skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
So we're not supposed to be afraid of Ebola anymore?

Or will the new vaccine conveniently save a Western country from a sudden, mysterious outbreak of Ebola?

The new Ebola vaccine is produced by Merck, and.. Oh look! Former CDC Director Now President of Merck's Vaccine Unit:

http://articles.mercola.com/sites/articles/archive/2012/08/0...

>> In the summer of 2011, Merck president Julie Gerberding said in a news interview1 that she's "very bullish on vaccines," as she recounted the various ways she helps Merck sell its products. What she didn't divulge was her motivation for leaving her job as director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC)—an agency charged with overseeing vaccines and drug companies—and join Merck in the first place, back in January 2010.*

I'm sure that's completely unrelated. Nothing to see here, peon, move along!

EDIT:

It gets even "better":

>> The CDC disseminated extremely exaggerated data on the 2009 H1N1 "pandemic" and urged almost everyone in the U.S. to take the new, untested vaccines. When questions arose, they blocked CBS's requests for samples of the swine flu cases and added obstacles to getting information. Despite the many dangers that have since been linked to the hastily developed vaccine—including the confirmed link to narcolepsy—the H1N1 vaccine is now part and parcel of the "regular" seasonal flu vaccine, although most people are completely unaware of this fact. And the CDC is now, for the first time ever, urging the seasonal flu vaccine on everyone in the country, from six months' of age until death.

>> Even more disturbing, the CDC withheld data on miscarriages from the H1N1 vaccines under Gerberding's lead, while insisting that pregnant women be put first in line to receive it.

But you've been told that "anti-vaxxers" are a bunch of conspiracy loonies, so you should just keep laughing and sneering at them, yes?
Ephemeral Undo
Maybe folks over there keep a kerosene lamp and a night's supply of kerosene on hand just like we keep candles, flashlights and batteries handy.
Why Homejoy Failed and the Future of the On-Demand Economy
When I moved to California a few years ago I drove all of I-40 and the second we crossed from AZ into CA the roads went to shit. Worse than literally any other state's stretch. You could hear the difference. I could go on at length about about why CA seems to lack the kind of civic life I have found in other states, but I'm biased as hell and have a very limited perspective.
Sweeping 4K drone footage shows off Tesla's Fremont factory
> Now you're being unfair to me.

In that case, I'm sorry. I wasn't happy with how I worded that bit, and I've deleted it from my comment.

I don't agree with you about diligence, though. There's something not right about searching through someone's personal or posting history for ammunition in an argument. It seems to me a foul in the local sport. But I don't yet know how to express this precisely.
Often you can even take the same dress and dress it up to accompany someone in a suit or dress it down to accompany someone in jeans and a t-shirt.
His value system is consistent with the cultural norm (higher pay for longer harder work). In my opinion you shouldn't act like he is the one acting strange.
The weight option has the benefit of durability. A battery needs to be replaced after x charge/discharge cycles. The goal of GL is to reduce poverty cycles by making a one-time investment that pays for itself in a month. Adding the recurring cost of a battery, even if still cost effective, runs counter to that goal.
As eusocial creatures, the bees don't precisely "learn" this sort of thing, or pass information on by "teaching" other bees to coordinate this sort of behavior.

It's an instinctive reaction, deeply ingrained in the surviving lineage of the bees that react like that, because all of the others were culled against, and eaten voraciously.

With bees, the only creature that should be regarded as having any degree of agency is the queen, and all others are to be regarded as appendages. Flying, autonomous phantom limbs.

The behavior of the collective is guided by pheremones, and when sensed, the subjects of the queen must react reflexively to the varying scents of the hive. Failing to react appropriately to the ambient chemical signals of the hive, for bees, is like being born physically deformed or mentally handicapped for humans, and the unfit would not survive in the wild. The queen's colony must hold her aloft, as assuredly as our own legs must carry us over terrain, and our hands must pick food up and place it in our mouths.

