's a story of a bunch of institutions that were more corrupt than we thought.