skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Patenting is unneccessary. It also causes a lot of problems like siloization and reduplication of effort, which adds to the cost of drug R&D. The structure of the academic-science-industry complex has become so distorted that I'm not sure CEOs of biotech firms are the most competent people to be developing drugs. Ask any PhD (even those who are in the industry) about what they think of how pharma picks what to put into their pipelines, and you will nearly unanimously get a dispirited answer that is some combination of herd behavior, lack of creativity, legal departments, CYA, and just plain dumb business management.

An example: Pfizer closed down their Lansing michigan plant and wanted to force their employees to relocate to San Diego, without doing a real analysis of the decision, and on the eve of the move came to find out that the one person running their fermenter culture system didn't want to move - he wanted to raise his daughters on a farm and San Diego was too expensive for his pay grade. So they lost the ability to basically do every bioassay that they were doing in Lansing. Three years later, I had the opportunity to work next to the massive san diego pfizer campus. The facility was 2/3 empty and pfizer was struggling to find extra tenants and toying with a 'bio-incubator' idea.

http://indysci.org/projectmarilyn
There is literally nothing bad that could come of this, and I'm totally serious. I'm sure the women that attend will benefit hugely. I may get the missus to watch the stream. Been trying to ignite her entrepreneurial spirit!
jeez what's with all of these MRAs coming out everywhere when somebody tries to do something for women? this shit happens every single time
This is my issue with A16Z's claim also. So Bitcoin eliminates one of the failure modes of digital transactions -- namely, confirming that a particular ID indeed is associated with a particular account value -- in a way that avoids the need for intermediaries. That's great, but that's not the most important failure mode, and only part of what is needed to solve the Byzantine Generals' Problem. The generals need not only to authenticate the sender and content of the message, but confirm receipt and intent to act based on that content to the sender. It's that second step that I don't see Bitcoin solving. We still need intermediaries to handle chargebacks that result from fraud by either buyer (I didn't authorize this) or seller (this isn't what I agreed to pay for).
Just for those curious, it's not that cheap actually compared to Google's enterprise level Geocoding. Nor, I'm guessing, is it able to geocode internationally. In which case you might as well use Mapquest, as it's completely free.

Currently, the company I work for uses Google for geocoding and we have 1.1mil a day which ends up costing around $5k (22%) per year more than these folks... but! It includes international geocoding, google maps, etc.

Simply using census data to Geocode US addresses is easy; and there are directions how to do it here in the comments... but setting up Nominatim (from open street maps) is a serious amount of effort (and not cheap for a 32GB server) but /is/ capable of global level geocoding.

One great use case for this service though: using mapbox, which is currently forbidden by Google's TOS...

While I'm stoked to see competition in this space, I wish the competition was a bit more robust (but everyone has gotta start some where, right?)

I hope you all continue forward with this, and hopefully add international capabilities as well as price drops. I for one would do away with your free offer altogether as the free users ROI will probably always be an expensive crap-fest and allocate those resources to driving the price down for your paying customers.

If/when you all can do ~1.1mil international geocodes per day for less than $10k a year, LET ME KNOW! :)
Hmmm...I understand he has a bone to pick with the SEC but a captivating blogwriter he ain't
Paxos is Byzantine Fault Tolerant. A malicious node is a special case of failed node.

"The objective of Byzantine fault tolerance is to be able to defend against Byzantine failures, in which components of a system fail in arbitrary ways (i.e., not just by stopping or crashing but by processing requests incorrectly, corrupting their local state, and/or producing incorrect or inconsistent outputs)."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Byzantine_fault_tolerance
>If I have a comparable amount of confidence in my snail tail guy as I do in the USG's hunger for USD, then snail tails are suddenly "intrinsically valuable"?

According to the definition I gave, yes. If you're thinking of 'instrinsic value' as meaning 'absolute value', then yes it's just as absurd to say snail tails have intrinsic value as it is to say anything else has intrinsic value. It certainly sounds absurd to say "snail tails have intrinsic value" for any definition of "intrinsic value", but then, it's absurd to be as certain some guy is going to trade snail tails for water as you are that dollars will buy you freedom from prosecution for non-payment of taxes.

>but your definition just seems confusing at best, and perhaps even useless (though if it's useful to you, then have at it).

Ya, I have no idea if it's useful or not. There are certainly people who are suspicious of using goods as currencies if they don't have 'intrinsic value', according to that definition. I don't know if that suspicion is well placed or not, but it is there.
Ok, I'm going to seem incredibly blunt and perhaps ignorant here. Hopefully someone can help me understand. I don't understand Node.js. Why do I care about being able to write javascript on the server? I can just as easily write a python script which, in my humble opinion, is much easier to read than javascript. I don't want to turn this into a language bashing session as I realise the argument can somewhat become a religous one. Is Node.js faster? Is it easier to hook into a web server? Why?