This highly specific reaction to the giant wasps probably emerges the same way aversion or attraction to flavors and smells arise. Those that cannot taste a fatal poison, will mistakenly eat it and not reject tainted food.

The way these bees react to the hornets, without the use of stinging, and instead restraining their predator cooperatively, is probably driven by the smell of the hornets. I can't really fathom how a reaction like that works, but the hornet species must have killed so many bees, single-handedly, that they selectively bred the survivors capable of stopping them, sort of the same way we're inadvertently creating antibiotic resistant viruses.
You are now qualified to take a job as an oil company or nuclear energy lobbyist.
It may be morally absurd, but it's certainly not economically absurd.
Once I had a college professor who said, "Plagiarize, plagiarize, let nothing escape your eyes." He meant it! Copying assignments in his class was acceptable. But at the end of the semester, he would come by and talk to you and see what you really knew. If he found you lacking in understanding, you failed. You still had to know the material. Blind copying would get you to the final examination, but it wouldn't allow you to pass it.

Any aircraft the Chinese make will presumably be put to some examination, some day. Will they be able to pass? Your guess is as good as anyone's.
Google Talk: Uber Co-Founder and CEO Travis Kalanick (2013)
To investigate the debate, Dr. Harlow created inanimate surrogate mothers for the
rhesus infants from wire and wood.[10] Each infant became attached to its particular
mother, recognizing its unique face and preferring it above all others. Harlow next
chose to investigate if the infants had a preference for bare wire mothers or cloth
covered mothers. For this experiment he presented the infants with a clothed mother
and a wired mother under two conditions. In one situation, the wire mother held a
bottle with food and the cloth mother held no food. In the other situation, the
cloth mother held the bottle and the wire mother had nothing.[10]

Overwhelmingly, the infant macaques preferred spending their time clinging to the
cloth mother.[10] Even when only the wire mother could provide nourishment, the
monkeys visited her only to feed. Harlow concluded that there was much more to the
mother/infant relationship than milk and that this "contact comfort" was essential
to the psychological development and health of infant monkeys and children. It was
this research that gave strong, empirical support to Bowlby's assertions on the
importance of love and mother/child interaction.

Another experiment by Harry Harlow. The interesting things to observe here is that the money felt attachment to something that provided it with contact comfort. The brain in question wouldn't even know what "contact" is because it lacks a sense of touch. With that in mind (no pun intended), what we're left to speculate is where that complex mass of neurons will venture. Will it "hallucinate and invent" something that provides the equivalent of a mother figure?

Alternatively, (and I think this is more probably), it's possible that the brains we invent for a long time are merely equivalent to evolutionary stages of brain development from millions of years in the past. That begs the question, would the precursors of the modern human brain be considered to be an inhumane condition to the brain we have today? It clearly had a lesser capacity in all sorts of ways. The ancient human brain cannot comprehend, yet alone fathom what the modern human brain is capable of. By the time we grow these brains to the neuronal mass capable of human levels of thought, we will probably lack the ability and knowledge still on how to make it think like us because the technology for growing it bigger is going to far outstrip our capacity to coax it to grow a certain way (assuming we even know what that way we should grow it to achieve the consciousness of the modern human).
Voxel-Based game engine supporting soft bodies and animation
I was really struck by the idea of "veto points" -- basically, how many different groups can derail a project. There seems to be a sweet spot where you have enough checks and balances that good projects get done while bad projects get blocked, but some parts of American governance (obviously including California) have so many layers of checks and balances that very few projects can make it through the gauntlet.

It's one thing to have to get by the budget committee, the whole Senate, and the governor. It's quite another thing to get by all of that, plus the EPA, the voting public, unions, TV/newspaper/blog pundits, half a dozen special interest groups that have conflicting requirements, and lawyers representing all of them.
Ask HN: Are there any open source projects built with microservice architectures
I've been professionally involved with a couple of microservice implementations now, but they've all been proprietary systems.

