skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
This is just a taste of what this guy can write. If you liked this, do yourself a favor and check out couple of his books. (They're pretty evenly divided between atheism and evolutionary biology. If it's first published before 2000, it's probably the latter. And don't be afraid of older dates, The Selfish Gene was published in the 70s and it's still probably the best).
Right, I would have thought it impressive if any major DB was the source. Getting it to the point where the source DB is taxed as much as possible seems to be the point of all your optimization. Nice that you could get there.
"'x considered harmful' considered harmful" considered harmful.

Also, I have anti-anti-anti-missile-missile-missile missiles.
> Obviously there's a massive body of work out there when it comes to climate science and it would be ludicrous to dismiss it all, but surely it's time to agree that we need a lot more skepticism especially when these claims are being used to advocate policies that will at least cost hundreds of billions if not trillions of dollars.

The problem is that more skepticism means less action, and it's obviously very important to act soon. None of these news stories call into doubt the fundamental science (global warming is real, man made and has dire consequences) and we've been doing nothing but debate these established facts for the last 20 years.

George Bush (Senior) knew it in 1989
http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/index.php?pid=17765 well before those emails were ever written...
> The better CEOs I've seen are able to compartmentalize this ability: they can be likeable, loyal friends, and restrict their ruthlessness to their business relationships.

I've been thinking about an idea in this vein a lot recently due to a less than ideal business transaction. It seems to me that the idea of a ruthless CEO is a myth constructed and put up on a pedestal by a largely male business community (combative/competitive instincts, right?). A successful business person need not be ruthless in the strict dictionary definition. What they need to be is persistent in pursuing their own economic goals or those of their organization. From the outside, this might look like ruthlessness, especially in a transaction between friends, but experience has shown me that applying social norms to a situation where market norms should rule can end badly.
I think the main issue is just that on a given project, there needs to be agreement on what will be used. I hate opening up a file in vim and seeing some lines tabbed and some lines spaced and things not lining up right at all.

:retab has helped on several occasions.
I just stay in touch with my friends via phone calls. Keeps things between me, them and the NSA.
About the iMac? I read about it in "iCon", the Steve Jobs biography (much less hostile that its title would seem to indicate), and a couple places on the web if memory serves, but I couldn't tell you where.
I can't create one, it keeps telling me: "You do not own that identity" while I certainly -do- own that OpenID and am logged in.
FTA: "Reformatting the file (with indent, for example) makes diffs completely impossible since the whole file will be different."

Apparently the author doesn't know about the -w option to diff, which makes it ignore whitespace.
Donation for Red Cross Raise To $7 M through Messages
There are several comments by 'Alan' in that thread and they all make perfect sense to me.
If a well-known fact makes your argument weaker, you should always omit it. It makes your writing more credible!
I often see this claim made on the Net, and it is always quickly followed by someone saying that it's a load of rubbish, and that there is nothing stopping Adobe from doing harware acceleration in Safari plugins for the Mac.

So, this being Hacker News, is there someone out there with some experience writing Safari plugins that can give us a definitive answer to this question (preferably with a brief description of the APIs involved).

I don't think I can stand reading yet another thread on this topic which is filled with what appear to be poorly-researched assertions...
Sorry, but I think you are in some weird kind of 'damage control' mode here.

First of all, one hit per second, or even 4 is ridiculously low and most other search engines crawl at a much higher rate.

Second, you really should learn how to use robots.txt and what nofollow is really for.

As for 80 legs, they should start caching stuff so one client crawling a page will have the effect that other clients of theirs will not be revisiting that same page for a while.

If a relatively low volume crawler is already a ddos attack in your book then I hope that you will never be subjected to a real one because it will be curtains for your site in a heartbeat.
I think he actually meant "MonadIO m => m a -> m a".

Anyway, if I were going to use Haskell-style type signatures in an article about shell scripts written in Perl, I would probably skip the whole typeclass and monad concept, and just say something like:

keep :: Action -> Action

This doesn't say much about the infinite nature of the process, unfortunately, but modeling effects as though they are pure functions just gets you into trouble anyway. His textual description is much more natural and easier to understand.

Anyway, I like articles that combine both Perl and Haskell :) They make me feel less insane.
In its defense (though I'm definitely a spaces man), this article is about 10 years old.
One thing this article seems to miss is that Google offers a lot of tools in which Baidu were not their primary competitor.

Google Translate comes to mind. Baidu don't even seem active in this space, their online translator app goes to the website of some (human) translation agency [1] who pretty clearly didn't develop the machine translation software they're featuring on their website (based on the fact that all their language pairs have English, rather than Chinese, as one of the components).

