skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
No one is claiming that truth is decided by a vote among scientists, and I don't see what's gained by pretending that anyone is. What is sometimes claimed (and a good thing too, because I think it's true) is that when the great majority of experts in a field agree about something then they are likely (though of course not certain) to be right.

The Hadley emails do not in fact show that the consensus on climate change was the result of "derailing the literature", whatever exactly that is supposed to mean. And this glacier thing looks to me much more like a confluence of cockups than a deliberate attempt to mislead anyone.

Everyone should be critical about everything. That applies not only to the claim that humans are causing climate change, but also to the claim that we are not. It seems to me that the former claim wins easily in (1) plausibility on the grounds of basic physics, (2) weight of scientific evidence (so far as I or any other layman can tell), and (3) historical honesty/dishonesty of proponents.

Are you suggesting that AGW needs to be "proved" whereas not-AGW does not? If so, why?
I very much like this :) Lower CPU, doesn't slow down the page, and the UI responds much faster.

Downsides: no fullscreen (yet), and doesn't skip-to-and-buffer from the middle (loads a frame, and waits until load-from-beginning catches up). As I typically watch all of a video if it's on Youtube, though, that's easily acceptable.
Also I'm a fan of Catalyst but it's not necessarily hot and trendy...
Tesla's Tower of Power - Transmitting Electricity Though The Atmosphere
Languages: Clojure, plt scheme and (I guess a little) newLISP.

"noSQL": Riak, MongoDB, Redis, (I think the "new-ness" has worn off CouchDB")

Trendy: node.js, ruby on rails, django, lift

*Really any "web framework that promises to make development easier"
I use "home" all the time in conjunction with middle-click. Google is my home page, so when I middle-click on the home icon I get a new tab, ready to search.
IProxy - A Poor Man's iPhone Tethering
Tickery: Exploring tacit social nets on Twitter
India inmates take yoga to reduce their jail sentences
Internet Health Report
It seems that as long as your app is doing < 100KB/user/month of wireless data then it is free. Once you do more than that, you have to start charging a monthly fee. So you can use as much Whispernet as you want but be prepared to have that change your price point.
> The airports in Orlando, Philadelphia, San Jose, and Miami put the restaurants (not counting junk food) outside of security. So you have to wonder, "Do I have enough time to eat and then get through the line?" (Pittsburgh, Tampa, and Chicago Midway did it right.)

Other fun thing about the way we do it here in Pittsburgh, though: If you go to TGI Friday's and get a steak... they give you a steak knife.

Makes me really appreciate the hassle of going through the huge security process.
I'm all for new layouts and ideas - people will get over changes like this. Facebook redesigns have taught us many times.

From what I can tell though, Sam and James could've done a much better job of communicating and working through the changes with their current users, especially power users. A "what's changed" and why guide would've been useful; the one blog post they wrote is not sufficient.
The changes affected responses to the emails, which are a lot more than actual sales. Sales increased with more responses/communication with leads.
I can't figure out the UI---or even, on first visit, what the site is, apart from a Flash app that plays music I haven't heard before. I am very confused...
This can be very helpful in identifying the health of the overall internet.
Seeing all of those disparate quites + Andy Rooney made me think of this: http://www.collegehumor.com/video:1903619
The second.

Could be that my experience is not representative, but after asking what my salary expectations were, every company I ever worked for wanted to pay me a bit less than that.

I am also sure they would have done so regardless of how much I asked for, it's standard haggling practice as far as I can tell.
Seems cool, but still a long way from a replicator that can brew me a cup of hot Earl Grey.
And those examples are terrible.

This first example says "unstable" which is clearly false, so we can ignore him as ignorant.

The second two are both on windows, which until windows 7 was unable to schedule hyperthreading correctly.

The last example with linpack you are maxing out the core, so obviously hyperthreading won't help. Hyperthreading helps when you are not maxing out the core on any one task. Although a drop is not great, for regular desktop apps I think you'll have an overall net gain.

