skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Palestinian youth break through separation wall to remind the world
Equipment is pretty trivial to design+build, and additionally there's a robust secondary market in lab equipment. And, for most stuff that isn't cutting-edge, the cost is in build quality. The recent reversal of the trend away from open hardware is nice. But, most "DIY bio" equipment has the feeling of scratching a geek itch more than anything else.

The important stuff, however, is the consumables-- enzymes, antibodies, chemicals and so forth.

A good market for cheap reagents or a few good suppliers of cheap reagents+optics would do more for DIY bio than all the kickstarted copycat hardware in the world (with the exception of fluid handling robots maybe)
In the case of this article, yes.
I mentioned MSSQL specifically because of personal experience with it over the past 8 years. I see PostgreSQL as the best open source alternative. I have little to no experience with Oracle, so I can't speak for it, but I suspect it's just as functional and preformant.
Building cars with less capital
This thread reminded me of an excerpt from the beginning of http://www.dimensionsmagazine.com/dimtext/kjn/people/heavies...

"Dionysius of Heracleia was notorious for his appetite, and eventually grew so weighty that he could scarcely budge: he suffered from apnea or narcolepsy besides, prompting his doctors to prick his flesh with needles whenever he fell asleep on his throne. A contemporary poet has him declare that he aspired to end his days 'on my back, lying on my many rolls of fat, scarcely uttering a word, taking labored breaths, and eating my fill,' for of all the ways a man might die, an excess of luxury was the only truly happy death. Nevertheless, he lived to what was then the ripe old age of 55, earning a reputation for fairness and generosity that competed with his size as an object of astonishment."

Rejection of duty is rejection of responsibility. I have no complaints about people who do so -- and would enjoy more vacations of that sort myself -- so long as they've set up their lives to not be responsible for others during their rejection period. It may be better to find ways of enjoying life's comforts while staying on top of your business, though.
The browserstack website is currently down for me. Anyone else?
Logging Pods in Kubernetes
Got that same email. Went to browserstack.com and found a maintenance sign.

What's going on?
> If someone's a bad actor, just do us all a favor and name the bad actor.

I agree with this, but accusing someone when you're not 100% sure and only have circumstantial evidence seems even worse.
I just got this too.
He didn't make up the phrase "information wants to be free," it's something that was said a lot when mp3 piracy first took off in earnest. Even if the literal meaning is quite more general, when someone writes this chances are they mean it in connection to media and DRM.
"Name me one smart hacker from the 80's or 90's that didn't get wickedly rich"

Pretty much none of them got wickedly rich. For the most part, they got a decent developer-tier salary at a tech company.
<i>The author has an issue with productivity for the sake of productivity.</i>

I agree with that sentiment.

<i>Spending time helping people in need is obviously a valuable and wise use of time, but you shouldn't feel guilty for not spending every waking moment increasing your net worth.</i>

Again, I agree, but the author seems to be A-OK with goofing off for years instead of pitching in with the rest of us.
i presume he doesn't want to be the one to out the guy, which might be viewed negatively. instead, he gave just enough details to let someone else to do the outing.
It was online around the time of OP's post. Looks like they went offline in response to this event.
Top Startup Mistakes
So you start coding even if the schema is not finalised?
I've tried Chrubuntu and it doesn't work as well as Crouton. The wifi, specifically, is flaky. Have you had better luck with the Chromebook 2 specifically?
BrowserStack trolled by ex-employee
But it has been false for a long time

Actually it has been getting more true for a long time. With computers in nearly every aspect of society we have more data than ever to sift through. AI/ML is a big data problem. Numerics and simulations become more effective with large amounts of data. Instead of simulating a result from 1 data point, try 100s, 1000s or millions or data points.
Ask HN: Can I Help You With Your Job Hunt?
Hey HN,

After finishing my degree in Comp Sci I trained in technical recruitment. I thought it would be interesting to get paid to understand the industry and learn about the roles that were actually out there, market rates, negotiation skills, interview techniques, resume writing etc.

