skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I'm impressed by the article, as usually I expect articles on these issues to skew towards a complete misunderstanding of homelessness, often at best with a tone of exasperation.

From my experience around homeless or border-line homeless people, it's always more complicated than it seems.

And yet, simply being kind, even if just acknowledging their existence without making them feel judged, seems to me like a great start. Even if the underlying motivations might be misguided.

Here in The Netherlands we have some systems that help those who are homeless, or those who are in danger of becoming homeless. While there is plenty of criticism, and plenty goes wrong, there are also plenty of examples of people getting back on their feet because we have strong support structures. I really hope stories such as these will help to increase initiatives like that, or at least funding of existing (result-based) programs.

I feel there are some serious societal issues underlying the phenomenon, but something is better than nothing.
The parallel/series approach sounds really interesting - I'll have to look at that. On the other hand, if you wanted to reduce valve count, you could even do charlie-plexing! Then you can get 2*sqrt(N) nice valves to control N bottles. That would be really cool. Now somebody's just got to build the 100 bottle bartending robot.
> Our evidence shows that only one Spotify user’s data has been accessed and this did not include any password, financial or payment information.
Not that I know of.

An interesting aside - as you may have read, FMT is being investigated as a treatment for autism. The thinking here is as follows. Babies are born with a certain level of Clostridium species (not necessarily C. diff). Clostridium are very good at producing toxins (botulism and the toxins involved in C.diff). Normally the level of clostridium in babies drops on its own. It's believed that in some babies, this drop never happens. These babies are then therefore continually exposed to toxins from these clostridium bugs, some of which may have neurotoxic properties and can result in autism. The goal of FMT is to alter the gut flora enough to get rid of these Clostridium species and stop the toxin from reaching the brain. There has been success in young children. What we need to keep in mind though is that autism is a spectrum of not only symptoms, but also a spectrum of causes as well, so FMT won't necessarily work for everyone.
I think the joke was because only one user's data was apparently accessed.
Mass. General researchers to build next generation of brain implants
This would be great news, except I trust Mono even less than I trust IIS. At least IIS is fast, even if it breaks in bizarre and opaque ways.
> The idea that its rational and sane to lose $10k is laughable

Not obvious. Until you get his SSN or otherwise do a background check, you have no idea what's in his past, or how that $10K compares to his legal obligations. There is an unaddressed moral question for society in whether a person in a difficult situation has an implicit right to both a non-zero personal net worth and anonymity.

(again, I don't know Leo's situation either)
You can write cmdlets in C# and VB, not just call Powershell cmdlets/scripts. You should be able to write cmdlets in Ruby, or Node.js or Brainfuck.
If he can't handle the money, what makes you think he would've accepted the health care?
Children reacting to a computer from the 1970s
My company published a guide to C Diff last year. The author, a GI doc and C diff researcher, had this to say about hospital-initiated transplants:

Stool transplant, also known as a fecal transplant, is a unique therapy. At our hospital, we recommend stool transplants only if all else has failed. Specifically, if a patient has had recurrence of C. diff, even after pulse-tapered Vanco treatment, or multiple bouts of Vanco, Dificid or Flagyl, it’s time to consider a stool transplant.

The idea behind a stool transplant is to “reseed the lawn,” so to speak. After exposure to weeks or months of antibiotics (including Vanco) the normal bowel flora — the organisms in your colon that help prevent infection — is weakened. They simply can’t keep C. diff out. In other words, the normal barrier function of the colonic flora is gone, and C. diff gets right back in. So putting in some normal flora from a healthy donor is like reseeding the lawn — it restores the barrier.

The author was aware of the DIY movement, as well as the rise of holistic medical practitioners who are offering transplant treatments.

He also noted that transplants are still relatively rare. Not many PCPs know much about C diff and recommended treatments; patients usually are referred to specialists in gastrointestinal and infectious disease.
Regarding the "Perl 5 interpreter for the JVM": See rakudo-jvm.

