skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
>For the growing Cicada community, it was explosive — proof this wasn’t merely some clever neckbeard in a basement winding people up, but actually a global organization of talented people. But who? Speculation had been rife since the image first appeared. Some thought Cicada might merely be a PR stunt; a particularly labyrinthine Alternate Reality Game (ARG) built by a corporation to ultimately, and disappointingly, promote a new movie or car...Microsoft, for example, had enjoyed huge success with their critically acclaimed I Love Bees ARG campaign.

Sounds an awful lot like an ARG to me. While coordinating an ARG, a marketing firm never struggles to look like "a global organization."

I didn't do much detective work on I Love Bees, but somehow one of my friends was paying attention when dozens of GPS coordinates were released. One of them was clearly pointing to the student center at NCSU. We were freshman living on campus (2004-2005) and we simply walked there at the prescribed time. There were two other guys standing there next to the payphones:

"Watcha doing?"

"Oh, just waiting on a phone call."

We all laughed. My friend answered one of the phones and had to answer some trivia question about the ILB backstory. It was quite surreal. Again, my pattern matching indicates a PR stunt more than a recruiting tool (there seems way too much fluff for that), but who knows.
> Why is the Food and Drug Administration sticking it's nose into what is essentially a novelty product?

Because it was being marketed as a health product, not a novelty product.
"VC-istan" doesn't give a shit about you or me, correct. This is not some paranoid Conspiracy (capital-C) theory.

Those capital-C conspiracy theories are like gods in that they are excuses to look no further. (Why does "the Illuminati" conspire toward evil? Because they're evil! It's a devil archetype.) They almost never exist, and don't hold together for long. The reality is that people act according to their own interests. If we can figure out what those interests are, we can learn things. You learn the most if you assume that conspiracies and weird personal vendettas, prima facie, don't exist.

Paul Graham, for example, probably doesn't care about either of us either. However, he does have a need to appease VC-istan (which is not quite a conspiracy, but has shown aggressively and illegally collusive behavior in the past). If he wants access to the best talent, he needs to be able to place. The fact that someone is pressuring him or one of his moderators to suppress the ideas of someone fairly powerless tells us something-- that VC-istan believes its reputation (the asset that enables it to get top talent cheaply) is in peril.
No kidding? I always understood London to have absolutely perfect conditions for real pea soup fog. Much like San Francisco.
What company is doing the advertising? Are they subject to FCC regulation? Seriously though, there being no ASIC hardware for ltc mining yet means it's "ASIC-proof" in the same way that it not raining in New York today means that New York is "rain-proof". There's been no drive to build and (more importantly) sell ltc mining ASIC hardware.
Oh yeah, a Chosen One fantasy: http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/TheChosenOne
Oh, right. I'm sorry.

I think there are some ideas that cannot be broken down and you really do have to be reckless to try them - they deserved a mention because otherwise my comment was too general. They're dangerous but they're also important for progress.
That fosters dependence issues.
Why PHP continues to thrive in the age of the PaaS
However, the deep web (non indexable content) is several orders of magnitude larger than the surface web. The source I found [0] is from 2001 (sry!) and talks of 400-550 times the surface web.
[0] http://quod.lib.umich.edu/cgi/t/text/text-idx?c=jep;view=tex...
Color me skeptical, but it seems like bullshit to me.

The newspaper article has basically one source. The Wikipedia article dates from the day the newspaper article was published, and only has the article (and a reprint) as its sources.

http://uncovering-cicada.wikia.com doesn't seem to have any activity from more than 6 days ago.

I'm really not a cyber-sleuth like the guy in the story, but the first two pages of Google didn't show anything from before 11/26/2013.

I'm sure the puzzles are engaging, but this looks like fake buzz.
Testing 42 shades of blue seems like an experiment "without much investment". Are you saying that's an example of a bad experiment?
Kotlin M6.2
Thank you for sharing, it is indeed a great talk.
Elfster works pretty well!
Some people are obsessive seekers. Of riches. Of a calling. Of enlightenment. Of whatever: "If only I had ___, then I'd be happy."

