skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
This will come off as a strawman, but the same could be said for every drug ever prescribed. There's absolutely no way to quantify the effects an "unnatural" molecule will have on a human body, since everyone will have physiological differences, and there will be a near infinite number of environmental factors. The best we can do is use the sum of human knowledge as a framework to test that drug to the best of our ability, and try to figure out if it's safe by examining the evidence.

I'm an agricultural geneticist (not in industry, I have never worked on GMOs but I do keep up to date on the literature so I can educate others), so I will be biased here, but GMOs have been very carefully examined for decades with no credible evidence to suggest they pose a threat to human health.

Without going in to a lesson on population genetics, most genes, even if they found their way in to a natural population outside of a farm, would not spread in the population because of selection against them. Empirically the frequency of this kind of spread from crop to natural population has been found to be nearly non-existent, which is why it's not a huge concern.

Humans have been causing artificial selection on plants for thousands of years. Breeding for completely unnatural traits, and even crossing entirely different species to create novel organisms for agriculture. GMOs are far more controlled in this sense, where you know exactly what you're doing to the genome. Combining two genomes separated by millions of years of evolution at random through forced sexual reproduction in plants happens every day in crop breeding but nobody cares because it has this arbitrary label of "natural", presumably because it doesn't involve some sinister figure in a labcoat.

Unfortunately the anti-GMO activists do an excellent job of spreading misinformation and distrust of scientists to the public. The large biotech companies can do very little for the PR of GMOs, leaving academics to try and fight against the tide of hatred for what is actually an incredible tool for solving the worlds food shortages. Sadly most scientists are too busy writing grants to bother.
This is simply false the PS4 is at 6 million consoles sold in under 4 months[1]. While the PS3 had sold less than that in 7 months[2]. While I'm not going to double check all the numbers, the PS4 is supposed to be the fastest selling console to date.

And it's just entirely bullshit to try to compare total consoles of all types sold in a particular months, considering so many variables.

[1] http://www.extremetech.com/gaming/177788-ps4-hits-6-million-...

[2] http://www.videogamer.com/news/worldwide_ps3_sales_only_4_28...
Because lies are detrimental. Ideally, we would be able to outlaw lies in public discourse, and humanity would be better off for it. Practically, of course, it is nigh impossible.

The Bush administration told lies to go to war. If they knew there might be criminal repercussions to such a thing it might have very well saved lives. Hence, in this context it is a good idea.

But again, the practically of the situation makes such laws difficult to craft, to say the least.
Software Developers Fear Age 30
Strangers were asked to kiss for the first time
You are? That surprises me. Do you have a background in algebra?
I'd like to point out that a lot of intelligent people opposed to GMOs are not opposed on religious or biological concerns. The reason a lot of intelligent people are opposed to GMOs is because of the fertilizers and pesticides that are used on them. Fertilizers and pesticides are dangerous and harmful.
Unreal Fur combines high-end fashion with ethical faux fur.
Depressing that my highest block so far after ~1hr play time is less than the number of upvotes this HN post has.

Great game by the way!
Excuse me for saying so, but I think you may need a little sit down. You do not seem to be at all well.
This is the first time I have seen anyone blame perl for the dot-com crash.

Disclosure: My first and 3rd jobs were slinging perl for dot-coms, one of whom is a still leader in Web 2.0 or Web 3 or whatever we are on now.

PHP is mostly a web templating system, never had much of command-line presence. Perl always did.

I don't think you know what you are talking about.
The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy game is 30 – and online
Moera – high performance, highly available redis and memcache hosting
"better criticism of poor science reporting in the media,"

This makes me think of another pet peeve of mine: where are the skeptics?

The Skeptic movement almost exclusively goes after marginal outsiders: fringe archaeologists, ancient aliens people, UFO cultists, extreme new agers, creationists, faith healers, etc. Yet for every person who has spent a $10 on a bogus homeopathic cure there are a few dozen people who have spent hundreds of dollars on a bogus pharmaceutical promoted by a multi-billion-dollar ad campaign.