Sometimes when asked for advice, I've wished for an open source project with enough activity to get people to understand the scope of some of the decision.

There are probably hundreds of developer focused projects to build/manage microservices, but what I'm really hoping for is some dog food.
Well one had to say the whole premise of 'couldn't find evidence thus fact didn't exist' was fishy even before the article started digging out the evidence that reseaecher somehow missed.
Metafilter, mainly. ($5 signup fee, and then I chip in $5/month to help support it)
I'm not looking to get hired, but I am looking to do statistical analysis/Manhattan plot for endometriosis variant identification using a patient group, and develop a therapy using CRISPR. Would you be able to recommend anyone I could connect with?
I moved from Chicago to LA and thought the roads were an amazing improvement. Nowadays I drive 25k miles a year in CA and I think the roads are mostly fine. Last year I went on a road trip from Chicago to Kansas City and back. I don't know what exactly people are talking about, CA roads look ok to me. AZ and Utah have amazing roads, but let's be fair, they are used a lot less, and are a lot easier to maintain.
As someone who lived in Canada and is currently leaving in the UK I was always surprised by the exceptionally poor state of maintenance of everything that is in the public domain in CA. Nothing was more sad perhaps than the state of the Aquatic Park pier in SF. The stunning beauty of the natural setting contrasted against the decrepit and crumbling (literally) pier railing was shocking. How do people living in one of the richest cities on the planet put up with such crap?
Not really, because he's pushing towards a completely arbitrary minimum $70k salary for everyone. That's certainly his right as the business owner, and that sentiment shared more widely might be better for society, but there's nothing particularly "capitalistic" about it.
Shh... http://zission.com
Linters

I take back "brightest minds"
That's an interesting connection to point out, thank you.

I have no real understanding or even awareness of analog computing. I recall leafing through an old textbook on chemical engineering earlier this year (as I was looking for practical applications of graph theory), and read a little about the use of analog computing to solve ODEs, and being pretty surprised.

This might be an interesting read: "Handbook of Analog Computation" [1].

[1] http://www.analogmuseum.org/library/handbook_of_analog_compu...
There are other hemorrhagic fevers with no vaccine. I don't think we should get too carried away with Ebola just because it has, roughly speaking, a higher mortality rate, and has been kept in the news by this latest outbreak.

The ability to make a vaccine that looks promising a year after a major outbreak occurs is good, but not so impressive. A better achievement is, will be, developing processes to create vaccines for viruses, even previously unknown viruses, rapidly, being able to target viruses in places and stages current vaccines can't handle[1][2], and developing ways of testing a vaccine's efficacy without waiting for a large outbreak.

Laurie Garrett's The Coming Plague (readily found by searching for the title in combination with epub) chronicles some encounters and research with various pathogens including several hemorrhagic fevers.

[1] Rabies still kills tens of thousands of people a year in Asia and Africa, in places where "get vaccinated" is not the standard response to getting bitten by a wild animal (the major vector of Rabies there is feral dogs); by the time symptoms appear it's too late. That's more people dead of Rabies per year than have died in the known history of Ebola outbreaks.

[2] Or, for example, HIV.
Cecil the Lion's Killer, Dr. Walter Palmer, Contacts Authorities
I read about the "NINA" paper when it came out. This summary of the new historical research amply shows that the original thesis indeed needs "substantial modification".

While it says nothing of the historical accuracy, the exchange between the two historians, quoted in the text, makes me lean much more in favor of the researcher behind the new work.
> I was never able to get through Zork because of the inherent illogic (e.g. if I go west, going east should take me back).

Zork is a graph, not a grid. It makes sense, it just isn't rectilinear. For instance, You start by the mailbox, west of the white house. Going north takes you to the north of the house. From there you have to go west back to the west of the house. On a map it looks like this: http://i.imgur.com/g9Wd39x.png

Note the inside of the house makes perfect sense, as I'd argue the areas around the house do to, once you picture them.

