skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
According to an editorial in The Lancet¹, there are 200 million women worldwide who want contraception but don’t have access to it. Simply providing family-planning services is five times cheaper than other carbon-emission-mitigation technologies.

I submit this as an excellent example of a policy measure that would help prevent global warming if the scientific consensus is right, and provide a genuine social good even if the consensus turns out to be wrong.

¹cited by the AP, here: http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2009/09/18/tech/main5319878.s...
I think the problem is in our definition of "Mission Critical" which is a fuzzy word. Depending on how "critical" a failure would be, continuous deployment may or may not make sense.

The author talk about 2-year certification periods as though that were a big deal, which indicates he has a different definition of "Mission Critical" than, say, a Shuttle Engineer, Power Grid Manager, or Nuclear Regulatory Organization (All of which experience 5+ year certification periods _after_ the release of a new system)

A multi-hour failure at amazon.com has different consequences than an multi-hour failure of the west coast power grid.

As one who deals with organizations that have QA, Code Drop, Full Scale Test Environment _in addition_ to their staging environment prior to allowing anything (including software that has been fully regressed with the coverage described in the article) to be pushed into production, I understand the resistance to deploying "latest and greatest"

The workaround - maintain a Full Scale Test Environment (preferably, _multiple_ such environments) internally for your Engineering, QA and Operations Group - and drive your continuous deployment builds into _those_ environments, and then stage checkpoint releases for your "Production" environments.

The only downside is that production customers don't get the opportunity to provide rapid-feedback on new features, so you still get a bit of the negatives associated with waterfall class requirements-architecture-design-implmement lifecycles, but, you are able to enjoy the benefits of rapid prototyping and bug triage internally that are associated with continuous builds, massive automation frameworks, and close-to-real-world deployments of your software.
John Mackey and Whole Foods
Hong Kong has this system, and I love it. The airport is far enough out, that it has it's own train, (the airport express).

Not the actual security screen, but all the rest of it can be done right at the train station. You can check your bags and even check in for your flight. The lines are short, and you can dump the bags early and enjoy the trip.
The article makes a good point: despite the "masked" non-adjusted returns, you don't really have an alternative to equities over the long haul.

From the linked WSJ article: "All of this might be enough to put investors off stocks entirely, until they consider the long-term alternatives. Measured over the 1978-2008 period, rather than over just one decade, stock performance in real-real terms actually is better than that of just about any other major investment class, Mr. Thornburg found: 4.5% a year. Stocks' ability to keep up with inflation over the very long haul may be their best selling point.

In real-real terms, stocks did better over that period than municipal bonds (2.5% a year), long-term government bonds (2% a year) and corporate bonds (0.2% a year). Real-real home prices were unchanged over those 30 years. Both short-term government bonds and commodities suffered losses. (Mr. Thornburg has experience investing in all these areas, although his mortgage affiliate went bust in last year's housing collapse.)"
So the problem is that people are using naive string implementations (character arrays) instead of proper strings?
I understand that continuous deployment could be very beneficial, but how do you change a customer from using US Army type deployment to accepting continuous deployment? What if you need to satisfy multiple different customers, all with their own taste or distaste for risks and new releases, how do you make the transition to continuous deployment?

It seems like crucial to the benefit of continuous deployment is that your code actually be used when you check it in by lots of people, so that regressions are found immediately. If you can't get that to happen, the entire process grinds to a halt.
Amen.
Unfortunately, the chain is only as strong as the weakest link.

FWIW, the vulnerability is listed in the OWASP 2007 Top 10 as Malicious File Execution http://www.owasp.org/index.php/Top_10_2007-A3
cool. i think the ideas that take services that were previously available only to bigger corporations and make them accessible to everyone (ala polleverywhere.com) are almost always useful.
you might want to look in to developing in other mediums other then calling - texting or emailing in are also good.
Wimpy Evidence for Dark Matter Particles
Twitter & Facebook:  introductions are not necessary
Is that solvable? An ad has to be placed in print long before it is shipped out. I don't think you can really hope for liquidity.

Also TV advertising isn't that far from it either from what I understand.
Yes, texting could also a part of this, I should have mentioned it.
One company I recently purchased from (www.bonobos.com) has had some success marketing via rewarding consumers for attention. Their various strategies got people a little more involved than just listening and calling a phone line, but I think it's an interesting concept.
Live by the cloud, die by the cloud.
TenYears: Single Most Innovative Product of the Decade
>Nothing was put on risk.

Do you know Stephen Fry well? Is he 'nothing'? Can you predict how he will feel about this?

>if the twitter account in question didn't belong to Stephen Fry or anyone famous?

I didn't say famous, I said good.

