skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
"Doesn't it seem like you'd have obvious selection bias with who would volunteer for the IPCC?"

Yes it does: Those who care about its conclusion. I don't understand why you think someone who thinks climate change is not happening should be less likely to volunteer, given the impact of the report.

As the article said: the IPCC is only assessing and compiling results of climate research. Those "untrained amateurs" that you talk about, are they "assessing and compiling", or are they doing their own research? If they are doing research, then they should not be compared to the IPCC but to one of the thousands of references that constitute the sources of the assessment report. And if their results are really believable, then hopefully they will be published and be one of the sources used for AR5.
I think I agree with Radley Balko, but it's hard to tell, because in his crusade against civil asset forfeiture rules, he leaves out quite a bit of detail. To read him, you'd think that any police officer can take your car and stick it in an impound by executive fiat. Not so.

In Illinois, which he refers to in many of his blog posts on the topic, Balko insinuates that the state can hold your property for as many as six months without going to court (in other places, he says it can be over a year). That's not true. Property owners can file claims for their assets and get them back in less than 2 months after a court hearing (the "2 month" number is a statutory time limit).

It's only if both sides of a case stretch their time limits to the absolute maximum (the defendant by failing to file timely claims, and the prosecutor by dragging their feet) that the limit hits 180 days.

Furthermore, Balko's definition of "not having a day in court" apparently excludes "days in court for the specific purpose of getting your stuff back"; in other words, he appears to only be counting the actual criminal trial. But that's silly. Either way, it's still an impartial judge making the call, not the revenue-hungry police force.

To read my comment, you might think I'm fine with civil asset forfeiture. I don't think that I am. But I'm definitely not fine with sloppy arguments.
I'd prefer to say example.com/a_nice_long_link rather than example.com/qQqueF especially when a single typo in the latter could take the recipient to a random site on the Internet rather than a 404 & search page.
There are strong incentives to break many laws. There are also often adequately strong disincentives: fines and prison for example.
The "slippery slope" in my neck of the woods was the elimination of Grade 13. Yes, we had one of those here in Ontario, Canada -- and it was a university (as opposed to college) prep year. I never finished it (I was too cool for school at the time, and Grade 13 was just a brief return visit after a period of serious professional "truancy"), but my course of studies consisted of three sciences (physics, biology and chemistry) and four maths ("abstract algebra", "functions, relations and matrices", calculus, and statistics). Admittedly, first-year university studies in the province were hell for people coming from outside of Ontario (or for anybody who loaded their schedules with courses that didn't fit their university program).
I'm guessing here but I think that app swipe is just from the 'Home' screen, not within apps. And I'm pretty sure you can customize the 'tiles' to put the most frequent ones on the main page and then just have the rest a swipe away. That's pretty much how I use my iPhone right now.
CubeStormer: Rubik's Cube solving machine built out of legos
"Crime is publicized everywhere"

The main culprit is your local news.
I've actually been thinking of doing something like this for a while. I think the market is there, but I don't think it's SaaS providers. I think you should start looking at web games and social games. Also take a look at Facebook games. There's a LOT of Facebook game developers out there. Granted, it's moving very much so from individuals to large companies, but you might still see some customers there.

As for implementation I'd definitely use a server side API. It would be nice to be able to send a large list of the user's data and receive back any possible achievements. For example if I had an RPG and the user had just killed a monster I would want to send you my health at the time of kill, what level I was, what level the monster was, how many of that monster I've killed, how many monsters total I've killed. That way I could get back multiple achievements if they were "Kill 10 Monsters" and also "Kill a Monster That is a Higher Level Than You" but only use one API call.

Anyway, I think it's a good idea. Try asking some web game developers.
Edwards: Why the big secret? People are smart. They can handle it.
Kay: A person is smart. People are dumb, panicky dangerous animals and you know it. Fifteen hundred years ago everybody knew the Earth was the center of the universe. Five hundred years ago, everybody knew the Earth was flat, and fifteen minutes ago, you knew that humans were alone on this planet. Imagine what you'll know tomorrow.
How to install phpLD
A perfect guide who are looking to install php link directory (phpld).
Pretty cool idea. How are you getting the info from TVRage.com? If you're doing a cURL type web scraping then you might want to check out if you're even allowed to do that.

Definitely add show times, like your friend said.

Are you planning on monetizing this at all?
The UI makes both the iPhone and Android look incredibly dated. I have a few questions about discoverability and usage in practice and it looks a tad laggy in places, but on the whole it looks very nice.

The downsides are that it shares many of the problems with the iPhone - the lack of multitasking, no Flash, and I bet it requires iTu--the Zune Software. There's also unknowns on WM7 as a development platform, and whether it requires you to use the App St--Windows Mobile Marketplace. That said, from what has currently been shown I think the good massively outweighs the bad.