The areas that aren't like that are purposeful. The forest is confusing because it's easy to get lost in forests. The maze is also intentionally confusing. Quite a bit of zork takes place in an underground cave, and so it makes sense that leaving one room through a tunnel that curves will make you enter the new room from a different direction than you'd expect. It may be unfair to not mention that in game, though.
This is indeed a very interesting encoding. One part of the optimization comes from the use of binary encoding and the other from using offset tables to optimize random access. Offset tables also allows to modify random data in the structure without having to reencode the whole information. This comes at the price of less compact data.

It looks like I could update my YABE encoding which is a straight JSON binary encoding.
There is no line. We are just animals. If we can do it to other species, it is no big deal to do it to ours.

Also by definition science is immoral :)
I think it is - for the cited examples getting a raise from 40k to 70k, this is strictly better than what they had before,/but they're still complaining. Economic rationality has nothing to do with it.
Well, Pandemrix was never used in US.

The mechanism of narcolepsy was quite interesting. Note that it was linked to surface proteins of the virus itself:

https://www.newscientist.com/article/dn24772-flu-vaccine-hel...

The fact that GSK vaccine managed to replicate exactly those surface proteins exactly that way (I guess better than the virus itself?) was quite unlucky. Maybe that could have been caught in more extensive clinical trials (I don't know).
Statement: “... slow or fast, your body still had to break down and consume that burger.”

Response: You are saying that the digestion rate of the burger doesn’t matter, because the entire burger is still processed by the body. But the way your body processes the burger is different depending on the digestion rate.

A couple of things can happen after a given amount of glucose enters the digestive system.

Consider when the digestive system releases the glucose into the blood rapidly, much more rapidly than cells are able to absorb it. The pancreas releases a lot of insulin. Muscle and fat cells both significantly increase their blood glucose absorption rate.

Alternatively, consider when the digestive system releases the glucose into the blood gradually. Cells are able to absorb more of the blood glucose as it is coming in, so blood glucose levels do not rise as much. There is some insulin signaling, but there is less of it. High-need muscle cells already have increased their blood glucose absorption rate due to increased energy requirements, while insulin signaling to fat cells is minimized.

In the alternate scenario, high-need cells muscle cells, while fat cell growth is limited.

Statement: "not eat the burger in the first place."

Cutting out something I like is not a sustainable way to eat healthily. Food intake is not just regulated by energy homeostasis; the reward system, e.g. the mesolimbic pathway, is also potent.

Statement: "improve your insulin resistance/glucose tolerance"

Agreed.

There are two ways to avoid excessive insulin signaling. One, you can decrease the rate at which glucose enters the blood. Two, you can increase the rate at which glucose leaves the blood. My article talks about one, and you seem to be an advocate for increasing insulin sensitivity, which is advocating for two. I think most people should do both.
My friend made a memory game for Android
The F-15 Eagle entered service in 1976 (first flew in 72) and will be in service up until 2025. That's 49 years. Considering the cost and assuming it works out, 30 years for procurement for the F-35 seems reasonable.

The SR71's top speed was just over mach 3. The F-15 can reach mach 2.5. The Mig-25's top speed is mach 2.8 but was clocked by the USA over Israel at Mach 3.2 (Yeah, the SR71 ain't all that). Mig 31's top speed is mach 2.83.

The F-22's top speed is Mach 2.25.

The F-35 is a measly mach 1.6. I think this shift in priorities is revealing and goes beyond a mere obsession with supermaneuverability. The USA is now able to project force around the World, so the need for a fighter that can get somewhere at very high speed is not what it used to be. Now we need a fighter than can be invisible, be great at surveillance and jamming and if it gets into trouble must be able to completely out maneuver the enemy. So slow, smart, invisible and highly maneuverable is what we got.