Btw, check out the author's disclaimer:

>Neither the editors nor the author shall not be liable for any possible damage caused by the materials of this article.
Survivorship bias is behind almost every instance of supposed alpha found when running pattern based studies. That and the bid-ask bounce.
if you need some advice with US shortcodes for texting shoot me an email.. i spent some time dealing with this for a different idea
Pretty sad. Google links almost completely to copyrighted content. Why isn't it illegal?

This article reads much more like a condemnation of ISOHunt specifically, though.
It would be interesting to know how much of that innovation comes from Apple and how much comes from their manufacturing partners who actually make all their products.
You can't malign a hugely successful piece of software without justifying your opinion in front of a very technical audience such as this.

Or, I guess you can and suffer the consequences (as OP did).
"Linked lists and RB trees are very different beasts, each appropriate for its own context."

Precisely. And I don't think this is a metaphor. I understood that changing the data structure triples the speed of a particular piece of program.

I bet Zed Shaw omit the "particular" part because it was obvious. Apparently, it wasn't.
You can actually search for this vulnerability on Google Code Search, and it finds a few results that look exploitable. I don't know how to go about informing people with that code that their systems are vulnerable. Many are open source projects, so anyone using those tools are vulnerable too.
"Not trusting Google" seems to be a theme on the internet lately.

Presumably Google, being no fools, will pick up on that and understand that it's a problem, both for advertisers and developers.

It's just a question of how long it takes them.

It's entirely possible that many of these situations with Google looking bad are primarily a result of them just not communicating. But presumably Google could figure that out, too. They're the only ones with the information to do so.
Checklist for New Products
> Nothing was put on risk. The person/group who did this not only removed the fake tweet in question but also showed enough respect (if you actually read the whole article).

Would knowing that Stephen Fry suffers from bipolar disorder, and has threatened to quit Twitter not long ago (http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2009/oct/31/stephen-fry... ) change your view?
I don't know whether they're planning to deprecate that but they do provide the alternative local_assigns hash for partials now.
Looks like the author's of the "comparison paper" have a new paper out (the byline says Jan 1 2010) titled "MapReduce and Parallel DBMSs: Friends or Foes?" which seems to take a different approach at characterizing Map/Reduce, but unfortunately the contents are only available for premium members.

http://cacm.acm.org/magazines/2010/1/55743-mapreduce-and-par...

Parallel DBMSs excel at efficient querying of large data sets; MapReduce-style systems excel at complex analytics and ETL tasks. Neither is good at what the other does well. Hence, the two technologies are complementary.
Yes, sent. It usually takes some time to actually get through.

And you really aren't missing anything.
Excellent post Ron. I've been semi-following Totlol for a while now. I have kids, and I think it's a fantastic product. There needs to be something like Totlol out there. I think once you have kids, you suddenly realize this :)

Good luck on the job search. I'll cross my fingers the legal walls crumble, as I'd love to see you working on a project you've started and are excited about.
having a blog successful enough to generate 1-2k users is a pretty big project in itself; sounds more like a way to put things off than a good first step.
After reading the entire article, this definitely impacts any interest I had to integrate with google maps, youtube or google app engine.

I wonder what the chances are they will change gmail terms the way they did to author (ie deceptively) and if I should look into other providers.
A few bloggers have already done the "use only Web apps for a month" thing and written about it.
Linus Torvalds created a personal project that grew into something huge. I admire how he still manages the Linux kernel development, even as it has grown to a large organizational project. This is a good example analogous to growing a start-up organically into a large "company"

Happy Birthday Linus!
Very nice. But all those vertical alignments are bothering me. I think if he moved the text bodies of the posts to the left to align with the dates, it'd be better. Also, his posts are short so those titles and dates are dominating the page. Maybe making them smaller and making the titles the same shade of grey as the dates would help.
Attaching SLR lenses to an iPhone
How to Get a Glowing Recommendation Letter
I'd like to take this opportunity to rant against sites that have some global forward set up to bounce a mobile user from any page on the site to the mobile home page. I'd love to read your post, but I'm on a train right now with my iPhone and the only page you're willing to serve me is your main app page. Those kinds of redirects should only be set up for the home page.
Do radio stations really have that many phone lines though? I'm not sure what the benefit of that would be; just let the carrier create the circuit or not, no? It certainly sounds like a good idea if the alternative is maintaining that level of infrastructure.
That seems like it could easily end up being very slow. The OS doesn't know what data is going to be needed and it could page out the wrong data. It's probably worth trying, but it doesn't seem like a masterful solution.
Continuous deployment is all about avoiding such failures. As such the more "critical" the system is the more valuable this form of deployment is (though I also believe its also valuable for less critical systems!). And of course, continuous deployment is not complete without shakedown and back-out procedures.
Touché
totlol's experience may influence your answer: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1019360

I guess it depends on a) whether products you build can stand on their own and are just augmented with twitter integration, combined with b) who you think will eventually buy twitter.
Abstarct algebra
Hello,
Studying for prelims and I would like to have a solution manual for Dummit&Foote. Would anybody offer any help? Thank you
Now that we have DHT + PEX + magnet links (http://lifehacker.com/5411311/bittorrents-future-dht-pex-and...), someone should come up with distributed torrent search and make the whole chain distributed.
I got the address right in the actual mail, I wrote that from memory, damn.

