skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
In recent years research has found more and more evidence of genetic determinism. i.e. certain types of brains are more prone to violent behavior. Psychopaths also have a certain brain "signature" [1]

I wonder if the legal system recognizes genetic determinism as a mitigating factor in violent crimes. If I were a defense attorney in a no-win scenario, I'd probably try this defense. Ah..will probably spend the rest of the night researching [2]

1. http://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/the-neuroscient...

2. https://www.google.com/webhp?sourceid=chrome-instant&ion=1&e...
Can you provide any references to that effect? I'm pretty sure the closest we still officially have is a virus that is derived from smallpox, which they convinced to jump species and infect apes.

Unofficially, well... case in point.
We're pushing 7 billion api calls/month through it. on two aws boxes.
The Truth About Youtube
I'm hoping to simplify it!
Qualification framework might improve certain grading system
Brain structure differences do not necessarily imply genetic determinism.
Dissertation Help
This is very cool, it is very close to a product I would spend money for. The product I would spend money for is an e-reader for code. I would copy a 'blob' to my tablet (ipad preferred by Android is ok too) which has all of the code in my example (could be small like an application, could be large like the entire 3.13 kernel source) There would be an ever present search bar or hot-gesture that would let me search for function, definition, callers, or callees. Think cscope on steroids for the language of my choice. Browsing around the source code would bring up source in syntax colored glory (either dark motif or light). It would use high resolution fonts on my retina display for crisp clear text. The typography would be optimized for reading code. It would remember my walks through the code, it would be able to recreate them on request, it would have a swipe-able interface to get to a notes pad "behind" the code where I could at notes about what does what. I would have the ability to fold entire functions, clauses, or loops, and unfold them as needed. It could bring up doxygen comments, when I gave a long press on a function name, it could jump between call graph and code mode. In short I could read code of arbitrary complexity while I rode the train home from work, or sat on the tarmac at JFK. I would pay $100 for an App that could do that for me.
Calkin-Wilf for Early(-ish) Haskellers
Don't forget XYY (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XYY_syndrome#1960s)

A cautionary tale about drawing conclusions from small sample sizes.
I was initially keen to read this, as it appears to be one of the only works on the topic of the Soviet bio-warfare program. However, the author's scientific credibility and "authenticity" (for lack of a better term) has been called into question: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ken_Alibek#Criticism

However, there are some Soviet bio-weapon incidents I've read about which were verified (by people other than Ken Alibek) as having genuinely occurred.
predisposition to murder doesn't seem like a good reason to let someone go free
This is one of the most profound revelations so far. Yet, HN just buried it off their front page. Wow.
This doesn't surprise me, sadly...

incarcerated homicide offenders had reduced gray matter volumes in the medial and lateral temporal lobes, including the hippocampus and posterior insula

...and indeed I've wondered why we don't test for conditions in the incarcerated population that have known potential for altering behavior, eg Toxoplasma gondii see http://wwwnc.cdc.gov/eid/article/9/11/03-0143_article for example.

Assuming for the sake of argument that we could soon reliably identify symptoms of a homocidal disposition, what does this mean for criminal justice and law enforcement? From a purely utilitarian point of view it makes sense to monitor or even confine such people, but from a libertarian (philosophical) point of view, we could not subject them to penal confinement as people can hardly be held criminally liable for deficiencies in their own brain structure, which might be the result of genetics, malnutrition, or childhood trauma.

Some sort of medical incarceration is the obvious alternative, but this is legally problematic. A Supreme Court case O'Connor v. Donaldson (1975) (among others, but this is the big one) made it very difficult to commit someone for confinement in a mental institution without clear evidence that they present a danger to society. Arguably, the US went putting people in mental institutions too casually and without regards for their rights, to a position of not providing sufficient mental health services for all but the most unhinged patients. While this technological advance might one day provide a reliable gauge of a person's homicidal capability, that's a long way from identifying how or when such behavior might manifest.

At a less extreme case than confining someone, should we allow someone with a measurable homicidal tendency to purchase guns? If we forbid them doing so, how do we avoid a tiered approach to citizenship, in which the rights of some are abrogated pre-emptively through no fault of their own actions, but a 'fault in their stars'?

From a different angle, this is also an interesting result for attorneys involved in death penalty defensive work - if MRI scans, which the courts and public are highly familiar with, can reliably predict homicidal characteristics, then the question of criminal responsibility becomes much more difficult to answer, since people have no control over the structures of their own brains.
The Estimote beacons are the closest I've seen to this idea, but I would like to hear about more competitors.

http://estimote.com/
I come back a few weeks or months later, and find that HN is still silently killing NSA stories. This was near the top of the front page, until I refreshed and it disappeared, ranked 25 among the new stories despite 13 points and 2 comments.