One feature I'm particularly happy to see is Wi-Fi Sync. I hope this gives Apple the kick up the backside they need to include it in the iPhone.
Send an SMS to (650) 918-6928 with the name of a TV show.

You will receive a reply with the number of days the next episode will be on (and the date) as well how many days ago the last episode was broadcast (and the date).

eg. Send an SMS to (650) 918-6928 with “Dexter” and you will get the following reply:
Next episode of Dexter in 224 days (9/25/10). Last episode was 62 days ago (12/31/09).
Civil forteiture is one of the most egregious abuses of civil rights in America. As far as I'm concerned, having a court case entitled "United States v. One Mercedes-Benz Sd Vin Wdbcb20c6fa177831" is tantamount to Reductio Ad Absurdum. How can a piece of property be guilty of a crime or a tortious act?
Man uses Facebook to track down assault suspect
The title of the blog post implies that Tornado has support for sessions. This is not the case. The author of the blog post is benchmarking his own extensions to Tornado.
You're not making sense.

If the IPCC wrote that elephants can fly, that would not have any impact on the state of climate research or on the state of elephants. It would just mean that the IPCC report was wrong.

Mistakes in the IPCC report only means the conclusions of the IPCC report could be wrong (if they are bad enough). It can never alter the state of the studies that the IPCC references. They can be right or wrong just like any other studies.

And the article posted makes a pretty convincing case that these mistakes were not in any way central to the conclusions of the IPCC.
Thanks! TVRage now offers an API with this information and I am utilizing that.

Don't really see this taking off yet and don't plan to monetize unless it gets too expensive to run. A couple of hundred hits a month is affordable.
How To Start A Web Business And Survive
I have read [no citation available :-( ] the actual crime rate is somewhat correlated with the number of young men -- say, aged 13-30 -- in the population. This would explain an increase in the 1960s followed by a decrease in the 1990s and beyond.
Yep,that article says that exactly the same thing is happening in the UK. Probably it's human nature.
Achievement systems have 2 issues:
a. users attempt to fixate on achievements more than the software they're supposed to be using
b. users cannot achieve certain things, realize that its hopeless, and lose interest in the system all together and possibly the software
Oh, it's going down. But the United States is doing this by keeping everone who might commit a crime in jail. And that's expensive.

As the depression deepens, you'll see states start to close down detention facilities. Add to that a huge unemployment rate among the young and poor, and you're just asking for fireworks.
I think the perception that crime is worse comes from the vast numbers of people in prison, which has risen significantly, and continues to rise.
The Client Is Not Always Right
Nice piece and my only quibble would be with the idea of automatically deferring incorporation until you get outside funding.

On this point, the advice given is great is you are a sole founder but even then may create tax risks if you time your entity setup to match the time of your first funding (e.g., Founder A gets 90% for IP assignment + Investor X gets 10% for $100K = Risk of $900K taxable income to Founder). This tax risk is normally manageable but it also is most easily avoided or minimized if even a sole founder sets up an early shell (even an online instacorp) to give himself a buffer between first founder grant and first investment.

With a founding team, it is normally a mistake, in my judgment, to defer entity setup too long as people invest time and effort and develop IP for the project. It can and often does all work fine as long as the co-founders in such a case continue to cooperate right up to the point where they chose to document their relationship but they are at risk of, e.g., "I was promised 25% of the company" type of claims or "I developed key IP that belongs to me" type assertions if they have not defined stock grants with strings on them (restricted stock) and have not entered into work-for-hire contracts should they have a bust-up or serious disagreement of some kind prior to documenting things.

The practical risks of a disagreement may be low but my point is that, when you have a founding team especially, it is a mistake to have an axiomatic rule along the lines of "don't incorporate until you are working with Other People's Money." The issue should be consciously thought through by any founding team and the cost/benefit considered before deciding this one way or the other.

A more detailed analysis is found here: "When should I set up an entity for my startup business" (http://grellas.com/faq_business_startup_007.html).
I'm certainly not going to argue against his point, however there's a related and more subtle one which gets ignored a lot.

Generally if you are writing off sunk costs there are also some accrued benefits lurking. Before you terminate X you need to look at those.

Examples are things like:

- Cost of restarting things like advertising in the future from a cold start.

- Continuity and loyalty benefits from suppliers.

- R&D realized or in-progress.

- Accrued experience.

That last one is a biggie. There's a reason that failing companies get new injections of capital. Quite often their major asset is that they know where the toxic slime pits in market are - because they fell into them.

So, the money is gone and you shouldn't give it a second thought. But you probably bought some assets with it (plant, experience, contacts) and you should think about which ones will diminish of evaporate the moment you stop doing something.

