skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> if there’s no selection pressure on the organism, it will not evolve

This is (and the article agrees) a statement not compatible with modern evolutionary understanding. Primary school-level knowledge about biology should be enough to debunk this claim: a set of genes survives if there are organisms that pass those genes on, it's as simple as that.

If there is a mutation in a homogenous group of individuals, and that mutation is not lethal or otherwise causes the individual to die before procreation, that mutation survives - selection pressure or not.

There are also genomes that remain highly preserved over long stretches of time, which should likewise not be surprising. This occurs even at the gene level: there are genes in all of us pretty much unchanged compared to early eukaryotes, mostly because the proteins they produce work well, but also because mutations to those sequences are generally lethal.

While most mutations are lethal, it's not true that the remaining ones are beneficial either. This means there are lots of individuals with sometimes distinctive properties which are still causally disconnected from selection pressure.

Anyone who spent some time experimenting with evolutionary models on a computer should know this, because those are intrinsic properties of genetic systems. We expect them to behave that way. We expect ancient versions of organisms to stick around if there was no reason for them to die out. That doesn't mean the reverse is true in the sense that no change in selection pressure leads to genetic stagnation.
GPS Navigation Without Internet (Offline)
We just changed the subtitle to a different one from the submitted page. We're open to suggestions for a better one.
> GMail, and probably others [..] All of which are big names that can and do work ENTIRELY without JavaScript.

Gmail uses massive amounts of client-side JavaScript (perhaps compiled from a different language, of course).
A person who "fell on hard times" has at least in theory had the chance to try to save past income, and has a realistic prospect of earning higher income in future, assuming the BI is insufficiently generous to dissuade them from seeking paid employment altogether. Given that the average annual income of an able bodied person over the course of their life really ought to be higher than that of a too-disabled-to-work person, it doesn't seem unreasonable to redistribute less money towards their needs in a period when they're not in work.

Which able bodied person should be the ceiling on too-disabled-to-work people's income? Not sure, but I'm reasonably confident that "the most unambitious and indolent one" is not the correct answer.
Unfortunately Aperture is also being discontinued...
There's no general answer to your question. It's like game theory, depends on the players and context (technical, legal, financial, market maturity).

Juce and PyQt were created by single developers, so it's not impossible. Staking out and defending a niche would be a prerequisite, open-source or proprietary.
US universities only for the rich
Airbnb referral program lost them my business
I signed up and booked a trip on airbnb recently. The process was pleasant and I sent invites to my family and told them about it.

My parents, who are on the road, decided to try it out. They sent pics of their place and said they had a great experience. Great! Now I get 25 bucks and they learned about a new service, right? Nope.

I waited a week or so and contacted customer service. Must've been some kind of oversight. The rep was prompt and requested the email of the referral I made. I thought it was odd since my account clearly shows they signed up, it just didn't register that I should get a credit... but I obliged and sent the email. The rep then told me he would have to contact them to ensure that I did in fact invite them... ummm ok? Why?

Here's my response:

"That's silly. But go for it.

They are in my referral group... It shows in the UI.
And they have made reservations.

Not a great experience."

Then I get this bit of snark along with some questionable information:

"Matt,

I do apologize that this has been such a painstaking
experience, however it looks like the issue is due to their
initial reservation not being at the qualifying limit. Once
they begin a trip that is worth more than $200, (before
Airbnb fees) you will both receive your referral credits.

Oliver C"

According to their docs, 75$ is the qualified price... not 200$
https://www.airbnb.com/referrals/terms_and_conditions?offer_name=default

Honestly, I don't even care about the credit... It's great to save a few bucks but at this point I am more inclined to just move on...

I wanted to share because I figured there may be some lessons for others when dealing with customers. In addition their marketing for referrals is really shady when it comes to being upfront with the restrictions (10o dollars bonus... if they rent their place AND rent someone else's AND it's over an amount).

Anyone else has a negative experience with these guys?
PostgreSQL 9.4.1 Released
Personally, the only part of trademark I care about is impersonation. It should be illegal to claim that Google was involved in building my shitty products.
Women can be bros. People where I went to school called female bros "biddies", IIRC.
Raising the income for the entire population would indeed just inflate the currency.

But a basic income would not in fact raise the income of the entire population. It would lower the income of the rich and raise the income of the poor. Because it would be paid for with taxes, not deficit spending.

The rich would GET basic income, yes -- but their taxes would increase by an amount that would more-than-compensate for the higher influx of money. Their after-tax income would be lower.
Godless Parents Are Doing a Better Job
Show HN: GraphPaper – create your own workspace for your projects
>And it didn't reach nearly your $30k a year - I have no idea where you came up with that number.

The whole point of BI is to be a low-middle class income, which is currently about $30k/year.
New ways teens are getting high on household substances
There's an option for the basic HTML layout available if you have JS disabled.