Apologies in advance for any trodden toes.
Simple hosted private npm and registry.nodejitsu.com
The biggest take-away for me is that HN can make your work day totally unproductive if you let it.
It's a "miracle", now redirect is working.
Ask HN: We launch, now what?
I don't know if this question was already asked.

What do you think are the steps to follow, and also the steps to avoid?
Network Solutions has been doing other unethical things for years. This is a pretty huge one, but I'm surprised you haven't run elsewhere years ago!
Love, Actuarially: How to Hack OkCupid
How Too Much Sugar Will Slow Down Your Brain
I'm not an expert, but I understand that was more a function of the economic downturn than anything.

Relevant:
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/09/24/us/immigrant-population-sh...

That article reports that immigration from Mexico may be on the rise again. It also cites that half of the undocumented immigrants in the U.S. (about 6 million people) were born in Mexico.

I guess my point is that Mexico has significant issues to deal with and therefore it may not be a good anecdote and instead be a better candidate for the special-considerations bucket.
You can learn you some node with nodeschool
http://nodeschool.io/
There was some interest in canvas in the community but the heavy handed moderation killed that pretty quick.
I prefer their other method of registering domains that you checked for whether or not they were available. They would then charge a premium to get that domain.
I find it fascinating that the first year is more expensive. You'd think they'd want to do the whole "first year is cheap!" trick to catch people on the renewal.
I have an account with Network Solutions that they will not let me cancel without calling their sales team. I do not have an active credit card on file with them nor do I have any domains or hosting services. They send me e-mails every month trying to bill me for something that I haven't signed up for with language indicating that I'm about to "lose" my services (that don't exist) if I don't pay.

They're terrible.

It fascinates me because I wonder who the leadership team is and what the company culture is like. Do they decide to be terrible by sitting around in meetings brainstorming ways to screw their customers?
I've noticed that quite a few American hackers have tattoos - at least way more than the hackers from where I come from (France).

Is there any cultural significance to it? Does anyone have any good hacker tattoo stories?
fennecfoxen, for some reason your posts after this one are appearing as dead. Thought you should know.
Thanks for the tip. Just added some t-shirts with quotes. The goal is to create more designs in the coming weeks.
It's easy to overstate how leftist many of the governments there are. Outside of Venezuela (and Cuba), I wouldn't consider anything they have done surprisingly or inappropriately leftist. Photo-ops with Chavez or Castro are meant more for domestic PR than anything policy related.
Exploring the Battery Status API
This is about about as far as I can remember society being away from 1984. The NSA bulk surveillance is bad (doubleplus bad?), but remember the most pernicious influence in the actual book wasn't the surveillance, but the criminalization of actual ideas and corrupting the language in order to accomplish that (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Newspeak).. in particular whiteblack (not to minimize your own nom de plume).
Ask HN: Do you really following the blogs and how?
There are so many related blogs/magazines about tech and business. About 50/60 sites that i am following, let's say daily average post 10-15 and here is the result : Daily average post count is 500-1000. Let's say, i am just looking the post's title and skipping it in RSS reader, 10% got my attention and open it new windows, etc.. This process takes my at least 1 hour, i don't have enough time and i am falling behind it. "Should i scan all of these" , i don't know but i want to be aware. i don't to waste my time but i want to catch something that could be important for me.

How do you manage this, or do you?

Thanks.
Contrary to your belief, there is absolutely nothing "patronizing" about supportive events in a hostile environment, a hostile environment created by decades of outright misogyny and sexual harassment, accompanied by decades of sticking ones head in the sand by others - like you and the OP.
I see affiliate marketing mentioned often in the comments.
I don't know anything about getting started - do you have an easy way for me to get started other than just Googling it?
How To Gather Information About Partition Layouts
My experience with them is that their reliability is actually below that. We moved to Softlayer, couldn't be happier.
DAU/MAU measures engagement (i.e. how sticky/habit forming an app is). Retention is similar, but different.

If your point is that you can't draw conclusions from statistically insignificant data, then yes I agree with you. DAU/MAU does not work well when you have only a few visitors. Either way, it looks like the app in question had enough data to draw some conclusions.
Russian Officials Seek to Ban JW.ORG
You also have to consider that when the drives eventually fail, they will be replaced with hard drives of the future -- which will presumably be cheaper than the HDD of today. I.e. they depreciate quickly.
Yeah, similar is when you get names from Canada and look at the cities.

The first one I get is from Weagamow, ON, which is a North Caribou Lake Indian reservation, with like 900 people in it.

