skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I'm personally kind of amazed it hasn't already happened, either through intentional (mis-)tinkering or natural mutation. The reason I'm surprised is air travel. People fly everywhere, and anything that appears that is easily transmissible ought to spread like wildfire.

It means one of several things:

(1) Humans are more resilient against plagues than we think.

(2) It's harder to produce a super-disease than we think, so it's a very rare event.

(3) We've just been lucky as hell.
The HTML anchor in my previous link is not surviving the auto-linking (it needs the last '.'), but see point 4 (Who can get a .cat?): http://domini.cat/en_sunrise_faq/index.php#t14
An amusing aside - from the Exchange Visitor Host Site Handbook which is sent to supervisors of J1 program participants:

Signs of Cultural Adjustment Issues

“This country is really stupid…” - A common statement from trainees who are seeing a
cultural trait of the United States through the experience of their own culture, not that of the U.S. A response might be, “Why do you suppose we’ve done that for the last 200 years?”

“English doesn’t have enough words…” - A common statement from trainees who cannot
ﬁnd a way to express emotions that are described in their native language, but not shared
by the Anglo cultures.

“All I want to do is sleep…” – A common statement of depression brought on by the
overload of change.

“I’m gaining a lot of weight…” – The change in food often results in weight gain. It is often diﬃcult for trainees to understand how to use local and diﬀerent foods for a healthy diet.

“Americans ask ‘How are you doing, but don’t really want to know…”– An accurate and
common observation that may indicate the trainee is understanding what is said literally,
but not hearing the underlying or cultural meaning.

“Why should I celebrate your holiday; I’m not American…” – A common attitude that
could indicate the trainee is suﬀering a bit of cultural identity crisis.
It seems like they're testing out new pricing models - doubt this will stick. BUT I applaud the use of testing in these situations! Pricing is sooo tuff.
yes and no.

For example, the trend now is toward maintenance drugs and biologicals, because that's what the execs want. Whether or not this has anything to do with efficacy is questionable. During my biophysics days, I saw so many drugs enter the clinical pipeline even purporting to treat alzheimers, that were basically following up on "popular memes in the field" that from first principles I would look at and say, there's no way this will work.

I've spoken to one pharma consultant (to get the chat, I didn't tell him I was making an unpatented drug) who basically lamented what had happened to the cancer field as the big companies lost their R&D and turned to acquiring biotechs for their blue sky stuff - and he characterized biotechs as being on to "fad-dey" stuff. Now, it's alos possible that he's wrong too, and that I'm on the wrong track. So you are correct to worry about the likelihood of success.
Strings are overrated, they should never be used until you really need them.
Regarding the prevalence of GA, I've been experimenting with self-hosting analytics on my own domains using piwik [1]. So far, I'm pretty pleased with it and I feel somewhat better knowing that my users' data doesn't go to any third parties.

It does everything I want it to do (so far), but I'm not an analytics power user by any means.

[1] - http://piwik.org/
Universities stuck without cheating software
Is it just a quirk of the GPU architecture that Nvidia can't mine as well as AMD or it a problem with their cards?
Took over 5 seconds to load. I don't like this.
Javascript Bitcoin Exchange Solution Kit
Mars does have an atmosphere, but it's thin. As for holding onto the air, it all depends on what kind of timeframe you're talking about. The Moon, for example, has no atmosphere because it's too small. But if you magicked into an existence an Earth-like atmosphere on the Moon, it would persist for something like a million years before it all drifted away. Mars would do even better. That kind of timescale is probably plenty for human purposes.
Show HN: Adding PG's Five Commands to Todo.txt Android App
I think the analogy is broken. In case of nuclear armrace it's a different technology that destroys (bombs), and a different that saves (missile protection?). In case of genetics it's one and the same - engineering organisms.
Bring back full-window compose.
>> I think Paul is referring to the hyperbolae in the title and its implications.

If that is so, then it doesn't come across that way.

I'm not sure what the perception is towards the ND oil boom workers, but to get a sense of how the protesters perceive the tech community, take a look at the Fake Google employee that was at the protests: http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2013/12/fake-google-emp...