Revalue these assets in terms of the cash flow you can extract from them, write off the actual amount spent, and then you have a good basis for making the decision.
The right set of achievements paced correctly can counter your second point. The first is quite valid, though.
The Start-up Survival Kit
Ask HN: secure web behavior for your grand-parents
Hi there,

I am searching for resources about security basics for people who are not really web professionals. Say, the kind of people who mistake Read Write Web for Facebook :-)

Examples:

- how to choose a good password
- how to use the "little green bar" next to the URL to avoid phishing
- ...

Do you have anything in mind? I googled a while, but there doesn't seem to be much of this, especially for non tech-savvy people.
Why would anyone bother stealing a cell phone? They're easy to flag as "stolen" and become useless at that point.
Didn't read all of it, but I think it might be similar to an idea I once submitted to YC. Also reminds me of http://sf0.org/

I think it can work. But I also tire of game mechanics by now - I don't want external influences on my choices.
Depriving a person of access to his or her property without charging the person with a crime is a violation of due process. I shouldn't need to file a claim for the return of my property if I haven't been accused of wrongdoing. I also disagree with your argument that "property owners" (not "defedants" since the property is accused of the crime, not the person) simply need to file timely claims because hiring a lawyer to file a claim costs money that the property owner may not be able to afford if they have few assets and the seized property is something like an automobile, the loss of which causes them to also lose their job. The constitution exists to protect citizens from this sort of thing.
MWC: Adobe AIR and Flash Player on Smartphones
Well, if you read what the gentlemen from Adobe has said since, his objection on the private list was about how the chairs of whatever committee he raised his objections to basically made a unilateral decision without discussing the objections. So, at least according to him, the private list material is essentially objecting to the process by which his public objections were handled.
Some people just enjoy stealing things.
All Presidents Are Above Average
Yes, there are some interesting side-effects when you attempt to motivate people to do very specific things. But, I don't think people leave the site or software when certain badges are too hard.

I think http://www.StackOverflow.com is a good example of where badges only add to the experience and don't get in the way.
TREXA announces pricing details for DIY electric car
Once again I recommend the book "Risk: the science and politics of fear". It outs forwards lots of theories and research related to this.

On a related note I saw the other day that one percent of the us population is in jail. A huge amount of basic bits and bobs like military gear and paint (90% of domestic pain production for example) are made by prisoners (some might say as slave labour!). One in ten black men are in prison. 2 in ten have been in prison at some point. This numbers gobsnacked me (passed on for informational purposes only :-))
If it's based on the rendering engine in IE8/7, then pretty much everything on the web already works for it. No mainstream sites are "safely ignoring" Internet Explorer.
Timing a China Bubble Collapse: Currency Revaluation Higher Imminently
A year or two ago, an NYPD officer told us crime was up in the city and that it just wasn't getting reported. Yet another case of making your metrics.
I strongly agree that you should incorporate early. The author claims nobody in their right mind would sue a company without any money? They may if they think the founders have any cash, or they may just threaten a suit to scare off potential competition, which can be more effective if you're personally liable!
Are you in the DC area?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kpxiCxO5k0g
"This site uses Microsoft Silverlight.
For a richer experience please
download and install the plug-in."

Am I posting this as a warning to those of us who can't/won't install Silverlight, or as a thinly veiled commentary on Microsoft's practices? You make the call!
Maybe he was a secret agent on a mission and he needed to call the CIA RIGHT NOW to report some amazing world-saving discovery! By giving up his phone, he could have been SAVING THE WORLD!
Was it ever non-optional? I.e. what was the slide down the slope from A to B?
It's not just the public sector. There are plenty of shady services firms (law and marketing especially) who work the same way. In those areas the only thing that mitigates abuse is essentially firm reputation and goodwill between individuals.

It's hard to design a contract that gives the right incentives to the right people. Because the government is essentially banned from using goodwill and reputation as a basis for buying decisions (as it gets called cronyism and/or the old boys network) they are stuck trying and failing to enumerate a fair contract instead.
A lot of what goes into a good online-security mindset is good understanding of some basic concepts that a lot of novice computer users lack.

One example is the fake alert popup. You and I know that it's just an image in a small web browser window that is designed to look like an OS's alert, but that's a pretty sophisticated thing to be able to figure out.
Which demographic has the greater profit potential?
Spam hits Google Buzz already
What's wrong with Mozilla Jetpack
With regards to the interface I have to vouch for Windows.. I have a Zune HD. I love it. The UI is anything but limiting and amazingly intuitive.

My girlfriend would ask "How do I do XXX" and before I could remember how I would accomplish the objective, she had explored her way to the solution.

Obviously a phone will have more strenuous requirements, but the interface I'm using on the Zune seems like it may be the exact outlandish interface that changes the way we think about buttons, and menus for interactive portable devices.
This is an interesting question. It looks like one could claim a copyright in contracts in theory, but there are several practical problems to making a contract copyrightable. Personally, I always thought that copyrighting contracts might make them unenforceable since copyrights could limit a public court's ability to interpret and publish rulings on protected contracts.

