skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
More accurately humans acquired the high-altitude tolerance gene variant from Denisovans and it was selected for in the ancestors of modern Tibetans. This varient is present in other human populations in East and South East Asia, but only at low frequency.

What I think is more interesting is that the Denisovans gene flow came in from males - human girls are easy would be the bumper sticker.
I already know how to program, and thought it'd be interesting to explore other forms of media that are related to programming/computing in general that aren't necessarily technical.
Return of the Silk Road
Why in every Edward Snowden discussion someone talks about him living in Russia? Do you not know he was only traveling though Russia when his passport was invoked by the US? He has no choice but to live in Russia!
Sure, and I am not arguing against robotic exploration which is incredibly valuable, but I also consider human exploration to be incredibly valuable both from a strict scientific point of view and from the point of view that sometimes there is an intangible value in attempting and accomplishing incredibly difficult things.
Mi Air: Xiaomi's Air Purifier
While I agree that is the appropriate question to be asking, it's worth considering the length and complexity of the drug pipeline for creating new legal drugs, as a way of estimating the risk of new illegal drugs, which go through nothing like the same degree of testing: http://www.pacificbiolabs.com/drug_stages.asp

A new legal drug in its first iteration frequently through animal models frequently has a breakdown of 80% or more effectiveness, with the balance of the population mostly experiencing no effect and a small remaining fraction experiencing negative side-effects. The drug will then be tweaked and twisted to increase the size of the population it is effective on and drop the size of the negative side-effect population to as close to zero as possible.

This is a hugely expensive process. It is where a good fraction of the hundreds of millions of dollars that go into the development of legal drugs wind up, and it is necessary because biochemistry differs very significantly across individuals.

What the makers of illegal designer drugs appear to be doing is more like a developer who says "works on my machine" and then ships. No testing, no QA, no coverage... just ship based on a single working instance in a particular environment. That's a recipe for disaster, and while the disasters are mostly recoverable, the process is fraught with risk.

This does not mean that making it illegal will change anything, because near as we can tell from the data the law barely changes human behaviour. Making abortion illegal does not change it's rate but just makes it unsafe. Making murder legal would not result in a vast increase in the rate of murders--it would result in blood-feuds and other mechanisms that the codification of law was designed to prevent. People don't refrain from murder because it's illegal (for the most part) but because they believe it's morally wrong. The law follows from that widespread moral belief, not the other way around.

So legalization and regulation may well be the best way to go, but given the ordinary standards of drug development that might create an underground grey-market where things are almost as bad, safety-wise, as they are now. A carefully targeted criminalization, that focuses solely on drug makers rather than distributors or users, might be a better solution. So long as we keep in mind that the goal is to minimize harm, including the harm done by law enforcement.
Configuring a Standalone Plan 9 CPU Server
Thank you very, very much! Promoting these sorts of ideas is my main contribution to HN (since I am not a professional programmer, but merely a techie dabbler and lover of mathematics)

However, the real credit should go to people like Jonathan Ott, Charles Grob, Stanislav Groff, James Fadiman and Benny Shanon. Terence McKenna too, of course, but I find his views are less appealing and less convincing to the typical HN demographic. There are far more academically credible authors who write deeply about these things than TM.
Browserify gets my vote as well. I'm using it in a project currently and barely learned how to use it when I was starting the project. It's got clear documentation and works very well.
You were down-voted because your comment is irrelevant if you read my comment above...
what do you want?
what is the one thing u want it very badly?
There have been murmurs of this possibly having a renaissance. [1]

I read an article in a magazine sometime back as well, talking about the possibility of luxury flights like London -> New York, but boarding in a nice piece of park land instead of an airport. The flight would be much longer, but there would be essentially no jet lag, much nicer quarters to sleep in, five star restaurant food, etc. It certainly seemed to me there is potentially a niche market there somewhere.

EDIT - all I can find is a DailyMail(!) article - http://www.dailymail.co.uk/home/moslive/article-1357747/Airs...

EDIT 2 - seems to be this company - http://www.hybridairship.net

1 - http://m.ibtimes.com/zeppelins-making-comeback-aeroscraft-ai...
> I never found the metaprogramming/DSL creation to be particularly inspiring. I've made some pretty wacky/cool stuff with it, I just got bored with it ultimately -- it felt like it was piling more things on for people to learn, rather than actually abstracting things away.

DSL creation is all about firming up your domain model. If all you're doing is shifting complexity around, then sure, you won't get anything from the easy refactoring/metaprogramming. But if you're gradually learning more and more about how concepts work outside of programming and inside the underlying business, (Ruby works best when you're supporting a revenue-generating business rather than something more abstract) then you're actually getting somewhere.

