skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
First of all I dont believe that he banned 2000 users for disagreeing with him. Thats a preposterous assumption I assume it will be very obvious to anyone in a administrative role that he did not for such a pity reason.

However, even if he did ban even one user for disagreeing with him without breaking a rule, then that is a very serious violation in the spirit of wikipedia.

Now I'm sure this goes on and on in such as place as wikipedia. I wonder how many administrators they have that are looking into climate change / weather on a day-day basis.

Far too many people are going to make their decisions on these matters based of what wikipedia says for it to be allowed to be tainted by information not backed up by facts.
I feel you. Migration can be a pain in the ass. Fortunately I only have 5 site with media temple. Next month I will have some free time and I will definitely dump this horrible hosting.

I personally recommend slicehost, there are excellent. Never had a problem with them, leaving them was a mistake. I was looking for a managed solution and MT was recommended by some guys so I jumped.
Flagged. I get really depressed by all the approval such utter crap receives here on HN.
I'm the co-founder of Workstax (http://www.workstax.com), a service which, from the sounds of their overview, is very similar to what these folks are going to build.

We have taken ideas from Facebook/Twitter, Reddit, and SharePoint, to build our messaging system for teams:

- from FB/Twitter, we took the idea of a Feed, Profile (and explicit support for tagging)

- from Reddit we took the idea of voting up/down to signal to the rest of the team (but we also introduced posting quotas to counter spam, and giving you the ability to use your quota to put posts/documents at the top of the feed)

- from SharePoint we took ideas about teams, documents, discussion threads, and specifically worked on search to make it better than that of SharePoint.

We pushed these features out just last Thursday and I wrote a part 1 blog entry about it here: http://joubert.posterous.com/separating-the-important-messag...
Even if you don't give a fig for the president's time you'd still be concerned in that case about the potential personal cost of hanging up vs. potential benefit of staying on the line.
> Flagged. I get really depressed by all the approval such utter crap receives here on HN.

Odd. Two of your four submissions are about how climate change is real.

http://news.ycombinator.com/submitted?id=ugh

It seems like you comment favorably when a pro-climate change article is submitted, and the flag is because you disagree with the piece more than the topic.
Good luck. I have a too high communications bill that I would love to pare down.
Another vote for WebFaction. I've tried half a dozen hosts over the years, and WebFaction is the best one so far.
Edit: nevermind what I wrote below. I just figured out I didn't understand the controls. Would it be impossible to create "drag and drop" for units?

I tried a single-player game in Firefox (3.5), but it hardly reacts to my input (even though top tells me it's barely consuming any cycles). I thought I'd give it a try with the Chromium Beta (but couldn't login anymore, so I created a second account) too - same thing there though.

In any case: love the idea!!!
It wasn't supposed to measure anything, it was supposed to impress you with how awesome Arc is.
and my finals week
All told, Connolley created or rewrote 5,428 unique Wikipedia articles. His control over Wikipedia was greater still, however, through the role he obtained at Wikipedia as a website administrator, which allowed him to act with virtual impunity. When Connolley didn’t like the subject of a certain article, he removed it — more than 500 articles of various descriptions disappeared at his hand. When he disapproved of the arguments that others were making, he often had them barred — over 2,000 Wikipedia contributors who ran afoul of him found themselves blocked from making further contributions.

If true, I find so much power over what people believe to be mind-boggling. While we've all heard various people complain about Wikipedia, I never would have thought the situation was like this in a million years. I guess I just assumed there always were multiple viewpoints for things that were in any way controversial.

I'm incredulous at this. It has to be exaggerated.
The Power of Origami
Google To Acquire DocVerse; Office War Heats Up
It's great that they corrected themselves and all, but why didn't this come out in public? It seems to have taken an FOIA to get it out there.