I enjoyed helping people find their ideal role but disliked most of the way traditional recruitment companies worked (profit over people). I absorbed the useful skills & transferred them into my own career.

I moved into my own technical roles where I've been for the last few years. More recently I've started managing a team of engineers and have found that a lot of the career mentoring advice (what I assumed was common knowledge) to be the most useful.

I have provided highly successful resume assessments in a freelance capacity for a while now and would like to extend this further.

Is there anything I can help with on your current job search?

In return, I'd just like feedback on your progress.

Thanks!

(I'm my username at gmail.com if you want to get in touch directly.)
Three/One Letter Variables.

Lapidary:

(of language) engraved on or suitable for engraving on stone and therefore elegant and concise.
i just got this also. Hopefully this isn't true.
the author is a woman
In my experience, you can't dictate the use of project management tools to a customer. If your customer likes email, that's what you're going to use.

I've tried Basecamp with limited success. But that's just my clients. Maybe your situation is different.

(Also, Basecamp gets astonishingly cluttered and hard to navigate when you get slightly busy. I have a group of 10 people creating a nonprofit organization from ground zero -- including legal work, website, etc. -- and it's pure shit to try to find stuff in Basecamp. Highly NON-recommended. So beware the curse of success in persuading people to use a tool like Basecamp.)

This means that you need to keep yourself highly organized in order to remain sane. For me, I am a happy IQTELL user. http://www.iqtell.com

But you might find something else that you like.

See, the problem isn't the tool you use. It's you and your brain. Get that right and everything will be fine.

A piece of paper with a list of stuff on it is fine. Right now I have a list of 9 things on a piece of paper. If I'm not working on one of those, I'm off course.

The usual disclaimers: David Allen is God, etc. etc.

But seriously. Keep it simple. I would say get a Moleskine and a pen, but I lost my paper organizer in a cab in Riyadh and that kinda sucked the farts out of dead seagulls. So now it's all in the cloud and in my phone, courtesy of IQTELL.
Interesting. In this simulation, fighting on multiple fronts is optimal because then no single enemy can surround you. Funny. Leads to drawing along the borders being more significant than drawing within a solid colour block.
Yeah, looks like angry ex-employee(s)...
Next Project: “Networking for Sysadmins”
Offtopic, but ".website" is pretty much the worst TLD conceivable.
I would probably still use them even if this information is true because we never had any important data go through their service (just testing accounts) and because I am not aware of any good alternatives.

... would look for an alternative first! But for now assuming that this is not real, anyone checked if it is real?
>I hate posts like this that don't name names. If someone's a bad actor, just do us all a favor and name the bad actor.

>Using a throwaway in case I'm wrong, but Andrew Romans of Rubicon Venture Capital (http://rubicon.vc) checks all the boxes here:

Are you serious? If you don't know, then don't run your mouth. Don't post some kind of bullshit like this from a throwaway "in case you're wrong".
It is clear to me that penalizing assumptions rather than "stuff" has worked out well in the past. It isn't clear to me that we shouldn't penalize stuff (or in this case, universes) at all. The fewest-assumptions version of MW seems to lead to such an explosion of "stuff" that there might well (in our optimal version of Occam's razor) exist some term that doesn't show up in evaluating nebulae, but dominates in considering MW. That said, applying a meta-Occam's-Razor for now should leave us with the focus on assumptions, and thus I think with MW.
MSSQL can be a great value for the money if you need all of the additional tools (SSIS, MSAS), and you are already in a Windows environment. For a straight rdbms, pg is a great solution.

Oracle is something you only use when you have reached some problem that only Oracle can solve. Even then, I would still try to work around Oracle. It is expensive and requires a large amount of tuning to make work well.

Oh, and pretend MySQL doesn't exist.
It's hard to belive it's a legit email, more likely their system has been compromised.
Also reminds of another old game called 'Colors of War'
http://colors-of-war.webs.com/
> are the publishers just ignorant of that?

My hypothesis: DRM is like magnetic healing bracelets. Do they work? No. Do people buy them? Yes. Are the purchasers just ignorant? No, not exactly. Ignorance isn't the problem, because telling them the facts doesn't change behavior.