The vast majority of Skeptics (capital S) strike me as basically just establishmentarians. They're not really skeptics in the philosophical sense-- their skepticism is strictly reserved for certain fashionable-to-criticize outsider positions. I don't see them as real advocates for science, more like a cult of people who like to shoot fish in barrels to prove what great marksmen they are.

On top of that, many Skeptics are dicks about it. This further puts people off science, making them think that science consists of a bunch of arrogant eggheads constantly congratulating themselves on how superior they are. It makes science look like another fundie cult.
I like stb_truetype myself. It's C so you'll have to bind it if you're using any other language, but it's a lot simpler than Freetype. (Less features too, but it'll take a .ttf and return a bitmap, which sounds like what you want.)

http://nothings.org/stb/stb_truetype.h
I have read through their Masters thesis and compared it to others in their department. The quality of the writing is low which surprises me considering that the person graduated in a top tier level university.
As for the PhD, I don't see proof of other papers written during that time so they may have indeed focused solely on their work. I just need that desire to communicate properly extending beyond their thesis.
I'd like an invite. JerryTap@gmail.com.

Thanks
I'd prefer to see a law that merely compels those found guilty to record a video retraction/apology and make it available via youtube or another streaming site. For the average person this is nearly a non-issue. However, it would provide ammunition to the opponents of pundits and politicians who habitually bend the truth to gain advantage.
If your question is, can the founder maliciously single you out and dilute all your shares to zero because he hates you?

That would be illegal, and you could probably sue in that case.

If your question is, is it safe to do a business venture with people you don't trust, my answer is no don't do that. There are many ways founders/investors could make you unhappy if they wanted to.
Show HN: World Population with D3
I've seen that. Wiki, #nethack, valkyrie, and some decent but not extraordinary luck.
This is a great game!
Nanobar.js – Lightweight progress bars
> It can be devilishly difficult to distinguish between someone who is lying and someone who is misinformed, and that task becomes exponentially more complicated when the underlying "fact" is itself uncertain.

Another good example (IMHO) is the case of academic fraud. Often, the researchers' assumptions bias the entire study, leading to a result that an unbiased researcher wouldn't get. For example, the biased researcher pools groups that shouldn't be pooled, or the biased researcher doesn't log-normalize data that should be log-normalized, leading to "wrong" results. Edit: But most of the time, the researcher doesn't even realize that (s)he is biased.

On the other hand, we have researchers who clearly have monetary interests behind their publications: Séralini comes to mind who publishes biased books on GMOs but also publishes extremely biased research, or all the "bad pharma" as described in Ben Goldacre's book of the same name.

There have been cases where "obvious" scientific fraud has been investigated by the police, for example in Italy [1] or South Korea [2], but the slope is truly slippery. Where do you draw the line between "honest mistake" and "lie"?

Furthermore, most countries already have a problem with more and more scientists dropping out of science, which will only be exacerbated if you can go to prison for a huge mistake.

[1] http://retractionwatch.com/2013/12/06/should-scientific-misc...

[2] http://www.nature.com/news/2009/091026/full/4611181a.html
Except... He's not an atheist, he's agnostic.
jackgolding@live.com.au Thanks!
I'm really excited about decision making becoming a thing people do with the internet.
American Historical Association Statement on Open Access
Surely it hasn't escaped your notice that it's rather par for the course for Android to give users the ability to do things they way they want, whether necessary or not.

Android doesn't presume to dictate acceptable feature sets for applications; as a result, sometimes apps will do things that the user did not expect or want (which may still in fact be a valid feature of the app, or may just be a bug), and then it provides tools to allow users to identify and correct the problem if it is unacceptable for their use case. This is the pathological case, though, and not the norm. The general assumption is that the user's preferences trump the OS's, which is a large part of the reason that so many people like Android to begin with.
You might want to revisit your employment agreement.
Ask HN: What is an ERP reseller?
I often hear words like SAP, Microsoft Dynamics, Oracle, Sage Reseller...