GSM is bringing new encryption, presumably because they already know it is weak. I work in the industry so have no fear, it will be an issue.
A Recap of Cool Libraries for Ruby
Indeed. Can Google be sued for this kind of search capability: http://www.google.com/search?q=%22always%20sunny%20in%20phil...
This is the first time I've seen your site - it seems pretty great, but I'd love to be able to browse video without having to authenticate.
Wow, I hadn't really thought about this... vertigo.

10K people designs and builds both hardware and software which the 90K people software company needs to copy -- for decades?!

There are some explaining factors, of course.

The 90K company has a monopoly strategy, so they need to build their O/S so complex that it will be hard/impossible for competitors to make a bug-compatible implementation. But I still get dizzy.

Edit: This went down fast. :-) Down vote if you think it is low quality/unsuitable -- but please add some argument why this isn't a really surprising case? Are there examples in other industries?

Edit 2: Yes, Microsoft does make some applications that Apple doesn't. There should be at most 5000-7000 people at Apple doing software? Do Yahoo's search (and other Bing competitors) have 20K people... each? Hardly. (And isn't it extra shocking that Microsoft copies, despite having Microsoft Research?)
Mark Steyn: Cross the river, burn the bridge
Heartwarming...
>It could be all coincidence

They did change the TOS without notice and without announcing it. The fact that the story hit TechCrunch last June and Google hasn't cleared up the situation doesn't put Google's actions in a good light. My guess is there was a change in business strategy at some point and Totlol is a casualty of this.
You should be able to send multiple dns queries in a single http request.
I think executionally it's a great idea. The thing is - telephones were always used as an input channel because people were listening to the radio and NOT doing something else. Maybe there's a live tv application here - maybe event programming makes sense (you could sell this off to a progressive experiential marketing agency - Jack Morton/etc.) for promotional elements.

The long and short of it is - think of the required use/application and where this actually fits. Or if not, create a use for it and monetize.
I have a few available - email neurofog at gmail if you still need one. Others may apply :)
It's a pretty common attack. I have several identical attempts against my website on a daily basis (can easily tell from the access logs).
include() works because of the ruby server. It's only required for developing uki itself. See http://github.com/voloko/uki/blob/master/uki.rb#L41

The best way to minimize the merged code is too run it through Google Compiler and gzip. jQuery does the same.
Or, not of.
You should be leery of building a business that piggybacks on any service, Google-owned or otherwise. The first question you should ask yourself if you build something on XYZ is, "What will we do if XYZ is no longer an option?" If you don't have an answer, find a new idea.
If it was, does that make his points any less valid?
If you're going to depend on one of these services for something serious, you should always have a plan B. Architect things so you actually can use your B plan, at least in theory, which means avoiding integrating to specific features.

YouTube - can you swap to Vimeo or a white label provider? Revver?
GMail - have your real email (on your own domain) redirect there.
App Engine - outlook not so good!
I'm sorry, isn't the elephant in the room the admission that the HadCRUT data was shown to be corrupted/inaccurate?

And that a few lines of Perl automated the error checking to such an extent that the errors just popped up?

How exactly am I to have confidence in the rest of the numbers?
It seems that several different people at Google did plenty of communicating with Ron. What we have here is (NOT) a failure to communicate!
I don't see any deception here. There was no contract, nor promise made. Google had a free service. They didn't like how it was being used (probably by other sites) and changed the terms to something they liked better. It's their service; they aren't honor-bound to preserve other people's business models.

Would you say the same thing if Google thought it was so great that they started a competing product?
Amazing. I wrote much the same thing about a month or 2 ago when I had a large number of stories I wanted to add. I even wrote a vim thing to generate the story stub. :) my tools don't post directly from vim tho. But I can add a story from the shell.

I try as much as possible to enter such data via local files and the CLI, and pivotal tracker's API is quite good for this.
You would probably think life insurance wasn't such a good bet if the premiums were 90,000 per year for a 100,000 payout. It's silly to talk about whether "climate insurance" is a good bet without assigning numbers to the premium and payout.
Indonesia Java International Destination | Indonesia Cinta Musik
Thanks. Got it, and I am completely underwhelmed.
ZOMG THE INTERNET HAS WORMS
I'm very apprehensive about doing anything that relies so strongly on a third party service, and this is unfortunately a great illustration why.