I watched the F-22 do a Herbst maneuver today at the Seafair in Seattle which is impossible without thrust vectoring. It's an amazing and weird sight. While the new breed of fighters have taken a lot of flak, I wouldn't want to get into a dogfight with one of them while flying a fighter that has traditional control surfaces that need stable airflow when they're able to fly below stall speed at crazy angles of attack and use thrust vectoring to change direction with zero airflow over their control surfaces.
We could get away from all the crazy wars that people are starting here on Earth.
Maybe this was like a Reagan era military spending play. Outspend your enemies so that they will go bankrupt trying to copy you.
Jealousy is quite common. You see plenty of instances of this, people can't wait to measure their self-worth relative to others and would happily affect the lives of others in a negative way simply because it makes them feel better about themselves. After all if you determine your status by the pay you receive and the stuff you can buy then it's better for you if your colleagues earn less than you and your self-worth will suffer if your colleagues earn the same.

Human nature is predictable and depressing.
No, it's not strong. We've forgotten what a true pestilence like polio does because vaccination programs have all but eradicated it. Those diseases killed and maimed - only idiots without understanding of history and suffering would oppose vaccination programs. Bad things happen to people, and sometimes due to medical errors, but vaccination programs are the few things that are simple to implement and reduce human suffering
From a security perspective, frameworks are theoretically superior. Much like how you should not roll your own crypto, instead opting for well tested libraries, a good web framework will be built with rigorous security in mind.

That's the theory, anyway. Your mileage will vary depending on how security savvy your engineering team is regardless, but at least with a framework it's usually straightforward to fix well classified bugs.
That's a question I'd really love to have answered, actually.
SICP Lecture 7A: The Metacircular Evaluator (1986)
so many comments are downvoted.Rare thing on hn.
That's exactly why I found it interesting. It's always revealing when a response mixes shock and outrage with a series of dodges, misdirections, and evasions.
Hm. This allows putting functions into edn that gets sent to the browser now, then doesn't it? Since ClojureScript can eval now?
It's called researchers bias where someone so fervently believes something is true that it influences their research.
NINA is a good example of an uncomfortable truth.
It's his money, he's the capital-holder, he can do what he wants with it. If he thinks it's better for his business to do this, that's entirely up to him.

Capitalism doesn't mean "pay your employees out according to some made-up scheme of who's-worth-what," though the weird calvinist pseudo-capitalism we love in the U.S. sure likes that kind of ranking.
That there is a video is interesting for the NYT. That it's using Flash player is doubly interesting.
No worries. This is the first time I've interacted with you, and I don't completely agree with everything you've said, but I do think you've been completely fair. I don't mind if you're a bit more pre-emptory than I might have been if it keeps the knives put away in these threads.

>There's something not right about searching through someone's history

But those are things that the person posted publicly. Why is there anything untoward about browsing a person's public comment history (for relevant posts)? What else is it there for? They can and should delete it if they don't want it to remain. Sometimes a quick check of a comment history is all that's needed to see a pretty consistent bias (or other problems). I'm talking about really obvious stuff. It's a reddit reflex, and not all that useful here compared to there.
Hahahahah fuck off

"They (Native Americans) didn't have any rights to the land, and there was no reason for anyone to grant them rights which they had not conceived and were not using. What was it that they were fighting for, when they opposed white men on this continent? For their wish to continue a primitive existence, their 'right' to keep part of the earth untouched, unused and not even as property, but just keep everybody out so that you will live practically like an animal, or a few caves above it. Any white person who brings the element of civilization has the right to take over this continent."
Well, for open-source projects, we usually don't have a bunch of VC money paying for us to learn how to shave yaks and goof around with devops.

The complexity of having a microservices setup outweighs any benefits one would get for a hobby or nonpaid project.
I'm pretty sure they use audio fingerprinting (Gracenote MusicID has been cited) but using metadata with track lengths would probably suffice most of the time without too much piracy risk.