Is it essentially an affiliate marketer selling that companies systems to businesses in exchange for a commission?

Let's say you are a Microsoft Dynamics ERP reseller. What is the advantage and disadvantage of being an reseller? How do you typically find channels to sell the software to? Do you have more credibility because you are aligned with a brand name company vs rolling your own ERP software?

Is it possible for an individual to become a partner/reseller for one of those big name software companies? Have any of you experience in this field, how is the game played? Is it purely a game of making sales?

Does experience in software development help? Which reseller program should you choose, obviously the one with the highest comissions?
Calling it "Tail-call optimization" shows a lack of understanding.
"Tail-call elimination" is no mere optimization, it is an operational semantics that means certain operations happen in guaranteed bounded space instead of unbounded space, and therefore are guaranteed to be possible to execute if some simple initial conditions are met, vs virtually guaranteed to crash the program at arbitrary moments.
Like the OP, I needed more control over the crawling behaviour for a project. All the scraping code quickly became a mess though, so I wrote a library that lets you declaratively define the data you're interested in (think Django forms). It also provides decorators that allow you to specify imperative code for organizing the data cleanup before and after parsing. See how easy it is to extract data from the HN front page: https://github.com/aGHz/structominer/blob/master/examples/hn...

I'm still working on proper packaging so for the moment the only way to install Struct-o-miner is to clone it from https://github.com/aGHz/structominer.
imran.nappa@gmail.com - that is me. :)
booom 3688 http://awesomescreenshot.com/0db2gytp66 (is that good??)
In the Bay Area or New York?
I get a sense that some people change languages or frameworks frequently just due to boredom, inability to commit to any one thing or a desire to pad their resume with buzzwords.

It's just like everything else - great programmers will tell you to learn multiple languages to expand your mind. Mediocre programmers will twist that around and use it as rational to flip-flop around without developing any deep knowledge.
I think we're talking about the browser side of things. I haven't investigated why, but it pegs the cpu on my macbook pro in Chrome, Safari, and Firefox.

It seems pretty light on the server side.
> If they knew there might be criminal repercussions to such a thing it might have very well saved lives.

A war of aggression is already a crime against humanity, which is a capital crime.

It's really a matter of enforcement. From the "Least untruthful" to the people who unleashed multi-trillion dollar wars on a pack of lies, the laws are there already.
At least in the U.S., lying by itself cannot be made illegal, as a violation of the First Amendment.

That is what the Constitution says. The policy of the government is very, very different. [0]

Remember, don't talk to government agents without a lawyer.

[0] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Making_false_statements
Colorado gets $2 million from marijuana taxes
I don't know what the best swag is, but I assume you're trying to think 'outside the box'.

I think swag has two purposes.

1) Try to build a relationship with the developer, let them think about how you care about them, get them keen on your product, stay front of mine. For these sorts of things, we've seen stuff like coffee mugs, usb keys,keychains, etc. Stuff the developer uses, but the focus is not on being seen by other people.

2) the other type is stuff that broadcasts your company name and tries to make an affinity between the developer and the community. This is the stuff like t-shirts, hats, jackets, laptop cases, etc. etc. Sure the developer uses these things, but they are promoting your brand by using them, and are (sometimes) proudly showing their affinity to your company.

So first off, which type of swag are you looking for? What is your product, who are the developers? Is the brand on a public item going to help you get more clients, or are you so niche that you just want the developers who use your product to talk about you?

Today I got my first qi charging pad, and it is ripe to have some branding on it. If that fits your market, that could be a cool thing that developers use every day, but it would be rare than anybody sees it other than the dev.
Thanks latj, this is what I was thinking. Big batches may be a good model for a large brewery but not necessarily for a small one that is growing organically.