Also, the "error" is particularly egregious and Stasi-like: collect info on people doing something legal, nay, constitutionally protected. It's also very typical for US Secret Police to do. The COINTELPRO program infiltrated Quaker organizations in the 60s, some DoD office did it before Gulf War I, and someone seems to be trying it today:
http://www.afsc.org/ht/display/ContentDetails/i/5264/pid/268

I suspect the Secret Police tries to infiltrate Quaker organizations because it's so easy: they welcome just about anyone, and do all their work out in public, unlike less trustworthy organizations like the DHS and TSA.
I have no experience with these people and never heard of them, but I am guessing that the CC information is needed because they are giving you root access to their server. From a purely legal and business point of view, it seems to make sense.

What if someone registers for more than one vps (or dozens with the help of proxies and gmail account) and runs illegal activity like spamming or DDOSing some other site? These are all plausible scenario and having valid CC number is the most reasonable thing to do.
10 Uses for Blocks in C/Objective-C
I trust Wikipedia more than the National Post. The author's thesis is that William Connolley "erase[d] the Little Ice Age [and] the Medieval Warm Period" from Wikipedia. Well, all you have to do is go to the "Medieval Warming Period" article click "view history" and you can see the last version William Connolley submitted to the site, which begins:

"The Medieval Warm Period (MWP) or Medieval Climate Optimum was a time of warm climate in the North Atlantic region, lasting from about AD 800–1300. It was followed by a cooler period in the North Atlantic termed the Little Ice Age. "

http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Medieval_Warm_Peri...

So these claims seem pretty ridiculous.
> First of all I dont believe that he banned 2000 users for disagreeing with him. Thats a preposterous assumption I assume it will be very obvious to anyone in a administrative role that he did not for such a pity reason.

Right. This is an extremely mendacious way of presenting the basic statistics, that he has made >2000 blocks/bans in general. See http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?user=William%20M.%20Conn... and for a more readable summary of that, see http://toolserver.org/~interiot/cgi-bin/count_edits?user=Wil...

As of right now, he has 2029 block/ban actions to his credit. Looking at just the most recent ones, we see quite a few 3RR enforcements (on non-climate articles), similar edit-warring blocks, basic anti-vandalism work ('vandalism at Plus-size model'), sock puppet blocking, some unblocks, and so on. Looking through the last 70 actions, I see none that obviously pertain to climate change. (2029-70 is obviously <2000.)

So "When he disapproved of the arguments that others were making, he often had them barred — over 2,000 Wikipedia contributors who ran afoul of him found themselves blocked from making further contributions." is obviously a lie; things like that are why I assume the opposite of anything the National Post says.
One would think so ... but the author makes a lot of very specific and falsifiable claims. Any Wikipedia data miner would I assume be able to disprove them rather quickly, if they are indeed exaggerated.
I really doubt the author of this piece knows what a Wikipedia "Admin" actually is. They do not have godlike powers over WP.

Kind of makes the meat of the article not worth arguing about.
The Turbo Encabulator
Yet another article on success written by someone who has yet to be successful. Nice. Can we please put a moratorium on this rubbish?
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MXW0bx_Ooq4

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RXJKdh1KZ0w
Aaron Swartz just falsified the fundamental claim of the article. It's the highest rated comment on this article. The right thing to do now is to flag the article.
Why is this being voted down? It is correct.
Here's the critical distinction: you can use only whatever's already provided by the language+libraries you use. That's what I did. I didn't go back and add stuff to the Arc libraries to make the answer to the challenge shorter. I just used what was there already. This will be clear to anyone familiar with the source of HN; all the language features used in the Arc version of the challenge are used throughout news.arc.
It might not actually be unresponsive but it certainly feels that way. There is no feedback, the screen just violently blacks out, units just jump from A to B, buttons don’t react to clicks at all and so on and so on. This games needs a ton of polish. If anyone ever again claims that animations are useless eye candy I will show them this game.

I love turn based games – but, sorry, not this one. I gave up after a short time and was very frustrated.