It can run perl5 and perl6 code, and has proper threading support, but the perl5 backend is still in development.

Regarding the "Perl 5 to Javascript compiler": See perlito

perlcc, the static C compiler is very stable and used in production.
I like this idea and will try to create a profile myself. Could also be useful to rethink personal targets anyway :)
Snover specifically set out to design "the next generation platform for administrative automation" in 2002. See the Monad Manifesto:

http://www.jsnover.com/Docs/MonadManifesto.pdf

And Snover's description of the process almost a decade later:

http://www.jsnover.com/blog/2011/10/01/monad-manifesto/
Visual programming tool. Its not only for learning.
While not really a URL shortener in the tinyurl sense, cjb.net offered sub-domains for URL redirection that effectively shortened long URLs (ie: mysite.cjb.net) since the late-1990s; it was a pretty popular in the gaming community.
Biologists Find New Rules for Life at the Edge of Chaos
I think moving CGI.pm out is major but good!
Post-Snowden: the economics of surveillance
Location history is necessary for some Google Maps feature I don't remember. But for either of these services you can create a dummy account on your Android devices and just enable it per-device, and separately sync your main [real] account's mail, contacts, etc. Segregates privacy information so any exposure is limited to an individual device or profile.
This was my first take-away ... at least Wired linked to an article they wrote backing it up (even if you still don't agree): http://www.wired.com/2012/11/amazon-3/
I don't think this will happen, for two reasons.

1. The issue of what is "in your interest" is not so black and white. For instance, one of the reasons Google is still so popular is because it more consistently returns the results we want. On many DDG discussions (or Bing-related discussions when it was still being discussed), this has been raised as a deal-breaking issue for many people. Google's results are often more relevant and useful. This is in part because of Google's vast store of consumer data. Now, you may argue that their results are better for other reasons, but the fact is that using their consumer data is an integral part of their ranking algorithm, and people like their ranking algorithm.

2. On a more cynical note, it seems that governments and corporations are aligned in their interest to collect as much data about citizens as possible. I doubt that the U.S. government will mandate a reduction in storage of consumer data, when they themselves benefit regularly from that data thanks to widespread use of NSLs and other legal and extralegal demands.
Haskell, and Why It Might Be My New Favourite Language
Thoughts on a cool new language: Pony.
Here's the source I think you are citing: http://www.nationalhomeless.org/factsheets/Mental_Illness.pd...

20-25% is a pretty high number, especially when you compare it to the 6% of Americans with a severe mental illness. I can't find any good estimates for the percent of homeless with any form of mental illness.

A good question (which I can't find an answer to) is what is the percentage of the long term homeless population that suffers from severe mental illness?
It helped me with formulating my targets and reflect what would pull me away from my (fine) current job :-)
Well, because Windows is not Unix. It's not even "not Unix" the way Linux isn't Unix. Its heritage is mostly VMS and CP/M, if you want to compare it to anything. Trying to treat Windows as a Unix is a very leaky abstraction that is going to cause many more problems than it solves.
The next evolved-over-multiple years large and complex spreadsheet tool that I inherit that has even a rudimentary test suite will be the first.

More often than not, the fact that a spreadsheet was used meant business was doing an end-run around lack of IT support initially to build the thing and wanted the quickest thing that appeared to work without any concern for (or even knowledge of) software development process, and its almost certain that in the history of changes (even if IT was forced later to adopt the spreadsheet) have been do the minimum required to meet each new requirement without really understanding what went before (often because the one person that understood what the original was doing has left.)

Which isn't really a problem with the tool, but with the social conditions which make the tool attractive to use in the first place.
I noticed that the queen's pawn opening has grown in popularity considerably.

I don't really play chess anymore, but two decades ago, I played quite a bit. Much of the time, it was against a computer. I couldn't win. I finally found a book that really worked for me, and it taught me the "stonewall" approach, where you (playing white) advance the queen's pawn, lock up the game, and start maneuvering very tactically to restrict the movement of black's king and get a mate.

