skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The surface of the Earth was molten some 4.5 billion years ago. The big bang was about 14 billion years ago. The start of the relative record is a mere 135 years ago. It is absurd to conflate the two, and it's a critical foundation for the statement.

By simple random odds (which given that weather stations are few and far between, simple odds of micro-climates can shift temperature slightly), even with zero influence of global warming or any other effect, it's entirely possible to break records set over such a short period. I'm far too lazy to calculate random odds right now, but setting a new high at a 17 year interval doesn't seem remarkable. It is in the context of global warming, but in isolation it really doesn't mean much.

This isn't an anti AGW comment, and it's unfortunate that it's impossible to even state something so fundamental without it becoming religious, but the truth is that we've been recording our planet for a very short period of time, with growing accuracy and coverage every year.
5 tips for scaling agile in an enterprise environment
NOAA <> NASA
When you say "they would be doing it anyway without a salary" are you really saying that you have employees who would otherwise work on your project anyway, without pay? I don't know anyone for whom this is true, but if you've found one, congratulations.

Don't get me wrong--I care about what I do. So much so that I put a price on it. If anything, someone who is willing to do 90 hour weeks while getting compensated at a level appropriate for 40 hours cares LESS about what he does, as he is cheapening his profession.
Has anyone tried to implement basic income using crypto-currencies? Is it feasible?
"The ticket scalpers" happen when prices of tickets are too low. So either price discovery of the correct price is too risky/costly or the seller wants to subsidize the buyer for some other reason.

This isn't even dependent on the EMH - if there is no price theory at all, then...

So Uber et al could actually be "ticket scalpers" and there's only a deeply normative reason - not a rational one backed by economic theory - to decry them. Of course this illustrates a .... nice example of shear between complex social arrangements and the (ab)use of mathematics.

Taxi medallions are a textbook example of rents. A business model that goes after rents almost cannot be "evil. Of course if it's your ox being gored...

"Sharing" is Just One Of Those Words - like "nice" or "fair".
It's been a while since I've heard the mainstream climate deniers claim that the world isn't getting warmer. Most of them just claim that no matter what happens, it's not humanity's fault nor is it humanity's problem.

--edit: jedberg beat me to it in another conversation: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10092967
Not really. Competition can be relied upon to maintain net neutrality. It's what consumers will opt for when given a choice.

Not in the face of anticompetitive schemes like "zero-rating" promoted web sites.
I just realized that Gattaca contains only the letters G, A, T, and C.
Are the music streaming companies paying T-Mobile to take part in the program? If not, is the barriers to entry objection sufficiently mollified? That is, the carrier is making an entire class of content zero-rated, not picking favorites.
Their method of manufacturing is different than others. It makes the process faster, allows for greater detail, eliminated the issue of having layers which weakens the structure, and it allows for much more complex designs without the need for temporary structures.

I think their funding is well placed and will indeed give the 3d printing industry a shake up on the consumer market.
Not sure why you're being downvoted without explanations, a good job (key word, good) can bring a lot to a person's self worth and sense of purpose. You have an interesting idea here - for someone that can't find work, it could be the opportunity to do something that would build their abilities and might help get their lives in order. A guaranteed income is a pleasant idea, but gives people neither skills, nor discipline, and lessens modern incentives (nicer stuff, more options) to build either.
Basic Income does not imply a flat tax rate.
Quit Your Soul-Sucking Job and Do What You Love
Well, if you accept that humans are a major cause of global warming, the equation becomes pretty simple:

Limit human behavior or limit the number of humans.

Both have scary ramifications.
Meet the new development practices making the Internet of Things a reality
Singing does use a different part of the brain than speech and it would be interesting to know if it's similar to listening to whistling.

Someone in my family used to stutter badly but their singing has always been flawless
That's a bit of a false comparison. Most of the "coldest ever" headlines that you'll see are talking about particular locations or regions, which have extremely high variance. If you look at enough different subsets of your data, you're bound to find both high and low extremes somewhere. But this article is talking about a global average, which is much less noisy.

When you look at global average temperatures over a comparable span of time (since ~1880), every year in the last couple of decades has been pretty close to a record high. The last record low was more than a century ago. http://data.giss.nasa.gov/gistemp/graphs_v3/
I tried this test on mobile (iPhone 6 with iOS 9) over a flaky hotel wifi, and I got impressive results, 25s vs 3s: http://m.imgur.com/ND1wzZs

Also the OP test gave similar order of magnitude.