The OS task scheduler can switch tasks if one stalls for IO. A CPU based task scheduler can task switch on cache miss, or availability of single pieces of a CPU (like an adder).

Next he'll say not to run a multi tasking OS. Instead run each task on it's own CPU - "and don't worry we are making more CPUs soon".
Anyone has a link to the video recording of this presentation?
> Running more threads increases throughput for applications as long as you have available cores.

As long as you are CPU bound.

Once you're IO bound you can have as many cores as you want but it isn't going to move any faster.

The only machines where I manage to approach 100% cpu usage are video servers, all the other boxes are sooner or later IO bound. The only cure for that is gobs of memory.

It's in my experience pretty rare to have a webserver with more than 4 cores to be CPU bound. Most of the time the disk or the network card are the bottle-neck.

Unless you code in a very inefficient way of course, then it can be that you need more CPU before you hit that wall.

AMD so far more or less held the moral high ground against intel in the 'spin wars', they can do better than this.

It's simply a marketing piece in the guise of a blog post.

At the bottom of the entry it reads:

> John Fruehe is the Director of Product Marketing for Server/Workstation products at AMD. His postings are his own opinions and may not represent AMD’s positions, strategies or opinions.

So they effectively distantiate themselves from this posting but at the same time it sits on amd.com.
Which makes this the only VPN I'd trust. I'd also trust them to take adequate security so, if they're seized, nothing is revealed.

Gotta love TPB. Protecting your identity since... when did they start? Since they started.
Research, with 'unusual' icons, shows that some icons are more confusing than others. Specifically, icons that have too few or too many details. Now you could argue that a certain amount of detail has become the culturally entrenched norm and that such research still doesn't prove a thing, but then the burden of proof shifts to you, to back that statement up with an experiment. After all, it also simply makes sense: with too few details, you need to choose from all possible details you could add to make sense out of the symbol. On the other hand, with too many details, you need to choose from all possible details you could remove, before the main point stands out. You're just trying to minimize the amount people have to think.
Are "symmetric multithreading" and "simultaneous multithreading" the same thing?
The later problems get significantly more complicated, that you won't be able to cut corners.
Yes, it's a marketing piece, but the statement that AMD is never going to add threads to their CPUs is surprising. Given the trend in memory vs. CPU performance, adding threads to hide latency seems like a complete no-brainer.

I'd really like to see a detailed technical justification for it.
Boxee or Plex on Mac ?
What is your opinion?
node.js (both the core and projects which build upon it)
Stupidly simple distributed computing with CL
Awesome.

Also recommended is Gang Leader For A Day by Sudhir Venkatesh, whose work with the crack gangs of Chicago's Robert Taylor homes was featured in Freakonomics. Sudhir revealed the inner workings and social motivations behind gang behavior.

http://www.amazon.com/dp/1594201501/?tag=httpwwwhiph02-20
That wasn't intended as a reference to Apple, it was meant as a generic amount of disposable cash that a business might have at hand, and be able to risk building inventory on a product they haven't announced or fully market tested yet.

And I wouldn't describe Apple's $30B as 'lazy'.
> There's a reason most companies don't talk pay with people - if somebody else makes more, it's going to bruise feelings and ruffle feathers and screw up morale.

I don't think thats quite right... The reason most companies don't talk pay with people is because most companies fall into the "pay as little as we can get away with" category. In that category, some people are bound to be getting paid unfairly when compared to others, so its not surprising that feelings would be hurt and feathers would be ruffled if the truth came out. If everyone is paid fairly to begin with (regardless of whether or not pay is usually public), then by definition no-one should get upset if they do find out the pay of others since it would be fair.

The real difficulty is getting everyone to agree with the same idea of "fair." For example, software engineers should be able to fairly evaluate their relative pay against other software engineers doing similar work, but they may have a difficult time fairly evaluating their pay relative to sales people.
Hot as in cool: Etherpad. Almost one of a kind, taken over and closed down then open sourced after a large backlash. I think a good additional web concept to join wikis and forums and sidebar-chats.