People who buy magnetic healing bracelets want particular feelings more than they want to know the truth. So they buy the thing that gives them the feelings they want.

I suspect DRM is similar. Major media company executives like feeling in control. They don't like people "stealing" their content or doing "the wrong thing" with it. DRM gives them feelings of control, letting them turn the positive-sum game of entertainment back into a zero-sum dominance game.

Ridiculous, but that's what happens when your raw building material is primates, and then you give all the power to the ones best at climbing the primate dominance hierarchy.
And hopefully the patch is more than just "looks like it's time to change the root password"; if the claims in the paste are even remotely true, they have deeper OpSec problems which will take longer than a brief maintenance window to fix...
Hah. I like that the German word for calligraphy is "schönschreiben," which are the two words "beautiful" and "writing." (Same as the English version I guess but more native-friendly.)
El troyano Rovnix ha infectado PCs con Windows de 130.000 británicos
Because the internet is making it's way towards a death spiral. They seem to realize it's not worth the investment.
I disagree. Many people attempt to use it as a non-gendered pronoun, but I don't think that makes it inherently "gender-nonspecific".

Think of it this way. When you call a male-identifying person "guy" it affirms their gender. When you call a non-male-identifying person "guy" it passively denies theirs. "Guy" is not gender nonspecific, and when you use it that way, it has the potential to make a non-male person feel like their gender identity is being assimilated into your idea of a "guy", whatever that is.

Another thought to leave you with. "Guy" == male when the gender of the person it refers to has not been established. Suppose someone tells you "I saw this guy biking down the street the other day..." Do you ever imagine that they're talking about a woman?
I've been using saucelabs for over a year. It's very comparable
Recalculating Odds of RAID5 URE Failure
Is this for real? Any evidence of them being hacked? I think it's a bit weird for a company to just say "we lied. Sorry," and leave it at that.

I too received this email and am scratching my head. Their website is currently "under construction."
What is forward-secrecy?
Terrible title. Should be something like "Study identifies protein which improves synaptic plasticity in animal models"
Hey, can you suggest some good reads for understanding databases enough to build a simple relational database ...
Baltimore, MD; Reston, VA; FULL TIME

Videology Group - http://www.videologygroup.com/

Internet advertising startup looking primarily for server-side Java developers (if your Java is rusty but you're good, drop us a note anyway). I was working for a start-up called LucidMedia Networks (hence the "lmn" in the e-mail address below), which got acquired by Videology. Our stack is Java/Spring/*nix (Linux on the server but Mac in dev) with MySQL and some NoSQL stores on AWS. The Baltimore office also has a team on a large .NET stack as well, but Java teams are spread across both offices. We have some big projects in the works involving big data and volume as we scale globally and across mediums (video, mobile, etc.). Currently, our Reston platform alone handles 4 billion requests a day.

Contact me directly at sahil_lmn@yahoo.com.
I like when I'm on a run thinking about adding something to my website, and then I get home to find that very feature, nicely implemented, posted on HN! (Also, as a former English teacher, I can't resist pointing out a typo: "(Explanation: The value of deta-purplecoat-toggle must match the value of data-purplecoat to make this all work.)"
Prior discussion from a few days ago:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8562351
I do, certainly.

It's not a big deal to change a schema if you need to.
Yep. If there is an issue in the schema I go back, make changes to the db and my code, and continue.
The CFO of large healthcare organizations is historically who decides what software is purchased and used. Why the CFO? Because most enterprise healthcare software is built to support the billing/accounts receivable department.

It's very difficult to find an EMR that focuses on patient care and communication. The cynical side of me thinks that there isn't an incentive to build this kind of software. Doctor's aren't paid to make you healthier; they're paid to submit to insurance companies the correct diagnosis and procedure codes.
Sounds like someone hacked their servers and this is how their version of disclosure.
Calling all Hackers and Security-Geeks out there!

