skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Is it? I don't know the mechanics. How about genetic testing, is that also a chemical process that is unique for each marker? Seems like a genetic sequencing tool could be programmable once the DNA/RNA has been analyzed. The best HIV test available is an RNA test, which can provide results as early as six days after exposure. This is obviously not my area of expertise, so I don't know how realistic it would be to downsize such a thing.

Also, how does this device perform a test for a viral infection and for a bacterial infection, if the tests are unique and chemical? Does it use a particular substance for each test, which has to be refilled per use? (Again, I have no idea how this stuff works.)

I know that 23andme continues to produce new information about my genes as new studies are done to find genetic markers for various diseases and traits, which is pretty cool. If there were a device that detected viral and bacterial RNA/DNA, would that be software extensible?
I think the analogy completely falls down. The Manhattan project was about a technical breakthrough, a big step forward that hadn't happened before.

Where is the analogue in crypto and security? There is no unsolved holy grail. Frankly, we have all the technical tools we need to make the web an extremely secure place.

What we are lacking instead is general investment in FOSS tools, regulations that hold a company responsible for leaking user data and encourage corporate prioritization of security, and national education about security risks and basic Internet dos and donts (phishing etc).
Urbanisation and the rise of the megacity
U.S. court orders Symantec to pay $17 mln for patent infringement
I think you would be surprised at how underpowered your phone is when it starts having to fill an entire Retina display, among other things.
Organizing as a cooperative does not necessary mean that everybody is paid the same. For example John Lewis a large UK high street retailer is organized as a cooperative and limits the highest earner salary to x75 the lowest salary (the current chairman is at x60), and bonuses are distributed in an equitable manner.
Not an irrational concern, although I'd say banks are still sussing out regulatory limits and workarounds. I'd be fine working at GS for many years into the future and see folks with similar backgrounds who have done that.

For me, it's less about money and more about the institutional leverage implicit in bulge bracket firms. I'm content when I can think about big, creative problems and if that translates into less money for me personally that's alright. A large problem, in my opinion, with S&T desks is the relatively recent adoption of the IBD mentality of moving up the invisible hierarchy by working at x for two years, y for one year, getting z graduate degree, etc.
PlentyOfFish, pure bootstrapping.

Wikipedia, while not a for-profit company, had to operate in a lot of ways from day one like any other startup. They control costs quite well given their immense scale.

Microsoft was fanatical about controlling costs. They were very profitable from early on.

GitHub was founded in 2008, and only took their first major venture capital in 2012. The business funded (or close to funded) itself from very early on.

Craigslist never took venture capital. Funded itself by very low costs of operation, and a minimum revenue approach.

37signals, from what I know, never took any major venture capital and was bootstrapped.

Here's another list:

http://37signals.com/bootstrapped
Lenovo ditched it on the Thinkpad[0].

I read this and thought, "At long last, Lenovo has realized that they've destroyed ThinkPad keyboards in recent years, and now they're celebrating the ThinkPad's return to its stature as the world's greatest programmer's laptop by restoring the Ctrl key to its traditional position!"

No. No, no, no, that would not be what they have done.

[0] http://cdn.arstechnica.net/wp-content/uploads/2014/01/thinkp... o_0
I worked in the nuclear industry a long time ago. The reason some parts are expensive is the documentation (chain of ownership) and testing involved. Some parts must be flame tested (set on fire and self-extinguish in X seconds), so that 50% of the batch are destructively tested in order to meet specific requirements. It doesn't justify excessive profiteering on a setup or per-part basis, but there is reason for connectors costing $90/part.
Interestingly, this comment, while probably being of the most technical detail / value in the thread, was downvoted by someone :)
For us JS bystanders who get whiplash from release announcements, I think it's pretty hilarious. I definitely read it as a joke.
Absolutely none at all.
EBCDIC has lowercase because it is _Extended_. http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/BCD_(6-bit):

"BCD ("Binary-Coded Decimal"), also called alphanumeric BCD, alphameric BCD, BCD Interchange Code, or BCDIC, is a family of representations of numerals, uppercase Latin letters, and some special and control characters as six-bit character codes.

[...]

IBM later created the 8-bit code EBCDIC (Extended Binary-coded Decimal Interchange Code) based on BCD."
I love that I'm being downvoted for quoting pg.
I pitch stories regularly to reporters. Dan is by far one of the best reporters in the business, and is the person I go to whenever I have something that is interesting, but far too technical for the mainstream press. He always does an excellent job with it, particularly if I give him a few days.

I've worked with plenty of unprofessional reporters who butcher stuff, and don't care about the details. Dan isn't like that.
If, ten years from now, 1% of C++ code is written in a functional way, does that really mean that functional ideas are winning the debate? Does the C++ committee deciding that functional programming is a valid approach that C++ could do a bit more to support really mean that functional programming is winning the debate? Or does it just mean that FP is viewed as "not totally without merit"?