My guess would be that with Google Translate out of the picture, Yahoo Babelfish probably gets most of their traffic instead -- better quality than Baidu's provider.

[1] http://www.netat.net/
Interesting. Can you email me your openid that you're trying?

spam@paulisageek.com
The idea of skepticism is all well and good, but think about this: which psychological force is more powerful, intellectual honesty or human laziness? How much work have you personally done to try to understand our climate? While you are being skeptical, are you living with less consumption than you had before the possibility was as public, staking a middle ground between two possibilities, or are you continuing on as usual?

This is a global issue. You will find hyperbole and mistaken predictions, and yes, fraud, on both sides. Nature doesn't care. The question is: by how much can we alter the planet's ecosystem before it is unsafe? The IPCC's models predict about a 2C temperature rise in the 2090s from the 1990s if we have 450 ppm in the atmosphere. That temperature rise is further predicted to be the point we had better not go past, to avoid more severe damage. We are currently at 385 ppm, over 280 ppm from before the industrial revolution. That means we've used up 60% of the slack we had towards a pretty hard (and hardening) limit. Clearly, with the knowledge we have about the physics of greenhouse gases, there is some amount of CO2, some amount of radiative forcing, that is beyond what the world can handle without risking severe changes to the ecosystem and our way of life. It is not enough for skeptics to claim 'we don't know what that amount is, we have our doubts,' if it is followed by words or actions that support business as usual. There must be some agreement towards an acceptable limit to the dumping of a disruptive chemical, in massive quantities, into a finite atmosphere on a finite planet.

For what it's worth, I think it's more likely that carbon reduction policies will create a positive, rather than negative, effect on the economy.
http://librelist.com/

Use it, love it.
https://www.merchantconnect.com/CWRWeb/glossary.do?glossaryL...

Visa and Mastercard are the usual parties when it comes to giving out merchant accounts. An ISO is an institution created by a bank or a consortium of banks to allow merchants to accept various cards, but without having a merchant account with either Visa or Mastercard, instead they have their merchant account with the ISO or 'MSP' as it is also called.

http://www.mastercard.com/au/merchant/en/acquirers/communica...

It is unlikely that you will find yourself in the position of a MSP or that you will be dealing with one, banks normally use these only for groups of merchants for which it makes no sense to have a direct merchant account with the large card companies.

They are an instrument for 'vertical' markets. An example of a member service provider is for instance PaySquare, positioned to accept point-of-sale transactions.

https://www.paysquare-services.eu/form.aspx?id=71&ver=4&...
Most of the author's points are easily avoided if you learn how to read other people's code.

Srsly. When you're starting a brand new green-field project, you can indent however you feel like. But if you're working on an existing project, just do it the way the original person did it, even if it's not your favorite coding style. It's not worth the time and energy arguing over it. All this talk about ease of reformatting code is ridiculous...you shouldn't reformat code, you should just do what everybody else on the project does.
To continue the chain, did you consider using Librelist? Zed seems to be mad at Groups for similar (but not identical, his reasons were short whereas yours were long and detailed) reasons. Do you feel forums tend to be better than mailing lists for these kinds of discussions? I've been considering the question lately, as I used to be a _huge_ fan of forums, but have moved away from them as of late.
A better argument is that it makes [svn / git / cvs] [blame / annotate] useless, which it does.
">I was under the impression Africa had no native written languages

Are you kidding me? Ethiopia alone has multiple scripts."

Ah well, when I was living in the United States people used to ask me if we all used elephants for transport in India. I used to answer "Sure, we had this big stable of elephants and I went to school on one, as did all the kids in the neighbourhood. Actually I went to the airport for my trip here on the house elephant .. "

(Fwiw, my great grandfather did own an elephant in the early 1900s but it used to haul lumber and take part in temple processions, not so much provide transport from point A to B ... )
There's more discussion about this here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1006725
Any videos of AIs squaring off out yet?
Parents can give you opportunities. At about 12 they found me a computer science tutor, and that pretty much sealed by future career (for better). This was _NOT_ random. It was only one of a very long string of stuff they tried very deliberately in order to find my "thing".

As a kid I did briefly a whole lot of stuff, from swimming to skating dance to karate. Most of it didn't catch at all - I still have two left feet - but the stuff that did made a real difference. And almost all of it was at my parent's initiative.
So you have a rule, "every file gets formatted in <style> before it gets checked in - edit in any style you please, but reformat it after".
The fact that an apparently generic sounding resource, http://www.google.com/web, is a highly-specific niche search, I expect.
I just borrowed "The Visual Display of Quantitative Information" by Tufte.
Good stuff, I like it a lot!