It's a caricature for sure, but it sounds a lot like the comment at the top of Hacker News right now.
Show HN: Chef Browser
But there should be no such thing as a VPS. You should be able to just give n people a shell on a box and quotas, permissions etc would suffice. That you can't is a shortfall of the OS and a hypervisor is a bandaid.
Like vector instructions or doing memory mapped access in a processor with MMU.
Are you kidding? India and technology are highly related.

I know I won't be travelling to India on business anymore because of this. I don't want to be arrested.
I wish i have the older ui, the UI they used to launch. Simpler and faster than the current.
The ballistic technology that can deliver a warhead to a target 12,000 miles away can also deliver a constellation of remote sensing satellites into orbit.

Remote sensing is what held off nuclear holocaust during the Cold War. The ability to reliably and quickly detect and respond to nuclear first strike creates the "mutually assured destruction" strategic framework aka deterrence.
Wow. Why would anyone want a nice HTML slideshow when we could enjoy it in your all-caps pasted format?

Do you convert every pdf and powerpoint you see into plain txt?
Actually, I'd completely forgotten about GhostRank, the opt-in data collection service. The sneaky part I was referring to was just the default setting to add new trackers but not block them. I don't think any users have the expectation that updates will work that way.

I'd argue that Ghostery should come with a default configuration of ALL trackers and cookies blocked. I'd argue even more strenuously that after the user configures Ghostery manually to do so, ALL should continue to mean ALL even after updates. Ghostery currently has 700 3P cookies in their database, and almost 1700 trackers. There is no valid argument, imho, that a user who configures to block ALL really means "block ALL right now, but if you see any new ones, I would really like to try them out first!"

However, I mostly agree that Evidon has been up front and straightforward about what they do and how they do it. I want to like Ghostery. I do like Ghostery. This little bit of sneakiness though, honestly, taints the whole operation. You can call it an oversight, and I will agree that it can't possibly have much marginal value to Evidon...but it's somewhere between tone-deafness and carelessness, two qualities that call for heightened vigilance.
Consumer protection is possible in Bitcoin - it's voluntary on the part of the service provider, and should be demanded by customers.
oh ya, whatcha selling?
Indeed, I am living near Austin and addressed by my cousins as John Robert, thank you very much.
Not trying to hide anything. Yes I may be biased towards my product but I really like online IDEs and
I started using online IDEs because I wanted to code on a Chromebook. However, most didn't meet my needs because they are very inflexible. So I started Neutron Drive for myself mainly.

There are a lot of different options out there. Try them out. I think other IDEs have become more flexible now so they will provide similar advantages.

Other options to try:
https://c9.io/
https://codenvy.com/
https://www.nitrous.io/

Those are the best I can think of besides Neutron that is :-)
Really, "mugged"? Google walked up to her on the street and threatened her with a weapon?
Show HN: Bug in reply to comment on HN.  
Could be user error but it looks like some line breaks that are entered into the text box are not reflected properly.

Broken example - http://imgur.com/VR4WXBL

Working example (extra line break)- http://imgur.com/1vRF7G8

Screen shots were taken after clicking "update"
There's also the extra emissions factor. Instead of human powered clean energy they will all have vehicles, which no doubt will cost extra in gas and vehicle maint costs when we are supposed to be moving away from fossil fuels
For the curious:

https://duckduckgo.com/?q=portrait+quilts
https://duckduckgo.com/?q=photo+quilts

http://www.bing.com/search?q=portrait+quilts
http://www.bing.com/search?q=photo+quilts

http://www.yandex.com/yandsearch?text=portrait+quilts
http://www.yandex.com/yandsearch?text=photo+quilts

http://www.baidu.com/s?wd=portrait+quilts
http://www.baidu.com/s?wd=photo+quilts

http://search.yahoo.com/search?p=portrait+quilts
http://search.yahoo.com/search?p=photo+quilts
As a sufferer of this disease, I would like there to be further study within other areas of potential treatment. While the article here notes the usual refrain: "He and other experts noted the benefits of P.P.I.’s must be weighed against their risks", the prospect of other modes of treatment is worthy of study, in particular what the link is between GERD and carbohydrates. Many of us who have taken PPIs for years have already suspected side effects such as nutritional deficiencies, as well as "withdrawal" effects that would appear to make PPIs a habit-forming medication (there is conflicting research on this, but for example http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/19362552 finds a link).