It looks like HTTP2 will be awesome for mobile!
Perfect.
http://puu.sh/jIiG4/731c98e894.jpg
> while the revenue models of every creative industry are being gutted

You say this like it's a bad thing. The established business models in these industries, where the content creators are basically enslaved to the entities that distribute their work, have become obsolete thanks to the Internet. Capitol Records doesn't need to front the budget for an album and pay to press copies anymore. We have crowd funding, digital downloads, etc, not to mention that the quality of digital recording technology has increased to the point where just about anyone who wants to can record an album in their home. The only reason these parasitic entities still exist is that they're bribing politicians to pass legislation to keep them in business.
You'll also find many conservatives who will allege that the NOAA has been manipulating their data and "changing the numbers" to make the case for a warming planet.

Nevermind that any European or Chinese or Russian climatology group would deliver the exact same data...
The point of net neutrality is that without it, your new service will never have a chance to make any inroads at all, so customers won't know they can't access it. A competitive non-neutral market won't fix that.
> The main problem is that companies stop doing what they were doing during YC—instead of relentlessly focusing on building a great product and growing, they focus on everything else. They also work less hard and less effectively—the peer pressure during YC is a powerful force.

I'm curious about why there's no consideration of the possibility that perhaps such a high-intensity pace is simply not sustainable on a personal level for most people.
China arrests 15,000 for Internet-related crimes
This is both rude and uninformed, a poor combination for HN.

Think about your tone. Try to engage fruitfully with people.
Prior to the satellite record historical temperature data is much less reliable, since each source is in a local area and may have different heat island effects, calibration, or quality of instruments. Additionally not as many stations were operating in 1880, which means more uncertainty about the data we do have.

Folks have tried to get around this by finding proxies for temperature (measurements that are theorized to track temperature, like the width of tree rings for example), and then calibrating that data by comparing it with the intervals for which we have reliable data (since 1970 for satellite data, or earlier for whatever thermometer data might be suitable). The long-term trends are identified and argued based on these proxies.

So to answer your question, they can calibrate a proxy using the satellite record, see what it suggests about 1880, and combine that with the available temperature data, but that's about it.
In the first article, he says we'd need to increase taxes 35% if we don't cut any programs. If we cut them, he says we'd "only" have to increase taxes 18%. Neither seems particularly affordable to me — remember, this is on top of our existing rates.

If we cut existing beenfits, it still seems to me many disabled/unemployed people would be worse off with BI, or about the same, as the current system. So we're left with massively higher taxes, and people who can't work will be left poorer.

The second article mentions all the secondary social benefits, and all the costs we'll avoid associated with people living in poverty. I buy that, but a 18%-35% tax rate itself is also going to have a massive deadweight losses as well which he's not accounting for. Current marginal rates are 30-40%, so we'll now have 48%-75% marginal rates (or assuming a 35% increase, 65% to 75%). Think that won't make society poorer and decrease the incentive to work?

I want a stronger social safety net. But BI seems to me like a extremely costly way to do it. There are many things we can do that would have higher bang for the buck.
Yeah but programming languages are an abstraction layer on top of already existing architectures which are not going away any time soon. X86, ARM, etc. So as long as code can talk to low level hardware and get executed, it doesn't really matter what you language you're using.

I can understand the need to have others pick up from where you left off, but that's introducing politics into programming, and more oft than not, it confuses what you're trying to achieve (which is converting some form of input to output I hope)

As a first port of call, it would be preferable to know one low level language like C, and a scripting / CRUD language like PHP/JS, as a lot of application development now is web based. Bonus points for learning ASM as that's as low level as we can get. (Unless you work in an Intel chip facility and are not allowed tell people what you're working on).
This seems like a failure of YC - if companies that have gone through the program are consistently forgetting the lessons it has taught as soon as they leave, maybe they're not being taught correctly?

That said, I'm not surprised. YC is a rare opportunity, and people will absolutely punish themselves for the duration of their stay in YC to get the most out of it. Few people can maintain that kind of pressure longer term. I don't think that's a weakness, I think it's just being human.
Amazon summary looks interesting; I've ordered it. I just feel that it's more often a case of incompetence than deliberate manipulation of the truth.
That has nothing to do with the temperature.
If we didn't lock up criminals? I'm going to go out on a limb and say there would be more criminals.
I would say that for the purposes of his essay, he's being a classic Burkean Conservative. That position means that our ability to discern all the things that could be lost by the disruption will be hard to determine up front.

Agreed that the assault on the word "sharing" seems tacked on, somehow. I suspect it is - it means "somehow like Napster".
"At the end of a YC batch, the general consensus among the partners is that about 25% of the companies are on a trajectory that could lead to a multi-billion dollar company. Of course, only a handful of them do. Most go on to be decent or bad."

"You have to keep up a high level of intensity for many, many years."

Don't take this the wrong way /u/sama, but could it be that perhaps business models are the problem and not founders not grinding away for years on "real work"? 90% of startups fail [1] [2]. I am highly suspect of the idea that this is caused by teams not being committed or working on "fake work". More likely, markets shift, business models aren't viable, and so forth. This is not a case of people "not giving it their all".