(By the way, I changed browsers, too. From Safari to Chrome to Firefox, just to see whether it might be the browser.)
Tech bloggers discussing art with marketing speak is the embarrassment of technology.
In my (admittingly limited) experience with ArXiv, CS is not well represented. Most CS researchers just don't put their papers up on it.

Try searching on the ACM Digital Library. When you find a title, Google for it (doesn't even need to be Scholar), and you'll often find the author's copy on their webpage.
> Can you trust anyone on climate change?

Okay, let's say we can't. Should we:

(A) Spend trillions of dollars and place complex legal restrictions on activities that quickly develop the world

(B) Give it a while and keep researching

The call for immediate action is based on the idea that Armageddon is coming around soon if we don't do anything. That's looking more false by the day as people investigate. The largest piece they had for Armageddon level climate change was the hockey stick graph, which has been thoroughly debunked now.

> But a funny thing happened on the way to Copenhagen: a couple of Canadian researchers, McIntyre and McKitrick, found that when they ran simulations of "red noise" random principle components data into Mann's reconstruction model, 99% of the time it produced the same hockey stick pattern. They attributed this to Mann's method / time frame for selecting of principle components.

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=992073

So - yes, let's say everyone is questionable right now. Isn't that a pretty good reason not to spend trillions of dollars on programs of questionable effectiveness? At least until we learn more? You'd have to be convinced of an imminent Armageddon to argue otherwise, and that's looking more and more unlikely by the day.
It took a month to get anything written about climategate on climatologist Michael Mann's wikipedia page - many of the contraversial emails were his. It finally got unlocked and was able to add something yesterday.
This is a great reminder of what's stayed the same more than what's different. Or, at least, how gradual the change has been. The jump from 9.x to 10.0 is surprisingly subtle compared to the jump from 9.x to Snow Leopard.
In the chat console, the blue text on black/dark grey background is totally unreadable.

So far I'm very impressed.
If the compiler is part of the runtime (i.e. an interpreter that compiles expressions in order to evaluate them), and then the type checker is part of the compiler, even eval should be able to throw type errors. What, then, is the problem?
It's been so long that recalling all the reasons KidPix made me happy would be impossible. But I can remember spending hours using that app, doodling, making little movies, and just enjoying everything about it. Little touches like the "Oh No!" sound effect made the app so much fun to use.

The app was bought (along with the rest of Broderbund's IP) and resurrected a couple years ago:

http://www.mackiev.com/kid_pix.html

Not sure if it lives up to the original.
Thanks for the feedback. How should the controls be for this to be more usable? The game is still under development, so any feedback would be very useful.
Cool! Works for me on a firefox 3.6b4, but I found the interface a bit clumsy and lacking visual feedback, and also some may not notice the commands area in the lower-right corner. Otherwise, thanks!
You misunderstood me. I have nothing against discussing the topic. I have something against posting utter crap and the massive amount of approval it receives here.

I am allowed to flag utter crap, right?

(And, just for the record, I most certainly did not flag every climate change critical post. Some made points that are worth discussing.)
Presumably s/he considers the claim "climate change is real" less crappy than the claim "climate change is a giant hoax". I don't see anything very awful about that, although of course not everyone will agree with it.
Calling asl "signed english" is usually a good indication that the writer doesn't know much about the subject. Then they go on to say:

> "It turns out that the information content of handshapes is on average just 0.5 bits per handshape less than the theoretical maximum. By contrast, the information content per phoneme in spoken English is some 3 bits lower than the maximum."

Talking about the information content of speech symbols is likely to be entirely bunk, but I'm going to go read the full article and try to find out whether the summary is bad or if the research is really this confused.
"we closed a deal after putting my friend in between the deal to act like my secretary"

That's brilliant. I'm going to try that too.
Piero Scaruffi's site
Internet Explorer not supported

Awesome!
Yes, I am both. Which is why I've noticed that I'm often conflicted between the two goals. I'm not sure where the contradiction lies?