Are you looking for something to use or something to contribute to or what?

If you really care about popular and trendy, get some real data e.g. from http://sourceforge.net/softwaremap/ and be surprised that the most popular of the past week are a package of Microsoft Fonts and an ERP, Accounting and CRM app. The most popular of all time are eMule and Azaureus file sharing and Sourceforge.net itself and the Crystal Space 3D SDK.

In fact the most webby looking one in the lists seems to be PHPMyAdmin, of all things.
If the site I'm looking at is a guaranteed dead end to today's research, then my only option is to look elsewhere.

Whether I fill in the sales form or go to another site, there's no way I'm going to get the information I need immediately. As a result, going elsewhere saves me time, while filling in forms in the hope somebody replies is a waste.

Add in a history of bad experiences with companies using similar sales processes, and it's nearly 100% that I'll leave and never come back.
This is true. I was referring more to non-social-network web apps, like going between Google Docs and ZoHo, or switching version control hosts. There's typically a loss of some data there, but the really important stuff (raw content) can be pulled out and transferred with minimal effort.

Social networks are about the opposite, as a lot of the content isn't really "yours", it's a result of interaction. I made no reference to this in my comment though, so thanks for pointing it out :)
clojure

squeak
In the image, it's got the Linux penguin mourning the company it helped to kill, and yet nobody mentions Linux in the whole comments thread?

Just curious... Is the other creature BSD or Amiga?
you're not entitled to equal power of speech or equal anything for that matter. just freedom of speech. you can say anything you like. you have to earn being heard.
I think talk of "the theory" is ambiguous, so let's break this down a bit.

(All the claims I'm going to list should really be made in a quantitative form. They all can be; I'm just too lazy right now to look up the numbers.)

Theory 1: More CO2 in the atmosphere tends to produce warmer climate. This is, on the face of it at least, a consequence of well-established physics. The burden of proof here is on anyone wishing to deny it, just as it would be for "if I drop a dachsund from the top of the Leaning Tower of Pisa, it will fall to the ground".

Theory 2: Human activity over recent decades has increased the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere. Yup, the burden of proof here would be on those who advocate this theory. As it happens, there's no shortage of evidence. See, e.g., http://www.gcrio.org/ipcc/qa/05.html .

Theory 3: Human activity such as we've seen over recent decades is likely to lead to warmer and warmer climates, if CO2 emissions aren't reduced and other drastic steps aren't taken. It seems to me that, given Theory 1 and Theory 2, the burden of proof is on anyone who wishes to reject Theory 3, because it's basically a consequence of those two.

(If you strengthen Theory 3 to include the claim that human activity over the last several decades has in fact led to warmer climates, then I agree that the burden of proof is on whoever's making that extra claim. It seems to me that the evidence for that claim is in fact very strong, and with that evidence in place the rest of Theory 3 becomes even more the default position in the absence of strong disconfirming evidence.)
There seem to be plenty of little UI glitches to: like not being able to click to position the audio level (have to drag the knob instead). Obviously these should be easily fixable, but I'd like them to fix them.
Two reasons, potentially:
1. Principles.
2. If you find another site that gives immediate pricing, you can use it for any subsequent purchases in a similar domain, or they may also be more respectful of your time in other respects (e.g. support), saving time in the long run.

Besides, it stands to reason that googling around for a few more minutes is less time and hassle than waiting for one or more e-mail round trips with humans in the loop for the quote process.
You can't seriously reply saying "PuTTY is awful, instead install Cygwin"?

PuTTY is almost as good a program can get - no install, basic use case just works, good default colour scheme, proper full screen option available. Fast, simple, minimal fuss until you hit some stupid terminal quirks.

Cygwin is almost as bad as a program can get - massive install, with confusing nonresizable large package choice dialog, masses of files everywhere, services, ugly stuck in a command prompt by default, hacks to bring everything unpleasant about nix onto Windows.