Stay classy, mods. Signing off now :D

Edit: Currently ranked #72, probably well on its way to the fourth or fifth page. At least on https://lobste.rs, I might be able to see a modlog explanation if it gets removed there too.
Why do you need millisecond(or is it microsecond?)-fast liquidity? What's wrong if there's a 10s or 1min window?
Areas with high unemployment like Spain are particularly vulnerable to disruption of the form that AirBnB is bringing to the hospitality industry, but I chuckled at this paragraph;

"Catalonia’s regional government said Tuesday that Airbnb is in “serious” breach of regional law and that it has ordered the company to pay €30,000 ($41,000) in fines within the month or begin adhering to Catalan law."

I'm guessing they meant to write "and begin adhering to the law" but so often we hear that you can either follow the law or bribe the officials to look the other way, it reads a bit like the latter :-). I'm curious what the folks in Spain think of this, is AirBnB a good thing or a bad thing?
Latest Snowden Leaks: FBI Targeted Muslim-American Lawyers
I love this type of research, but this particular study requires a two-ton grain of salt.

First, these results are based on only 20 total homicide offenders. So when they claim they can classify 75% of murderers correctly, that really just means 15 out of 20.

Second, the final classifier has access to more than 14 variables, including factors like the number of previous convictions, not just brain structure. [1]

If you're fitting 14 variables to 20 data points, it's very likely you're over-fitting. I personally would wait for a much larger study before drawing conclusions.

[1] "The identified variables were age, PCL:YV Factor 1, PCL:YV Factor 2, years of regular substance use, total number of convictions, ICU, SES, brain volume, left and right lateral orbital frontal cortex, medial orbital frontal cortex, anterior and posterior cingulate, right temporal pole, and right and left parahippocampal cortex." http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4055901/
Infuriating. I also just lost the ability to downvote posts and comments...
As yohanatan mentions, the OTP ecosystem is build around the notion of letting processes crash. In every other language that I can think of, you try to handle all errors immediately when they happen, whether that be an explicit check like in C or Go, or through some kind of exception system.

In Erlang/Elixir, your programs should be designed such that each process performs a small enough task that if it crashes unexpectedly, you can "recover" by restarting it. This idea is complemented by the shunning of side effects.

If you do it right, you end up writing wildly different programs in erlang/elixir than you would in other languages.

That said, erlang is specialized for a certain kind of problem, and if you're not building large-scale distributed systems, you probably won't as much out of erlang. Clojure is more general purpose.
I wrote a page that tries to explain the syntax in a way that's appropriate for programmers (who don't need to be shown how the REPL can be used as a calculator and things like that): http://dv.devio.us/a-quick-look-at-haskell.html
I do not understand why there are moderators on this site. I mean what's the point of the upvote/downvote buttons?
How file-system fragmentation and defrag affect ebs snapshots
The "generation" part is only part (one syllable) of the given name and doesn't constitute a separate name. The "yong" in my name is "generation name", but no Korean will call me "Yong" any more than an English speaker would call Richard "Chard".

Because most Korean names are neatly split into three characters (each character is a syllable in Korean), many people also write their names in three space-delimited words in Latin alphabet. And then westerners get confused and end up with patterns like "Gil D. Hong". (I'm not blaming them; you can't expect everyone to understand all the world's naming systems.)
it seems that cs61a (UCBerkeley) still uses Scheme at some point
http://www-inst.eecs.berkeley.edu/~cs61a/su13/

there is also cs61as which is entirely in scheme (but no lecture)
https://edge.edx.org/courses/UCBerkeleyX/CS61AS/2014_Spring/...
Well, and this is just a crazy idea here, you could just decide as a society that citizen gun ownership is kind of pointlessly dangerous, with a close to statistically insignificant rate of self-defense usage, and instead move back to a model of an actual well-regulated militia.
> the current system of government-funded science, which seems normal, in fact was invented more or less single-handedly by Vannevar Bush shortly after World War II. [1] The scenario that worries you was the norm for approximately the previous history of humanity.

The previous history of humanity isn't a standard that I think we should aspire to. It means no democracy, short lives, widespread brutality, open discrimination against most people, and not much investment in or success in the sciences.

> Anyone worried that a private patron of science might, e.g., put his career at risk, should be a thousand times more afraid of the Feds.

That's a strong claim. I don't agree subjectively; is there anything that backs it up? My impression from talking to people who apply for federal research grants is that it's tedious, time-consuming, but apolitical and based on merit.
grub2 is pretty much the textbook definition of "overdesigned." All it has to do is transfer control to the OS... that's it. But somehow it grew code to parse filesystems, set up graphical user interfaces, load modules, and do half a dozen things that it really has no reason to do. Half the time this hairball won't even boot after you change something, because you forgot to run the correct script to refresh the other scripts, or you moved something on the disk.