From http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/16871438, "A very low-carbohydrate diet improves gastroesophageal reflux and its symptoms": "Obese patients with gastroesophageal reflux disease (GERD) may experience resolution of symptoms utilizing a very low-carbohydrate diet. The mechanism of this improvement is unknown. ". Why don't we figure out that mechanism? I already have abandoned the usage of PPIs after I suffered feelings of chronic weakness after years of use, and instead I eat a lot less carbs - if I spend a few days eating extremely low carbs, I do in fact seem to notice my GERD disappearing entirely.
Nice to see some talk on this subject other than about the notorious H-1B
Many larger companies pay experienced interns fairly close to what they pay new graduates, which can easily end up being $40+ / hour.
I'm afraid it would go the opposite way—everyone chooses the cheaper, less private plans, then the company raises the prices and the ad-ridden plans eventually start costing the same as the old neutral plans, while the neutral plans (sold as "private" premium options) get premium prices - 5x what the ad-ridden plans (and the old neutral plans) once cost, etc.
I'm not a MS employee, and enjoy it very much. You get downvotes for acting like a fanboy, not for telling "the truth".
This looks like ExtJS, but worse than ExtJS.
Comes up first for me - https://www.google.com/#q=portrait+quilts

Edit: HA! Sorry, it's an ad! I thought it was the first organic result but it was actually the second ad!

I can barely perceive that shade of yellow indicating that it's an ad. Took two or three takes.
Great idea. Remember that in Montreal, you have to climb outdoor stairs covered with ice to get to the mailbox. Or roads blocked with snow.

Easier to have a common area. We already have that outside cities anyway.
OwnCloud 6 has been released
Are you doing "sbt idea" or "play idea?" From what I recall, "sbt idea" was broken, while doing it using the play launcher works, as they have some broken dependencies.
Call for testing - unity-control-center (fork of gnome-control-center)
Yes, that is true. They were too late from the very beginning in this era of smart phones.
Ryse and the problem of breasts in video games
This isn't a new service, it's just new to San Francisco. It's been running for 6 years in Seattle.
It's cute. Whoever signs up for it will make money for AT&T on ads. Whoever opts out will be closely watched by NSA because you know, you opt-out :)
Since work's got me locked into IE/Bing, I might as well point out that Ms. Cringely's site is #2 on Bing (#6 if you count the 4 ads on what looks like a 15% blue-gray background that come before #1).
Research should not be avoided merely because it isn't likely to succeed.
I see a lot of these articles; someone feeling cheated because Google takes them off some or all search results. Google did not "mug" anyone - it is the reason for your traffic to begin with. The fact that you even ever had discoverability among a billion or so websites is a beautiful thing. Additionally, have some perspective, the search is a free tool that is very tough to get right. This might sound harsh, but I believe the effort in complaining could be better allocated into promoting the authors' sister's business. To emphasize, Google search is a FREE tool - use it to get business but don't make it your bread and butter because it is optimized for users, advertisers - not the content creators. To accept this is not optional, it is simply reality.
Search could learn to handle a hierarchy of mailboxes. For example, if you have labels "project1" and "project2", each with sub-labels under them, it doesn't seem possible to make a search in "project1" to go into the sub-labels.

Grep-based search would be good.

When replying to a message, it would be nice if the controls for breaking the window loose of the rest of the application didn't require four or five actions, in different parts of the screen. Here's what I mean. Hit "reply" to a message. If you want to pop that window loose, so that it's actually useable while you run through other messages, you first go to the upper left corner of the editing area, click the drop-down, and hit "Pop out reply". Then go to the upper right of the subwindow that just opened, hold down shift, and click the arrow that points up and to the left. None of it is intuitive, and it's just too much clicking for such a simple action.

It would be nice if the editor wasn't so forgetful about the insertion point. For example, if you're editing some text in a reply, and click on the "..." icon to see the message you're responding to, the insertion point hops to the top of the editing window.