Get many good things from command line nix from http://unxutils.sourceforge.net, put them in a folder in your PATH and leave the CygWin swamp a long way away.

Maybe I'll try it again with MinTTY, it does look like a good terminal for CygWin. It's not an easy decision though, I predict it wont be at all fun.
It's possible that all of the more trendy apps have moved to Github by now.
For those of you who haven't used the site before, the old version is at http://old.thesixtyone.com/ for you to explore.
Is it just me or does HTML 5 video support seem like a Google plan to leverage their video dominance into browser market share at the expense of Microsoft?

Not that I'm complaining, the sooner Trident goes down in flames, the better.
Web Development with R
Which "ERP, Accounting and CRM app" ?

List seems to change fast.
Anecdotally, I had the same experience as well. I usually have t61 on most of the day (including the first day I ever used the old interface). I purposefully didn't use http://old.thesixtyone.com/, to see if using the new interface stuck. It didn't.
The advice is to hire the best workers. But by definition, not everyone can be the best. So, say all the firms are bidding up the best talent to their true 10-20x values (and giving them interesting projects), as the author suggests. The market adjusts, and it becomes economical again to higher a massive team of average workers with management and space. You might have to set your goals lower, if you can no longer expect leaping innovation that only a genius could make. But it's way easier to find and replace average talent. If they can actually do the job, and your business is expanding, then you can raise compensation to at least maintain morale.
That's pretty cool. How about using the keyboard to organize a tab, does anyone know if there's some config setting to re-enable this?

Also, 3.6 seems to open new tabs exactly to the right of the current tab. Argh. I liked them at the end!
Symmetric multithreading is not a term I know. You probably mean symmetric multiprocessing, which means more cores or CPUs.

Simultaneous multithreading is what intel calls hyperthreading.
I'm pretty sure that's the Java thingy (for lack of a better term) - not sure if it's actually got a name or not...
In my casual micro-benchmarking experience, hyperthreading on my Core i7 920 can be worth about 50% extra. That is, the difference between 4 threads and 8 threads on 4 hyperthreaded cores can be about 50% (and I can see that Windows 7 is scheduling the 4 threads across the 4 cores correctly).

I expect that if the code was extremely tight with no cache misses, any extra gain from hyperthreading would be pretty limited, if not negative due to extra thread switching costs.
Upload and Share Any File With Google Docs
So it logs into eBay and tries to sell itself? Funny.
"symmetric multithreading" isn't even a real term; it's just a mistake in the article.
Some interesting thoughts.

The iPhone was far from complete when it was released. What they did release was very polished. They are still iterating somewhat when they tacked on 3G, the API, etc. The iPhone was also launching into a mature market, as was the iPod. I think many of us knew our smartphones sucked and had laundry lists of things that sucked about them. Apple's real gamble was that people would spend large amounts of money on their phone. They still gambled, but I think the need to make huge pivots and change everything was less likely.

Also, I think Apple has enough money where they can afford to have an unsuccessful product, unlike startups. AppleTV hasn't taken off, and I think Apple will eventually launch a major dud, and will have spent a lot of money on it, but they can afford it.

Finally, Apple seems be really good at predicting what people will want. This is rare.
Especially as many of those forms simply email someone.

If a form was used, Re: makes sense. If not, I agree with the spam-indicator. If it was in the spam box, I'd probably gloss right over it, as I hadn't contacted anyone with that subject line.
Spot the difference: http://meccho.com/
Perhaps not having an easy way to purchase your software lead to more people buying it, in 2002 (thought I find it hard to believe). I find it even harder to believe, though, in 2010.

$200-$500 is not a lot of money for a developer tool, or for a business purchasing said tool. So putting an obstacle in front of someone seems rather pointless. Of course, I suppose it depends on the tool. But if I didn't think it was worth the money I wouldn't buy it anyway. And if its nature leads to lock-in--well, once someone's gotten over the hurdle of "Is this tool/company worth sticking with?" I wouldn't exactly want to give them another chance to reconsider.
Can you imagine the kind of indigestion that eating Oracle would give you?
Could you link to further reading about how a CPU-based scheduler works? The wikipedia article [1] only mentions OS-level scheduling, and I was always under the impression that the CPU knew nothing of threads or processes.

