skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
This?

The agency's proposal comes more than 40 years after the agency was first tasked with evaluating triclosan and similar ingredients. Ultimately, the government agreed to publish its findings only after a legal battle with an environmental group, which accused the FDA of delaying action.
Serious question: why did you bother with the press release structure for this post, complete with the (pointless) Rabois quote?
One difference is that it's not in a central GOV DB. Shouldn't it be considered private if the company can guarantee me it's not analyzed by the government without my knowledge?
It sounds more like an issue at the POTS side of things.
Regarding mice, you are likely referring to Eddy Rubin's paper (I familiar of the work in Eddy's team at Berkeley when I was a postdoc in functional genomics in Steven Brenner's lab).

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/15496924

"Some of the deleted sequences might encode for functions unidentified in our screen; nonetheless, these studies further support the existence of potentially 'disposable DNA' in the genomes of mammals."

Note their qualifications. I'm asking for proof. Making a viable mouse that has a lot of deletions is in no way
evidence that the regions are nonfunctional. For example, maybe they deleted a conserved element which has cold-shock response potential, but the mouse was raised in a room temperature environment.

Many of those "worthless transposons" actually seem to play a role in evolution http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1369526612... and others show that even "dead" transposon probably play a role in the evolution of tail exons: http://genomebiology.com/content/11/6/r59

basically, I know where you're coming from. I used to even believe the dogma. Then I spent some deep time looking at genomes, functional evolution, and biophysics, and came to the conclusion that papers like this:
http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v284/n5757/abs/284604a0...
which influenced an entire generation of scientists, are just wrong. Meaningless speculation in the absence of data! Those of us who have spent a lot of time digging into ENCODE and trying to find the really valuable nuggets are starting to come to the conclusion that vast "deserts" of the genome are in fact filled with rich regulatory elements and other functional (including as-yet uncharacterized elements) elements such as RNA genes that classic mechanisms of DNA-evolution-constraint measurement, like Jukes Cantor, are unable to process.
The is a way of minimizing the frequency of having to reach esc (be it at esc or caps lock)
" jj For Quicker Escaping between normal and editing mode.
inoremap jj <ESC>
Except we don't live in that fantasy world. In reality there always is, and always has been, war looming on the horizon. Maybe we'll someday achieve a utopian, Star Trek like existence, but I don't imagine it will be anytime soon.
While I doubt this will be the final ruling after the appeals are said and done it still signals to me that we are moving in the right direction. The more debate we have on this issue on the public stage the better.
> What teenager wants to hang out in the same place as their parents?

Parents have been on Facebook for a long time. Why are teenagers today leaving but not teenagers from 3 years ago?

Also, why is it assumed that teenagers who stopped using Facebook today aren't going to come back when they get older and have adult-things they want to share?
Well we'd need someone like Snowden that might leak or expose the decision process. We bomb people in countries we are not even at war with. We sentence people to death, and we keep tight control over how we do it. There is no public trial happening, no jury.

It seems to me that the incentives structure rewards a continued War On Terror. Everyone directly involved in it, tends to profit from maintaining it.

Also I refuse to blindly believe in the inherent goodness or extraordinary purity of heart of those involved. You ask for extraordinary evidence that they are incentivized to kill. Ok, I can also turn it around and take the point that those involved are by default bad, don't have pure motives, are evil and are motivated by money or desire to inflict pain and require extraordinary evidence to prove the opposite.

We have seen them lie time and time again. To the people, to Congress. At this point they have the burden of proof that their have good and pure motives at the core of their decision making. Sorry, they lost the confidence that once might have been placed in them.
“The government does not cite a single instance in which analysis of the NSA’s bulk metadata collection actually stopped an imminent attack, or otherwise aided the Government in achieving any objective that was time-sensitive in nature.”
Collecting metadata about email is OK - as in, who you mailed, and who mailed you. This information is no more private than the address on an envelope being sent to you via the postal service. Collecting the email itself I think has a higher bar to cross - the logic used in the CDR collection was akin to that of the postal mail address question.
Sure, except that tippers (users) are not likely to be in position to judge the quality of a commit, nor really want to wade through hundreds of commits to decide which ones might be worth spending money on, and for the most part, just want to support the development of the project rather than micro-manage it. It's a nice ideal us developers can dream of, but the model implemented BitHub is just easier to use.

To use a restaurant analogy, a shared tip jar that gets split evenly at the end of the night results in much fairer distribution (and includes the chef and cashier as well) as opposed to personalized tips which get unfairly / unevenly distributed between waiters. Most people tip because of the full service, from ambiance to service and cooking, not just the front-man performance.

