skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I totally agree. It all got a little Rush Limbaugh at the end.
For some perspective, the top 5 Government contractors are:

1 Lockheed Martin Corp.	$14,983,515,367
2 Boeing Co.	$10,838,231,984
3 Northrop Grumman Corp.	$9,947,316,207
4 General Dynamics Corp.	$6,066,178,545
5 Raytheon Co.	$5,942,575,316

Here are the CEOs of those companies...

http://littlesis.org/person/1931/Robert_J_Stevens
http://littlesis.org/person/1418/W_James_McNerney_Jr
http://littlesis.org/person/1052/Dr_Ronald_D_Sugar
http://littlesis.org/person/2363/Nicholas_D_Chabraja
http://www.raytheon.com/ourcompany/rtnwcm/groups/public/docu...

All white men, if anything they should up the affirmative action programs in my opinion. Oh, and stop spending so much of our money on military and start putting it into public healthcare and education.
I agree that the burden of proof is on creationists if they want to positively assert that God created man, but plenty of anti-evolution activists limit themselves to the narrower grounds of just claiming "evolution is only a theory, burden of proof is on the evolutionists". Yet they tend to get called "denialists" in that case, also. (Though I agree the evidence for evolution is much more mature than the evidence for AGW.)
They're talking about the probability of any cow being a super bowl football. Not of any slaughtered cow.

The fact that half of call cows get slaughtered is pretty irrelevant.
What is needed, I believe, is a definition of information
that is as rigorous as, say, the definition of energy.
By the way, a fundamental tenet of Shannon's theory is that
(quantity of) information is defined in terms of the
_expectation_ of its recipient, so it seems a rather
different beast than the quantities with which physics deals.
Pretty good description of the world of ideas and why you only pick one to really follow through.
Aha!

So the value of your words depended on evaluating them in a sarcastic context. This lack of referential transparency made it difficult to reason about them at compile-time.
People have been using this technique in this way since at least 2006:
http://int2e.com/blog/improved-digg-integration-script/
http://jeremiahgrossman.blogspot.com/2006/08/i-know-where-yo...

Since changing browsers to prevent this will not happen tomorrow, this can be partially worked around both server and client-side.

Server-side: If you have any sensitive URIs you don't want leaked or brute-forced, add an extra parameter containing a random value. URIs you might want to protect are those with XSRF tokens or session IDs. URIs can be brute-forced locally on the victim at a speed of approximately 40,000 URIs per second.

Client-side: Use incognito mode for sensitive surfing. Plugins such as noscript can partially defend against this, however it's possible to do history detection using pure CSS which I believe will work even if you're using noscript.
Update: Fixnum posted another client-side solution "in Firefox, go to about:config and turn off layout.css.visited_links_enabled"
Yeah like Toyota with braking systems. Exposing personal data to people you don't want to have it is no big deal.
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Anger Leads to Apology From Google About Buzz
The GPL for instance is copyrighted. You'd think they are a group that wouldn't assert copyright needlessly.

You can find some "public" terms of service and other boilerplate stuff for your web site by digging a little bit. Just don't copy verbatim without understanding what you are doing.
"We need a way to make the fact that this bolt has been built public and accessible so if someone needs something similar they can contact the right folks and ask."

Not really. If you need a bolt that absolutely needs to be able to withstand the rated forces at the specified size and weight, it needs to be non-destructively tested. The expensive part isn't the bolt, it's the testing.

You don't want it to be tested when it's the last bolt left in a redundant pair and it sheers off.

"Why would they say how many t1 lines are need and how many servers? That is silly. What if someone could get the same effect with less power and bandwidth?"

Because they did a needs analysis and calculated the probable amount of bandwidth, and decided that redundancy was necessary as well. This stuff isn't just a guess, it is based on hard data.
I'm not a lawyer. You should talk with one before doing anything.

That said: I asked this question directly to my attorney a couple months ago, as she was reviewing a contract I had cobbled together from similar specimens I found on the web. She said that no, legal language found in contracts is not at all copyrightable in the USA. I've informally gotten the same response from a couple of other attorney friends over beers.

The funny thing is, from what I've been able to find about copyright law - again, as an entrepreneur and as an open-source/free software programmer, not an attorney - there is no explicit exception I know of for contract language. My guess is that common legal practice has evolved so that the courts won't enforce it, and attorneys won't pursue it, for a basic reason: it would be overwhelmingly stupid to do otherwise.

Contract language is normally intended to be precise, clear and unambiguous. If every contract had to be tweaked because some propane-tank business in Montana or something just happened to use the same wording before you did... well, that would be a minefield that makes the software patent mess look like a tranquil field of daisies in comparison.
Some of the hacked emails from the University of East Anglia discussed how to manipulate discussion on realclimate.org by passing AGW-supportive comments through moderation quickly while allowing AGW-skeptical ones to linger indefinitely.

Is it responsible to keep assuming, then, that the ideas presented at RealClimate.org are a legitimate indicator of the state of scientific opinion on this topic? Can you provide links to other sources?