I'd love to see an export to CSV feature - graphs are nice, but having the actual historical numbers available would be awesome.
Saying you can define tabs to be a different number of spaces is, at least some of the time, erroneous, because some languages (e.g. Python) define tab as 8 spaces.

I have a very simple policy on tabs: I don't use them. And since I've had that policy, I've never had a problem involving tabs.
Climate science has falsifiable experiments, predictions it's made and is checking. It also has a historical record. The trouble is that the truly alarming claims are equally disastrous to check. It's frankly astonishing that we, as a species, haven't figured out a better way to deal with dire risks in an unpredictable environment, but science has stepped up to the plate. We can model, in pencil and paper, in bits and bytes, and in neural firings, what might happen in reality, under certain circumstances. We can check these short term predictions against short term reactions (atmospheric scientists do this all the time, for example looking at temperature gradients as a way to show that the increase in temperature is a greenhouse effect, not from the sun brightening), we can check parts of the historical record against one another, and we can drill down into all of our results and strive for a model that encompasses all of it. And when we've run said model and somewhere in the future as a consequence of our actions it predicts a significant likelihood of disaster, it should give you pause. Not unlike how you can model, in your own head, the possible consequences of rush blindfolded across a busy highway, even if you've never actually experienced it.

You get one shot. The scientific method is not for matters involving life and death. It is for the models we have of the world, our understanding, our plans. It is for trying, by way of modeling and analogy, what we might see given what we might do. But as for the decision, that requires judgment. Why can't people understand this?
Just checked it out...Mmmm, clicky. Very mouse intensive to navigate. Also very stuffy on 1024x600 (Netbook).
Ah, one assumption I never like in this discussion: code will always be read via an editor.

I've been flirting around with a literate programming environment, and it's been far easier to use spaces with a traditional line measure - around 80 chars. The code can be included into HTML or print layouts with few edits. That seems to be the "easy to layout" setup.
You're right, people in China are aware of this - and they bring it up all the time... but God help you if you (as a foreigner) do.

It's a common mentality with the Chinese (speaking as one myself)... only you are allowed to criticize your kind, any outside criticism is presumptuous and arrogant. This attitude pisses me off, since it prevents us from learning from everyone else on this rock.
You find bad research in all areas, also in evolutionary psychology.

BUT -- most of that type of criticism of evol psychology also painted Dawkins, which you quote here, with the exact same brush... :-)

(For some fun, go read Dawkins' criticism of "Not in our genes" http://dba.fc.ul.pt/evo/textos/Dawkins.pdf)
Round-the-Clock Car Factories in China Still Can't Fulfill Drivers' Demand
This kind of sparks with that whole "developer email client" thing I was talking about in another thread. Forums are in HTML and HTML is about formatting for reading. As most know, code has different reading standards than legible text, making forums a really poor choice for code talk.

I really wish there were a new standard of markup for code highlighting through email.
What you describe is not what the author (and I) want. You should not use tabs until it is no longer possible, you should only use tabs to indicate the indentation level. To perform further alignment beyond the indentation, for example to align arguments to a function after the opening parenthesis you use spaces.
Haiti's Fault Rupture Boosts Long-Term Risk of Jamaica Quake, Experts Say
I personally use kwrite. That doesn't mean it's "better" than emacs, just that I prefer it. Editor use is an indiviual choice, and people are more productive when using the editor of their choice.

Similarly, people are more productive when using the indentation style of their choice. I like 3 or 4 spaces of indenting, and I find using 8 spaces makes the code hard to read. Other people have different preferences. It seems to me that the best way to accomodate everyone on a multiple-developer project is to require that code is run through a formatting utility before being checked in, and to allow people to use similar utilities to format it when checking it out and editting it.
A Slick .NET Control with Slide Effects
SlideControl is a .NET container control that manages presentation slides and offers a pleasing slide-effect when switching between slides. SlideControl has a built-in backtracking-stack that remembers slides visited and unrolls these actions on demand.
I think we kind of know. I mean, wolves and dog like creatures live along side humans all over the world. They hunt with us and eat what we leave behind and we use things or did for a long time, things they left behind. It's only natural that the ones that shared knowledge with each other among the group benefited more along the direction of a shared ability to communicate amongst themselves than would members of groups that did not care to share such a bond. ref: http://tolweb.org/treehouses/?treehouse_id=3804

We see avatar and see how far into the future he saw those animals and they had evolved these complicated neuronal cross species connections. Now if you believe in evolution, then you can't argue with that as a potential reality in the future. In a way, it does exist across species now in more trivial forms, including, if you will allow me, eye contact. I would offer to suggest that eye contact may actually be one of the first forms of cross species and even family. Birds, fish, all kinds of mammals... You can make eye contact and communicate with them if you have the patience. The more primitive the organism, the more patience is required to communicate with it -- if it can communicate.
Show Me What's Wrong - a tool for helping with "computer issues"
Zoho is a 1000+ company? Wow. I thought you were prob around the 200-300 level.
How is that going to prevent the banned users from signing up again?
Can you discuss in detail the way Onlive do the Encoding? Why do you think their business model is awful?
I've been using ':set list' in vim with different characters for spaces and tabs ('_', '| ') appearing at the start of a line for the better part of a year now. This makes sure that I stick to the convention of whatever project I'm working on because it's very obvious when I don't.

