Hacker News Reader

athomon Why Arabic is Terrific

That's interesting. I found my German lessons did help me better understand the underpinnings of English. Of course, that may owe more to the teacher, and English being a Germanic language probably helped, but knowing a second natural language does give you a new perspective on your first, and additional languages broaden that even further. If you don't feel knowing a second language is helping you use your first, maybe you need to look more closely at how you use both.

athomon The Dollar-Store Economy: How the lowest end of American retail does business

I remember when you'd still hear people refer to dime stores, though I'm pretty sure the term was obsolete well before my time.

athomon Federal Circuit Slams Patent Troll

Wait a minute. You said the defendant had to put up half a million dollars? And the district court awarded the defendant $489,150.48? Half a million is $500,000. Unless I've picked out the wrong numbers, the award looks pretty close to the costs.

Can you clarify?

athomon MIT develops new method to cure broad range of viruses

Actually, you wouldn't want to do that. A lot of human cells actually rearrange their genome as part of their normal function. This is how lymphocytes come up with antibodies, for example.

By selecting and rearranging several different coding sequences from three different chromosomes, each lymphocyte develops its own antibody "design", permanently changing its own genome in the process. This is what allows us to develop immunity to a broad range of foreign antigens with a relatively small amount of genetic code. Think of it as an "immune alphabet", if you will. You certainly don't want to interfere with that!

Other rearrangements also occur, some harmful, others not so much. Even if you wanted to target just the bad ones, though, a virus really isn't the tool for it. Your cytoxic T lymphocytes already do that. In fact, what you're really describing isn't all that far off from what we already have. I think we even have mechanisms for genetic error correction and repair, but I'll have to hit the books again to double-check that.

athomon MIT develops new method to cure broad range of viruses

This is what your normal immune defenses already do. While some white blood cells (neutrophils, monocytes) fight bacteria by "eating" them, viruses are too small to be directly attacked this way. Instead, they cells they infect have to be destroyed before they can release their viral burden. That's what cytotoxic T cells do. They recognize antigens on infected cells, and kill them by triggering apoptosis (programmed cell death).

What is truly unfortunate is, this doesn't always work. Some viruses are able to "hide" in their host cells, preventing them from activating the immune response, and persist idefinitely in a latent state. This is why you can't really get rid of herpes, once you have it.

What looks promising about this development is that it seems to target a form of RNA that is simply not found in healthy cells. Human cells store their genome in double-stranded DNA, and use single-stranded RNA for transcription, but make no use of double-stranded RNA. Apparently, only certain viruses do, so the presence of dsRNA in a human cell should be diagnostic for viral infection, regardless of its sequence. In other words: see dsRNA, kill it!

Would that all viruses were that easy.

athomon Scientists find evidence of salt water flowing on Mars

Microbial mats look like one of the most promising candidates, and NASA has a team seriously exploring this possibility: http://nai.arc.nasa.gov/students/this_month/page6.cfm

These mats tend to build up in layers, and often form structures known as stromatolites. You can find some examples both at the NASA team's site (http://nai.arc.nasa.gov/students/this_month/page2.cfm) and here: http://www.evolutionaryresearch.org/stromatolites.htm

There used to be a page up, claiming to show the remains of actual stromatolites on Mars, but it seems to be completely gone now (Spirit Finds Stromatolites, http://www.xenotechresearch.com/marsstro.htm). The Wayback Machine has it at http://web.archive.org/web/20081120022703/http://www.xenotec... but I'd probably rank its credibility with the Face On Mars.

EDIT: Just to make it clear, all actual stromatolites in these links are definitely of terrestrial origin! (At least, I think they are)

athomon Swedish man caught trying to split atoms at home

Only if someone checks his pockets very thoroughly after each shift.

athomon What Happened to the Future?

No kidding! The best part is, it's all so unnecessary! When I saw the blank page, I decided to have a peek at the source, an lo and behold, there's the essay! Copy it to a text editor, turn on dynamic word wrap, and... enjoy?

athomon Drchrono (YC W11) Brings iPad-Based Medical Records To Doctors

Actually, yes. HIPAA -- the Health Information Portability and Accountability Act -- is the watchword in medical recordkeeping, these days, and cloud storage is a major point of failure if you don't do it right. Neither DrChrono nor the linked article mention HIPAA, except to say they're compliant. They need to say how they're compliant, give details up front. I'd be more willing to take them seriously if they discussed the topic more like this:

The Nirvanix Cloud Storage Network meets the healthcare industry's need for secure archives. You can use policy-based replication to store data at multiple storage nodes that meet SAS 70 compliance. Nirvanix solutions encrypt data both in flight and at rest and enable you to instantly verify the integrity of your files. You also can make data securely available to selected users. We even seamlessly migrate data to new discs on standard refresh cycles, eliminating the complexities of long-term retention. With its secure long-term storage, the Nirvanix cloud will help you to comply with HIPAA Privacy and HIPAA Security Rules as well as other mandates for data privacy. (http://www.nirvanix.com/solutions/healthcare.aspx)

Here's a few other links that discuss the topic in a more informative manner:

http://www.hipaacompliancejournal.com/2009/05/cloud-storage-...

http://billkos.squarespace.com/hit-journal/2010/1/21/cloud-s...

http://hipaaaudit.com/2010/06/22/do-no-evil-says-google/

EDIT: Replaced Nirvanix quote with the correct paragraph. Oh, and I don't represent the company. Just picked 'em out of a search.

athomon IBM patent trolling patent application

Actually, the real win for whoever actually got such a patent would be the "no tagbacks" effect.