I can imagine several advantages. You can replicate without having to extrapolate quantities, pressure, etc. You get to run more experiments, I can envision a supervised machine learning system that learns which parameters make the best beer. You don't throw out big batches, etc. Sure, it may require more labor, but you get other advantages.
Except that mudslinging is usually done by 3rd parties so that the main candidates can keep their hands clean.
Why does the store (sixrig) has ads on their site?
A bit of advice. Do check that you are not doing an internship with immature first time CEOs/CTOs.

I've seen an intern lied to, abused and dismissed without recommendation letter and promised salary by a CEO/primary founder of a YC company that I was with. This was no fault of that intern and AFAIK was done primarily because that [recently immigrated from India] CEO wanted to save about $3k of moneys. One of the reasons I've left that company and dropped from YC BTW...

edit: a clarification. this is anecdotal evidence and probably doesn't reflect statistics of YC companies in general.
I work remotely for Silly-Valley and change bases frequently. This is just one of them. Bali is too crazy-drinking or hooneymooner for my meetup tastes, and Thailand while safe enough does still mean a new visa run for a lot of people, which is why keeping any potential meetup in China might be nice. I too was in Kunming from ~2001, however I am definitely not getting any older!
Actually I'm not sure. However, I certainly don't want to "out" theknown99 as either gender.

I will add an addendum to my response as it is overly aggressive.
Internet Users (% of the population) – Google Maps Gallery
Does this solve the same problem that new relic does? If not, what is the difference?
That's not "lying by itself"
It is burning my CPU (browser side, not server side)
http://i.imgur.com/NgXi4LG.png
The author should provide configuration so it does not get data from stats.json every second.
There are multiple levels of caching. The cache in a disk is just one. Filesystem cache is another, which happens in RAM. There may be a layer of caching between filesystem and disk. Applications routinely cache data in their own memory allocations before writing to the filesystem.

fsync lives between applications and the physical disk. Its (intended) effect is to flush dirty data that an application has written to the filesystem all the way to the physical disk.

For maximum performance and minimum fragmentation, you want to wait as long as possible before data is flushed from the filesystem's cache. In a typical storage system, the filesystem is what decides the approximate ordering of writes and the allocation of disk space. Disks have no idea what's going on, they just respond to commands to write certain data to certain locations; their discretion is minimal, at most they will re-order a small batch of writes for optimum head movement.

Delaying a flush as long as possible allows the filesystem to coalesce multiple writes to the same location into one write, allocate disk space in the largest possible chunks in the best locations to avoid fragmentation and excessive seeking, order the writes for rough optimization and for data and metadata consistency.

Caching data in RAM is a good thing.

fsync is what you use when you've got important data that needs to be preserved immediately. Most data on a typical PC or server is just not that important. You're better off letting the filesystem do its job. And there's a whole continuum of data consistency in between, where you might want certain operations to happen in a certain order, or data to be written in a certain order if it's written, even if you don't necessarily need them to end up on the disk right now.
This was not a pleasant experience. Half my screen (horizontally) was taken up by a blank UI element, while the actual screenshots were scrunched together on the right. It took me a while to realize that they were two screenshots next to each other.

Others have mentioned the flashing UI elements - if you wanted to show that things were updating in real time, you could've added the highlight to the votes themselves, instead of flashing a big rectangular area.

Also, you are biasing voters by telling them that one is 'old' while the other is 'new'. Show two screenshots (hopefully, larger than the tiny ones you have right now), in some random orders, and let people vote without bias.
AFAIK, Amtrak generally checks IDs these days as well
I can hardly understand anything, so here is a transcript -

http://blog.inside.com/blog/2014/3/10/edward-snowden-sxsw-fu...
jerf described a similar case where one is okay with losing some data, but not "too much". I'm not sure how to make that approach rigorous. (If rigor isn't important, and it's just best effort with no guarantees at all, then don't bother with fsync at all.)