That's the second-best approach. The first is using a JS-redirect to the flashy AJAX page, or just overriding all the default handlers necessary with JavaScript (remember, at this point, your content was already (supposed to be) properly rendered for you by the server).
> Why are people just now 'discovering' that you don't need to throw JS at an application to have it completely usable?

I think a new generation of developers for whom the web has always been, essentially, a rich and dynamic applications platform is 'rediscovering' that it's really just document markup with Turing completeness on the side.
I'll just point out that going into the 3rd or 4th year of YC's existence, everyone was asking this about the software companies they were funding.
Could the timing belt issue have been avoided if it was replaced? Or would you say it was something else that caused it to break, and would have happened regardless?
Noooo! Nice catch. No SSL on the blog, but looks like the link takes you there. Will make a quick fix in a few. http://blog.keepupdated.co should work for now.
Hacking Habits
All photos automatically stored in the cloud at full resolution.

At last! Here's hoping I never again spend a week recovering a friend or family member's lifetime of photos from their failed hard drive.

By the way, check your backups.
I think there would need to be some structure around children, what an incentive to make babies! $8k per baby per year, the Duggar family would be making $168k per year! I'd rather it be something as an adult. So the number of people 18 years or older is 242,470,820 [0]. Double the $8k to meet that poverty line as a couple. So at $16k per adult you come out to just under $3.9 trillion a year.

Edit: from the poverty data [1] you could say that only ~45 million people get the full $8k, the rest starts to taper off at the 50 cents to a dollar pace. That means this would cost considerably less. $360 billion is the minimum. The cost out would be $3.9 trillion, but those extra $8k checks would be collected at tax time. A one job two adult household, the job holder would have to pay back all the $8k, but the partner wouldn't if they didn't make any money.

[0] http://quickfacts.census.gov/qfd/states/00000.html

[1] https://www.census.gov/hhes/www/poverty/about/overview/
Here's official statement (got an email from BCBS with same content): http://anthemfacts.com/

The biggest question I have is why such sensitive data was not encrypted.
The Incredible AI That Can Watch Videos and Tell You What It’s Seeing
Absolutely, you are 100% correct. I definitely misspoke.
There are so many different species of bacteria that it is hard to estimate how many there even are, but according to Wikipedia, it might be between 10^7 and 10^9. I'd be willing to bet that there is a healthy species of bacteria that has stopped evolving, that perfectly copies its dna when it divides, and never transfers dna horizontally. There's no technical reason not to, and the numbers are so huge that they almost guarantee it.
Actually, I would bet I did read it and his point was directly addressing the article. In fact, the article itself commits suicide by the end when the author admits that one can just hire a mechanic to do the work. (And his quoted price for per-hour is ridiculously high. My mechanic charges me 70$ per hours, not 170$.)

And yes, the author's point is totally dead. How can one be able to pay 300$ every single month but unable to pay 600$ once every blue moon for a big repair? Predictability is oversold. The only fact remaining is people inability to live within their budget; if you can somehow put away 300$ every month when forced to pay for a new car's reimbursement, you should be able to put aside the half as much for future unknowns.

This is not theoretical since that's how I live and how I manage my car. I own a 2001 Corolla. I even had to change both the motor and transmission two years ago. The cost of which, including parts and labor, came down to less that one year's worth of payment on a new car.

You can buy used car. You can pay for repair. It's still cheaper than a new car, and you don't need magical privilege to do so.

(Simple real-world hindsight would tell anyone so. Just look around: poor people drive old cars. According to you and the author, they couldn't. Yet they do. So, which is wrong: reality or arguments on a page?)
This was a really great read:

(1) I think the data-driven humanities are very interesting. The professor certainly gets at some rather deep questions regarding plot, and it's nice to see the structure of the bait-and-tease page-turner quantified.

(2) There's a passage about artificial intelligence and using computers to construct stories. I thought the following quotation on that was pure gold, hitting a truth that may be uncomfortable to those of us who consider themselves artists and creators, but which we will certainly have to engage in the future:

It should be obvious to all writers that parts of “the craft” are deeply schematic; if you feel threatened by a machine, there’s probably something suspect about your humanism. We should resist the precious notion that there’s something inimitable about the whole enterprise of storytelling.
Your example doesn't work because it's a monopoly situation. That is, in your world there's only one landlord, so given that housing is a fundamental need and he controls 100% of the supply of housing, he can always raise his prices.

Now, that's not to say that a guaranteed income wouldn't necessarily cause inflation in some goods and services. It probably would! But the standard answer to "why doesn't the provider of a good or service just increase the cost of their service to the maximum disposable income of the buyer" is competition.
NO! BAD! Do not trust the pens. All they do is check the acidity of the paper which is one of the easiest things to fake.
> In your scenario, what will happen to GPG? The world just loses this essential asset?