[1] http://www.quora.com/What-percentage-of-startups-fail?share=...

[2] http://www.forbes.com/sites/neilpatel/2015/01/16/90-of-start...

EDIT: Its been proven scientifically that people encounter diminising returns past 40-50 hour work weeks. [3] Don't encourage grinding harder. Encourage finding where to exert the most leverage, and hiring best people you can hire today. Quality people + automation leverage (your software) + quality marketing is a solid formula (but not a guarantee) for success. Luck, while no one wants to admit it, is a non-insignificant component of success ("right place at the right time").

[3] http://www.lostgarden.com/2008/09/rules-of-productivity-pres...
I think it's super interesting to hear that they're developing software to automate traction updates. It would be so cool to be able to "gem install yc" into your Rails app (or whatever) and then have hooks that will automatically keep them abreast of user growth and engagement.

It provides really interesting opportunities for them to be proactive about giving help at the right time. For instance, they'll be able to setup rules for notifications e.g. when you're having a slowing rate of growth, or to send congratulations when you've had a strong month etc.

I imagine one of the problems in investing in so many companies is that you aren't always aware of problems before it's too late. By using software to collect metrics about their portfolio companies, they can systematize how to become aware of and help out companies where they can make a difference.
There's no arguing with someone who believes economics to be an a priori formal science.
GovTrack Insider: Uncover Daily Activities of the US Congress
Seems there are now three things that can not be discussed rationally: politics, religion and climate change.

It is a perversion of science when a scientific theory is no longer subject to healthy criticism and skepticism.
wait a second. The OP was comparing "aftcasting" TO "forecasting" 2-3 days in advance, and that's what my statement was based on.

If your 2-3 day forecasting is off by 5-6 degrees (celcius), why would your "aftcasting" forecast for 200 years ago be any more accurate if it is "just as good" as a 2-3 day forecast? That means I would expect an error of 5-6 degrees, same as a 2-3 day forecast

edit: formatting
The latest IE11 update destroyed Win7 ("wininet.dll problem") on my work pc - QA on vacation? So such virtual machine images of IE will come handy.
Agreed, it's like expecting someone to run a marathon at a sprinter's pace.
Of course it's a failure of YC. There is a 0% chance YC has all this stuff right. It would be depressing to them if they did: that would mean there were no further opportunities to improve the outcomes for YC companies.
Make a startup that cuts human agricultural and industrial production and consumption by 50%, without hurting peoples consumption-insane lifestyle. Alternatively, make a startup that kills a sizeable fraction of people on earth-- which fraction is yours to pick, just make sure there's lower consumption of resources afterward.

Alternatively, make a startup that plans to relocate/revamp agriculture and industrial production into negative emissions processes while being cheaper than any of the current positive emissions processes. This isn't as far fetched as it seems on the longest term, but in the term that we need it, it's going to be tough. We're already living in a climate that is pushed past where it "should" be.
Google Photos Introduces “Rediscover This Day” to Help You Reminisce
> You can find WebKit powered browsers on any platform

lol what? The latest Safari version on Windows is 5.x and isn't even distributed officially by Apple anymore. And Safari is a bit more than just Webkit.

> That's not a problem

Yes it is.Without a mac, one can't test websites on Safari.
Basho Mesos Framework for Riak
I remember a client at a previous job claiming an app we were developing for them was definitely going to get "millions of users" in only three weeks after release, even with a small marketing budget. I laughed at how crazy unrealistic that was.

I bet they would look at these numbers and scoff, even though it's still an excellent number and I know they didn't even breach 50k users several months after release (I was no longer on the project after that point).
Yeah, it can also be an always on-call group with limited options supporting software written by dozens/hundreds of different devs with little to no DB knowledge but is crucial to running the company.
Humans were a major cause of acid rain and the ozone hole. We more or less solved these problems, by "limiting human behavior", and most people didn't even notice.

I don't see why people should be so scared by more solar (or even nuclear) plants.
If everyone is nitpicking that part of my comment, it would be worth noting that I was paraphrasing from the paper I linked.

> For the beginning of the twentieth century, the errors of such upper-air circulation maps over the Northern Hemisphere in winter would be comparable to the 2–3-day errors of modern weather forecasts.

Might be worth reading the abstract / full paper if you're interested in the topic.
"I tell founders to consider how directly a task relates to growing." - but is it really all about growing?
If you don't trust the NOAA, just check the Russian, Chinese, or European climate models and temperature measurements.