Just install elilo and enjoy having a system that actually works.
Apparently they are pointless.
Ask HN: Why are mods burying NSA stories?
And it seems I'm still slowbanned/hellbanned :D I'm thinking that something like /r/undelete for HN could be really useful.
whats wrong with fb?
Doesn't seem to be working.
I really hope they improve the app as well. Great articles in print but app was almost unusable last year when I tried to do a digital only subscription.
Reminds me of a cross-country (US) trip I made some years back. Having just passed through Mt. Rushmore (home of the National Memorial Parking Scam), I asked for suggestions on routes further east. I was immediately guided to the most direct route.

I interrupted, pointing out that I'd started in southern California, was headed to Virginia, and was more interested in the scenic route. I then got pointed on some amazingly beautiful roads through the Black Hills and skirting the Pine Ridge reservation, with an Indian pow-wow on the radio, and, after sunset, a lightning storm playing out on the horizon in my rear view mirror. Spectacular.

I've been known to take the scenic route through town (or between towns) as well, particularly to avoid both traffic and ugliness.
It seems to me that the real problem is that flash has access to browser cookies without following the browser security model.
As I just wrote elsewhere, the typical ways you get from Maybe x to x in Haskell don't have room to get tripped.

There is a function, fromMaybe, which takes a Maybe x and gives you an x... but it also takes a default!

Often even more useful is the maybe function:

maybe :: output -> (input -> output) -> Maybe input -> output

This takes a default output to use if you're given Nothing, a function to apply to the input and generate an output if you're given Just an input, and Maybe the input, and gives you the resulting output. As I said this is often more useful than "and use this default", because quite often the value you want to generate when it's Nothing is outside the image of the input under the function in question. For instance:

maybe "no number" show maybe_integer

There's no number I can pass to show to get "no number", maybe lets me very conveniently avoid trying to force one.
Doesn't work all that well on Chrome, either. Make the window narrow and the text goes below the fold but is unscrollable.

Edit: Just on the first page, it seems.
To be frank, reasonable people are nervous because muslim ideology, as published, matches the modus operandi of things like ISIS, the states of Pakistan and generally middle eastern countries to some extent.

And frankly what also makes me horribly nervous is that when talking to muslims that are clearly well integrated, at work, or when going out. I can't get them to condemn terrorist behaviour. Not even when we're talking obviously immoral behaviour, like the 1972 olympic attack (just to avoid 9/11), or today ISIS' modus operandi. When it comes to the obvious religious extermination policies that exist in places like Pakistan or Bangladesh, or all over the middle east, again, it does not seem to be possible, in my experience, to hear condemnations of that behaviour. And frankly, when going over the behaviour that muslim history claims "the prophet" had, like exterminating Khaybar, men, women and children over a trivial conflict, again you can't get muslims to condemn that behavior. He, by the way, did not just kill them, but tortured them first, forced kids to watch family members' executions and worse.

They just deny it exists, how it's all a massive conspiracy against islam, muslims, those countries or some other such claim that they can't defend at all. Regularly muslims suggest that the whole of the quran, hadith and other sources has been falsified just for the purpose of that very discussion.

Knowing that these are well-integrated muslims, not "normal" ones is worrying, very, very worrying. To be honest, if someone were to try something like ISIS is doing in Iraq[1] in America, I am absolutely convinced there would not be serious opposition to that from the American muslim community.

I don't get how we can ever really live together with this religion. There simply is no interest in doing that on the muslim side. Yes there is a period of calm that has started with the WWI extermination of the Caliphate by the Turks. I feat that period is ending, and things will get much, much worse in the medium term.

I know I'll get downvoted for this, but I feel this is a legitimate concern.

[1] http://rt.com/news/166436-isis-execution-video-iraq/
That statement just implies that you're bad at understanding flaws in studies. Does this mean you should be banned from voting?
> Everybody knows Apple is a shark, but Google really hustled us.

I find this (rather pervasive) attitude quite curious. If Google had actually committed grave ethical breaches and caused gross harm to its users I would understand it. Google actually puts "don't be evil" into their code of conduct - it's part of their employment agreement with their employees and they spell out in detail what it means. That is actually a real concrete difference to these other companies. So I am curious how you think they have they "hustled" everybody? They are surely not perfect, but the way people talk like this I can't help wondering, where's the gigantic breach of faith you are talking about?
In his book "Free Will" (http://www.samharris.org/free-will), Sam Harris discusses the dilemma of what we would do if we suddenly discovered that horrible acts of violence were actually pre-determined by one's genetics and physical traits, rather than by one's (supposedly) controllable will and thought processes.

How do you punish someone who unwillingly commits atrocities, someone who cannot control it and didn't ask to be born that way? What do you do with that individual? IIRC the example was someone committing a murder and then the jury discovering that the person actually had a brain tumor that was making him/her act differently from normal. Do you hate that person? Who do you blame?

