skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Yeah that kinda sucks. It's one of the reasons college hackathons are so compelling - people aren't there with their startups, it's students looking to learn. I think sometimes people judge student hackathons based on corporate hackathons they've been to but they are fundamentally very different.

Jacob is right, big prizes can suck. I'd love to see fewer big prizes at hackathons. Having some small stuff so people feel accomplished and valued is nice though. Jon Gottfried has a really good article about this[1].

I go to a lot of student hackathons and generally people are there for learning - not competition. They're certainly not there for "boozing up"!

And of course hackathon projects amount to nothing 99% of the time. That's not a problem. That's totally to be expected from 24 hours of hastily put together code. The value students get is learning about idea generation, working with others, managing a project, how to use the libraries, frameworks, and APIs, how to work to a deadline, how to debug, how to do version control, how to deploy, how to test and improve your work, how to present your work to others, and much more. And I don't think companies or VCs who attend really expect to find a next Facebook - they're probably more concerned with just meeting the kind of students who would rather spend a weekend building stuff instead of boozing. Furthermore, hackathons don't undermine the value of sustained effort on hard technical problems - but they can be the first step for students starting to work on technology outside of their courses.

You're all totally right that large prizes suck and pitchathons suck. Most student hackathons do a pretty good job of staying away from those (though some could do better for sure). As Jacob said, "hackathons should be about coding something cool, not winning, networking, or partying" - I've honestly never been to a student hackathon where that wasn't the case. So I'd be careful about throwing the baby out with the bathwater.

[1] http://news.mlh.io/are-hackathon-prizes-the-worst-thing-sinc...
Not always, but it's a distant second to improving your product, talking to customers, and improving your product.
Look, if you start re-using the term for "thing that's impossible to find because it doesn't exist, but people go around looking for it nonetheless" for "many really large Silicon Valley companies", I think it's time to declare a bubble has inflated.
Another good indicator is the absence of free beer and pizza :/
Pennybank:Two party Bitcoin microtransactions
http://www.one-tab.com/

not the same, but has a similar impact.

However, it still does not solve the underlying problem, but that is a non-technical one and can only be approached with some kind of yoga, meditation or any other self-control trickery.
I used to agree with this view, until I participated in an aid trip in college. When I personally saw what extreme poverty was, it changed the course of my life and future career decisions. So, the $1000 plane ticket and 10 days in a rural, high-need area allowed me to look outside the bubble of American extravagance I had grown up in.

It is one thing to rationally know that people are without food and basic medicine through the reading I did or videos I watched. It is another to be in a high-need community and find myself trying to explain to a father that I just ran out of the antibiotics he needed to help his sick child fight an infection. Of course it would have been more effective to not buy the plane ticket and ship $1000 more of antibiotics to the community, but that is the cost we (myself and the community) paid to change a lifetime of decisions I would make as a privileged American. The cost sickens me, but it is the reality I have come to understand.

Emotional connections are powerful, but they are difficult to form without the personal connection. My hope is that as technology improves, we will be able to build empathy more effectively even without the aforementioned expensive plane ticket. Perhaps then we will be more hesitant about war and more vigorous in helping refugees, victims of natural disasters, and others.
HBase and Accumulo
windytan.com
theorangeduck.com
nullprogram.com
esr.ibiblio.org (wtf?)
joeyh.name
ebb.org/bkuhn
shift-reset.com
joearms.github.io
> In many ways we are already selecting for those traits and have been for countless generations

What we are not quite confident about is if one gene may have two or more different affects that we have yet to discover.

Artificially changing selective genes without thinking that another gene may be needed to counterbalance one change is the possibility most worrying.
This seems relevant, an anecdote from Richard Hamming's "You and Your Research" [0]. Take it as you will.

> Another trait, it took me a while to notice. I noticed the following facts about people who work with the door open or the door closed. I notice that if you have the door to your office closed, you get more work done today and tomorrow, and you are more productive than most. But 10 years later somehow you don't know quite know what problems are worth working on; all the hard work you do is sort of tangential in importance. He who works with the door open gets all kinds of interruptions, but he also occasionally gets clues as to what the world is and what might be important. Now I cannot prove the cause and effect sequence because you might say, ``The closed door is symbolic of a closed mind.'' I don't know. But I can say there is a pretty good correlation between those who work with the doors open and those who ultimately do important things, although people who work with doors closed often work harder. Somehow they seem to work on slightly the wrong thing - not much, but enough that they miss fame.