Imagine for a moment that you were sued over a product or service another party claims infringes a patent of theirs. Then, you found out that some product they offer actually infringes one of your patents. Now, you're thinking you've got leverage to negotiate a settlement, but the other party refuses all your offers, until you're finally left with no choice to countersue. That's when you find out they actually have the patent on patent trolling! Not only can they sue anyone they like for the slightest whiff of possible infringement, but the defendant can't fight back without actually violating another patent!

Quite the trump card, if you can get it.

athomon A new method of making electricity from sunlight

That's very interesting, but I can't say I've heard of Glenn Beck touting Tellurium Exchange. Nor has anyone told my why now may be the best time ever to own tellurium, although your post is giving me a pretty good idea.

I suspect rarity has less to do with the issues surrounding gold than its ancient desirability, its role throughout history, and the cultural baggage it's picked up in consequence. You probably carry as much rare as gold material in your mobile phone as you'll find in one of those solar cells, and if not, the platinum in your car's catalytic converter may more than make up the difference.

Don't let one minor inconvenience get in your way. ;)

athomon HBS Student Creates Smartphone App To Detect Malaria

Oh, wow...

Okay, I just spent the better part of an hour working on a comment on this (hey, I just passed a hematology course, sooo... ;), and then, as I finally got around to checking out the website, I catch this line in the video (emphasis mine):

"All that's really needed from an individual is a drop of blood from the finger to create a thin smear on a slide for analysis with standard protocols."

That's a lot different from what the linked article claims (again, emphasis mine):

"A single drop of blood from the patient is required then smeared on the microscopy lens."

Smearing the lens directly seemed an interesting idea, although it poses a few challenges I'll touch on shortly. However, a close listen to the video makes it clear that's not what the project purports to do. The Lifelens "hardware" -- the lens -- is just meant to give a phone camera microscopic capabilities. How well that works isn't too clear, but it's definitely not the same thing.

It would actually be quite difficult to get an acceptable specimen on a tiny lens. The standard laboratory method is to place a drop of blood on a slide, then use another slide to draw it out into a thin film. Here's a quick video that shows a pretty good example:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iA6ce-3sYgk

Note how the tech drags the slide back at an angle over the drop, then pushes it forward almost immediately. It takes good timing and a lot of practice to get it right, and then you have to find just the right part of the specimen for a proper analysis. What you get in a typical thin smear is a range of population densities, from a clumpy mess of cells crowding and overlapping each other, to rarefied lines and clusters of cells spaced widely apart. The nice, evenly spaced fields shown in the article are just a small region of the full sample, usally a couple fields behind the feathered edge. Getting that is a challenge just in the laboratory. On a tiny lens in the field? I'll believe that when I see it, and this is just the second step! (Getting the sample is the first) The specimen still has to be stained.

While RBCs with their hemoglobin do en masse make blood red to reddish-purple, individual red cells don't actually show a lot of color without staining. Nor do white cells; they just look a bit larger and grainier than reds. To better examine cell structures, a stained specimen is needed. The standard analytical sample is a Wright stained thin film smear, which requires three different stains be applied and washed in sequence. This stuff doesn't just wash off, either, so don't expect to use the same lens twice. Again, however, that's not what the project actually claims to do. What it does claim, on the other hand, strains credulity in other directions.

Sad to say, but a half-sphere lens on a phone camera does not a microscope make. Without going too deep into details (I hope), proper microscopy requires close attention to the properties of light and lenses. You can't just point a powerful lens at a specimen and expect to get a good image. You also need to ensure sufficient lighting, proper contrast, and control your depth of field!!!

I cannot emphasize that last point enough! Even squashed nearly flat under a cover slip, any specimen you examine is still three dimensional, with details you can only see by shifting the microscopic stage up and down by very small amounts. The depth of field is very narrow. A professional scope's fine adjustment is fine enough to shift focus on a cell from "front" to "back" and anywhere in between. As you might imagine, that requires keeping the stage very, very still. That's why scopes have specimen stages. You won't get that out of a phone camera without clamping it down.

That's what made the article's statement so interesting. If an acceptable specimen could be obtained by smearing the lens directly, the fixed position might allow for proper analysis, but that's not what the project purports to do.