I guarantee you they'd be happy to prove America wrong on the world stage, so there's an incentive for them to be accurate.
That's a nice start, but many members of a drug gang might not ever touch drugs, at least if I can believe The Wire's portrayal of drug organizations and their division of labor. I am also skeptical of the correlation between arrests for drug offenses (where there is no victim to complain) and violent crimes.
The article paints Moeser as a villian -- she refuses to accept the fact that their system broke and compromised the integrity of the results on an exam, and instead insists that the students are just getting dumber, the eternal complaint of the aging generation, and are getting worse at taking an exam she declined to ever take herself. It's mind-blowing she is allowed so much power to shape what American lawyers look like, but this is coming from a profession that works very hard for 3 years to completely remove moral reasoning from their repertoire and replace it with bureaucratic rule-following.
For those who believe that climate change is real, and a significant threat to our longevity on this planet, would you please view / read this and share your thoughts?

http://therealnews.com/t2/index.php?option=com_content&task=...

I don't believe defeatism is helpful, but I got a very Prince "Party Like It's 1999" feeling after consuming this. What should we do? If we pull all the fossil fuels out of our economy tomorrow, everything will crash. Not to mention that there is zero political will to even contemplate this. So what should we do?
I think “toes the line” is an expression literally meaning, “To advance to the start of a race.” From there, we get the idea of participating in something, and from there we get conforming to rules or standards.

As in, “Raganwald has a potty mouth in person, but he toes the line and respects HN’s guidelines for civil discussion."
Thanks for the honest assessment. It's definitely something I need to consider.
Hi Jeff, congrats on your work. One question of general interest for buddying big data scientists and engineers: do you think from your position that Spark is going to replace Hadoop in the coming future or they will occupy different niches in the market? Thanks.
Designing and Building Stockfighter, Our Programming Game
I've always found it incredibly frustrating that both sides focus so much on "is it caused by people". It makes things personal, it sounds to many people like an accusation – "you're ruining the world just by living your life" – which (understandably!) makes people defensive, and it's completely beside the point. There are only two relevant questions: 1. Is it happening? and 2. What can we do right now to fix it? The answer to (1) seems to be "yes", but while I do hear lots of discussion about different answers to (2), I hear even more about all this stuff that's happened in the past and can't be changed. Don't get me wrong, it is definitely important for scientists to understand how our behavior impacts the climate, in order to make intelligent proposals about how to fix things, but it's purely a distraction in the policy discussion. Even if we determine that humans have had nothing to do with the looming crisis, we still need to figure out how to fix it, if we want to survive. If lived in an era with an impending but completely naturally occurring ice age, we (or, at least, many of us) would still be trying to figure out how to stop it, or survive it.
That's why I said "their own" JS-based implementation.

And the point is that it goes out of its way to re-invent features already supported by ES6 just so they look more like Ruby. Like using string interpolation instead of template strings, for example.

It's not a language built on top of JS to improve upon JS, it's just as contrived as CoffeeScript (which unlike this one actually had a reason to exist in that it influenced the development of ES6 when a lot of features it implemented weren't yet part of JS).

What is the benefit of learning this language? Who is this for? JS programmers? No, they could just use Babel to write something that will eventually become vanilla JS.

Does it bring anything new to the table like ClojureScript or LiveScript does? No, it's basically CoffeeScript with ES6 scoping rules and JSX elements.

So in the end all it adds is another barrier to entry for new developers joining your project/company with the only benefit being that it's "prettier".

I'm not saying bad ideas aren't worth exploring -- they are, and if your bad idea happens to involve creating your own programming language, all the more power to you. But the only "good" reason to use this language is if you want your JS to look like Ruby.

Just like Haml is for people who want their HTML to look like Ruby; and like Sass (not SCSS, I mean the original braceless syntax) is for people who want their CSS to look like Ruby.
You're mixing things up.

Parental income can be seen as the result of parental traits that (if passed to the offspring) will help them in life - intelligence & industry.

Ie the parents are rich because they are smart and work hard. Those traits are passed to the children - who then follow suit.
I like this 1.5 minute video on the technology: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l3TgmvV2ElQ

Whether the economics ultimately work or not, it's an incredibly compelling demo.
Different from other resin printers? It doesn't seem different than them, at least from this material.
The Day Hollywood Ate Silicon Valley
Very good point. This is even more critical in a FPGA as you are working with a fairly constrained resource.

There were a number of people in my first hardware design course that had a great idea right up until they found it didn't fit on the xilinks chips we had in the lab.
While I understand the point of the author, I don't really see why paying per play is unfair. It seems to me that artists who creates a song that I love enough to play it 100 times in a year should get more than a song by a random artist listened to just once.
The article should have been titled "never lose momentum". Burnout is always a big thing. And distractions are even bigger. And complacency is fall of many.
Do out of band "aftcasts" correctly show the decade-long global warming hiatus from 1998 to 2008? [1]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_warming_hiatus
It took me 2-3 years and a biology teacher casually mentioning it in a lecture for me to get it. So you're in good company.
Employee Engagement Benefits Customer Service
Just curious, how do you install IE6 in Win7?