I'm very conscious about always having a means to maintain control over my product. That might mean I'm actually shooting myself in the foot in other ways. But at least I can (hopefully) never fall victim to a situation like this.
on iPhone -> Click Learn More > and the link to the story.
Can someone run the numbers using a different time frame as the baseline? Can someone who is not an uneducated ignoramus like myself explain why it matters?
How to target a product for startups
Been done. Gnutella et. al. were doing distributed search by design, because Napster's central index was ruled to be infringing. Everything old is new again...
I don't buy that the more critical a system is, the more valuable continuous deployment is. The downside of continuous deployment is that you see more problems in production than you would with a fully regressed build. The advantage is that those problems cost 1/10th as much to fix, releases occur much more frequently, and you have a tight feedback chain between your customer and the product.

The argument for Continuous Deployment is that you _always_ see problems in production, and that all you are injecting from moving from a staged-release cycle to CD is that you are now seeing 10-15% more issues (Let's say 60 P2 or greater Issues instead of 50 P2 or greater Issues), but the cost of fixing everything has dropped significantly, fixes occur much, much more quickly (sometimes same day instead of multiple months), and you are able to enjoy the productivity advantages of your software that is finely tuned to the users needs much, much more quickly. CD can (and usually does) result in less downtime than stages releases - mostly because of the rapid cycle from coding -> error detection -> problem resolution.

The _only_ problem as I see it, is that you don't have as much control over the probability of a P1 issue hitting your system. That's fine in the case of something like Amazon.com, where a P1 issue might cost the organization $10 million dollars, but they've received $50 million dollars in value from using CD. It's not the case where a P1 issue might result in a catastrophic loss measured in 10s of Billions of dollars (Power Grid, Shuttle Launch, Nuclear Systems) - for those, you need to stage ensure 100% coverage/regression/code review. In fact, you need 100% coverage/review of your _development techniques_, not just the code produced.
> I'm slightly queasy about calling "torrenting whole seasons worth of shows I paid for" "time-shifting";

That's because it's illegal. You haven't actually paid for the shows. You've paid for access to the stream of content, but that doesn't automatically grant you access to acquire that same content from a third party. It'd be the same as if you saw it in the theater and then said to yourself "hey I've already paid for this once so I'm just going to torrent the dvd rip."

I'm not judging. I do this too, even for shows I don't "pay for", but let's face facts: we're minor criminals. I'm not entirely comfortable with it either so I'm weaning myself off of it. Eventually, everything becomes available on netflix, so really it just takes patience. (Sometimes my patience is worn thin by netflix's fucked up queue-jumping practices, then I torrent. I'm weak.)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Milankovitch_cycles
Global warming WILL occur, regardless of man.

The question is what is the value of the subcomponent of temperature variation caused by man. I would argue that it is nearly impossible to isolate this value. It would require models of every other natural cause of temperature variation, from the galactic position of the solar system to the water cycle, and confidence estimates of these models. Weather is a prototypically complex and chaotic system.

Rather than allocating resources based on an answer to a nearly impossible to answer question, we should tackle questions that are more solvable like "relation between cancer rates and environmental pollution" (aka things that could have the same policy effect i.e. curbing emmisions) and remember that acute, immediate events can have a far more deleterious effect on global temperature http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_winter
There are lots of details missing. But replicating the whole wave was not the point of the demo.

The point was to show that we are not forced to use complex frameworks like SproutCore or GWT to build desktop-like app layouts. It's still possible to build them staying lean and simple.

And by staying simple you can move times faster. The demo was written in 2 evenings by a single developer.
I was a DJ and program manager for my university's radio station, and based on my experience I think there's a much larger opportunity here. Firstly, to answer your question, yes I think non-profit radio stations in particular would be quite interested in something like this, as they can't usually afford more than a 1 or 2-line phone system.

Now, the larger opportunity. If you could make it a less-specialized system and aim it at radio stations, I think you'd really have something. The biggest problem we had with taking calls on the air wasn't so much that we couldn't afford the phone lines, but that we couldn't afford the call-screener. If you had a system that could simulate let's say 10 lines, whereby people call in, it plays an automated screening message asking them their name and purpose of their call, and then it transcribed that onto the DJ's computer screen and allowed them to pick which calls to answer while the rest remain on hold, that would be awesome!

I don't doubt this could probably be done with some combination of Google Voice and Grasshopper. Then again, they don't market their products to this niche the way you could. The biggest hurdle with B2B is acquiring the customers, which often takes a focused message. But I digress.
I don't think continuous deployment necessitates deploying to production at the end. I worked at a startup that used continuous deployment to deploy to staging, then used push deployment to QA and to producion. This worked really well with the mostly-outsourced dev and QA teams. It gave rapid and concrete feedback to those teams, but left high risk operations in the hands of the dev lead and ops.