skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I may be misinterpreting what you said but it seems as though you consider 'start' 'stop' 'intron' 'exon' 'suppress' as properties of transcription factors. If this is not the case I apologize but to clear any misconception those are all properties of the DNA sequence, transcription factors BIND to DNA sequences but are not part of the gene itself.[0]

I'm also not quite sure what is meant by suppress.

Really all transcription factors do is up-regulate or down-regulate genes, i.e. make more proteins from this gene or make less. However simple that seems this is actually an extremely important function. Other than enabling cells to respond to say, heat, stress, or tension by making proteins that help them cope, gene regulation levels are important in differentiation. This is the process by which cells 'pick' a destiny, i.e. brain cells, kidney cells, etc.

Generally, you can think of every cell in your body (with some limited exceptions) as containing all genes in your body, so how does the cell know what type of cell it should be? One way is by transcription factors, which will tell the cell make more of this kidney-related protein, or other proteins that help determine its fate.

They have also been implicated in memory formation and almost everything else you can think of. But for the actual process of what transcription factors do they just regulate how much protein should be made from this gene.

[0]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transcription_factor
Your comment reminds me of this discussion I had before here on HN and someone made a reply that has stuck with me to this day in its eloquence. I'll quote it here because I want to share what comment I'm talking about but out of context I think it makes little sense and I think you should read the thread [1]–it's very relevant to what we're talking about here.

> Essentially it is trying to say that we are at a global maximum in a space that is probably more nonlinear. In fact our genes may well be suboptimal in some respects even if you think they have "control".

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4906810, just read the first four comments from the top, mvleming -> mcherm -> mvleming -> justincormack
I seem to be getting 404s and 403s at random from the registration form's target URL -- perhaps they've gotten more interest in this offer than they expected.
The war of API directories has just begun.
My experience shooting an NFL game in a blizzard without autofocus
Publishing an RFC is not that straightforward because of the formatting requirements. In any case, whether you go on a blog or publish a draft RFC, you WILL get shot down a lot. Part of the territory.

If I were you I would contact some people who have done RFCs before and ask their advice. Contact the Applications Area directors at the IETF and ask for advice.
Barry Leiba <barryleiba@computer.org>
Pete Resnick <presnick@qti.qualcomm.com>
If they think that this work belongs in a new WG then they can help you get it set up.
We manage opt-in mailing lists for customers of restaurant chains, and for well timed, well-targeted campaigns they get open rates in the 30%-40% range with the majority of opens within 15-30 minutes of the send anyway. It takes more resources for us to handle the outbound mail load than to handle the inbound image requests, as for the image requests the url's contains enough info to do a trivial regexp based rewrite and fetch the images from a cache. I don't think handling a 100% open rate as soon as the mail was delivered would even remotely be a challenge.
Google to charge advertisers viewed for seen ads
Glad you like it! I'm writing a blog post detailing how I made it which should be done soon. It's built with mongodb and nodejs, JavaScript FTW :)
> GMail serves all images from a datacenter in Mountain View, CA

Citation needed.
If you've ever watched a stone mason work, the tallented ones exert much less effort. My example comes from bar tending. I used to work for a high end catering company so I poured a lot of champaign. After a while, I could pour a bottle into 6 flutes and each flute would be exactly the same height. They would never foam over and it was really easy.

I think the big difference is that people know that pouring six flutes of champaign perfectly is hard. They've poured champaign before and they know they couldn't do it. The same goes for laying a wall. Shit, I don't know any management types that would even do thier own drywall. They know they'd screw it up. But, these same people just assume that software is easy. I just had an interview where the CEO asked me to figure out how to scrape an ugly website. I was given an hour to determine which toolkit to use, learn how to use it, and deliver a solution.
It's about cost versus yield. Custom-designed ASIC chipsets are orders of magnitude more efficient at their intended task compared to general-purpose CPUs; whereas it's impossible to buy or make "special" RAM, and cheap RAM is something everybody wants for everything anyway.
> They'll cache and own even more of your data

As a Gmail user, that's what I want.