So, again, my starting question: What is your definition of "winning"?
There are a couple of scenarios I can think of to help it make more sense:

1) You're pushing to a remote server which has a checkout of the working copy as the live version of something, e.g. a webapp.

2) You're pushing to a co-workers repository to allow them to see updates (though probably a less likely scenario)
Actually if a normal company is to make a profit off of you, you will get paid less than what you are worth to them. There are some market forces at play that determine typical worker's pay, but they aren't really tied to what you are worth and are instead the smallest fraction of your worth the company can get away with based on what other companies offer. Because of the nature of profit seeking companies, this fraction is always dropping in a healthy market. WalMart workers, for example, are not paid what they are "worth" or the company would make zero profit on their labor. It is a frustrating misconception that workers in a capitalist market get paid what they are worth.

In a coop, many people will get paid more than they would otherwise, as no one gets paid starvation wages unlike most companies in the US.

Highly productive workers may get paid less in a coop than in a typically arranged company however because typical companies exploit the workers at the very bottom in order to reserve more money for those at the top. It is possible for highly technical workers to get paid more in a coop though. Apple's latest profits were something like $750k per worker per quarter (this includes apple store employees), though clearly they are exceptional. If a coop does very well, they could easily provide more money to all workers than the typical pay of a highly successful company.

A coop that makes a lot of money can also contract out some work to coops that make less money, thereby taking advantage of cheaper labor without relying on exploitation of workers. A coop that ships boxes will earn less per worker than a coop that designs robots, but such a system is generally more fair to workers.

So some people may get paid less than normal but most would get paid more. Traditional companies can afford to pay more to those at the top by exploiting those at the bottom. This does not happen in a coop.
Not sure why you were downvoted — this is pretty true. At the very least, it's hard to argue that the art in Braid was absolutely top-notch for platformers at the time.

I also have to say, though, that Braid was remarkably fluid for a puzzle game. What I mean is that instead of having to stand in one place and suss out each puzzle in your head, you were compelled to experiment with the game world, internalize the rules, and eventually intuit each solution. In the end, I believe I only had to "work out" a handful of puzzles in the entire game. (Contrast this to a puzzle game like Sokoban, where you pretty much have to logic out each screen. I hate those kinds of games!)

With that said, it looks like The Witness is going to be a much more cerebral puzzler.
> When corporations have no recourse about their knowledge workers leaving and working for a competitor and giving up their IP/Trade Secrets

Companies do have recourse. It's called treating your employees well enough that they don't leave.

If your company isn't smart enough to know who is important and how to keep them happy, then your company is going to have problems. Technical staff, especially, tend not to jump for small amounts of money or minor problems.

As for technical workers, you simply can't prevent knowledge from leaving when they walk out the door. Especially for things like semiconductor manufacturing research, the knowledge of what was tried and didn't work is often more valuable than the knowledge as to what did work. How in the world would you stop that?

Finally, he left in 2011. You're going to have a pretty difficult time convincing me that Samsung's current 14nm node is solely base upon TSMC manufacturing that was only at 28nm at the time.

Overall, it sounds like TSMC had an internal political battle over what direction the semiconductor process research should go. Liang lost the battle and left. It seems that Liang was correct from an engineering standpoint, and the folks who stayed behind at TSMC were wrong. Sucks to be TSMC.
A couple of the dimmest of office workers decided to use S/MIME - just because.

We're using Office 365. I prefer OWA to any fat client. OWA cannot (with various failure modes, but let's just stick with "cannot") show S/MIME mails.

A coworker sends mails that I cannot read in a web interface to the same mail store that he accessed to submit that amazing piece of art in the first place.

S/MIME has no good reputation here..
That's not true and the v8 team's stance is pretty clear. The master branch is the only "fully supported" code base, currently at 4.2.56 [0]. Most other tagged versions going back a year or two receive best effort support. Usually, that means Ben Noordhuis, but often Andreas, Yang, Vyacheslav, and others on the v8-users and & v8-dev lists. Good responses all around in general. And the list of responsive people continues to grow.

[0] https://github.com/v8/v8-git-mirror/tree/4.2.56
I don't think there is one. Cybersecurity requires pefection. The old saying that to keep systems secure you have to win every battle with your attackers, but the attackers only need to win one.

I think we're fundamentally doing it wrong. We work to try to make things more secure, but perfection is not possible for humans. We need to accept that complex computer systems and networks cannot be secure. And find ways to make them useful dispite that.
Using a PC approach to protect wealthy people from criticism. Humorous.
CrunchBang was my togo distro as well. Everything's nicely setup. But when I tried ArchLinux, I never looked back. CrunchBang has a very awesome community!
More people claim religious exemptions than are a part of religions that actually forbid vaccination, and Christian Science doesn't have a problem with vaccinations when they are required legally. If your religion doesn't have a problem with something if it is required legally, then it's not a religious problem: it's a policy problem.
Yeah, I guess it does come down to prosecutorial discretion and the DoJ.