(Edit: Originally, incorrectly thought this was from Feynman)

[0] http://www.cs.virginia.edu/~robins/YouAndYourResearch.html
Ellen Pao on Reaction to Kleiner Case, Workplace Sexism and Running Reddit – Q&A
Uber is not over valued. They are about to re-define, the transportation and logistics of the whole world. Of course they are lot of rough edges and they are facing bureaucratic walls and demonstrated some old Microsoft style Evil Empire style tactics, the company reeks of Domination mentality and they have enough traction. Where Lyft et al. try cultural things to attract, Uber is an efficiency monster. Their coverage is bigger and better in terms of both Areas of the Cities (esp. DFW) and platforms (including Windows Phone). There is lot of potential increasing the taxi market share as well as expanding into other markets/services like delivery etc and/or making fleet arrangements with Cities or Companies. of course the futuristic self-driving cars and de-coupling transportation from car ownership is a vision Uber rightly fits into.

If I can buy Stock, I will bet my House on Uber.
Oh bullshit. That's like saying not being able to break any other law causes brain damage.
http://www.cyanline.com/blog.php?entryT=Extracting%20Deleted...
There are indeed many examples of this, especially in third-world countries ruled by dictators or superstitions, or a combination of the two. But that doesn't stop us from creating those cures/preventions for ourselves, because it's still the right thing to do.

We may eventually get through to them, at any rate. See Bill Gates and Polio vaccines, for example.
The Bees In The Trap / EPISODE 3 – Doors to Open
None. People who have time to cultivate a following are very rarely the people who deserve one.
Edward Snowden tells John Oliver he did not read all leaked NSA material
Yes, the founders should be home working 95% of the time. That still leaves a few hours each week to "explore opportunities". I can think of many reasons to go to networking events (disclaimer: I organize a startup conference[1], I used to organize a meetup for co-founders to meet, and I used to have a business networking over lunch startup[2], so it's a topic I care about)

When I network, my ROI horizon is 6 months or more. In my personal experience, if I need something right now (find an angel to give me $250K, find a developer to write my MVP), it won't work. However, people I met 6 months ago, who I found interesting (but had no particular need for at the time), turn out to be a life saver.

Don't be selfish: network for others too. If the person you are talking to is looking for something specific, and you happen to know someone who could help, offer to make the introduction (assuming both parties pass your quality threshold).

Quality of events matter: if you are a new entrepreneur and doesn't even know what vesting or 83(b) is, you need to chat to people to catch up to the average level of entrepreneurs around where you are. At some point, you will "graduate" from those events. You can tell because when that happens, you can help pretty much everyone at that event with confidence. When that happens, you need to move to higher quality/more selective events. Pro tip: if there is no such event near you, start one.

[1] http://thestartupconference.com
[2] http://colunchers.com
> Having used Chef, Puppet, and Ansible

The only comparable system that I believe is a match for Ansible is SaltStack.

> As a functional programmer, I understand the benefits and appeal of declarative syntax. Unfortunately, systems programming is the one place where it's really hard to be 100% declarative, because systems are inherently all about state[0].

Have you looked into Nix/NixOS/NixOps? I think they have a really good approach to "functional configuration mgmt".

> perhaps things will change as we move toward better containerization models

I agree. When using scrappable VMs/containers (deploy to a new one, then scrap the old one) that are build from a description, it is in some ways quite close to approach in the Nix-camp.
Is it even good practice to have a dozen of tabs open?
Maybe it depends on the type of websites open? Travel related with 10 SO questions and 3 Youtube instances? That's not focused work right?
The point is I am very confused why people have dozens of tabs open at once. Please share with me the reason behind this habbit
With reusable rockets and just general privatization of space travel, the whole idea is to make the product more accessible. No one knows how big the market could be.
Before you think about the possibilities for improvement, just think for once that there be more depth to the topic of genes than we have fully realized.
Let me put this through a really quick acid test.

Does a child have the right to be cared for? Someone must provide this care.

Does a child have the right to be protected from prostitution? Someone must provide this protection and someone must provide for the needs that were driving the child into prostitution to begin with.

To me it seems you can easily have rights that force someone else to do something.
Opportunities lost in a sea of growth rounds
But this is not a CLA with DataStax but with Apache right?

Edit: Oops, no it looks like it's with DataStax. Then I can understand why people wouldn't sign it.
Programming competitions actually require deep algorithmic knowledge and lots of training
Python flavored afl-fuzz for reference: https://bitbucket.org/jwilk/python-afl
More than that, the dead reckoning data from the GPS "infected" numerous other automated systems that should have caught the error, because there was (is?) no defined standard for what a GPS receiver should do in the event of losing its fix. In this case, it kept transmitting position data and added a proprietary "invalid" tag that wasn't parsed by other equipment.
Please suggest a better alternative to simulate the culture and mentality of a startup, for a typical 18 year old who is not a part of the world of tech.
On a mildly related note, does anyone know if there's a nice analogue to Firefox's tab groups in Chrome? I'm not sure if I'm ready to make the plunge into something automated like this.
I wonder how many best practices and contemporary OS techniques have come and gone in the Hurd's source code over the years.
Factor in the time-value of money, and the risk of investments. Is $100 going to be more useful to the EFF to stop bad law now, or is $200 in a couple years when they have to try to repeal bad law?
Based on the description at [1] it does indeed seem logical that a VACUUM would prevent this type of recovery on primary databases.