In an ideal futuristic society we would be able to alter our genetics in such a way that we do not present an unnecessary threat to others, if we do indeed discover that we're naturally predisposed towards horrible acts of violence.
Num a => a

is actually
(Num a) => (a)

that is, Num a means roughly something like

template<class a>
class INum{
}

`a` is an instance of `Num`

if you want to write a times2 function(f(x) = x*2), its type would be (with redundant parenthesis added)

(Num a) => (a -> a)

so, a->a means it's a function that takes an `a` and returns an `a`... and `a` can be any thing that implements Num

The idea with haskell is that you heavily rely on polymorphism on the return types, this might make using code a little more awkward, since you have to explicitly say the type that you want to constrain to, but it makes writing generic libraries/APIs a lot easier, you might find this question interesting:

http://programmers.stackexchange.com/questions/105662/is-ret...

`[2..]`

is the same thing as

itertools.count(2)

in Python, an infinite sequence of number, starting from 2

sieve something where sieve (p:xs) = yadayada

is usually written on multiple lines

sieve something
where
sieve (p:xs) = yadayada

if you know that you can define a function with

f x = something_with_x

it's somewhat obvious that you're defining a function called sieve that takes a (p:xs)

so, you're just defining a function and using it (with the [2..]) argument on the same line

(p:xs)

is destructuring, it basically take a list (`(:)` is used to `cons`truct lists) and assign the first element of it to `p`, and the rest to `xs` (xs is a commonly used name for this in Haskell)

so, it's like calling

sieve(list);

but you can define its signature as

something sieve(T head, list<T> rest);

(`something` will turn out to be `list<T>`)

/=

is indeed the same as !=, so (x `mod` p /= 0) is just (x is not a multiple of p)

[x | x <- xs, x `mod` p /= 0]

is a list comprehension, and is taking all the elements from xs that aren't multiples of p

p, as suggested by the letter, is a prime... so you're recursively filtering the elements who are not multiples of p, leaving only the ones who are multiple only of 1 and p themselves (that is, primes)

finally, you're concatenating the prime you're currently acting on (p) with the infinite lazy list of all subsequent primes

Hope this helps
Worldcup-Winning moods of Germany(Vs Brazil) captured
You want to think very, very, VERY carefully about the implications of "genetic determinism" before you go down that road.
That's not totally accurate - sometimes you're exchanging more than just the item in question, for example, putting yourself in danger.

In other words, if you can sell an item for $100k if you follow a set of laws (a government's, an organisation's, a community's, or your own), but you could sell the item without doing so for $500k, the item is still really only worth $100k (to you), but the (physical/societal/moral) danger involved in selling the item illegally that goes with it is not worth $400k to you.

Or, put another way, the item may be valued at $500k (to some potential buyer), but the legal buyer of the item is offering not to put you in danger in exchange for $400k.
US government research funding decisions are made by scientists, not politicians or taxpayers.

Also, I don't know that 'benefactors' are any less corrupt than politicians or lobbyists (if we can paint any group with such a broad brush).
Can I get high before I fly out of the Mile High city?
Start working on a way to fix them.
20 total homicide offenders, 135 non-homicide offenders, and two control groups comprising another 41 subjects between them. I agree it's a highly preliminary result, but successfully IDing 75% of homicide perpetrators and 82% of non-homicide subjects is a good start. Why are you leaving out the rest of the test population?

PS I don't think it's perfect by any means, when you look at the population it's pretty particular to New Mexico. Per my other comment, I think the significance of this is that we should be doing a lot more research in our depressingly large incarcerated population to develop a better understanding what makes some criminals dangerous vs others who are just selfish or opportunistic.
There was a great episode on radiolab about this: http://www.radiolab.org/story/317421-blame/

On segment of the show is about a man whose self control is impacted due to some mental disorder. The question is: Should he be treated more leniently because it's not his fault, but his brain's? The conclusion, that I have to agree with is: Of course not! You ARE your brain.
To extend, how do you 'punish' those who have those genetics and physical traits, but haven't committed a crime yet?

How do you treat a perfectly innocent someone who cannot control it and didn't ask to be born that way? What do you do with that individual?
Theoretically, there's no reason you couldn't write a similar app for Android devices which support BLE[1] to reimplement this functionality, but Panic have only ever written for Apple devices.

[1] http://stackoverflow.com/questions/18906988/what-is-the-ibea...
Actually, Århus changed its name immediately after the reform, but Aalborg did not. It was not until 2012 that Århus decided to change its name back to »Aarhus« to become 'easier to spell internationally' (which was the argument).

I still spell it Århus to taunt the idea that it was the »å« that prevented Århus from the same business opportunities as Copenhagen -- I'm sorry, København.