My take on Zen Buddhism is that it's engineered to fix that problem. You need X to be happy? Great, let's get you X. Get up at 4 AM and sit quietly. Cook food. Clean dishes. Try to solve nonsense puzzles. Eventually you'll suffer a mild mental breakdown and achieve a realization -- the enlightenment that there is no enlightenment outside you to be found.

And anyway, in the meantime at least you'll be focused on quiet activities, not bothering the rest of us. ;)
> It's not hard to identify someone's mother on Facebook

This is by design. You can identify "relationships" in Facebook, and they will display who your mother, brother, sister, even cousins are.
I'm no expert, but as I understand Ensure is a supplement for your meals, Soylent is a replacement for them.

You shouldn't consume only Ensure, but you could do it with Soylent. They are completely different products.
It is important not to confuse the process with the product. 99% of good ideas do not come out as fully formed gems. Most of the time it takes collaboration with a group of trusting partners to nurture the thing into something good.

There's a point in time where you have to look at all the things that are being pitched, and think about it objectively in terms of what will work and what won't, but if that's the first step then what your really doing is looking at the steel ore that's being shipped to the auto factory and saying 'this isn't a BMW, throw it out'. Which turns out to be a great way of not making anything.
If Google tested 42 shades of blue once there'd be no story. The problem is that that sort of testing was a part of the process and was crippling.
Show HN: My new SAAS - Meat Snacks as a Service
Cause it's fake. AFAICT Google doesn't show anything earlier than 11/26/2013.
The iconicity of “peaceful resistance”
That is disheartening. For us, that is.
Nope, just a guy that fucks with databases.

No API, got it.
I'd like to add that 23andMe also wants to be a resource for finding patients for studies. They boast being able to find a large number of people with a certain condition in a short amount of time (a real benefit in human studies) because of the health information they have.
What is your criteria which states that 53 bits of entropy is not good enough? 53 bits of entropy shoved into modern PBKDF2 (10,000 iterations) would require ~11,000 days to brute force on a machine doing 1 trillion PBKDF2 iterations per second.

So yeah, a randomly selected passphrase chosen from a pool for 10,000 words would work just fine. Assuming we're talking about secure software. For websites, use a password manager and then pick your poison for how you pick the master passphrase.
Top notch chefs have been doing it for decades just without the gimmicky software versioning nomenclature.
Mandela was more than happy to use violence against the government as a tool in his cause for equality (although later he seemed to regret the need for it). Using violence, he broke reasonable and justified laws. Laws such as planting bombs, destroying property, and physically harming others.

Just because we can all agree that his cause was just, doesn't mean he should necessarily get a free pass from criticism or judgement.
Elsevier is taking down papers from Academia.edu
A hidden service bitcoin accepting DNA service presumably gives their clients anonymity right? So long as the DNA cannot be readily connected to my 'real' identity, I don't see much problem with anybody having it.

I mean, say they straight up sell it to insurance companies... now insurance companies know that some guy, somewhere, has [pre-existing condition here]. So long as they can't disambiguate "some guy", is there a problem for me? I could see myself opting into that sort of situation.
What is an Edison -> Serial "adapter". Do you have a link? Just curious.
This is exactly why the FDA is acting correctly here!

Dig deep on the 23andme website and you'll find that they test for a few BRCA mutations, but not all. It's far from comprehensive, and it's not at all equivalent to a normal test that you would get from a doctor. From https://customercare.23andme.com/entries/23241132-Does-the-2... "The BRCA Cancer Mutations (Selected) report includes 3 selected BRCA mutations. The BRCA mutations covered by this report are only three of hundreds in the BRCA1 and BRCA2 genes that can cause cancer."

I've seen several commenters here on HN making the same mistake as you. HN readers are generally smart and skeptical. If we aren't perceptive enough to see through the bullshit, how do you think the general public is going to fare?
> You shouldn't consume only Ensure, but you could do it with Soylent.