So what you do is you leave your complex methods where they are and think really hard about exactly what it is you're trying to do, what semantics you need to have. Then when you do refactor/redesign, the language you're using to create your classes isn't arbitrary, it's well-thought out and reflective of something that is needed.

Ruby does seem tailored for easy rather than simple, I'll give you that. But you don't have to accept that lying down. Simplicity is well within the ability of the programmer to attain, he doesn't have to rely on the community.
>>> it's not like there has been widespread looting and chaos at these marches

I'm not sure which exactly "these". I've heard a real lot of reports about the mayhem recently. Maybe if you count the number of perpetrators and divide it by the number of participants in all events everywhere, the result comes out low, I don't know. But I see how much damage was done[1], and I think there is enough of them to spoil it.

>>> It only takes one person to break windows and light fires.

Unfortunately, the size of the rioting and destruction does not look like it's done by "one person" or even negligible number of persons. If it would be so, they would be easily stopped by the people around them, or by the police with the help of the former. I've seen peaceful demonstrations, and I've seen riots (the latter, fortunately, only in recording) and there's a difference that can be seen.

>>> even if there is looting and destruction it's generally not a rational thought process that leads people to it.

I appreciate it. But since I am lucky enough to still possess the capability of rational thought and not be in a situation where I no longer have this luxury - maybe I should use it and ask myself "is this the best way?"And maybe call others who also have not abandoned the rational thought to do the same.

>>> I don't condone the violence, but I certainly understand it.

"Understand" is such a pliable word. Do I understand why some people may strap explosives to their bodies and explode them in the middle of a crowded market? Yes, I do, I am not stupid and there are tons of literature written on various ways of propaganda, brainwashing, misery, hopelessness and suffering. I can intellectually follow it without excusing the heinous actions in any way. And yet, when I read "I can understand it", it still somehow has a smell of excusing it to some measure. Is my perception wrong here? Same with rioting - I can follow the genesis of what happened, intellectually, but I can not see how what is happening is in any way makes it any better and do not think it should be excused.

[1] http://www.nbcnews.com/storyline/michael-brown-shooting/im-l...
You should have a look at Elixir. It's a simple, dynamic, functional language running on top of BEAM, the Erlang VM.

It recently reached 1.0 and is production ready: http://elixir-lang.org/
This is from HN contributor codahale, originally mentioned in the Atlas from Hashicorp thread.

"(Apologies for the self-promotion, but it's at least on-topic.)

I just opened up this repo yesterday: https://github.com/stripe/aws-go.

It's really raw, but it uses the JSON API descriptions from botocore to generate Go clients for all 40 public AWS services."

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8729740
> Then when you do refactor/redesign, the language you're using to create your classes isn't arbitrary, it's well-thought out and reflective of something that is needed.

This is how I generally like to design systems. But it also sounds more like DDD than a DSL; especially the concept of ubiquitous language. I prefer OOP to DSLs, mostly because OOP composes well since it's a first-class citizen in the paradigm.
Uber introduces surge pricing in downtown Sydney during hostage siege
Processing (https://processing.org) is an excellent language and development environment for playing with graphics.
SBS 3D Video Converter: Convert 2D Video to SBS 3D Video
1. min-wage raises are so modest and so slowly phased-in (in the US) so to not produce smoking-gun employment drops, and employers prepare in advance for them, so sloppy underpowered studies don't show any large effect. marginal effects are small and so you need a powerful study.

2. do you want people who receive food stamps etc. and aren't hireable at $8/hr to have any legal on-the-books employment options or not? either way they're getting the food stamps.

3. I personally would rather see more Costcos+Trader Joes than Wal-marts+McDonalds, so i want to believe your 'bad employers winning' unless we force higher pay, but presumably people won't work for bad employers, so i don't see where your forecast is coming from. anyway it seems a little cargo-cult. you can't just start paying $20/hr instead of $8 and suddenly beat Costco.
The cost of fuel is a trivally-small cost in today's launches. Contrast your thinking with Elon Musk's: he wants to drive down the cost of launches by 99% to facilitate putting a colony on Mars.
Boost.Compute v0.4 Released
You left off just plain downvoting. I've seen some fairly benign comments on certain topics go down to -3 or -4 in a hurry with no counterpoint given. Stuff the collective here will often ignore or debate, but down it goes.
I agree with this, and most of the reservations expressed, but just to note: he said Europe to Australia in 4 hours. That's... more like 22 hours now, right? That would be a very significant improvement.
Actually it is with simplified models.