The second I get is from Cornwall, ON, a small city of 45k people, the next is from Orangeville, ON another town of 30k people. Then Wawa, ON, a town of 3k people.

Meanwhile, Toronto, Vancouver, Montreal are all unrepresented.

I just got a person from Byemoor Alberta, a hamlet of 35 people. It says she lives on 1304, 90th Ave, but there's a 1 Ave, a 2 Ave, a 1 St, and a 1 St North. Definitely no 90th Ave.
And he did all of his initial human testing outside of the US--mainly in the USSR and Eastern Europe. I think the idea that the cost of testing has changed is still valid.

What I meant--but articulated poorly--was that the children selected for the tests were from a school for the differently abled because they were, at the time, seen as less valuable. That idea is no longer acceptable.
You can be a human, you can be someone with the flu, but you can't really "be" a feminist, or any other political "ist", being that there's no agreed-upon definition of the word. So it's more productive to talk in terms of people "identified as" X.
Ruby core closed ticket for insecure SSL/TLS defaults without changes
The only reason "lunatic" feminists seem more visible is because people feel compelled to point out the most extreme views of "lunatic" feminists every single time there is a discussion of feminism.

It would be like if every time a science article was posted on HN you had multiple people pointing out that all science is crazy because some lunatics used to think eugenics was a good idea.

Seriously, pick any thread on HN vaguely related to feminism and you will find multiple people claiming that feminism is a worthless lunatic ideology not based on reality. And 99% of them use outdated theory (just as eugenics is outdated) and complete misrepresentations to back up their claims. For example saying things like:

"oh, wait, one of the leading feminists (Alice Schwarzer) is strongly opposing any legalisation of prostitution"

When in fact her position is nowhere close to that:

"She views prostitution as violence against women and favors laws like those in Sweden, where the sale of sexual services is legal but their purchase is not. (See also: Prostitution in Germany.)"

It's pretty ridiculous to claim that feminism seems crazy because fringe feminists are simply more public, when you are directly and purposefully contributing to making them more public in a pretty transparent attempt to discredit feminism.
Minuum keyboard on a Smart Watch
How do you know they're building off of non-public blocks if they're doing so in secret collusion?

For what it's worth, Felten et al have a somewhat convincing (if not yet rigorous) argument that members of a so-called selfish mining pool have more incentive to defect than to continue cheating [0]. But, if a single entity controlled all of the 33%, defection is not a risk, and this entity could still claim an outsized share of the mining reward according to Eyal-Sirer.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6689329
The Bla Language: Extending Functional Programming with First Class Environments
The dollar's value comes from the barrel of gun. I thought that was plain enough. Bitcoins not so much.
This sounds like a potentially useful service, if it doesn't exist already. Preferably with a memorable phone number like 1-800-LAYWERS, but that's taken.
This might be me being hyper-pedantic, but I'd argue that not even USD is a particularly good store of value. If you have a significant amount of money it should probably be in at least low-risk stocks or re-estate. Not just sitting in a regular savings account in a regular bank.

But, I do get the point that at least the USD dollar doesn't lose/gain 50% value in a few hours by wild speculation every month.
This seems too ludicrous to be true. Is this something they expect ALL customers to pay? Even my dad who has 1 domain with them since the late 90s?

I'll be transferring all my domains (only a couple, most are with Namecheap these days) + any domains my family/friends have with NS out today.
First thing to do after launch is: Get people to signup/use your service/product. Then measure.

After that decide if it is a business and scale.
I wasn't referring to Snowden. I was saying that for every Snowden there is one or more greedy analysts that will just sell info quietly and we'll never know.

That's also why the idea that Snowden has caused a huge amount of damage because he alerted enemies to the US's methods is comical. The public releases have been heavily edited and the NSA knows exactly what data has been shared with the general public. If someone else has grabbed the same info as Snowden but just sold it quietly the adversaries got much more info and the NSA doesn't know it so they can't mitigate the impact.
This is what I found about it:

> The bitcoin system is based around the "block chain", whose main purpose is to implement a distributed timestamp. With a known set of participants, this is a solved problem (Paxos algorithm); on the public Internet with undefined participant list, it's hard.

http://www.baum.com.au/~jiri/ae/blog/01306143707
"Getting acquired and becoming a cost center for another organization is not how I'd define success."

I'd not consider that failure, either; Many things are valuable, yet often defined as "Cost centers". IT Support, for example, is almost always defined as a cost-center, yet it fuels so many parts of the business and can be such an improvement to getting things done it's insane in the modern world not to have it.