At this point, I really worry because the next President seeing what the long line before him/her did, might just be worse in not following legislation. For example, there is no authority to delay implementation of laws, but I guess it will become the default.
I imagine a compartmentalized market of coops where highly successful coops have only a few employees with a large salary, and then they buy goods and services from other coops that may make less money and therefore cost less. So a robotics design coop may make $500k per employee but only have 5 employees. When they ship products they could ship via a shipping coop that only pays $60k per worker.

This allows some room for exploitation but it would probably better adjust for real market value of workers than what we have now.
He addressed this in the FAQ. There are already ports to other platforms.

https://forums.handmadehero.org/index.php?option=com_content...
Competition at its best! Days after io.js gets released, node.js outs a major release.
Apple iPhone 7 Rumors 2015
I would assume you get a compile-time error because you are declaring 'foo' twice.

I guess you are right that the language is getting more complex because you are introducing a new way of declaring variables. However the added complexity in the language means you can write code which is less complex and error prone (if you consistently use 'let' instead of 'var'), and I think this is a fair trade-off given that backwards compatibility must be preserved.
That's certainly true. Part of the issue is that the media is largely from the middle/upper middle class, and so doesn't really know that trades are good work if you can get it.

Still, it's pretty frustrating to hear people talk about the gender disparity in the trades as if they're talking about ditch digging--i.e. as a benefit rather than hindrance to women. Teaching and nursing both require education, so the options available to women without education are measurably worse.
> This study was done on adult monkeys.

I think we read Table 1 differently: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2583786/table/T1...

> And AFAIK, in humans the differences in neural connectivity are negligible until testosterone kicks in.

Possibly, I'm not a biologist, but the 4th paragraph of the intro is interesting in that regard:

"Prenatal hormone exposure is known to influence children’s toy preferences as girls with congenital adrenal hyperplasia (CAH), an inherited enzymatic defect....show more boy-typical toy preferences than do their unaffected sisters or control girls....This preference is evident in CAH girls who look like and are reared as girls ... and despite the fact that most of these girls have typical female gender identity... When parental socialization was explicitly studied, one study found that CAH girls are more strongly encouraged to play with female-typical toys than are unaffected female siblings, yet they still show a masculine toy preference.... Thus toy preferences appear sensitive to prenatal androgen exposure..."
Why wouldnt someone running the charity you imagine focus on getting new standardized hardware rather than fussing around with a hodgepodge of old machines?

There's probably a thrift shop who will take it to sell and put the money toward charity. It even could be sold yourself on Craigslist and the procedures used to support whatever cause exceeds Goodwill in merit.
Presumably the reason that the other factories did not make an offer was that they would have had similar set up costs and already expected that the volume wouldn't be large enough to make this viable...
Yeah, false positives is what destroyed that company recently that had convenience store HIV tests. Lots of people who bought stock lost their shirts on that one.
You know, that's entirely possible. I was playing around with different methods of passing data between goroutines for increasing performance and I knew one of the methods I was testing wasn't idiomatic Go. However since I wasn't getting race conditions normally i assumed that the GOMAXPROCS fault wasn't down to my shonky code.

The weird thing is I thought I'd read somewhere that said Go defaulted to a process per CPU core (like the OP has hardcoded ib this project). I'm guessing that isn't the case then? It sadly wouldn't be the first time I've misread something! :(
"Relying on any form of secret is unsustainable. [...] Identity and fraud is what must be solved."

Would you mind explaining your concept of identity? I have a hard time grasping what an "identity" would look like when it can be used by everyone as they wish by virtue of not relying on any secrets.
No one's saying he inspired blind devotion. The people who put money into Fab made a decision to go big or go home. They ended up going home. No blindness there.

Lots of people who worked for Fab probably had a bad experience but many of them may have had a great time working at an interesting, dynamic place. They knew what they were getting into.
The current model is unsustainable, more so when you factor in predictions that 50% of jobs could be automated within the next decades. [1]

I think a mix of cooperatives and a guaranteed base income, healthcare, and housing would allow those that wish to work to continue to do so while not forcing anybody to work who doesn't wish to offers a much better alternative to keeping inequality in check than the current system.

[1] http://www.technologyreview.com/view/519241/report-suggests-...
Actually I'm pretty sure it's referring correctly to a singular probe. And unless you know something I don't, it's entirely plausible it's the result of a single data breach (e.g. the recent one at Anthem).
I don't think the plain text data is the problem. Data has to be in the clear at some point to be usable. That's the point that will be attacked. And it will eventually be compromised.
The Challenges and Triumphs of Learning to Code in Columbia’s Lede Program
DB-25-connector, meet hacksaw and belt/disc sander. Welcome, DB-19 connector!