I agree with the article's rationale and use this practice for new projects. Nearly all the arguments I hear for spaces are 'Other people screw it up, so just go with spaces to accommodate them'. I think this is quite defeatist. Why not enforce the coding style of choice for a project with some check-in hooks?
Simply imagine what happened if unionization occurred
throughout China and the ramifications for the
countries trade.

Unionization should occur. The Chinese government is using harsh methods to stop that. But the later it happens the worse the results will be for us.

China is going to require baby steps to bring it
into a democratic and free world

We don't need to be delicately careful as if China's a baby. The local human rights activists and upstanding corps like Google are very effective and non-aggressive ways of prodding it into a democratic and free world.
Unless you're using Python of course :)
"Despite the fact that Ext4 adds a number of compelling features to the filesystem, T'so doesn't see it as a major step forward. He dismisses it as a rehash of outdated "1970s technology" and describes it as a conservative short-term solution. He believes that the way forward is Oracle's open source Btrfs filesystem, which is designed to deliver significant improvements in scalability, reliability, and ease of management."

-http://arstechnica.com/open-source/news/2009/04/linux-collab...

Theodore Tso is the main developer of ext4 and numerous times he has said that it is simply another step forward, nothing new or remarkable, and that he believes that btrfs will be the implementation that really pushes the envelope for filesystems. Why is google moving to ext4? Why not wait/get involved with the development of btrfs? Does google know something about btrfs that nobody else does? If they want stability, why not just stay with ext2? I feel a lot of important facts are being left out of this advertised switch.
Thanks for the link. Fascinating stuff, makes me want to quit and go jump into AR.
Use a word processor (or a text editor that allows for fixed tab stops). This will also allow insertion of diagrams and other non-textual stuff (think clickable buttons, for compilation and testing, for example) into source code.

See, for an example implementation, BlackBox Component Pascal - Windows only, but runs moderately well under Wine.
I don't understand your hostility to pipes. It seems to be based on the fact that they were invented some time ago? On the contrary, the soundness of an idea famous enough to be known today is probably positively correlated with how old it is.

Pipes are a combination of dataflow programming and monadic computation, and are naturally parallelizable, functional and generally pipe processes don't share mutable state. All these concepts are highly relevant to modern programming.
Correct me if I'm reading this wrong, but doesn't this just mean that Yahoo knew about the attacks before Google told them? Google could have been aware of the attacks well before they told Yahoo about it, and there's no indication (given the information in the body of the article) that Yahoo knew first (likewise, the inverse is true).
Every version control system I've ever used would put a change to every line of the file in its history. It would be possible to retrieve all those changes and then filter out the ones that I don't care about, but that's so expensive that I've never seen it as a built-in feature.
I don't think it's even appropriate in this forum.

Why not? Its well accepted in technology that there are far fewer women than men. Finding out why is of interest to people in technology. However, to discuss it openly, people do have to make statements that are "sexist" because we are talking about differences between genders.

you better back it up with data

Articles like this can be helpful. It makes people reflect on their experiences and maybe change their actions. Sure, having data would be nice (although it might be hard to quantify "being a SAJ") but as long as readers notice these conclusions come from the author's personal experience and not any study, we can add as much salt to the article as we want.
Walls and bridges: even more on Facebookisation
There are things that programs can do to deal with this, but unfortunately the work-arounds come at the expense of runtime performance and code complexity.

For example, a program could use a different font to pull in missing characters. But this can take a lot of extra effort to render properly; if the typography system doesn't have the concept of font substitution (or even if it does), then your layout slows down while you figure out how to place the substitute glyphs.

Another option is reinterpretation: trying really hard to display an approximation of an unsupported character, instead of garbage (this could be done using the characters that are actually in the font, or it could be done by drawing manually). The idea here is to make it as easy as possible for the user to read what was intended. For instance, Unicode probably has a dozen characters that look like an ASCII minus-sign; it is kind of silly to ever display garbage for a character as simple as a horizontal line, as long as some line-like rendering is available.
These heroes were far from disposable
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