It might be interesting to see where this project goes, but at this point, it's still looking very alpha to me. I'd wait 'til they show this thing in action.

EDIT: Minor spelling error.

athomon Lambdas in C

My favorite part: l_anonymous_functions_name

Sorry, I just like the irony.

athomon Today's real life is yesterday's science fiction.

I'd like to know what kinda coffee is carbonated, myself.

Then again, I've heard of some interesting soda flavors. There may be more of those than of ice cream.

athomon Human cell becomes living laser with jellyfish protein.

Reminds me a little of a Mycon podship:

http://wiki.uqm.stack.nl/Podship

athomon New instructions in Intel's Haswell microarchitecture

I find the "gather" functionality especially intriguing.

APL and J have "transpose" instructions that let you rearrange the dimensions of a multidimensional array. I figured out awhile back how that could be done without having to move all the individual elements in memory; basically, keep track of the 'step size' between elements on each axis, and you can shuffle them around as much as you like. Of course, once you've done that, you're jumping back and forth all over the array to pull in each element when/where you want it.

Well, looky what those "gather" instructions do! Promising. Very promising...

athomon Protolol Jokes

Don't quit() the daily job.

athomon A Refrigerator that Runs Without Electricity

Maybe you could put it in yet another container with a dessicant to draw the moisture?

athomon 52 Years and $750 Million Prove Einstein Was Right

And for just three-quarters of a billion dollars.

It took me a second look to realized, but in today's dollars, quite the bargain!

athomon High-Speed Video Shows How Hummingbirds Really Drink

Very this.

I was just working today with a coagulation test machine (Coag-A-Mate: http://www.gmi-inc.com/BioMerieux-Coag-A-Mate-2210.html) that can draw samples and reagents from an array of loaded vials. A "liquid-sipping robot" would actually be a VERY accurate description.

athomon Study finds 'mother of all languages' (spoken in pre-historic Africa)

there's no reason to think that we started out with lots of phonemes and that these have been whittled away over time

I suspect the reasoning is more along the lines of languages picking up more phonemes over time, such that older languages, having been around longer, would have picked up more phonemes.

athomon Stop Telling Students Recursion is Hard

This is why most looping structurues can be replaced with recursion. It's also why you hear of "unrolling" tail-recursive calls into more traditional looping structures. They're equivalent.

athomon Stop Telling Students Recursion is Hard

Actually, this is not correct. While recursion is typically implemented in the form of a function which calls itself, that is not exactly what recursion means. In fact, "recursion" derives from "recur", which simply means to repeat, or re-occur, which, when you look at it, is exactly what a "recursive" function is designed to do (without all that messy for/next, do/while jazz). Calling itself is just a particularly clever, interesting, and elegant way to do that.

To really illustrate the point of recursion, consider showing your students one of the simplest recursive algorithms out there. You can find it on the back of many shampoo bottles:

  * Lather.
  * Rinse.
  * Repeat.

athomon Dear Google: You Can’t Threaten People Into Being Social

This reminds me of a guy at the last place I worked. It wasn't bonuses he was on about (though we had that issue come up, too), but performance appraisal. He was always trying to figure out just how much he needed to do to "far exceed expectations", as though by accomplishing just that much (and no more?) each year, he could "far exceed" consistently.

I think he might have been a little unclear on the concept.

athomon Birth and Death of Microsoft Bing

"The report of my death was an exaggeration." -- Mark Twain

I was having a look at Terabyte drives in Best Buy yesterday, and while wondering how well a model might work with Linux, I realized, now the display computers actually have internet capability, I should be able to look it up right there in the store! So, I wander over to a convenient laptop, kick it out of screensaver mode, start up the browser, and plug in the product name. Only after I hit the search button did I notice WHAT service I was using. Added bonus: Google was NOT an option.

I'll believe that Bing is dead when it isn't the default search engine in the default browser on the default operating system at the default computer store.

athomon On Tesla's induction motor

What we really need for electric cars is battery swapout. Just pull into the nearest station, trade out the drained battery for a fresh one, and you're off! Meanwhile, the station sets the drained battery on the charging array, and in a few hours, it's ready for the next customer!

In theory. I can see at least a couple of challenges in making such a system feasible. It's not like you can just shove the batteries into a massive underground tank, for example.

athomon AdBlock Freedom - block billboards, TV and magazine ads in real time

Next on the horizon: peril-sensitive sunglasses!

athomon At work? Try this Hacker News homepage inspired by Node [SFW]

So we need to come up with one that looks like a contract, maybe?

If I weren't trying to get away and do WBC differentials...

athomon [dead]

Well, if you want to talk about that sort of thing, I'm not sure it makes a lot of sense to trust anything an applicant for this sort of job might say about his criminal record.

Or anything else.

athomon [dead]

Well, if you reason it out, which applicant is less likely to get the company in trouble? The one who gets caught, or the one who doesn't?