Ability to remove an attachment.

When you delete a message, and you're looking in Trash, have the quick-preview line (i.e., the first few words, shown in the main screen listing all the messages) show the contents of the message you're actually looking at, rather than the first sentence in the most recent e-mail with the same subject. I don't know how many times I've panicked, thinking that I deleted an important e-mail, rather than some formulaic "Catch you tomorrow" or "No problem" message that I had trashed.

I've long ago given up hoping that some organizational capability would come to Gmail that went beyond the pathetic "conversations" mode. Gmail's idea of organization pretty much amounts to this: (1) you either want to list all e-mails by subject all the time, or you want to list them by time all the time; (2) you only rarely want to switch back and forth between those two views; and (3) if you want to list them in any other way, then it's a "search" which delivers limited results, and disappears the instant you navigate away from it.
I went from a fully MS Office company, to a different company that used Google Apps, which was recently bought by another company that uses MS Office (that we are now moving to). I've had extensive experience with both products at this point.

===Outlook vs Gmail===

Outlook has a lot of things going for it. One of my main complaints is the functionality difference between the PC and OSX versions of Outlook. Outlook on the Mac just isn't as polished and is missing a number of features that the PC version has. On the plus side of Outlook, it has much more powerful searching/sorting abilities. You can sort messages by a large number of fields. Searching allows you to filter on different fields as well. The big part of searching is that Outlook will do substring searching (gmail will only match on whole words).

Gmail excels at labels and visual presentation. As it is geared towards the basics that a user will need, a lot of data that you just may not care about is hidden away. This makes the bulk of what is important more visible. Also, I feel it presents long email threads in an easier-to-follow manner. Plus, once you learn keybinds in Gmail, it works the same on PC and Mac (which is totally different for Outlook). The other big plus for Gmail is proper handling of HTML. Outlooks HTML engine is pretty atrocious.

Calendars: both are pretty comparable to one another. Outlook is nice as you get desktop alerts even with Outlook closed (google can do this with the 3rd party apps). But Google is nice in that you can set multiple people as being able to edit/update an event, so management of events can be easier.

=== Word vs Docs ===

I'd say the only way Google wins in this is collaboration. Being able to work on the same document with multiple people at the same time is such an amazing feature, I'm sad to lose it. But at the same time, there is so much that Google Docs just can't do. So much advanced formatting, numbering bullets, and layout that it just isn't all that great at. If you just need simple documents, Google Docs can handle it, just don't expect anything too fancy.

=== Excel vs Sheets ===

Sort of the same argument as Word vs Docs. Collaboration is amazing in Sheets, but it misses a lot of advanced functionality and formatting. It's ok for basic stuff, but don't try to do anything to advanced.

Funny enough, in this category I feel Apple's Numbers is a really great tool. The D&D game I'm part of uses a Numbers sheet to handle characters, and one of the big features I like is embedding multiple tables into a single view (something Excel or Sheets can't do).

=== Powerpoint vs Presentation ===

Powerpoint again is similar to the Word vs Docs argument. Collaboration is the one main feature Google wins at. Google Presentation has 2 major issues for me: 1) it doesn't auto-resize text if you go beyond the size of the box (it just overflows). 2) layout of slides can slightly differ between edit view and presentation view, which can be very annoying.
Here's a short video compilation of the fake signing: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NpPvGP_GUXs

This has been confirmed by both a deaf member of the South African parliament, and the director of the Deaf Federation of South Africa.
The dates of ancient texts from India are claimed over a whole wide range. There is as much as 2,000 years of divergence between the earliest speculative date and absolutely attested known date for the Vedas, for example. A good outline of the issues in historiography of India can be found in Mathematics in India by Kim Plofker[1], who was trained both as a mathematician and Sanskrit scholar. Not always knowing when a particular text was composed has a lot of influence on knowing or not knowing which ideas appeared in what era in the development of science and mathematics in India.