> keep it out of the hands of spammers - in turn spammers will have to buy into google to get data about you.

Again, that's what I want. Spammers depend upon an incredibly low cost of sending emails with almost no accountability through botnets and foreign servers. If they need to open Google advertising accounts, provide a credit number, have to get their ads approved, and get charged market rates for their impressions ... I'm all for it.

But none of them will actually do it. Google won't make a dime from them.
It would be better accepted. The same way as the murder of a X citizen by another X citizen would be less of a fuss than the murder of a X-ian by a Y-ian.
I spent the better part of a year and a half on the premise that consumers care about data ownership. Spoiler alert, they don't. It's a similar concept in terms of what hackers tend to value.

There is a (small) niche of people that care about this stuff. But I can't help but feel that we, as hackers, try to communicate why others should care. Perhaps they should, I don't know. But what I do know is that they don't.

We end up wasting precious time and energy trying to convince someone who blatantly trusts Facebook that they should not. And we use phrases like "a company that's business is to sell your data".

I agree completely with you and after having worked at a large company (Yahoo!) on their security team I can confidently say that your data is safer with a large company than on some small or even self hosted software.

I'm not trying to convince hackers not to hack. I'm saying to not waste time convincing the general population. Scratch your itch and find the niche that actually cares about what you're building and talk their language.
So then what gives Google the legal right to fetch, store, and re-serve the images?
This is calling the method assigned to a Context, which would be defined as func (c *Context) Something(whatever) {} If you have a w Context variable, you could do w.SayHello, with this you just call the function without an intervening variable, straight from the definition
Suggested improved title: 416D65726963612043616E20436F646520: The "American Can Code" Act
Hackers Outsmart Pacemakers, Fitbits: Worried Yet?
"American exceptionalism" does not mean "America is an exception to rules" (whatever those rules might be)
Disable autoplay for Facebook mobile videos over cellular
Completely agree with the page one level above this one: "Electric noise has risen to the point that amateur radio activity in a city is getting close to impossible."

So true.
E-mail marketing companies would make a fortune coming up with "image composition plugins" for their systems. E.g. manipulating background patterns; alter the positioning of image elements; change text positioning, size, fonts; change objects in the images.

It'd be a gold mine.
Now Google is not the only one place to look for public APIs.
Or bombs delivered in other ways?
It would be interesting to see how you could have resolved the issues. I think eliminating the search index generation on instance startup would have solved almost all the issues you were experiencing. For comparison, Khan Academy serves up 6 million active users a month:

http://highscalability.com/blog/2013/4/1/khan-academy-checkb...

That's likely many orders of magnitude more than the traffic levels you're experiencing. Clearly the platform works, but you need to architect your application to work with it rather than trying to shoehorn App Engine to work with your architecture.

If you don't have the ability to do that (due to time pressures or other factors), then you made the right call to move to a platform you are familiar with.
How the new Gmail image proxy actually works and what does this mean for you
Over 4 grand for a course. How many units at a university would you compare your course to? Time wise it looks like about 2 classes for a quarter system school (which works well to compare because they are also 10 weeks long per class). That puts your cost per unit much higher than a UC school. Must be good stuff you're teaching.
So please remind me, who are the terrorists again? I keep getting confused ...
Also depends on how much investment they got surely.

Loopt apparently sold for $43m, but had $32m investment. I don't know if that's classed as 'success' or not.
Yes.

http://www.livingunderdrones.org/numbers/

There are no 100% solid estimates because of problems with reliable sources, but here are a couple of links to get you started.

http://natsec.newamerica.net/drones/pakistan/analysis

http://www.longwarjournal.org/multimedia/Yemen/code/Yemen-st...

http://www.thebureauinvestigates.com/category/projects/drone...
There seems to be conflicting information:

"their party was mistaken for an al Qaeda convoy"

"An air strike missed its target and hit a wedding car convoy"

Were they targeting the wedding car or not? One is a failure of intelligence, the other is a failure of the technology.
Gmail has probably the best spam filtering in the world, but you seem to think it's flawless, and it's not. I just now signed into my old Gmail account for the first time in ages. There's spam in there, and recent too. Roughly one per day by the looks of it -- messages that aren't newsletters, or from previous contacts, or anything that I signed up for.