I'm also not sure in what higher-level use case it actually makes sense. Sorry if I'm being thick, but saying "the case where I want exactly that" doesn't help explain that case :) I'm looking for a higher-level description of the problem that would solve (e.g., "an ACID database", or "a CDN" -- except those are cases where you may want zero or any data loss, respectively).
> First of all, I wouldn't even know who deGrasse Tyson was if it wasn't for sites like 4chan, reddit and hn. But apparently, he "has the world in his hands."

Same with Bill Nye. Cosmos will probably be one of the few things people might see with Neil outside the USA unless they go looking for him on the Internet. Other countries tend to have their own science communicators. As flashy and well made as Cosmos is I think things like the old "The Planets" from the BBC probably had better content.
Do we get a choice of what we do? I am interested in testing and security only not so much feature building and front-end work.

Also, do grad students qualify?
I thought about this for 5 minutes and really got nowhere. Can anyone come up with a nice analytic way to think about an algorithm?

There are a couple of brute force approaches: a) always pick the direction that will result in the most blocks to combine, b) always pick the direction that will result in the largest score.
Disclaimer: I am a private pilot and I am biased.

Pointing a laser at the aircraft is dangerous to passengers and people on the ground. But it is also dangerous to pilots who might receive (permanent) damage to their eye sight thus risking to lose the job (that they love and that feeds them). If someone points a gun at the police officer and gets shot, then I think it is a Darwin law at work. Same here - I have no problem with getting idiots locked up for life.
Ok, it's too late for me to edit, so please forgive my hastily aggressive response. What I meant by it is that it is easy to dismiss complaints about "one-sidedness" if things are tilted in your favour.
I would hope that is not true in the USA, but maybe you are right (depending on what you mean - I doubt you can publish SSNs and claim you had the right to do so).

I seriously doubt that publishing people's private info you got from your company would be legal based on European privacy laws (regardless what your company chose to have you personally sign).

I imagine going to jail is unlikely in any case. And I doubt it would be connected to your employment contract in any case: jail would likely be the result of some criminal offense you committed against the state, not against your employer.
"it's going to be very difficult to stop these drones."

Couldn't you just cover the prison with a wire net? If this really is a big issue, seems like a fairly simple solution.
Parent comment had to be qualified a bit: Never bet on anything proprietary which doesn't offer significant advantages over non-proprietary competitors.
Text Escaping and Unescaping in JavaScript
Actually I was thinking docker to re-use lxc-go to build the driver for LXC instead of using LXC userspace tools, this would have helped linux containers project as well. But I never intended they should re-write a new library from ground up.

My feeling was since LXC is already 1.0 and almost production ready, it would have been better to integrate its features in docker to make it production ready with one of the major enhancement of unpriviledged containers.

Now libcontainer as it is re-inventing the wheels, what's being done by LXC, will require a long path towards stability similar to LXC 1.0.

Moreover docker team should have spend more time building other drivers similar to LXC for OpenVZ or Solaris and BSD zones. Anyways I am not doing any code contribution so do not know the priority of the docker team. But this seem more sensible to me. Just my two cents.
The world needs this!!
Cool, I didn't even know that was a thing yet (other than via old school radio broadcasting).
This story isn't an accident, or a 2 year old. It is someone knowing what he is doing and knowing it is dangerous.
Run to the coffee shop at full tit.
Our customers are developers. My company is Stackify. We provide a service for operations that is a mashup of monitoring, metrics, errors, remote access and more.

T-shirts seem to be popular and we give those away. Just trying to think of some other clever ideas.
Well, since we're on the issue of political correctness, theknown99 could be transgender too :)
> Python 3 is a huge improvement

It's an improvement, but it's not huge. It's a better language, but it's still the Python we all know and love without a couple warts.
Or maybe go buy Threes which this is a descendant of?

http://asherv.com/threes/

Nice clone but it's definitely a clone and so should be treated as such.