Sexual differentiation in humans is split into many different pieces. There is chromosomal differentiation (at conception), hormonal differentiation (mostly through puberty), hormonal exposure in the womb (between 3-9 months), neurological differentiation (well into early adulthood in some cases).

Intersex conditions exist, and many go undetected until well into adolescence.

With all this, coming up with a consistent definition of male and female is actually pretty complicated, with lots of edge cases.

> Male/female have precise scientific terms that apply to all animal species.

Lookup how fruit flies are sexed, then compare to humans :) The animal kingdom can be a very different world.
I don't think I've seen anyone post this estimate of the transgender population yet:

http://ai.eecs.umich.edu/people/conway/TS/TSprevalence.html

The takeaway is that about 1 in 1000 people medically transition without SRS.

Notice this is written by Lynn Conway - very accomplished chip designer/electrical engineer/systems engineer

http://ai.eecs.umich.edu/people/conway/conway.html#Memoirs

I know a lot of trans people in my local community - but I'm trans myself so that's only logical. Still, intuitively, it can't be anywhere near as rare as 1:10,000
Marketing bullshit. Really not that hard to get out of "downtown Sydney". Took me 2 minutes this morning to get out of walk out of the Sydney CBD to a relatively safe zone.
Yeah low-level programming was why I have been working on firmware for a long time. But working on truly resource constrained systems can get old. Instead of really solving the problem at hand, you have to work on quirks and idiosyncrasies. I'm glad that we are now working on 32-bit processors.
> completely made up numbers with no basis in fact.

Did we look at the same website? They give the formula by which they derived the numbers, based on "standard" nutritional data for those foods. It's not a dataset per-se, it is (supposedly) a simple and easily reproducible computation of a widely available dataset. (No, I did not try to reproduce though I would if I were going to take any action based on this).

Why would you assume it is random?

And I ask, again, if you can point me to the two independent studies that confirm potato's properties, because I can only find one.
https://www.erowid.org/
"People listened instead of just waiting for their turn to speak" [0] - Chuck Palahniuk

I have tried probably too hard to not be this person. As a result, i've had literally hundreds of people tell me I'm a great listener. I don't order food at my usual haunts, they just make it. Letting people talk, and actually hearing and giving one flying fuck, is more impactful than I ever imagined.

[0] http://www.quotationspage.com/quote/37182.html
http://www.reactionengines.co.uk/sabre_howworks.html

Seems that they are using the heat absorbed from the air, via the helium to eventually heat the hydrogen going into the engine.

http://www.reactionengines.co.uk/images/sabre/sabre_cycle_10...
What would you suggest as a manned mission that isn't merely an expensive stunt?

As I understand it an Apollo style mission to Mars or Mercury is presently more like an early death sentence to cancer due to radiation exposure.

As best I understand the situation we really need to pull off a five year Biosphere 2 style mission here on earth in a hermetically sealed chamber deep underground. That is the current next step. But nobody has really tried.
This is posted here about every three months.

Norvig's approach assumes a very small fixed vocabulary (so it won't scale well to the basic multilingual plane), and can only recover errors with an edit distance of two or less.

If you are interested in a vastly superior yet still very intuitive approach to spelling correction, I recommend the classic paper on noisy channel model corrector by Kernighan, Church, and Gale, which fuses the probability distribution the distribution over possible errors and the probabilities over words themselves.

http://www.aclweb.org/anthology/C90-2036.pdf
Large "granularities" on storage devices always suffer this problem - whether it's sectors on an HDD (which have silently transitioned from 512B to 4KB) or blocks/pages in flash on an SSD. Perhaps it's become more prominent now that the granularities have increased while small read/write operations are still common.

(Aside: The autogenerated spam comments there are also strangely interesting - they sound almost poetic.)
That's actually a great point. Most illegal drugs have known safety profiles since they used to be (or still are) prescription drugs. Even those that were never prescriptions drugs (e.g. LSD) have been used long enough and by enough people that we have a pretty good sense of their safety.

People are taking a big risk with some of these designer drugs. Just because a drug looks like an illegal drug doesn't mean a dam thing. Sometimes a simple modification of a molecule (methyl changed to ethyl or a hydrogen replaced by a bromine) can completely change the safety profile of a drug.
Neurological would mean it's a hardware thing. An analogy would be a CPU that's physically wired wrong. So no matter how good the software is, running it will produce errors.

In the nature vs. nurture debate, this is a nature-side of things.

Psychology would mean it's a software thing. The analogy would be software with some logic errors in it s.t. no matter how good the hardware is, you end up with the incorrect result.