And spammers aren't even that smart, they're just numerous and financially motivated.

If somebody wanted to annoy someone else with this, they could.

And, again, even if this doesn't work against Google directly, it certainly would work against other service providers who decide to follow Google's lead.

Heck, just look at the recent popularity of the WhatsApp spam that spread malware to tons of people (including Cryptolocker in some cases), or the "Secure Document" phish that made the rounds in Gmail in September.
This is great. Is there a way you could categorize the APIs so searches can be filtered? I imagine this a common machine learning classification problem. Maybe check out http://scikit-learn.org/stable/
Seems like they may have slightly fallen over under demand. I'm seeing 403s when I try to log in.
Might be interested in this project... http://eternity.obsidian.net (Pillars of Eternity)

EDIT: More info...

This game was kickstarted and is being developed by some of the same people that worked on Planescape: Torment. They recently did Fallout: New Vegas, and are currently also working on South Park: Stick of Truth. Here's a link to the gameplay promo for Pillars of Eternity: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HKoDTzea79Y

Disclosure: My buddy works for this game studio
> Patent attorneys average around $250/hr.

The survey data cited in the post is from 2001. The post also says: "If you are looking for experienced patent attorneys at a reputable firm you should anticipate hourly rates to be somewhere between $275 to $400 per hour in areas outside major metropolitan areas and somewhere between $400 to $800+ per hour in major metropolitan areas."

FYI, patent litigators, who handle infringement claims and validity challenges, generally charge significantly more than those who do patent "prosecution" (that is, prepare and file patent applications and shepherd them through the USPTO examination process).
HN comment posts don't seem to be idempotent, so it's very easy to double-post the same comment by clicking twice on the button, or reloading the page at the wrong time, etc.
LESS or SASS? Which do you prefer?
Which CSS preprocessor do you prefer and why?

The reason I have asking this is, I learned LESS mainly because Twitter Bootstrap came with .less files.

But whenever I search, I found more resources (code snippets) about SASS. So before considering the it just wanted to know if there are any advantages.
In the e-mail campaigns we send every image is a tracking image. It all just goes into our log files an is then post-processed, so the additional cost of processing every image is minimal compared to the rest of the cost of the send.

Using a separate tracking pixel is pointless unless you for some reason want to let some third party track the opens (which some people might, e.g. to prove certain open rates)
> Now, an open question is if Google will make that request when the email is actually opened, which would allow marketers to determine if and when the email was read by the user, or if Google will make the request as soon as the email is received.

I reply to this question here. Sadly, a request is done each time and only when a user loads the image.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6898087

Which makes the Ars article even more wrong.
To put that in perspective, most of the first non-founder engineers couldn't buy (outright) a 3br house within walking distance of Y Combinator's office with their stock option proceeds.
Google could check if GUID_1.jpg is the exact same image as GUID_2.jpg.

If the same, just show a cached version. No more tracking.

(of course, email marketers would thwart this by making each image slightly different. google would respond by checking if the images are almost exactly the same. repeat. whack-a-mole ad infinitum).
ffmpeg is lgpl-encumbered. Openh264 is under the much more open BSD license.
PG recommended this method years ago for fighting spam. Puts a load on the spammers. Not sure if anyone has ever tried it at scale.
De-duplication does not allow Google to know

http://marketing.example.com/tracking/some_user.png

in cache is identical to

http://marketing.example.com/tracking/some_other_user.png

without passing the second URL — a.k.a. the tracking data — to marketing.example.com.
this is what the original announcement blog post seems to imply indeed
> Selling eyeballs -- or information on how to get more eyeballs -- is what they do.