The original goal of the article was to alert people who do both to this conflict, so that they can handle it consciously. I think I overstated that premise while writing it, which I now regret.
Happstack 0.4: A scalable framework for developing web applications in Haskell
Couldn't you obtain most of that within a Lisp library?
Anonymous's Message to Scientology
Oh. Asking for someone to actually back up their emotional little assertions with facts, and pointing out the hypocrisy of the obvious axe-grinding which accompanies their fervent assertions that they are unbiased is...."paranoia and ad hominem".

And your response was to add nothing except labeling "paranoia", right? Was that before or after you mentioned "ad hominem". Or did you, like him, have any actual science to cite here to support his assertions?

Your projection doesn't do your argument much good.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psychological_projection
My original goal was to help people recognize the problem, not to start some kind of war about it. I now regret having written the whole thing in a way which caused some controversy.
Some notes:

1) I typed "G" to have a settler unit wander out into the wilderness and it founded a city on its own. That was unexpected. I'm almost certain I didn't have it in any kind of automatic mode.

2) It would be good if we had a stronger indication of which tile will be the target of an action, and possibly a preview of the path taken there.

3) More animated indicators in general of where we should be looking at any given moment would be helpful.

4) Try to test the game on a large display (I'm testing on 2560x1600). It looks fantastic, but some of the UI could be better-delineated and tightened up. It seems to be a little spread out right now.

Overall, this is awesome. Thank you for creating it! Civ is very high on a lot of people's top-10-of-all-time lists, so this should become very popular very quickly. Good luck.
> It has to be exaggerated.

I hope you will not be surprised that it is. See my other comment about the blocking (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1005437). The 'created or rewrote' is mendacious as well. Connolley has created ~230 actual articles (http://toolserver.org/~soxred93/pages/index.php?name=William...), and many of those are stubs or have been massively expanded by others.

Here are some examples:

- here's an example stub: https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Robin_Hood%27...
- look at the history for https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/w/index.php?title=... or
- https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/w/index.php?title=...

Further, I'm not sure where that number comes from. 'unique Wikipedia articles' sounds like borrowed phrasing to me, specifically, borrowed from an edit counter like http://toolserver.org/~interiot/cgi-bin/count_edits?user=Wil...

But Connelly has edited >6200 unique articles (this includes article creation), not 5,500. 700 is a lot, so unless this guy is working off rather old data, I don't know how to explain it.

And needless to say, if you go through his edits, you'll find that 'rewrote' is massively misleading: adding links or references, fixing formatting, or copyediting - the daily fare of a Wikipedian - are in no wise 'rewriting'. That has connotations of changing everything, not tweaking small bits incrementally. It may technically fall under the dictionary definition, but here it's very clearly being used out of either ignorance or for rhetorical effect.
Two Tips:

1) I would default on the light screen. Just easier to read (and change the orange text up top).

2) A WTF link somewhere may be good to explain how it works / what the idea is.
Thank you for writing this. It's exactly the same experience I've had, and the reason why I wrote the article.
Why does that line make you think my essay was supposed to be a troll? Is there something logically or obviously wrong with that line?
English is not my first language. I apologize for my English; I do the best I can.
Of course, she's been a productive artist for the last 80 years: http://www.latincollector.com/lc/artist-data/rep_carmen_herr...
Since Linode started in June 2003 (and your company was one of the first customers -- I'm looking at your tickets), you got to experience a lot of the growing pains of a new company. If you were to try us today, you wouldn't walk away with the same impression as you did then. I'd bet on that.

We learned a lot during that time, and I think it's a defining aspect of our company that we can admit that.

I am, however, unable to find a one-day outage for your account; the longest I've come across -- which is power-related, so I'm assuming the one you're referring to -- was reported by your company at 5:39 p.m. and resolved at 8:01 p.m.
Hrmmmm.

But I could just write 'arc' for Java, and the above example would fall out.