He's not immortal - at some point someone else has to step up to the plate.
(lisp keymap)
Except if consumers don't have jobs they won't be able to purchase the products made by machines, therefore the owners will NOT make the money, and the economy will enter into a "death spiral".
Filling a Blank Slate
Are there any new advantages or opportunities for Bolt portfolio companies?
You've hit the nail on the head with left-hand-right-handedness at Google. Every interaction I've had with that company reveals behavior reflective of this condition. You've gotta scratch the surface to find it, but lately it's not very deep. When I interview places, and the interviewer gives me a single question, I hit them with something almost no one expects ("If you could change one thing without veto, what would it be?"). When I interviewed there at Google some time ago (I turned down their offer because of the answers I got to this question), six out of the seven interviewers I asked replied with some variation on "All the low-hanging fruit has been picked, and most people aren't in a position to solve the gnarly problems, so I wish I could do work that challenges me." This immediately sent up red flags with me, along with the weird sense of hivemind I got at the Googleplex. It wasn't exactly like wandering around a Borg cube, but it was close. Then recently the company I work for has had visitors from Google, and while I'm not involved in the interactions personally, there's a huge sense of this left-hand-right-hand problem even among teams working on the same product, just different groups. This is probably the case with all large corporations after a certain critical mass, but I'm personally experiencing a selection bias for Google in particular.
Congratulations ClusterHQ team! Very excited about Powerstrip.
Chef, Puppet, Heat, Juju, Docker, etc.
I used to have a very early FF phone that had super-low spec, yet all of the standard FF apps ran real well. Not sure if it was the phone or nature of FF OS, but I got amazing battery life on that phone, way better than any smartphone that I am familiar with. The shitty hardware failed pretty quickly though.
I wonder what percentage of users will have to buy more iCloud storage for this. Charging users for more than 5gigs of storage in 2015 seems pretty miserly, especially if someone has multiple Apple devices.
BI is NOT socialism at all. We still have private property and capitalism based economy, just like now.

If anything this is the pure form of the mixed capitalism/democratic economy/government model that every Western nation already has.

BI is a way of reconciling capitalism with the "post-work" work world we are moving into.
All of those elements are visual. You just need to look at each bill for a second to see if it's fake.

Some people have visual impairments but they really shouldn't be dealing with large volumes of cash.
Show HN: Made a new site for photo ranking, would appreciate any feedback
Well, I freely concede I am still missing the point. You use client-side javascript because that's what runs in the client. Whatever your server-side code does, why would you write it in javascript?
What techniques are being used for text to speech? Is is something deep learning related or more standard HMM synthesis? Any paper references?
This is exactly what we ( http://linphone.org ) do: we have a GPLV2 license that's used in many many open source projects, and we have a specific license for commercial projects, for which we provide support and ability to not disclose the sources that our clients might modify.

This kind of way to function give enough money to employ 10 people, and also secured a lot of new developments (encryption, video, etc.). Disclaimer: I'm just an employee, not the founder.

I would advise him to switch to that kind of licensing, if he wishes to. There's no reason he shouldn't be able to live through his work.
StoreFrontSDK Unity plugin spawns physical goods shop within mobile apps
Last but not least, I had the ability to just let the car sit. I didn’t need it for anything. It wasn’t the way I was going to make my rent money that month, it wasn’t the way I was going to get my child to the hospital. It was just a car that I was driving for fun. And that’s the biggest kind of Privilege! I can imagine.

Wherein we arrive at a key point of strategy in cheap vehicles.

Have two.

I spent half of college riding a pair of $500 motorcycles. On any given day there was a good chance one was broken with the engine sitting on my driveway- but I never once missed a day of class, thanks to redundancy.

Of course that did mean I had to invest $1,000 into vehicles instead of $500. Privilege!, I suppose, but a smaller one.

Bonus: the second vehicle takes you to Autozone when you are halfway through a rebuild on the first and discover you are missing your 12mm socket and six bolts
Ok, I found http://influxdb.com/blog/2014/12/08/clustering_tags_and_enha.... That all sounds very promising!
I don't see it that way. As long as the posting itself causes discussion to occur, then that's great. If that happens because of the title, rather than the content then so be it.

Additionally, I'm mostly participating and reading the comments here because of the general topic of new vs used cars. The content, at least in this case, is irrelevant to me.
Are those prices monthly or yearly? You should clarify this before asking for the CC details...
I'm twice bitten, once shy on used cars.

I know plenty of people who are reasonably frugal who still go for the new car, though I think they view it as more of a slightly risk-averse heuristic than an optimal decision. I think most of them recognize that with planning, effort, and a bit (but not a ton) of luck, they probably would do better used.