[citation needed]

Malnutrition can have effects years down the line. A bunch of early-adopters with confirmation bias trying it for a couple months proves little about its long-term safety.
I suspect it's the opposite, and that venture capitalists are a lot more worried about having to appease Paul Graham than the other way around, because of YC's position in the deal flow. I have anecdotal evidence that strongly corroborates that assertion, but you'll just have to take my word for it.

Given the notion that Paul Graham is not in fact worried about people on HN offending the delicate sensitivities of VC firm partners, your entire argument falls apart, and nothing you've experienced on HN has anything to do with you being a thorn in the side of any "-stan", potential or otherwise.

Incidentally, your continued and ritualized use of the term "VC-istan" harms your arguments, because it's a term that can mean whatever you want it to in any given situation. Is YC part of "VC-istan"? Who knows! It depends on where you want to be in an debate. Anyone who's been on more than a couple message board debates sees that problem coming and discounts your credibility to price that risk in.

It's one thing to use a term like "VC-istan" (I prefer "startuplandia"; Maciej Ceglowski seems to like "flounders") as a way of poking fun at startup culture. But that's not how you use the term. You write as if "VC-istan" is something real.

You didn't answer my question, by the way. I'm easy to find privately if you're not comfortable answering here. Or talk to anyone else. Just make sure you're talking to someone if you need to be.
> Safes should work just like convertible notes, but with fewer complications.

it's not an option because the purchase price of an option is lost to the seller no matter what.

it's not a loan because it doesn't have to be paid back on a schedule.

so basically it's more like a convertible security deposit.
http://docs.mongodb.org/manual/faq/storage/#faq-disk-size

Well known and understood. Even well-documented by 10gen themselves, nothing to do with the bling you added to Arango.
Well, I think many are just pointing out he was classified as a terrorist by the United States until 2008.
Hi - I'm a Survata co-founder.
Thanks for catching that - it was an error we made in producing the chart, not a problem with the underlying study. The image has been updated. Sorry for the confusion!
70 Unique Ways to Encode ＜
I think there is a difference between an inflationary/deflationary currency and inflation/deflation of value.

The USD currency experiences inflation by adding dollars to circulation which causes the value of individual dollars to drop.

Bitcoin is deflationary. Bitcoin, as a currency, experiences deflation (bitcoins can only be lost, never added, over time after all bitcoins are 'found'), therefore the value of bitcoin value can only be increased as supply diminishes.
Video Indecision in WebRTC: To Wait or Not to Wait – That is the Question
> This was not a flash of insight. This was the result of measuring EM field strength with expensive equipment, buying lots of iPads to test product variability, doing lots of experiments and iterating the design.

So what do you think is going to happen if someone else takes the same flash of insight ("use active sensing technology to achieve a smaller stylus"), puts in their own brow sweat to work out the details, and deploys a competing product? Adonit isn't going to sue for infringement, right? And if they do, they won't win. Right?
Ah, I see what you're saying.

Is there indeed a statutory or regulatory requirement to that effect? I'm not an attorney and you are, so you'd know better than me, but it's my understanding that "option" applies broadly to contractual obligations and rights to sell/purchase property or rights at some sort of preordained terms, conditions, price, or whatever.
If you think 23andMe is getting singled out in comparison to homeopathy, that's not correct. The FDA has long considered how to handle homeopathic remedies, and they do regulate them and the conditions under which they can be marketed.

For more information, visit the NIH website: http://nccam.nih.gov/health/homeopathy#hed6

Note that homeopathic medicines cannot be sold over the counter if they claim to treat a serious disease (something that wouldn't resolve on its own, like a cold or a headache). They must be prescribed!
It depends! If you're planning to go a year out with your startup, then I think you should invest sometime into Amazon and set it up with chef.
"How would you feel if your neighbour went over and bought a commercial observation drone that they can launch from their back yard. It just flies over your house all day. How would you feel about it?"

Pretty much the same way I feel about Google Streetview? Or Google Glass?
A substantial part of the work that resulted in the RFCs happened pursuant to federal funding before December 1980. This is significant because prior to December 1980, the enactment of the Bayh-Dole Act, inventions developed in federally funded programs had to be assigned to the government. Therefore, there was little incentive to patent those inventions.