I found that this was the only way I could beat the computer - largely because it allowed me to think along a very few narrow lines (often involving a sacrifice), while the computer would get bogged down in useless searches. This was all in the late 90s, my guess is that it wouldn't work anymore.

So, I'm wondering if the surge in queen's pawn opening is the result of people being conditioned to play against computers? And it brings up another point - I've heard (man, I wish I could find a link to this theory on the web) that chess masters who lament the rise of computers actually aren't particularly bummed that computers can beat the strongest human chess players. They're bummed that the best human chess players are now playing a style that is heavily influenced by years of practice against a very specific style of opponent - a powerful computer that can't really make a "mistake". Young people have opportunities to train that never existed before, but because they don't train against stronger human players as often, some of the style of the game has been lost. I'm not (and never was) good enough at chess to know if this is true, but if anyone has an angle on it, please chime in!

Oh - by the way, a very satisfying ending here. I knew a very brilliant guy who I couldn't beat at chess in high school. After I read this "stonewall" book, I was all ready for him. I advanced queen's pawn, all read to lock it down and take away his advantage. He simply advanced his king's pawn, basically telling me, go ahead and take it. The wide open game against an inferior opponent was worth far more to him than a pawn.

Good for him, though not so good for me ;) That's the kind of thing you do when you're experienced playing against people rather than computers.
Although that was no doubt in part due to the extreme expense of computers then. He said that 4 years before Moore published his famous Moore's Law, which many refused to believe for decades, in a period when computers were transitioning from vaccume tubes to transitors, which cost many hundreds of dollars when adjusted for inflation, and probably still when they were shipped with serial numbers. And of course memory was still made by hand out of magnetic cores.

Multics was the result of this vision of McCarty and others at MIT, hence its strong focus on security.
Now that is as straight from the horse's mouth as it gets!

Another science casualty on the altar of misinformed press.
Can you address danieltillett's question regarding anaerobes?
Cash in a safety deposit box, generally. Lots easier than opening a bank account. Take out what you need.

Also Patrick could put the money onto a debit gift card.

As I wrote above, there are larger issues here. If Leo can't handle this money, in any form, then he'll need a caretaker. Be that a relative, social services, friend, etc.
Possibly, but why wouldn't they say so? It seems reasonable to me that they would blame the heartbleed bug instead of taking the blow themselves.
I agree-- I feel like there's a long way to go before something like this becomes more valuable than simply watching yourself play on tape.
Processing overhead on a large number of torrent connections will overwhelm most consumer routers before they get anywhere near their theoretical max connection speed. Unless OP has a very high-end router, the best test would be a 1-to-1 connection. However, even a 1-to-1 connection (like a rented Linode VPS) will still likely be too much for a consumer router. See the rankings at smallnetbuilder for more info. For example, the fastest AC1750 router can only do 850Mbps from WAN to LAN: http://www.smallnetbuilder.com/wireless/wireless-reviews/321...
We have a similar connection at work and a torrent download is a good way to test the bandwidth.
In the tin-foil-beanie community, it's not quite as common a belief as chemtrails, but more so than the deep-underground-military-base meme.
If everyone is remote, where is that lunch held? Do you fly to them, or do they fly in to some "central" location? Just wondering what that location is if you are truly distributed...
Internet Navigator
There's a regex character class for that

Alphabetical only? $value =~ /[[:alpha:]]/

Ascii only? $value =~ /[[:ascii:]]/

http://perldoc.perl.org/perlrecharclass.html#Bracketed-Chara...
Ditto here.

You can color me unsurprised if mental health issues correlate with any lifestyle choice that differs from the norms of the culture one was raised in, really. I'm not sure if that's indicative of anything other than standard platitudes about finding one's place and/or being an outsider.
I will soon, thanks!
I can never remember the python 2 quirky, inconsistent syntax, I always have to look it up.