And you can still always ways to tip individuals developers (or waitresses) personally if you so wish.
I agree with your last sentence. But you made a categorical/general statement upthread, and I called you on that.
> Who you called, who called you, how long you talked - this stuff, which is otherwise known as call detail records it available to nearly everyone who works for the telco

And to law enforcement with a warrant for a specific person relating to an ongoing investigation. All the NSA just got rid of that pesky legal requirement. Why all the fuss?

Also that anyone at the telco that used that information, if that got out that anyone probably wouldn't have a job for long.
Emotional intelligence predicts job success: do you have it?
JUST RELEASED: Startup Design Framework by Designmodo
cool, you've protected yourself against a fork bomb.
lxc - makes sense.
For a criminal trial, a specific law must be broken. We can't retroactively prosecute violators under a new interpretation of the law.

On the other hand, I would like to see a serious investigation into the NSA's behavior conducted, possibly with top jobs on the line.
Curious as to why he left, since each of his $80,000 investment is a "guaranteed" 30x return, if we take his investment at a $800,000 valuation and the average valuation of a YC startup of $23.7M.
Great article, really interesting.
Merge avoidance: A note on privacy-enhancing techniques in the Bitcoin protocol
Got a PDF?
There is more than one body to play with, but Mars is among the better chances that we have (and I'd say certainly the easiest chance. Europa is the best chance, but it is not exactly easy to get out there).

Of course we need some sort of cutoff for how cautious we need to be, even if we do embrace caution. Slapping a McMurdo style base down on Mars so that biologists could work more efficiently would risk contaminating the planet, but I think that is a risk we should take (once we have confirmed that there is life there, it would probably be reasonable to loosen controls).
>>> But it’s rich, so it can buy cool. Facebook’s $1 billion acquisition of Instagram was their first big move to strengthen their position with the youth of this country.

But with young people, if Facebook is uncool, then by proxy Instagram is uncool as well. This is how teenagers think these days. They can sink as much money into other social platforms, but you won't ever get rid of the Facebook stigma.
Comcast Will Spend Millions on Khan Academy for Low-Income Broadband Adoption
The presumption by many people was that it was available to the government on demand before, it matters little to me if the government has it whenever it asks for it, or has it on file in near realtime - either way, I get no notice that someone has asked for it.
It's better to have slightly ugly if statements than to have silently broken if statements.
Also: 5 Reasons Why Apple's iPad Tablet Will Fail[1]

[1] http://webtrends.about.com/b/2010/01/26/5-reasons-why-apples...
Facebook would be the odd man out if included in your big-tech-company list. It would be the only service that you couldn't use by yourself.
Ah. Is Khosla Ventures related to Vinod Khosla? The same guy who sealed off a popular surfing beach in a small California town and declared it as his own? I always found that to be a terrible reminder of how money, greed and selfishness go hand in hand. Never mind me.
I was developing primarily in Delphi for 5 years, took a year off, and now doing it on a the side again a little bit. It's not SO bad mumble mumble mumble
The Secret Language of Plants
>Pepsi was considered a fad in the 60's when it was already 40 years old. It's still around.

Tons of things have been considered fads through the decades, some rightly (hula-hoops) and some not (rock music). The question, when making an analogy, is how they relate to Facebook.

Unless you connect Pepsi and Facebook with something more besides (both have been considered a fad), we cannot draw any conclusions from Pepsi with regards to Facebook's situation except this:

Sometimes, people can consider something as a fad when it isn't.

If you want to make this analogy work, you have to show why Facebook will be more like Pepsi and less like the hula-hoop or piano neck-ties.
That's just begging the question. The whole point here is that we shouldn't need "science" to somehow "justify" the colonization of Mars. Saying that it's a good thing because it "justifies" expenditure, is like saying that it was good for Hitler to continue WW2 because that's what incentivised the US to invade Europe: pragmatically it's correct, but pragmatism is really not what's debated here.

Personally I would like to see the priorities of "colonization vs science" reversed.
Some of us have longer memories than others.

* Facebook was the "Next MySpace"

* MySpace was the "Next Xanga"

* Xanga was the "Next Homestead"