Selling eyeballs: yes.

Selling information: oh good lord no, so very, very no. That information is never ever leaving Google's servers.
This legislation would designate computer programming languages as “critical foreign languages” and provide incentives for state and local schools to teach more computer science beginning as early as Kindergarten.

Considering a computer programming language to be a foreign language seems a little bit silly and so does teaching children computer science in Kindergarten. Is he missing the point or is this just the path of least resistance to getting more computer programming coursework into public schools?
Absolutely, I have a simple tag solution in the works.
Am I the only one who finds it supremely annoying when somebody lists a string of hex numbers and says "this is the hex translation for <some string>"? There's no such thing as a hex translation of text. Of course, if you specify an encoding scheme, then it makes sense.

So in other words, this is an attempt to be clever but is actually just wrong.
The repercussions are equally serious. What America is basically doing is creating more terrorists by harming innocent people. It's not a nice thing to see your loved ones get killed for no reason. Couple that with low levels of education, poverty, and you have more "Death to America" people who believe that jihad is the only way to salvation in an otherwise meaningless life.
> > ground-braking

> That's like aerobraking, right? ;)

More like lithobraking [1].

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lithobraking
I'm not sure I follow. OP's point is that a failed startup might still be profitable enough to be a lifestyle business.

That opens up some pretty cool options for the founders.
In other words; I was correct, not confused, and not badly misinformed.

Thank you.

If one can take your government provided food stamps and convert them to cash is an abuse, how will straight-out giving them cash supposed to help in that situation? They will be provided cash with stipulations so nothing would change according to the rules.

Although, I admit there is evidence out there that if you just give cash with no stipulations to people that need help instead of "stuff" distributed through a service of some sort, they tend to do better overall: http://www.npr.org/blogs/money/2013/08/23/214210692/the-char....
It's a failure of intelligence either ways, I'll tell you that.
At first I thought the hex was ridiculous, but I guess it's a good PR stunt. I mean, we're all talking about it now.
Yeah, good luck with that. Instantly, every hacker in the world would use Gmail as a DDoS amplification tool.
http://www.uspto.gov/patents/stats/Reexamination_Information...

"Filing Compliant Reexamination Requests"

http://www.uspto.gov/patents/Best_Practices_and_FAQs_for_fil...
Not with this emulator, since it uses threads.
How to make changes and test new library versions in a webpage on the fly
I also love this part, in the attachment:

"Carriers reserve the right to charge non-customers/non-former-customers a reasonable fee for unlocking requests".
Sure he dug a ditch etc. But he also built a house; that's more disruption than this whole process surely? And by reducing the water velocity, he reduces erosion potential. I think this might be very eco-friendly depending on the site.
"Jupiter radiation belts"

Found "Magnetosphere of Jupiter" on Wikipedia and it looks like the rest of my evening will be spent on this little tidbit. How could I never have heard about this.
Oh, that would be much better. I just grabbed one of the first images that came up in a search. Could be the media purposefully choose ugly options to sensationalize the story.
Yeah, I don't mean to diminish the importance of compliance -- it's a big problem, especially for things like antibiotics and anti-viral meds. And certainly, three times a day is a lot easier than five times a day. But as you imply, you might rationally make a different choice if you (the patient) know the facts. My point is that nobody has any skin in the game in the current system -- from the perspective of the decision makers, the costs are almost totally externalized.

Aside: I also learned about this when I came down with shingles. That was a bummer (not the least of which because I was on COBRA at the time, and the insurance company refused to pay the med costs without going through a complicated reimbursement scheme!)
Very awesome. Great resource!
> Wait, ANOTHER wedding? Didn't we do this a year or two ago also?

More than that. I remember quite a few news reports of weddings in Pakistan being hit.