PRINT TO A FILE, OR STDERR
print >> sys.stderr, "blah"
What are those '>' signs here? Why two? What happens if I use one only?

Compare this to (py3k):
print("blablah", file=sys.stderr)

PRINT WITHOUT NEW LINE
sys.stdout.write('blah')
I can't use print to print?

compare to:
print("blah", end="")

DISABLE FLIUSH
In python 2 there are 2 or 3 different ways to do that, all more complicated than each other. Compared to:

print("blah", flush=True)

Finally, it's a function, you can do everything you do with a function, use map, return a print from another function, include it in generator expressions etc...
Are You Creating Something Viral? Try This
I'm pretty sure companies would pay handsomly to be featured for 150 minutes on the HN frontpage :) It's huge exposure, so I wouldn't complain :)
How Software is Eating Web Design
The problem with spreadsheets is not a simple issue of good vs. bad. Spreadsheets have an extremely flexible and well accepted if not intuitive interface. The problem is that they do not provide visibility into what processing is occurring, require a lot of error-prone manual manipulation, and are difficult to audit. As such, they are not really designed for testing and disciplined business processes that ensure accuracy and data integrity. You can't have complete flexibility as well as rigid controls.

One solution is to recognize when a given spreadsheets usage has increased to a point where it - or some portion of its functionality - would be better embedded in an application. Another is to have some users adopt a environment/language like R which addresses the short-comings listed above at the expense of being more complicated and less user-friendly. But there is no simple solution that is going to result in spreadsheets disappearing from use.
it's also quite different from Neo4j which is a graph only database and is poor at representing normal documents. Neo4j is also very expensive if you want to use it in a cluster, whereas OrientDB imposes no such restrictions.

Orient is definitely a hybrid - it was a document database before it became a document-graph database, but I believe it can still do everything that n4j can. One of the nicest things about it is that it is object oriented - you can define classes and then extend them, something you cannot do in mongo or any RDBMS that I know of. This makes it very simple to use, because the database structure can accurately reflect your application class structure, without any need for leaky abstractions such as ActiveRecord.
Fukushima underground 'ice wall' aims to slow radioactive build-up
I feel i should point out that will not use an index.

DELETE FROM Table WHERE CreateDate < DATEADD(year, -2, getdate())
I don't know much about RG's history, but I wonder if his antics are partly why the site was so successful initially? From the little I've seen of RG over the years it seems like they rely heavily on gimmicks and antics as a promotional tool (I guess that's sort of the MO for the music industry though).
hell lot of data! First they have to find some alternative to zip these much of data!
The last time I tried OrientDB was about 2 years ago. I really liked the idea of an all Java DB. But somehow I could not get it work the way I wanted and struggled with the lazy/eager loading.

I guess now is a good time to try it again and see how it goes.
I see he's still as obnoxious like always. He makes points, though I'm not qualified to say whether they are valid. I wish he could be more restrained.

That said, if someone like David Deutsch publishes such theories with grand predictions, they deserve criticism.
Show HN: A small and simple JavaScript animation library
Interview with Neela Jacques, Executive Director of the OpenDaylight Project
What definition of mental illness do you use for serious mental illness? Substance abuse is formally classified as a mental illness in the DSM.
Microbiologist here - the name anaerobe is a pretty broad term. Within the gut there is going to be obligate anaerobes (killed by atmospheric O2) and facultative anaerobes (can survive in both oxygen rich and oxygen deplete environments).

In a blender, the obligates will likely die but the facultative will remain.
How (and why) to get developers to write a blogpost?
In no special order:

Evernote

FeedsAPI.ORG Professional

Yesware.com Team

DreamHost
DoorDash (YC S13) is hiring. Build the next generation of on-demand delivery
>there is no way to guarantee that you
>have actually eliminated every possibility

So, what? You just stop once you eliminate the known possibilities?

That last possibility REQUIRES experiment, investigation and thought to verify. If you discover a new possibility then you apply the process again.