* Homestead was the "Next Geocities"
I disagree. I interned twice at a telco, and while I had access to a bunch of information in databases as a developer, I had no access to call records, and in general you didn't have access to it unless you needed it for work.
The problem is as I understand it, the NSA currently has the view that if a corporation has access to it, then it's not private and they get free reign. It's not that I don't expect Google to have my gmail records, or my phone to have call records and geolocation. Those companies can use that data to improve their services to me. It's when the NSA decides that they have access to all of this information from all these companies is when I have a problem.
I don't think direct written orders have been issued to bomb civilians. What I believe is that it is left to be decided verbally or via other non-verbal signaling. Ex. "Make sure the job gets done well, wink, wink". Or just pay more per missions flown, and don't really bother punishing past mistakes. Pretty often "mistakes" become routine. Those in the chain very quickly assimilate incentive structures.
I think this is a generational gap. As far as I am aware their is a gap between what the role of secretaries was seen as (typing, filing) and what the range of roles contained within the post actually did. There was a good reason why even now, some people said that a computer, and great search hasnt caught up with an excellent secretary.
Can’t stream that Christmas movie you “bought” on Amazon? Blame Disney
Is there any evidence for this? Generally speaking, one would expect biocide resistant bacteria to be less antibiotic resistant.
I love this idea, I never thought of using the spacebar as anything other than a space.
I believe another reason teenagers are leaving Facebook is the insistence of using your real identity. Teens don't want their mom finding them online. That's why they're flocking to services where they can be anonymous, like Tumblr, where you can also meet new people outside of your circle of friends.
Thanks for sharing this. This is what Eugene Jarvis did to make Defender fast. It was a common tool in the toolbox for any clever game programmer for the 6809. I think it is awesome that Tom & buddy to experience the pleasure of its rediscovery.
Actually we can, what you can't do is retroactively prosecute based on a new law.
I don't think this decision will hold up on appeal. From the article:

Basically, the judge found the on-point Supreme Court precedent to be inapplicable based on changes in technology in the intervening time:

"Leon wrote that the government was justifying its counterterrorism program based on a 34-year-old Supreme Court precedent that has been eclipsed by 'technological advances and a cell phone-centric lifestyle heretofore inconceivable.'"

It's very worthwhile to read the case that is discussed (Smith v. Maryland):
http://scholar.google.com/scholar_case?case=3033726127475530...

Pay specific attention to the discussion starting at the end of page 743 ("Second, even if petitioner..."). That reasoning doesn't seem any less valid to me today than it was 34 years ago. It's an easy, clear rule: "private" means private, not "private but shared with my hundred closest sysadmin friends at AT&T or Google."
NSA Spying Unconstitutional: Legal Opionion
Sounds like a good reason to publicly shame amazon, thus damaging their brand value. If the damage to their brand is high enough, decent working conditions pay of. People start to be proud to claim that they "stopped to use Amazon".

Or what about some tighter regulation of their working conditions? Sounds uncomfortable - might be cheaper to just improve the situation of the workers ...

The unions are just doing their work with Amazon, and they are doing it very well.
> From the outside, the way American politics divides people is strange. The psychology of republicans vs democrats, tpartiers vs big staters seems more like the supporters of a sports team.

That's exactly what it's like, and the worst thing (in my opinion) is how it has spread to every facet of American life, so that arguments over factual information are seen the same way. The country as a whole is far more concerned with winning or losing than with the actual significance of the "field" on which their "team" is "playing."

Mind you, given how central sports is to American lifestyles[1], it's not like nobody could have seen this coming. But that doesn't reduce how dangerous it is.

[1] Walk into any American high school. Chances are, the walls are lined with football trophies, and the faculty's letterhead is plastered with logos for the resident teams. The social hierarchy of the students revolves around the star players. Outcasts are called "losers."
Different companies, different policy, I worked in customer care, and later in a quasi-engineering role. In both cases, and two different companies I had full access to customer CDR's.
If you're a "liberal" in the sense of the classical tradition[1] you should have no problem whatsoever cheering on the tea-party types at times. In fact, it would be highly unusual if you didn't. Well, at least to the extent that the Tea Party had, at one time, a sort of vaguely libertarian bent to it, since classical liberal thought overlaps with libertarian thought in many regards.

But most people who call themselves "liberal" in this day and age aren't, and the term has all but lost any actual meaning. These days, the people calling themselves "liberal" probably ought to use "statist" or "authoritarian" to refer to themselves. shrug

OTOH, the Tea Party these days has become a weird sort of mishmash of populism, anti-incumbent thinking, paleo-convervatism, libertarian thought, and (God|Satan|Allah|Dionysus|Zoroaster|Zeus|Thor|FSM|$DEITY) knows what. I'm not sure the Tea Party "movement" can be said to represent anything in particular anymore.

[1]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Classical_liberalism
If you are saying the division is by original design, that is kind of awesome. Did one of the founders say anything about it in a speech? That would actually be pretty cool.

I guess what I object to is the black and whiteness of the discussion. About 20% of the US electorate are swing voters. That's a lot of people who would never vote republicrat, regardless of policy. They will vote Democrat after 2 terms of drone strikes, or Republican after the tea party nearly caused an econopocalypse. That is really sad.

It also means that only the swing voters count. And the only swing voters worth trying to persuade are the ones with simple priorities, i.e. the nutty ones. It's not very healthy.
Ok, how about the law that makes it a felony to lie to Congress. Let's start with that one!
Is there any way to tackle this at the Terry level? It seems like we can protect ourselves more if we can explicitly eliminate the ability to systematically manufacture terry stops based on phone calls, other behavior, skin color, religion...
Bitcoin is so 2013: Dogecoin is new cryptocurrency on the block
"I don't want to see us throw the baby out with the bath water as it were, nor do I want the unreasonable encroachment on privacy to continue."