In a nature vs. nurture debate, this is a nurture issue. For example, childhood trauma might turn into some kind of aberrant behavior in adulthood.

Either condition might produce similar or even equivalent results, but the root causes are different and "fixing" them requires different approaches.

And then there might be poor folks with a combination of both factors.
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Jaron Lanier on Big Data
Lisp Macro
Oh, it was a bad idea from the get-go. That was the sentiment I had myself, and heard from everyone who had actually looked at the details -- long before actual hardware was available.

The market did NOT want Itanium, and Intel knew that - but intel believed that they were strong enough to dictate. They weren't, and their internal culture made it hard for them to accept that for a long time.

I actually find it fascinating - Intel had an OO processor (name escapes me now) between the 286 and the 386 that has a story surprisingly similar to the Itanium: Radical departure towards unproven instruction set which, when arrived, delivered too-little-too-late, causing the company to scramble into retrofitting the older cash-cow for the future before someone else manages to eat their lunch.

History does not repeat, but it often rhymes.
Hm, I might be misinterpreting your "IQ data" pointer, but just to be clear: variance of IQ in groups is much larger than between them.
The Physics Simulation – gafferongames.com
CBT, and medication have fairly similar efficacy rates for treatment of depression.

So it's not true that "We now know a person cannot think their way out of depression."
Exactly. Desomorphine itself doesn't cause your flesh to rot off, it's the impurities in it. I think they commonly use an iodine/phosphorus reduction to remove the hydroxyl group.

It doesn't surprise me that injecting a drug that has left over phosphorus triiodide or other phosphorus/iodine compounds would destroy your tissue.
I find myself refactoring to DSLs when I have a lot of composition to do and I want to cut the verbosity out of doing all of it. I'll take everything and turn it into something I can compose with and the DSL just knits everything together.

For example, I made an application that generates different kinds of feeds from a database. I found myself making a bunch of classes that responded to .call with similar interfaces, arrays of hashes. So I refactored everything to composable method classes and even identified and extracted concepts inside the composable methods so that I could compose even the method classes.

All the DSL does is compose the feed objects from the method classes. Each feed is composed of transformers, each transformer is a class with a .call method that takes an array of hashes and returns an array of hashes, unless it's pulling directly from the database, one of these is always the first of the transformers in the list. Or it's returning the end product, in which case it's always the last in the list.

That app is just way too much fun to work on now. It has the kind of design I would have thought of if I'd done it in BDUF fashion, only instead of coming up with it up front, I refactored working code to it. And I would not have wanted to do it in anything but Ruby.
I wonder if a bigger screen will make that difference for me. I've been using an 1920x1200 24" screen and that was nice, but for the past 12 months I've been fine with my 1366x768 12.4" laptop. Tough, I'm using a tiling window manager which makes a difference compared to others I guess.

(:
Eliezer is right, and I would add a corollary that you almost always run into trouble trying to fit objects into human-defined abstract categories.
Not going to go into details but I'd guess you're underestimating the size of the codebase (and thus the complexity of certain site-wide changes) by at least two orders of magnitude. Imagine doing (and testing) a "simple change" for every project on Github for instance. This is the dark side of giving each of your dev teams freedom to pick their tools.
Fun mosaic effect with Go
This pattern is totally embedded into the non-monadic applicative Either sometimes called Validation

data Validation e a
= Collect e
| Value a
deriving Functor

instance Monoid e => Applicative (Validation e) where
pure a = Value a
Collect le <*> Collect re = Collect (le <> re)
Collect e <*> _ = Collect e
_ <*> Collect e = Collect e
Value f <*> Value a = Value (f a)

There is no monad instance for this which lets us scoot forward through a computation and and all of the errors at once.
What's interesting is the massive difference between the US and Europe. I was very much around in '94 (I was 22 back then) and I honestly don't know the majority of these videos. Interesting idea though.
You can vaporize it or eat it for a similar (but different) effect. For treating pain, nausea and stimulating appetite, I am fine with marijuana. I've taken nausea medication, all of which stop working eventually. I fear that a dervived compound could be the same and could have the same problems Marinol did. I am all for research but for people suffering, I think they should be able to use marijuana if they want.

There are 66 cannabinoids and 480 known compounds in marijuana. It's hard to know exactly what is happening. I do support research for THC+CBD oil treatments to fight cancer cells. But if you are suffering through radiation or chemo, I would much rather have the full spectrum of marijuana to deal with it.
I would assume that it is widely known, particularly in this community. I probably come across at least three mentions of this every year.
The telos of America is not ROI. The conquest of the continent was not really about monetary returns. You should think of space as a new manifest destiny.