1 - https://sqlite.org/lang_vacuum.html
Echoing other comments, this does look pretty cool.

Would appreciate a comment from OP on what the use case is with this library? Maybe an example app or ideal use case?
It also helps that dang has been willing - eager, even - to issue a mea culpa and reverse a decision. In other words, he's willing to admit to mistakes, or if not mistakes, at least sincere and reasoned discussion. This goes a long way. He doesn't just say, "Hey, I decided, you live with it."
Plus for me the document is cut off mid-sentence.

It's a copy of a book chapter, plus the end notes (notice how the page number jumps near the end). The end notes aren't paginated by chapter, so you're seeing the first paragraph of the end notes for the NEXT chapter at the bottom of the page.
Agreed. It took me a long time to realise this, too. I'd go to hackathons and put together a working demo that lacked polish, then lose to people who basically put together a pitch deck with some HTML mockups attached.

Maybe it's just getting old, but the idea of exhausting myself over a weekend in order to create something I'll likely never use again has lost it's appeal. Every now and then I'll be disciplined and tell myself I'm having a "hack weekend" where I'm relatively anti-social, stay at home and work on a project. It's a lot more fulfilling.
Peter Thiel on Last Mover Advantage
Absolutely. The sooner the general public accepts that genome editing is going to happen anyway and the sooner governments create institutions which allow the benefits of genome manipulation to be available to everyone the better for social cohesion.
Hmm.. seems like server is unable to response to overwhelming & sudden interest
As an introvert myself. I felt exactly this at the recent YC Startup School BBQ. Every person in the room had interesting things to tell.
Getting together with friends in your spare time to make a web site/app?
Why is arbitrarily changing human genome something that biologist worry about, but changing the genome of other creatures and foods that are later consumed is not something that biologists worry about?
Looks awesome! Agreed w/below that more usage examples would be great!
It comes down to two things:

1: Pick your networking events carefully
2: Get good at walking away from clowns
3: Learn to work the room.

I can't emphasize the comment about clowns highly enough. These are the people who give you a good chuckle when their back is turned. Sometimes all you need to say is something like, "well, I need to meet a few more people, good luck on XYZ," smile, and go to the next guy.
Because everyone wants the "low cost, no fraud protection" card, until the Russian hackers steal a bunch of them. Then those people are the very ones who make the loudest noise blaming others for the problem, despite being told about the risks up front.
Having children not die of malaria causes economic growth. And economic growth causes children not to die of malaria. So either way they're connected...
We've been at GATTACA since long ago. GATTACA is about a guy trying to sneak into the space program even though he has genes that say he's got a weak heart. How is that not already part of the space program?

Requirements to be an astronaut

http://www.nasa.gov/audience/forstudents/postsecondary/featu...

* Distant visual acuity: 20/100 or better uncorrected

* Height between 62 and 75 inches.

Both of those are based on your genes. Have bad genes, you don't get to be an astronaut.

There's also

* Blood pressure: 140/90 measured in a sitting position

And while I suspect most people can adjust their blood pressure through diet and exercise I'm sure some people could never get in that range. In other words they'd have the exact same problem as they guy in GATTACA, a bad heart.
What you're suggesting is a sort of Manhattan Project for genetics. I don't think it's entirely impossible, but I do think that the scope of the project would be so great that it would be especially difficult to accomplish in a vacuum.
Show HN: FinchReviews, an app that helps managers document performance
http://unbouncepages.com/finchreviews/
Last week, I worked on a pivot for my earlier startup and just made a page for it.
FinchReviews makes it super easy for managers to document the performance of their reportees to help them in their annual performance appraisals/reviews.
You can do that by including an email to every email correspondence you want to document.
It could be a job well done, some course correction feedback or just plain one-on-one notes and we'll convert it into a timeline between the manager and the reportee that can be accessed by both of them during their annual performance review cycle.

After you create a timeline, we also pre-fill a performance review form that you can use at the end of the year to save yourself and your manager from the last minute panic of remembering what good you did in the year and what has been the evolution of your career throughout the year.

Please give your feedback on this. I'll be super duper thankful. [Like really thankful]
Uber will be in a great spot if they are thinking about integrating the technology with self-driving cars. That's how the landscape will most likely look in 5-10 years. Uber + Car Sharing + Driverless cars.
Seems to be back up?
thats an interesting video. Gave me a lot of food for thought.
Not that this is exactly how the middle class has been decimated, but nice illustration.
I'm curious about what this is, but I dare not click the link at work.
There's the obvious counter-argument about not being able to guarantee that investments will increase in value, but I think the more compelling one is that it's an especially useful time to be donating. According to the UN:

> in 2011, 17 percent of people in the developing world lived at or below $1.25 a day. That’s down from 43 percent in 1990.