If the developments had happened today, at MIT, BBN, etc, they would be patented.
Hard to tell. There's a 35+ minute lag on the MtGOx trading API right now so who knows where it'll be after the dust settles.
And worst are websites that block pasting passwords, for some unknown reason. Then I can't copy-paste the KeepPass generate password. Have to either type it manually, or mess around with the auto-type settings.

Government website have been the biggest offenders here, in my experience.
I get the CSS, but why the others?
Or balloons.
A: Chromebooks don't run Microsoft Windows or Office.

Next, The Verge asks, "What is 1 + 1?"
Or Google Glass, or Streetview, or...

It's almost as if Mr. Schmidt is speaking as a hyopcrite...
Typically, kids in the USA are taught 1 - 5 the way you describe, but not taught anything further with a single hand. If they want to count to ten, they use both hands in the same manner.

There are a few other fancy ways including even binary which could let you count up to 1024 if you could keep it all in your head. :)

The ASL (American Sign Language) method I mentioned in the parent is described here: http://www.dummies.com/how-to/content/counting-on-numbers-in...
But also work to improve your situation in life if you're not happy with it, right?

Not directed at you, I've just been a bit confused by the tension between contentment and complacency. I think the resolution is some sort of pragmatic middle ground: fix what's wrong in your life, but at the same time, appreciate what's right.
I really like Stripe (http://stripe.com) and have always been a fan of Campaign Monitor (http://campaignmonitor.com). We've been making lots of subtle design iterations to Mailgun (http://mailgun.com) recently too.

Also I'd recommend checking out LeanStack.io (http://leanstack.io) which has a great list of SaaS companies. You might find some inspiration there.
Could you link some of these products available for purchase for purchase please? I've heard a few times times that there are soylent equivalents currently available, but from my searching I've only ever been able to find meal supplements and not complete replacements.
Invisible Girlfriend: Finally, a girlfriend your family can believe in.
That is because ideas come from artists who are mostly really really bad at capitalism.
I think that this is actually a very complex issue, and the part that more informed people are finding problematic isn't that people are regulating 23andme at all. There are lots of genetic laboratories in the US where you can send in a sample of DNA and they'll tell you things like that you've got the G:A or A:A variant of Rs601338. A laboratory that does stuff like that is covered under CLIA[1], administered by CLS which like the FDA is part of the DHHS.

The FDA's theory here, though, is that since 23andme goes beyond just saying "You have the G:A variant of Rs601338" to "You are probably as susceptible to norovirus infection as a typical person" they're not just a medical laboratory but also a medical device manufacturer, and therefore come under the FDA's purview with much stricter tests for what they can market and what sort of tests their product undergoes.

To me, that sounds pretty ridiculous since you can easily just go on SNPedia to look up the associated information yourself[2].

[1]http://www.cms.gov/Regulations-and-Guidance/Legislation/CLIA...
[2]http://snpedia.com/index.php/Rs601338
/r/programming doesn't get that specific into programming. I think it's mostly an aggregator of resources for beginners learning how to program. (a large percentage of the posts are questions like 'which language')

I think its possible that your product could have gone over many peoples heads, at least in that particular sub.

Have you looked into subreddits like r/webdevelopment or r/html5( or javascript,CSS)? They have less readers but maybe they're more your target?
Git Eats Jenkins Commits on GitHub
For me, the seeking is the happiness ;)
I still don't understand the excitement behind this, but apparently everyone here can't stop talking about them. So I guess they are doing something right.
It isn't racism. This link provides a useful summary of the question : http://ineteconomics.org/china-economics-seminar-0/short-his...

The global interest in China's actual GDP on a comparative scale is to help estimate things like their future consumption of natural resources, their threat to global stability, and to evaluate global recessions/growth more accurately.