Here are the best resources that I found on this matter:

Re: copyright notice on contract
http://www3.wcl.american.edu/cni/9908/23029.html

Copyright and the Contract Drafter
http://www.adamsdrafting.com/downloads/Copyright-NYLJ-8.23.0...
The "experts" would say that the phone does not "get out of the way", because of this messy typography thing and the minimum of three hardware buttons required for navigation.
It's the Zune HD marketplace, and the accompanying SDK.
Almost all murders get reported, even in very screwed up countries. That makes it a very useful metric for comparisons across different places, and across time in the same place.

Without additional evidence, that police officer's statement isn't very helpful or credible.
I agree completely. In the real world costs are often NOT completely sunk. I could even add to your list, e.g. employee morale.

Along your lines of argument, you might say you've INVESTED money instead of just SUNK.

At the same time, we also tend to hold on to obviously fruitless enterprises. So the real lesson of course is to try to be objective about what's really going on, suspending your ego for the benefit of the project. Which I'm sure we agree on!
Perhaps I am too much of a "normal" but the phrase "SaaS Achievement Engine" sounds like that specific type of tech-marketing-speak that will be unappealing to site owners because they will be too bashful to admit that they have no idea what it actually means. I have no such hangups.

Second comment is that I think incentive systems are highly highly tied - almost inextricably so - with the content and community around each individual site. In order for a reward system to work correctly, it has to be based on existing user behavior. For site owners who know this, they'll probably want to structure the system themselves. For site/app owners who don't, how will you sell them on the idea that incentive systems are important to begin with? I think the market you're dealing with right now is people who understand the importance of incentive systems but don't know or are too lazy/busy to make one themselves. If you believe this market is large enough, you should go for it.
How Education is Ruining Your Life
Wow. This hadn't occurred to me before, but it also goes to show you how bad they were at naming. I mean, "Performa"? If that doesn't scream "budget line", I don't know what does.
Well regular mainstream sites aren't, but mobile web applications/sites are making use of css3 and html5 features not present in IE8/7. In the mobile industry Microsoft has such a large marketshare that it will be safe to ignore the browser of Windows Mobile 7 (for now).
What's the age of the blog got to do with it? It definitely takes me back to high school, because the parody culture it describes is much more in line with where I went to high school than with where I am now.
It's also important to consider in any given song if they were trying to stay exactly steady. How much fluidity of tempo is intentional?

It's a shame that most music these days doesn't even consider using changing tempo as a tool.

Music is all about contrast. Classical music and jazz embrace tempo as a tool of contrast, but we've mostly lost that in popular recorded music.

The great jazz drummers knew exactly what they were doing.

Here's a great example: (Harvey Mason on drums)

http://labs.echonest.com/click/?trackId=TRTGDWN125488885AB&#...

This chart looks pretty crazy at first, but if you are familiar with the music it makes so much sense. I believe that they (the entire band) knew exactly what was happening with the tempo throughout the entire 15 minute song.
Georgia the country, not Georgia the US state
Computing Networks: Fortalice Boutique Islamabad (Guest House & Hotel)
I don't understand how you can claim a lack of due process. The deprived is explicitly granted multiple hearings in court by a criminal judge. They in fact get more due process than a simple criminal defendant, because if they win any one of those hearings, they get their stuff back.

The rest of your comment, whatever. You're missing my point. I'm not taking on civil asset forfeiture, just sloppy reporting.
There won't be any surprising math here for programmers, though some of the author's efforts to explain math involving negatives in pragmatic, real-world terms were quite interesting. I also enjoyed this anecdote:

> The eminent linguistic philosopher J. L. Austin of Oxford once gave a lecture in which he asserted that there are many languages in which a double negative makes a positive, but none in which a double positive makes a negative - to which the Columbia philosopher Sidney Morgenbesser, sitting in the audience, sarcastically replied, "Yeah, yeah."
Does the rise of the Internet correlate? Our "news" is now just blogs and rumor - which is by its nature sensational.
Eliteflyers
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The guys at echonest seem to slip through the cracks a bit on HN, but they are doing some amazing stuff. I encourage anyone with an interest in music to check out the API.
Another interpretation, there are a bazillion laws. everyone you meet in a day likely has committed felonies. People are much more aware of laws and logic, so the lack of enforcement gets harder and harder to overlook.

Take the Lacey act: http://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/16/usc_sec_16_00003372----...

It is unlawful for any person to import, export, transport, sell, receive, acquire, or purchase any fish or wildlife or plant taken, possessed, transported, or sold in violation of any law, treaty, or regulation of the United States or in violation of any Indian tribal law;

Can you really say every piece of food you've ever acquired followed every required law? Did the truckdriver speed? It seems to me, you can be fined as much as the ticket would have cost the driver.