The approach is not a one-shot deal, you MUST keep applying it. The current laws of physics are models that we use to explain what we observe and (if the model is good) predict what we might observe.

This by no means implies that that the models describe what's really going on. It is possible to have a model that describes a system that works but is not complete. The deeper we dig, the more we learn.

The fictional quote was meant to describe a deductive approach to investigation, not a rigid method. How often did Holmes dig up new facts and change his mind after eliminating possibilities?
What a great way to extend the usefulness of an obsolete foundry!

I'm guessing that they're using hydroponics and carefully regulating the mineral supply to achieve the desired potassium levels.
In a cute attempt at defusing this interesting PR situation, Coursesmart attempts to talk to its detractors individually instead of participating in a public discussion:

https://twitter.com/liotier/status/471308846749982720

https://twitter.com/liotier/status/471307993850859520
One thing that I'm curious about: the GI tract is long and wiggly. Stuffing a transplant in one end only gets flora so far. Probiotics in the other end may help too. So what happens about the rest?

Is anyone making coated capsules to deliver flora further down the gut?
I've done a bit of work building a complex Excel spreadsheet, because that was the job - and what I wanted afterwards was an automated way to turn it into a Python script. Collaborating in Excel is tricky - it was a large enough spreadsheet that 32-bit Excel would sometimes crash, and version tracking was entirely manual.
Messaging 2.0 is now over
For sure.... quoted below.

Microbiologist here - the name anaerobe is a pretty broad term. Within the gut there is going to be obligate anaerobes (killed by atmospheric O2) and facultative anaerobes (can survive in both oxygen rich and oxygen deplete environments).

In a blender, the obligates will likely die but the facultative will remain.
As I answered you under the blog post itself, it's mostly held in Warsaw or any other big Polish city the person applying is based near :)
Who is "we" in this statement? Who meant for the internet to turn out, or not turn out, any particular way? I've been around the internet a long time, and I don't remember any such master plan. It just evolved, because a lot of people with a lot of different agendas nudged it this way and that over a time span that involved lots of technical and economic changes. Evolution doesn't have goals. It only has directions.

Instead of feeling nostalgic for a world that never was, how about if we work forward from where it already is? What incremental changes would make it better?
It seems that no one else has a problem with this, but I'm still not completely sold on Kickstarter projects that essentially function as pre-order mechanisms for products in development. Shouldn't this money be coming from investors or lenders?
> Pipe around JSON or XML? Then you just have data structures, but not objects. They can't have methods and if they could, what language would they be written in?

You could pipe around DTOs like that, and as long as they had a structure that attached typing information to them, you could use something like intents (similar to those in Android or Web Intents) to attach "methods" to them. The executables implementing behavior could be written in any language that the platform could run.
You know that "the people who call Go a systems programming language" are its authors, do you not?
I find points 1 and 2 difficult to believe as the primary reason people rely on Excel. I think the primary reason is as seanstickle suggested: Excel is the only programming environment many "business people" know and are comfortable in. I personally know people who use Excel for data analysis, and it's because they don't know a general purpose programming language.

edit: Based on your other comments downthread, I realized that you meant the IT department themselves should develop the application using "proper tooling", not the business people. That means that the business people will have to hand over requirements to the IT people, who will write the software. I think turn-around time may be too much for business people who want to do their own data exploration.
https://metacpan.org/pod/perldata#Key-Value-Hash-Slices

Hash slices look slick:

%h = (blonk => 2, foo => 3, squink => 5, bar => 8);
%subset = %h{qw[ foo bar ]}; # key/value hash slice
# %subset is now (foo => 3, bar => 8)
The whole article reads as though McConlogue was the sole source. There's one quote from Grand, about how he "actually likes to code", but his voice is noticeably absent from a piece that is almost entirely about homelessness – an experience that Grand is actually living and probably qualified to comment on. Instead, the article is just the author's speculation about his motivations. Weird.