Law enforcement agencies, criminals and dictatorial regimes use IMSI-Catchers and StingRays, which are false mobile towers acting between the target mobile phone(s) and the service providers real towers. The FBI or local police might deploy the device at a protest to obtain a record of everyone who attended with a cell phone. IMSI-Catchers can not only intercept mobile phone traffic and track movement of mobile phone users, but even remotely manipulate your handset. Unfortunately it seems that IMSI-Catchers have been exponentially popular lately, with an explosion of various "bastards" with governments and criminals all the same, using it.

Our "Android IMSI-Catcher Detector" aims to detect and avoid these IMSI-Catchers. Users shall be warned if the ciphering is turned off. Several other protection-mechanisms are in the works, too. We started to implement the first detection methods and need people who can check our App on real IMSI-Catchers or equivalent self-build hardware.

Also (and this is no joke), if you work for a company producing software for IMSI-Catchers, leak it to us! Should you work for the police (or similar organization) and feel like giving our App a test on the IMSI-Catcher in your garage, have some fun and do it! NOTE: Since all members of our project value privacy to be one of the most important things to keep, please protect yourself when undertaking any action. We do not want do endorse you losing your job, family or lives. Just feel invited to keep our project moving by leaking IMSI-Catcher software and other secret information to us.

WARNING: Our App is currently in BLEEDING ALPHA state - do NOT complain that stuff is not working, start contributing pull requests!

* Website: https://secupwn.github.io/Android-IMSI-Catcher-Detector/
* Roadmap: https://github.com/SecUpwN/Android-IMSI-Catcher-Detector#dev...

Be brave and join us!

SecUpwN and the whole AIMSICD-Team.
I liked this essay, but it's also important to point out that GDP is very strongly correlated with health outcomes like life expectancy. It might be that we are starving our souls, but let's not forget about the fairly serious consequences of starving our bodies.

I don't mean to say that I disagree with the conclusion, just that I think the historical context is missing something. We didn't become productive out of greed, we became productive out of hunger. That attitude has run its course, absolutely, and we need to ask: we're not hungry anymore, so what now?

But let's not denigrate how we got here on the assumption that it was never a good idea. We might have climbed past the lowest rungs of the ladder, but that doesn't mean we didn't need them. Indeed, there are many who still do.
alt-x viper-mode

You're welcome.
Happened for us as well, definitely got hacked by some joe schmoe, or a disgruntled employee.
Debugging is detective work.
Thank you! Fixed the typo :)
I've been looking into them for automated testing of our frontend, and their automated testing hours per day looks like the best bang for the buck for our price range.
Of course I'm serious, and I'll run my mouth all I like. You don't post that many identifying details about someone without wanting, on some level, for the person's name to come out, so it's time to stop screwing around.

HN is high-profile enough for Mark Suster to see this (hi, Mark!) If I've done a terrible, horrible thing by pointing out this guy fits a whole lot of the things Mark mentioned in his post, Mark can correct the record here by telling us I'm completely wrong and it was someone else.

We'll just wait for him to show up.
If I had to pick one thing it would be practical Unicode for the rest of the world.

Most English devs have no idea just how bad things are with current langs.

A quick experiment.

First, translate "Practical" in to Thai: ปฏิบัติจริง
(https://translate.google.com/#en/th/Practical)

Next, see Unicode Inspector:
(http://apps.timwhitlock.info/unicode/inspect?s=ปฏิบัติจริง)

Note that ปฏิบัติจริง is 9 somethings or 11 something elses.

Finally, move the cursor along the "characters" in either google translate's output field (it's fiddly but works if you are patient) or the Unicode Inspector.

Note that there are SEVEN movements.

What sort of elements are these cursor movements moving over?

Graphemes.

There aren't 7 Code Points. Or 7 Code Units. Or 7 Bytes.

There are 7 Graphemes.

Graphemes are defined in the Unicode consortium's glossary as "What a user thinks of as a character."

http://www.unicode.org/glossary/#grapheme

There really couldn't be a more fundamentally important aspect of text processing for half the planet than dealing with text at the grapheme level ("what a user thinks of as a character") BY DEFAULT, unless the dev wants to do tricky stuff.