While this would be a no-go for a 'regular' product, it would be perfectly acceptable for the niche application - floppy emulators for old personal computers - these connectors are used for.
For a completely custom connector, that seems like super cheap NRE to me. I work as an EE and have paid more than that on small run prototype stuff that is simpler to manufacture than a connector (think prototype circuit boards). Connectors require multiple sets of tooling and specialized processes unique to the connector industry. Even getting the tooling for the simplest plastic part is goig to be thousands of dollars.
Many migrant workers live in the catacombs beneath my apartment building. It is an upscale place, so the contrast is very strange; also these rooms lack windows and are technically illegal (they would never be considered livable in the west, it is like living in a car garage).
JSX mixing presentation logic and views seems to me like they have reinvented PHP. PHP is derided for this, but also for it's shaky implementation and semantics. JSX seems like Good PHP and that's a big deal because PHP is wildly successful despite being awful.
You're way more connected with the Chicago startup scene than I am. Do you think this list was representative? (I'm not challenging you; I genuinely don't know the answer).

Let's set up an HN meetup.
Content aside, I really like the presentation of this article. The cross-linking makes me feel like I'm leafing through a magazine, while the map and individual dossiers make the article so much more tangible.

Also — wow, $4,800 a month and living in a room like that! That's about how much my first Silicon Valley job paid. Kudos to that guy for being so money-conscious.
I honestly don't think this is a bad thing. Or, at least, it's no worse than humans doing the killing.

The article complains that such machines will never be able to make correct judgements about their targets with 100% reliability. However, neither can humans. Furthermore, I'd reckon that an artificial intelligence - with the hypothetical ability to tap into exabytes of raw data to base its decisions upon - is far better suited to those sorts of decisions.

The article incorrectly assumes that there is a distinction between the brain and any other ordinary computer. Once one realizes the sheer lack of such a distinction between organic and inorganic computing devices beyond rather-minor implementation details and computing capacity, the whole premise of the article is moot.

We already are using autonomous killing machines, and have been for hundreds of thousands of years. Those machines are called "humans".
ITS BEEN 6 HOURS. I CAN'T BELIEVE THERE ARE NO ALL CAP COMMENTS!
I'd strongly recommend looking into 3d printing these. You could pretty easily 3d print a plastic version of the connector itself (and shell, if male), then add aluminum tape to the inside if you need EMF protection. Then you just pop in pins (which you can get at Fry's by the hundred for a couple bucks), and you have a finished connector. A few hundred dollars in setup and you're done, with a unit cost of under a dollar, all in.
And yet step one in installing many commercial and open-souce software is:

echo 0 > /selinux/enforce
Where do you find these places? I've been blasting job apps since November. I think I've applied at like 15 places. No bites so far.
$60k is hardly a windfall, but it is a lifeboat.
I use capslock as a compose key

☺
For those wondering just what's inside, Mike (of Mike's Electric Stuff[0]) has some excellent teardowns with commentary on a few[1][2]. The engineering constraints (high reliability with low maintenance, instructing the user how to operate it, etc) make them very interesting machines.

[0] http://electricstuff.co.uk/

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pn-Wv9YAfv0

[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eWC22NufDUo
> Goodin is a journalist, not a security researcher. He depends on researchers as sources for his story

My main issue with the article was the way he presented the story as if it was based on facts instead of a few unproven claims. Subsequently, the story spread to other non-technical platforms, re-reported as fact.

> Robert Graham (...)

Well, that doesn't really matter.. extraordinary claims were made in the complete absence of extraordinary proof. And then a multi-page story was written based on nothing.

> I think Green is being a bit unfair to GPG in this piece

I agree, his comments were slightly smug.
Do the miners also offset their investment cost? It seems that, depending on how expensive they are, it may be a better solution to just run the space heater.
One thing I find interesting about stack languages is that if you imagine the stack tilted by 90 degrees, you realize that you are doing operations in some monoidal category.
Yah well numlock isn't exactly sitting in prime real-estate.
I think we're talking about something different. As I understand it, both sides honored the terms of the original contract.

Once that contract expired and it came time to negotiate a new one, the market rent was much higher and the tenant chose not to renew at the newly offered rate. No one has to have breached the original contract for this outrage (misplaced, IMO) at landlords to surface.
> Really? We'll invent a 100% secure computer system? With no way to be hijacked?

That's obviously not actually a requirement of killing machines if humans - being as phenomenally easy to deceive as they are - are acceptable options for assuming that role.

The system wouldn't have to be 100% secure in order to be good enough, by the standards we've already set as a species. It would only need to be more secure than a human.