I believe you have a valid point about moderation being the key here. Obviously there are bad people in the world, and obviously the state has a need to investigate their actions in an effort to protect us from them. And it is always a mistake to go around with your hair on fire demanding absolute answers to nuanced questions.

But right now from where I'm standing? I'm happy with throwing a lot of baby away. Maybe we keep his foot. Or a toenail. Rest of him's gotta go.

Here's the reason why: we are at the end of a slippery slope, not at the beginning. We started off with the state knowing next to nothing. Bit by bit, over the decades, they've encroached more and more. We've got to roll this back and take an honest look at whether all that we've lost was worth it.
If you actually think something of substance will happen, you are delusional. At this point it's just the worlds biggest PR game.

The systems are in place. The staff is untouched. Nobody is getting penalized. It's already over and we've lost by a huge margin. Every corp is in on it.

It's just a new reality we have to face. Secure and encrypt everything or have your data stolen. Simple.
That looks great -- and if you're ever looking to to some JS work in SF, shoot me an email: dave@pagerduty.com.

With scheduling, the hardest part seems to be the UI. It's the MS Word problem, everybody wants a simpler UI, but everyone uses has one complicated task and it's a different task.
Open-source blogging platform Ghost begins rolling out its fully-hosted service
I see, so we might see this as a temporary latency increase that will be quickly argued against or worked around in the name of efficiency.
Really? How do you target enterprises? It seems impossible to me to know which companies are actually willing to pay decently for apps. All the enterprises that I've encountered generally didn't like to pay more than ~10k euros for an effort of roughly two months of work, which isn't that much if you factor in the expenses (mostly wages).

It seems to me that the enterprise app development space is a low-margin business. At least over here in Germany. There seems to be quite a lot of competition in this space.
There are scaling effects here which I don't think you're taking into account.

We're not talking about pen registers or targeted investigations anymore.

We're talking about big data techniques, trawling through massive databases to find related suspects and evidence of suspicious behaviour. A guilt inference engine. "Google suspects".

This is both quantitatively and qualitatively different from your view that "CDRs are available to people who work at the telco".
When I saw the fluff commits I was immediately reminded of a conclusion from "Punished By Rewards" - once a reward is applied, people will start doing the minimum required to obtain the reward, as their motivation has shifted from intrinsic ("I want to improve the project") to extrinsic ("I want a reward, so what do I have to do to get it").
Gmail to cache and auto-display images. What does this mean for you?
Well it's not really about party identification, at least for me. I think poverty and health services are basic rights a rich country can afford. It has nothing to do with who is for it or against it. It's the principle of it, and Freedom works and tea party types are very much on the complete opposite of it. The disagreement on these points are considerable. I am not likely to be convinced that not helping others out is not a matter of social justice and a requirement for participating in our society. Those on the other side seem about as likely to change as I am. I happen to agree with Freedomworks and the Tea party on NSA/and other social-liberty stuff like the war on drugs and not fighting in foreign countries, but that's pretty much the end of it.
So according to your logic, as you've read in your school book and then wrote in your notebook a^2 + b^2 = c^2 that is "the same principle" what Einstein did with discovering E = m c ^2 since it has ^2 and the letters. Impressive.

Your school book is the equivalent to the Turbo Pascal on-line help (or TP book if you used TP 3). The similarity of the formulas is the similarity of your implementation and Carmack's "being first." Having your post the top of HN discussion of one real hack makes me deeply sad as it obviously reflects there are some readers who support your view of "the same principle." Or just don't understand, in my view.
So you come to a conclusion and then ignore any contradictory evidence, because it all must be part of the conspiracy.

Seems level-headed and reasonable.
Feminist Software Foundation: C+=, a new language for us feminists
I never buy "antibacterial" soap. All soap is antibacterial in the sense that it removes bacteria from your skin. That's all that matters.

Dousing those removed bacteria with chemicals, to which they could become resistant, makes no sense to me.
I think you're overestimating how many teens know that Facebook owns Instagram.
I meant more that I haven't really seen any open positions anywhere about positions like that, so I've thought it's more about who you know than what you know. I might be wrong though. Regarding skillset I pretty much have all of those. I have mostly thought that particular set of skills is not _that_ much needed (compared to <nodejs/C#/java/whatnot>)

Thanks about those links. While I'm well acquainted with iquilezles the other two were new for me.

The first link was especially interesting as I'm quite interesting in OpenCL raytracing, so that will save me a lot of research time in the near future, especially about the data structure selection. Interestingly with OpenCL 2.0 and devices that have shared memory anything that is fast to build on CPU and slow/open area of research on GPU can be pretty much ignored as the bottleneck between the two devices do not exist anymore.