Building a technology or product that is only good as an add-on, loss leader, or tech demo isn't shameful. If somebody's willing to pay for it, if you and your investors can get a good return, that's a reasonable measure of success. It's nice when a product is successful on it's own, but not everything is about direct-sales.
For no reason? There must be something behind this story.
You're conflating Private with 'for-profit'. Private includes entities that are nonprofits, like Janelia Farms, or, in the case of Mitchell, Glyn Research Ltd. American Cancer Society, American Heart Society etc. also give out very interesting long-term, high risk grants.

Yes, I have seen some of the shit that professors write for the NSF, and I'd rather they not be using taxpayer money to fund their intellectual masturbations, or hiking trips to the rainforest, or scuba diving expeditions (among other travesties).
> This is no such case for female founders. Here we have a much simples issue: stigmatization.

I disagree. I might be in the minority but in the places I've worked in tech no one cares - at least as far as I can tell - what your gender is, it's how well you do the job.

What I do see a lot of is women who are capable but not interested in STEM. Not because of some kind of social stigma, they just don't care about it. My mother studied mathematics and eventually switched to sociology because she was more interested in how people interact - math was easy for her, which was the primary reason she went to school for it. My wife is very intelligent and analytical but could not care less about computing.

There are legitimate physical differences between men and women (men on average have more upper body strength, for example) that are not caused by social stigmas. Isn't it reasonable to think there might be some mental differences as well? Perhaps the average man is less risk-averse than the average woman and therefore is more likely to enter a risky business venture. It's not some kind of discrimination or societal pressure or a learned behavior, it's just human nature.

That said - I live in a bit of a bubble. Of course there are places out there where women are discriminated against for this kind of thing, and I totally understand why conferences like this exist (I have no problem with them). But it's worth considering that sometimes it's not just a discrimination issue and must be corrected
I'm not going to argue against restraining these rich people. But what I will argue against is the type of answer given and the level of awareness that brought the answer. If people realized that there can be economy without money (i.e. resource-based economy) then all these rich people lose their power. Assuming that an RBE society would be more fairer for the populous.
This has been said elsewhere, but outside of /b/, 4chan is quite a normal board. I don't read the whole thing, but in my experience, /fit and /diy are fairly civil and often work-safe. /v seems about as good as any video game nerd discussion can get, especially since Quentin and his Diamond Dogs have been rescuing everyone.

I have been very surprised to not see very many people taking up 4chan's self-serve advertising. The audience on 4chan is pretty clear: video gamers, lovers of Japanese culture, artists, trustafarians and paranoids. They spend money on games, computer equipment, plastic figurines, art supplies, costumes, body pillows, music, camping equipment, tools and knives.
I'm considering creating chatroom site. Not my own chatrooms but using API of others. Seems like those may still be in vogue. Have you had any luck with them? I'm certain I can create a site in an evening, then I just need to see how to drive traffic to it.
Their leadership team must be grasping at anyway possible to gain revenue.
You were born male and so have not experienced female socialization and experiences throughout your life. You have what is often called "male privilege." I'm not comfortable with my "gender" either (who is?) but I don't plan on taking up space at the conference.
HN readers in these gender discussions are so outright condescending, hateful, and knowingly, deliberately unreasonable-- not to mention "othering"-- it makes me consider never coming to this website ever again.

Thank you for being a voice of reason, even though doing so can be incredibly frustrating in its fruitlessness sometimes.
Is Coeliac disease really that prevalent that they are worried about a gluten-free version of soylent? (I personally know one person with this condition but even he is annoyed about how everyone is going gluten-free.)
What makes you so sure? You think the sort of students who could get into Yale don't have other options?
Bitcoin allows for 2-out-of-3 (theoretically also m-out-of-n) transactions. Buyer and seller can agree on an mediator for dispute settlement.

https://www.bitrated.com/
Seems like you have to be really careful with VC as it can reframe a success into a huge failure.
I think it is important to distinguish between the different method of aids and different causes of deaths here.

Let:

P1 = % of human population who live in tribes and will die in droughts

P2 = % of human population who are children, live in villages/urban areas, and will die without vaccinations/medicine

M1 = Multiplier for P1 (to replace the tribal people who died of hunger)

M2 = Multiplier for P2 (to replace the children who died due to lack of medication)

If we give food to P1 and medicine to P2, the population will be: 100%

If we don't do anything, Earth's population will be: 100% - P1 - P2 + M1xP1 + M2xP2

So basically if M1 or M2 are > 1, the population due to P1 or P2 will rise. M1 might be 0 if the entire tribe dies out. But it could be > 0 if another tribe now takes over the land. M2 is most likely > 1, even as much as 3-4 depending on the location as the letter pointed out.

This letter was primarily addressing P2 population. Sir David Attenborough has spoken out against foreign food aid for P1.
LogMeIn Free discontinued in 7 days
Also, here's a discussion on their support forum:
http://community.spiceworks.com/topic/433777-alternative-to-logmein