CPU based task scheduler can task switch on cache miss, or availability of single pieces of a CPU (like an adder).

Can't the CPU just signal an interrupt for those, and let the OS scheduler handle it?

1. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scheduling_(computing)
Yup, that's what it is. I don't know what they meant it to be, but it always looked like a Ouija puck to me.
I think that issue is that the government claims there are legal cases against him, and the British government is wiping their hands of it claiming that they can't interfere until the legal issues are tied up. Though I think it's possible for him to stay at the embassy if he runs out of money and has no place to stay.

These are diplomatic issues. I don't think that the British government really has much leverage to apply pressure to Qatar. It's also possible that they don't do much in the way of action/applying pressure unless it becomes a major media event.

There was a media event a couple of years ago around a Canadian citizen that was detained in Mexico because her boss was a crook. Apparently they couldn't get/punish him so they grabbed her and claimed that she was implicit in the crime because her salary (~$30K IIRC) came out of the money that he cheated people out of (she was his secretary, IIRC).

The Canadian government was able to convince the Mexicans to allow her to serve her sentence in a Canadian prison. When she was in Canada I believe they waived her sentence, gave her community service instead, or something similar. This brought a lot of other people with similar issues to the forefront. Some of which had been trying to get the Canadian government to intervene for years, but they didn't get enough media coverage to warrant decisive action. I think that the number the CBC trotted out was ~120 similar cases of Canadian citizens detained in foreign countries for dubious crimes (or no claims of crime whatsoever).

I think that, in general, governments don't want to play the diplomacy game for these 'small gains' if they don't have to since diplomacy can be give-take in many cases. They are only forced to act to avoid losing face with the general public when a specific case becomes a media-storm.

[UPDATE] I guess I should mention that in the case of the woman in Mexico, her ex-boss even came forward to say that she had no knowledge of his crimes (for whatever that's worth, seeing-as the guy was a conman for all intents and purposes). Also, I can't remember of the money was her salary or a 'bonus' that he paid to her, but I'm pretty sure the amount of around $27K and she wasn't a rich woman, so I think it was her salary.
Facebook breaks ground on new datacenter in Oregon
The bit I'm praising is nothing to do with how open the device or drivers are, it's how much the design of the interface and end user experience has improved (and the team who made that a priority and then worked on it). So much software gets changed or more cluttered as time progresses and it's really pleased me that this hasn't.

If they could be open and still be like that, even better.
Google's Earnings Soar
"Branching in code"? I'd be curious to know what is the average half-life of a developer there. How long until they throw their arms up and say "no more monkey-patching... I'm outta here!"
DevCentral Weekly Roundup | Audio Podcast
I teach German in a (Norwegian) high school, and I think your experience is typical. Most pupils forget everything they have learned as soon as they can after the exams, and only a very very few will go to Germany and make use of it.

And the Germans speak pretty decent English by now, so the payoff is not as great as it was.
Previous article http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=957670
How does the possibility of employees becoming independently wealthy factor in to determining compensation for star performers? Let's say that I have personally determined that $3-5 MM of assets properly invested would earn me enough to live off of for the rest of my life.

If I earn $2 MM a year in salary, then in a short period of time, I could quit, retire, and work on whatever (open source, nonprofit) technical projects interest me. Companies vest stock for this reason, and I think Google does an admirable job of creating a college atmosphere full of world-class talent to retain passionate employees.

But not every company can employ Vint Cerf and Guido van Rossum and prepare gourmet meals.

Should a company try to keep their star employees under such an "independently wealthy" threshold? I imagine that Henry Ford, even paying twice the prevailing wages, didn't need to worry about this issue. 2x the average wage probably wasn't enough to quickly retire back then.
Google's Results in Five Bullets: Higher Margins and 13% Growth