But almost all current langs (including Python 3.x) get this stuff terribly wrong in all sorts of ways.

Perl 6 takes graphemes seriously.

From Synopsis 15 (https://raw.githubusercontent.com/perl6/specs/master/S15-uni...):

* Perl 6 by default operates on graphemes

* Perl 6, by default, stores all strings given to it in NFG form, Normalization Form Grapheme. It's a Perl 6-invented character representation, designed to deal with un-precomposed graphemes properly.

* The Perl 6 C<Str> type, and more generally the C<Stringy> role, deals exclusively in NFG form.

* By default regexes operate on the grapheme (NFG) level, regardless of how the string itself is stored.

So, as far as graphemes ("what a user thinks of as a character") are concerned, Perl 6 gets this basic aspect of text processing right when almost all others get it terribly wrong.

(There are a couple other langs that seem to have made an effort to take graphemes seriously enough. For example, the .length function for strings in Elixir (related to Erlang) returns the count of graphemes by default. And a few like Clojure take graphemes seriously, just not seriously enough.)

So, a significant and rapidly growing chunk of the planet's programmer population are likely to end up interested in at least playing with P6 to see if it gets this bit right (and they'll find it does).
The author, danah boyd, is female.
I'm not for calling people jerks in online forums either, but I think that in this case the point is valid. Someone is behaving like a jerk if they deny the experience of others through lack of empathy. If you (the general you, not you) respond to someone who tells you "this language makes me feel unwelcome" by arguing that their experience of the language is wrong, you are in fact being (quite literally) a jerk.
Yeah, man. Fire up a pier and visit:

http://localhost:8080/geg/demo

You'll find the code in your pier/ship/main/app/demo/core.hook

To reset the counter (wipe the app state), at your command-line, do:

:wipe %demo

I just tested it, I can see that it still works, but like I said none of this is guaranteed to go on working. It's all very alpha.

This is called a %gall app. It's always running because the %gall vane runs the main/app/ apps in the background without intervention, like radio/core.hook that runs the server for the :chat app. See you in :chat maybe, if you have questions about how this works you will certainly be welcome.
I've built Hackintoshes since 10.7, but I would never offer to build one for friends and family, only because I know I'll be called upon to fix the inevitable problem during software updates. This is a social obligation I rather avoid, lest I become the "IT guy" for yet another dependent.

My recommendation is - if you don't have the knowledge or patience to build one yourself, you should not ask one to be built for you, because it will break and you're gonna have an unproductive day/week while you wait for help to arrive. Not worth the headache and lost productivity.

Hackintoshing should be strictly treated as a hobby.
They get everything right but still include the nonsense names.

You can tell the experience level of an infrastructure based on whether they use Lord of the Rings references or not.
I surmise that the interest in this post (both the retweets that brought it to my attention as well as the upvotes that propelled it to the top of the front page almost immediately after I submitted it) is largely driven by an expectation that the investor described in the article would be outed.

It's been noted by you and others elsewhere in the thread, but a reading through that lens leaves the impression that the details provided were intended to have exactly that effect.
I disagree with you. I thought it was very clear and well written.

> Of course per-capita GDP doesn't fully capture quality of life, but it's easy to measure and hard to fake.

It's extremely easy to fake. I sell you a backrub for 10.000 dollars and after that I buy one from you for 10.000 dollars and we've now in 10 minutes boosted our GDP with 20.000 dollars.

> Measuring and quantifying something is a prerequisite to optimizing it.

Which is what he is talking against. We are too focused on optimizing, when a lot of what it means to be a human are things that shouldn't be optimized. And secondly, long periods without productivity may actually be the foundation of later quality. And you can't optimize these unproductive periods.
> If I've done a terrible, horrible thing by naming this guy based on a whole lot of circumstantial evidence, Mark can correct the record here by telling us I'm completely wrong.

You're asking him to risk his legal strategy to fit what is a cheap debating tactic.

I don't think that's going to happen.