The solution for arc doesn't have anything unique in it that you can't do in other languages just as concisely.

So I don't think it says anything at all about the language, it just says how well you designed the interface to helper libraries.

>> "all the language features used in the Arc version of the challenge are used throughout news.arc."

I don't see any 'language features' in the solution for Arc. It's just functions and parameters. They're not language features, they're helper libraries. They may be well designed good libraries, but that's what they are. The language used is irrelevant. You could have written arc in BASIC and the solution would be the same.

Maybe I just don't understand why arc is referred to as a 'language' rather than a framework/library, and why that distinction is important.
"... An entire generation of teenagers are now going to have a lifelong crush on a huge blue woman with a tail named Neytiri ..."

I went and saw Avatar yesterday and was blown away.

It was as good as when I first saw Star Wars the first time it was shown after wagging school and catching a train into the city. It was way better than the first Star Trek feature film first hit the cinema - those close-ups of the Enterprise still make me cringe. It was as good as Alien and Alien II which followed. I was trying to think why. Here's some of the reasons.

While most films shy away from the complexity of situations, this one didn't. I get the feeling Cameron had some unfinished business. A story not told, an alternate Aliens. The similarities are pretty striking. The film is about colonisation of a planet, with ruthless company yes-men backed up by Colonial Marines (or PMC's in this case). It even has Ripley. This time though we see colonisation and exploitation from the eyes of the conquered. We see what is lost. We see the consequences.

This isn't a re-make of Aliens two where the Colonial Marines blast away Ripley's bad-guys. Instead we are shown the complexity of a culture clashes, the conqueror and conquered. We see the relationship between locals and their environment, man made corporations and hired muscle and most importantly the consequences of War. It could be South America when Cortez arrived looking for gold, it could in the jungles of Sumatra now with timber ~ http://www.worldwildlife.org/what/wherewework/borneo/people.... The film is also is about as anti-mainstream as you'll probably get in popular culture.

Ask yourself what was the last time you saw a film that painted a beautiful picture of an environment and culture then see it destroyed in grisly detail before you... this is no ordinary Hollywood action flic. Sure the good guys win and the company men get packing. There are weak points in the film. I noticed even William Gibson was a bit shocked (my measure of what good writing is) ~ http://twitter.com/GreatDismal/status/6810783279 at name given to the exploited mineral "unobtanium" ~ http://twitter.com/GreatDismal/status/6810951397 being mined.

The strength of the film is that it mirrors enough of our own world right now and that and the richness of the characters and ideas in my mind makes up for any of the technical shortfalls.
same here- but centos on the home server because I am somewhat familiar with fedora.
If it's ruby only, then one obviously doesn't have root access.
What about the floating mountains?
True, especially if you're looking at what's "under the hood". But visually, there are a lot of continuities between the two, and of course the user base largely transitioned as if 9->X were just another upgrade like going from 6.0.7 to System 7.
9. I saw it on Imax at 7:00 on Friday. I definitely recommend seeing it on Imax first.

Some of the characters are pretty cardboard, and the theme doesn't really get to the depth it should. Also, calling it a low-gravity world doesn't excuse some of the world-building sins committed

But the graphics are truly amazing. It is seamless. Forget the wooden people in Beowulf or Zemeckis. The humans and tall aliens are somewhat segregated so you only get the sense of scale in a few scenes, but they work very well.

The other thing is that you sort of have to learn how to watch it. The camera presents different parts of the picture as in focus and you have to constantly shift where you are looking to follow the focus.
NearlyFreeSpeech.net

Insanely cheap. I deposited $5 on November 17th and I still have $2 left in the account, pushing 4.5 to 5GB/month.
Furious Eruption of Deepest Known Undersea Volcano
One language feature that's used here is lexical closures. This would be hard to implement concisely in a language without them.

If you wrote an Arc implementation in Java, then ran the program on top of that system, surely that would count as an instance of Arc winning the the challenge, not Java.