On the flip side, I've also heard the authenticity of those reports called into question. If a Taliban lieutenant and his posse are drone-struck, the local warlord can claim it was a peaceful civilian wedding and score some PR points.

I'm not justifying it, mind you. Commoditization of lethal force is something that scares me. I'm just pointing out the fog of war is particularly thick in that region.
I think it's more appropriate to say that the DNA is a storage medium. A pretty awesome storage medium: ~700 terabytes can be stored 1g of DNA.

The "machine" you are referring two, can be a set of enzyme complexes which performs the DNA transcription, as you said at the messenger RNA level.
There are sometimes legitimate concerns, but I think they tend to be overblown in the case of computer crime. Along the lines of the insane worries that Kevin Mitnick couldn't be granted access to a phone because he might hack teh USA by whistling into the phone, I think there is often a weird witchcraft-style reaction to computer crime, where the defendant is seen as some kind of nearly omnipotent wizard.
I don't think that's a proper use of NIMBY. NIMBY refers to something like a waste treatment plant. Society needs it somewhere, and everyone would prefer it to be in someone else's backyard.

This mailbox proposal would put mailboxes in everyone's backyard.
really cool, well done
> Shut down all armed drones.

Before drones, we did the same thing with cruise missiles, stealth aircraft, special forces raids, etc., etc., etc.

The particular weapon isn't the issue.
> Shut down all armed drones. Review the entire use of them from top to bottom. This isn't a video game, there is no do-over.

To be clear, this isn't a "drone" problem per so, so much as an "airpower" one. There have been plenty of incidents where the use of manned aircraft have resulted in similar (probably) inadvertent civilian casualties -- e.g. the AH-64 attack depicted in the "Collateral Murder" video or the bombing of the Chinese embassy in Yugoslavia, not to mention all of the incidents during the Vietnam War and WW2.

There has historically been a trade-off between risk to military personnel and civilian casualties. Ironically, the best way of reducing that trade off probably involves more robots, albeit ones that gives the military options other than "shoot" and "let potential militant get away".
I swear to christ someone has to pay for this kind of mistake, or we are just mindless thugs. We have to pay attention to correcting our mistakes, or we are tacitly endorsing them.

The problem, of course, is that there is no accountability. None. What do I do, write to my senator and say how mad I am? People write to senators saying how mad they are all the time.

And the press stands by and does nothing. They are just foreigners, its not like they were Americans.

On it's face, Obama has final responsibility for this mistake. He is the Commander in Chief of our armed forces; the drone strike policy is his; what will he say? What will he do? Ignore it? Apologize and promise to "look into it"?

I have a suggestion to align the interests of our armed forces with the interests of our nation: fine the fuck out of the group that makes the mistake. Make this incident have a material impact on next years budget. Teach decision makers that when they kill innocents, their careers are on the line. It's an embarrassment that travels all the way up the chain, all the way to the political level, but it will hurt your pocket book.

Where should the money go? The surviving families. They should be set for life. And if they radicalize and use their new wealth to arm themselves against the US? Oh well, I guess we should have thought of that before blowing whole innocent families up - and by remote control, no less. (Heck, we don't even do them the honor of putting a single American life in jeopardy to assassinate people anymore. Sheesh.)
I don't think teaching programming concepts to kindergarteners is silly. I learned to program at about that age (first grade, technically), and things like Robot Turtles [1] can be taught to kids who can't even read.

[1] http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/danshapiro/robot-turtles...
Here's the social workaround to that: Send a few e-mail campaign with "time sensitive offers" with a timer that starts on retrieval off the image with a "oh, by the way, please not that for Gmail users it starts on delivery as Gmail loads the image right away".

People love their e-mail offers. The type of users e-mail marketers want the most - namely the ones that responds to their offers very well - would be up in arms if Gmail makes them start missing out on offers.
Probably, though it'll likely take the action of another Edward Snowden for us to ever see that data.

You know, "most transparent Administration ever" and all that.