The risk averse heuristic goes like this: identify a car with a reputation for value, purchase under a buyer's plan, take very good care of itfor the useful life of the car. These aren't the people who show up in a shiny new car every few years - they often keep the car for 15 years or more.

Like I said, it's a bit risk and effort averse, since with a lot of research, careful evaluation (including a mechanic inspection), and a bit of luck (more the absence of bad luck), you can definitely beat the above strategy by going used. It's a lot of effort, though. Personally, I did all the things you're supposed to do, and still ended up with lots of $$ repair bills, so I'm no longer interested in used cars. I understand that I got unlucky, but I'm just done.

I suppose I'm also particularly convinced by the argument that people generally don't sell good used cars, since I'm one of those people who hangs onto a car until it costs me more to own it than replace it.
Yes. Google "stagflation".
I looked at the manual on my Fiat and my Silverado, neither of them recommend checking the CV boot for damage as part of routine maintenance. And I say that with 90% certainty that the CV joint on my Silverado (357,000 miles) is about to fail with the boot still intact. I can't come up with any other reason why the passenger side wheel has an inch or so of play side to side when it's jacked up, or why it clunks when I turn left. From the outside, the boot is in perfect shape.

(for those commenting on the CV joint thing, this is what I was told by two licensed mechanics after they had inspected it. Thank you for prompting me to get another opinion though).

Everything in your car, you can say "if it has done its duty, you replace it". Sometimes that includes the entire car. That Silverado is still on it's original engine. Has that done it's duty? How would I know when I should replace the engine? The frame also has 357k miles on it. I know from inspecting it that it's rotted in certain spots. Has it done its duty?

You and I know how to inspect various parts of the car to see how much wear they have. Not everyone can. A CV joint might clunk or grind before it fails. A timing belt won't give you that luxury.
As a photographer, 5GB isn't enough for storing high-res photos. It's nice to keep them off your iDevice, but relying on iCloud to keep them is silly.

Amazon, on the other hand, allows for unlimited cloud photo storage solely by being a Prime customer. All my 24MP RAW photos get stored there safely, along with having my own local storage for backup.
Chill out everyone, like George Lucas said, technology companies "just don't have the margins" to pay employees market wages. That's why we need to flood the market with foreign workers who will accept peanuts for wages, and that's why we need to implement systemic wage-fixing (administered by Google's wage-o-meter algorithm).

The power of markets is awesome! Except when we let it determine wages organically, or when big banks fail - then it's bad!
"He says he's made about $25,000 per year since 2001 — a fraction of what he could earn in private industry"

The developer of git-annex assistant was happy when he received $20,000 on Kickstarter and he said with this money he could dedicate his time on this project for a full year. [1]

Maybe he could also start a Kickstarter/Indiegogo etc campaign so that he could hire another full-time developer? If enough people find this additional workforce on this project worthwhile, it will be funded.

[1] https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/joeyh/git-annex-assista...
well, the article is just listing findings from the us "intelligence"...
Corrections and clarifications are welcome!
I have worked with public domain texts and you are exactly right, it is extremely valuable to be able to ascertain the copyright status of a work based purely on the date of publication (you don't even have to know the date of first publication if the date of publication you do know is early enough).

To paraphrase a comment I made on an earlier HN thread about copyright:

Consider a short story published in a literary journal last week. Allow a copyright system to exist that covers each eligible work for 30 years by default, and allows multiple extensions of 5 years at a cost of $1000 per extension per work, up to a maximum total copyright term of 100 years.

Someone in 2047 discovers a copy of this particular journal issue, which has now become obscure. They identify that this short story, though never being given acclaim, has had a subtle yet profound cultural influence. They decide to republish the story in their own commercial magazine, but want to check if the copyright has been extended. If it has not, the story is in the public domain. If is has been extended, the story is still covered by copyright.

They can search the central registry for the title of the short story and the name of the author. But they also have to search for the names of the editors of the journal, because it isn't clear whether or not the copyright stayed with the author or was transferred to the journal as part of the submission process. In fact, the copyright might have been granted to the owner of the journal, which may be an individual or may be an institution. The entry for the copyright might be under the title of the short story, or under the title for the journal, or under the title of that particular issue of the journal.
Furthermore, the author of the story, if they retained the copyright, may have submitted the story under a pen name, and/or may have registered the copyright of the short story under a different title than the title they used to submit to the journal, or the title might have been changed by the editors.
Or, the author, after having the short story accepted by the journal, may have sold it to a publisher who published it in a short fiction anthology, the copyright for which is registered completely separately and is essentially invisible to our hypothetical future researcher.

Any of these agents might have extended the copyright. It would be extremely difficult to prove to a high degree of certainty that the story was or was not covered by copyright.