It seems worth pushing to nearly-eradicate this "extreme poverty" now, rather than waiting another 20 years and doing something that would likely have a lesser effect on suffering.
Assuming that this isn't a troll "le wrong generation" post...

> I guess I can't really be sure, but I don't get the feeling people care about music like that anymore.

People in high schools still define themselves around the bands they listen to, don't be so sure to write off the younger generation as apathetic towards music.

> At the worst I wonder if the golden age of music as a popular art form is behind us. How many people follow sculpture or painting? There's plenty of work being done, but only aficionados of those forms follow it.

Music has been around as long if not longer than sculpture and painting. Art and music are still very popular, even if they're constantly changing.

As for your other comments about music today being "spineless and trite," we're currently in a second golden age of hip-hop and I'm sure fans of other genres will also tell you their music is alive and well.
I cannot even read the CLA, so to be honest I'm not sure who it is with.
I think this is fantastic. I would recommend attributing Edward Snowden for the quotes being used though.
The headline is misleading (NYTimes fault not OP's) the scientists are asking their fellow scientists not to use certain techniques on humans until the implications are more fully understood. Unfortunately that isn't quite as sensational of a headline.
Or that a bug literally got into the machine. It seems more analogous to edge conditions that weren't covered, which could overlap with actual defects. For example, input ranges that were "promised" to never be in a data set, but ended up happening anyway.
Communities experimenting with mesh networks
Are there any coding bootcamps in EU?
After a bit of googling I didn't find anything. This seems to be North American thing pretty much.

Just wondering if there are any good boot camps ai ed at web or mobile development.
The muscles you use for giving are the same muscles you use to save or pay down debt.

Know what your expenses are and how much you are spending. Know which of the things you spend money for are really important to you, and what you wouldn't actually miss that much. Know how to keep your spending in check as your income grows, not just increasing spending because the money is there.

People tend to react emotionally to the teachers of these principles, like Dave Ramsey or Mr. Money Mustache. But it's not personal. It's just math. You can choose to cut way back on your spending if you want to retire really early, if that's what's most important to you. Or you can choose to spend more extravagantly and retire later (or not at all).

Or instead or retiring early, maybe you want to live really frugally but keep earning as much as possible, so you can give as much as possible. The underlying principles are the same.
Thank the heavens for that.
From the article:

> First, where do we draw the line? If we’re prepared to donate one-third of our incomes to maximize happiness, then why not two-thirds? Why not live in a tent in a park so as to be able to donate 99 percent and prevent even more cases of blindness?

This is an area where the writings of Scott Alexander (Slate Star Codex) have been really helpful for me. He refers to this as "Infinite Debt" (http://slatestarcodex.com/2014/05/10/infinite-debt/):

"For years, I felt like I was probably ethically obligated to give all my income to charity, minus whatever I needed to survive. And the fact that I obviously wasn’t going to do that made me not give anything at all.

Once someone told me that my obligation wasn’t infinite, but just some finite amount like ten percent per year, every year, I was thrilled to be able to comply.

And of course there are people who make fun of this. “Oh, you really think you can just give an amount you find “convenient”, then feel like your conscience is clear and you can stop caring and be smug and self-satisfied?”

The proper response to this person is to ask whether they give so much as ten percent.

(“What? No, why should I?! I do my part by yelling at you!”)"
It's SFW. Just text, even the youtube video from John Oliver is SFW IIRC.
Fedspeak, or Security Through Obfuscation
It costs governments incredibly large sums of money to do anything in space, so if they can make it cheaper they stand to make a killing. Space technology has a huge indirect impact on ordinary folks -- from telecommunications to medical research to environmental science, and on, and on...
Stock or stock options.
This just got hell banned. How does that happen? What could possibly have been the problem with this little notes app?
I use tree style tabs[treeee] in Firefox and often open 5-10, process them (which may involve opening several more each). Eventually I find the information I need, but this makes it easy to group the depth of my search. This branch is from the API docs, that branch is from StackOverflow (and usually has a subbranch of questions that catch my attention from the more fun StackExchange sites, whoops), and then another branch with language specific questions. I try to clear everything at the end of the week, but it's really not a huge burden because I can collapse a tree and just mentally ignore it until then. Average day with lots of coding? 100+ tabs easily.

[treeee]: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-us/firefox/addon/tree-style-ta...
Have you seen the unregulated medical systems in 3rd world countries? Easier access to antibiotics etc than in Malibu. Failure to cure diseases may be more about culture than price. Not warranted to jump straight to Gattica horror stories.
Screenshot of the website for those who don't want to click it at work: http://i.imgur.com/5EQuKlO.png