The problem with "seeing it" is differentiating what you are seeing with what is. So for example a city in the US that has a lot of large buildings being built is a clear sign of economic growth because the market dynamics are structured so that people don't build buildings unless they believe they can rent them out profitably, so they 'lead' in the sense there is demand for that space, they go up, it gets rented, and now there are a bunch of new jobs in the city which brings in workers with wages etc etc etc.

But in China there are buildings that were built simply because the government said "Build a building." There are buildings that are totally empty (see this link http://io9.com/chinas-brand-new-abandoned-cities-could-be-dy... which has some fascinating pictures).

So people don't trust the economic statistics the government produces and seek out other ways of either confirming or denying what is said. Energy consumption is one such indicator which, when combined with a technology sophistication index, can provide another data point on China's economic strength.
Baidu music stops accepting bitcoin
If Valley folks created this, it would be the holy grail that NIH-funded bioinformatics researchers have been pursuing for the last 20 years. I wish them the best!

In all seriousness, this is exactly the point of most federally funded research in genomics, including the projects of the institute I work for. http://icahn.mssm.edu/genomics
FTA:

> Lots of researchers post PDFs of their own papers on their own web-sites. It’s always been so, because even though technically it’s in breach of the copyright transfer agreements that we blithely sign, ....

Not true. Copyright transfer agreements vary a great deal. I've published a few papers, and these days I don't sign any transfer agreement without reading it. A fair number of them specifically allow for posting copies of papers on personal websites.[1]

Probably the Elsevier agreement does not allow it. But since they've gotten so much poor publicity, no one who publishes with them has any excuse for being unaware of the consequences.

[1] OTOH, I'm in math/comp. sci., and Mike Tayor is in paleontology; maybe things are different in that field.

---------------------------------

EDIT. More FTA:

> Rich FitzJohn speculated: I wonder what their long game is here; petty harassment like that makes me way less inclined to publish in an Elsevier journal.

Seriously? After ridiculous subscription prices, aggressively making publicly funded research difficult to get at, revelations of fake "peer-reviewed" journals, paying for shill reviews, the resignations of several editorial boards, more than a year of a widely publicized boycott, and now this, he's just "way less inclined to publish". What does it take to get people to stop?

Alas, I know the answer. It is that tenure & promotion committees stop considering publications in journals like Elsevier's to be worth a lot more than publications in journals that are run ethically.
Best Performing Cities 2013
Pegasus: Super-easy PEG Parsing for .NET
There seems to be revisionism on both sides. Before yesterday did not know that Mandela started the armed branch of the ANC which actively bombed government buildings and while Mandela was in prison (and maybe not involved) bombed public places where innocent people were killed.

This isn't judgement, this is me as an American being shocked that the media and historical portrayal I've encountered never mentioned these facts (although, it's certainly not secret and not something I've investigated).
I was listen to an old episode of Radio lab (http://www.radiolab.org/story/91713-famous-tumors/) and they had an ad for 23andme. The ad most talked about how you can use this information and talk it over with doctor. The ancestry reports was just a side thing mentioned at the end.
Not sure you have any idea what cannibalism is...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cannibalism
Not a big fan of capital structure above common for early-stage investing. Too much possibility of fucking over the common. Why not bundle a non-expiring warrant with convertible preferreds?

Consider also how much harder this will make private placements.
Oh, for sure it's no cure for a lack of experience. My contention was solely with the statement that there is no real-world analogy. There is one; it's useful; it doesn't accomplish everything because it's just an analogy.
Fascinating story, but that article reads like the journalist took troll stories from 4c as sources. Seriously, whoever wrote this appears to be clueless.

> "a robotic voice told them to find the prime numbers in the original image. By multiplying them together, the solvers found a new prime"

Excuse me?

> "TOR is an obscure routing network that allows anonymous access to the “darknet” — the vast, murky portion of the Internet that cannot be indexed by standard search engines. Estimated to be 5,000 times larger that the “surface” web, it’s in these recesses that you’ll find human-trafficking rings, black market drug markets and terrorist networks"

Sure... the "surface" web is just the tip of the iceberg, right? Journalism at its best.