(One difference between India and either China or the near east is that the writing materials used in India, often plaited sheets of palm leaves, were much less durable than the silk sheets or bamboo slats used in China, or the fired clay tablets or papyrus sheets or parchment hides used in the near east. So many of the earliest writings from India have perished, while remarkably old writings still exist from either China or Sumer.)

[1] http://www.amazon.com/Mathematics-India-Kim-Plofker/dp/06911...
I don't know, but I can speculate with the best of them:
Someone posted on a bitcoin forum that they were doing this, showing how they were bidding on spot prices etc. A bunch of people raced to get in on some free money ASAP, of whom a significant proportion neither did the expected value calculation nor realised that it was possible to rent at a flat rate! Crowd mentality, in other words.
Thanks. This was really hard to read. I gave up after about line six.

When you take away the 'flash', I'm not really sure that there's anything in this other than tl;dr: no jobs so kickstarter.
Reminds me a bit of the recent article on the rise and fall of the content farm Demand Media: http://variety.com/2013/biz/news/epic-fail-the-rise-and-fall... (worth a read).

Someone was recently telling me that "diversity of traffic sources" is a key metric they use to evaluate digital media properties. There's a real risk in basing your whole business on organic Google traffic.
Doesn't come up on page 1 at all for me for photo or portrait quilts.

edit: An ad for portraitquilts.com shows up first in the ads sidebar, though.
That still boils down to "let's agree not to launch". It doesn't force anyone not to launch.
The sad part is that I was expecting that maybe there was a snafu with Google's NFC payments, or the Wallet, or maybe Google Shopping algorithm or something.

Google used to give her a bunch of web traffic, arguably for free, and now they apparently have stopped, possibly with good reason, possibly without. And that is somehow stealing?

I'm sympathetic to the plight of having lost revenue, but that revenue was never guaranteed, nor was it owed, nor should she have allowed Google to be her sole source of traffic.
Show HN: Cilantro - Chat 1:1 with employees at companies you'd like to work at
So close! I was hoping to finally be able to spend my Beenz.
Ten cents says it's Tencent.
most people intuitively perceive the fact that "the majority of drivers consider themselves above average" as human stupidity

I intuitively perceive it as good drivers being clustered together near the top, with a few outstanding lousy drivers near the bottom.

If you are not convinced, consider Bill Gates walking into a room full of college students - suddenly, almost everybody becomes below-average wealthy (if average == mean).

That's true in my country even if Bill Gates doesn't walk in. Hell, perhaps it's true even in the US.
I've seen it around LA as well.
Ok, I'll bite:

DO YOU BELIEVE YOUR COMPANY IS KEEPING UP WITH THE CHANGING LANDSCAPE OF BUSINESS?

- YES, WE'RE CONSTANTLY RE-INVENTING OURSELVES
- WE'RE TRYING, BUT WE'RE NOT THERE YET
- NO, WE'RE NOT KEEPING UP AT ALL
- WE HAVEN'T EVEN BEEN THINKING ABOUT IT

SUBMIT
Funny you should mention that. There was a blog post I had read where they were discussing an unfortunate AWS customer who bid $999.00/hour for Spot instances thinking it would protect their running servers from shutting down. Little did this person realize, Amazon - unlike eBay - doesn't just accept the next highest bid, they accept THE highest bid. They were running a Spot instance for an entire month at $999/hour. Ouch.
> So everyone smart says that we worry about terrorism way too much, and so far, they’ve been right.

And the people who are even smarter realize that people will worry about what they will worry about, and respond to threats proportionally to how much people worry about them rather than chiding them about how much they should worry about things.

Human beings aren't rational when it comes to fear, but the products of that fear are very real. We live in a world where people freak out if an adult talks to a child, but happily drive their kids around in the death traps that are motor vehicles. Not only that, but we've gone to great lengths to structure our society to treat the former as abnormal and the latter as totaly normal. Telling people to be rational isn't going to make them that way.
SteamOS will be available to download on December 13th
Were there any ancients besides the Greeks who did appreciate proof? It seems like Europe didn't quite measure up on that score again until the 1800s, either.
How I bootstrapped my Farsi learning
Most misleading title of the day!
Parametric Execution Models in Scala by Daniel Spiewak (Typing at ScalaSyd)