You should also moderate your tone. A lot. I've been reading and talking to people about global warming since the early 90s, and I'm strongly predisposed to take scientists at their word. If the stridency in your writing can make me want to close my laptop and take a nap, it's certain to stir up angry feelings in people who vehemently oppose to the idea of global warming. They will respond in kind, HN will get a little less civil, hence a little less useful for everyone. And you will bear part of the responsibility.
mod_ook could be out any day now.

http://www.dangermouse.net/esoteric/ook.html
This is neat. Some possible drawbacks:

(1) Browser layout engines are pretty messed up, and adding a bunch of shy hyphens can lead to really weird layout issues. I wish I had some good examples, but basically it has to do with taking into account the amount of space a hyphen takes up, and using that to compute how long lines should be, but then when the hyphens are in the middle of the line, not showing them. Anyway, as I remember sometimes it can result in text being eaten (i.e. not shown properly).

In other words, I’d try to do specific testing in a bunch of browsers, resizing a window through all reasonable sizes it might be, before counting on shy hyphens to work properly.

(2) This is still going to break search within pages. Pretty stupid that browsers can’t do proper search, but so it goes.

(3) This is going to be effectively a line-by-line paragraph composer, because browsers don’t do any kind of real paragraph layout. And it still won’t do any adjustment of inter-letter space. The combination of these two things means that using justified text is going to still usually end up looking like crap. Better than without any hyphenation, but not all that much better.

----

In short, this is kind of a half-way stopover workaround for the absolutely stupid lack of real hyphenation and justification algorithms in current browsers. Absolutely stupid because this is a solved problem: the algorithm used by TeX and described in one of Knuth’s students in the late 70s works pretty darn well (Adobe uses a modified version for InDesign), and on modern hardware should be perfectly reasonably fast, as well.

It’s not quite as bad as the lack of real layout in Microsoft Word, given that laying out text is the only purpose of that application, but still.... pretty bad.
I was just getting interested, and that was never five minutes.
They sort-of work. It’s far from perfect. Do your own testing before you rely on browsers.
Well, we're actually in a discussion of the magnitude of its effect at this point... (Which could lead to the discussion of whether there could be multiple causes for climate change rather than _just_ rising CO2...)

Like any chaotic system, it is difficult to predict the outcome, just that temperature is likely to increase. Think about the Mandelbrot set.

In any case, this is where one needs to look at other evidence.
"The community simply isn’t responsible enough to say, “No, this won’t work, re-implement it.” A company with QA is."

Try as I might, I cannot help but to agree with that statement, especially when the stagnant state of Nagios, Cacti, and Munin are concerned.
Having read through some of that leaked code, I can safely say that if they are as bad at climate science as they are at programming, we have nothing to fear. In particular, the assertions that some have made that the "artificial correction for decline" code is commented out, and was only used for testing, is troubling. Test code intertwined with the production code is a recipe for disaster.

And doesn't the phrase Climate Denialism have kind of a religious bent? If Climate Change Skeptics are deniers, then Climate Change Proponents are Global Warming Alarmists. Is there really a need to cloud things with name calling.

And really, are people actually skeptical that the climate is changing, or are they skeptical that's it's changing so severely and destructively that we need to put a trillion dollars on hot.

Hasn't the climate always changed? Wasn't their a 1,000 foot deep, 20,000 sq m lake in Utah, and a land bridge between North America and Western Europe? Is this the one right temperature? By what measure?
It’s not exactly an unresearched problem. Here’s from 1983:

http://www.tug.org/docs/liang/

Here’s a javascript version:

http://code.google.com/p/hyphenator/
Not ad hominem at all: simply inductive reasoning - not foolproof by any means, but often a good pointer.
women can use the b word - no one else can.

This one's actually news to me. I'm glad I never bothered keeping up with trends in political correctness, it seems to be a battle fought over shifting sands that cannot be won.
Thanks!

It's hard to ask for evidence in advance (and probably mildly contrary to the scientific spirit :) ), but at the very least it will have to explain lots of seemingly contrary evidence (or show flaws in _all_ those studies).

update: I should also mention that I'm fairly trusting of at least some of those studies, since I know some people involved in them and they're both smart and trustworthy... Also, I'd be very surprised if CO2 was completely innocent.

There's actually a theory going around that land use may be a contributing factor to climate change along with CO2: a forest absorbs heat differently than a crop field which is different from a city. This theory demonstrates that CO2-based AGW isn't either-or.
Your labeling everyone as denialist certainly does you disservice, if what you after is real and substantive debate.

I submitted this study http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1124236 yesterday and which did not attract much attention, being a weekend. The Study by Joseph D’Aleo and Anthony Watts provides 111 pages of counter arguments to the Climate Change hypothesis.

I got interested in the Climate debate because as a Mechanical Engineer with a PhD, having specialized in Thermodynamics and Fluid Mechanics found it extremely difficult to accept that one could model the Atmosphere's heat balance to the point of accuracy required for such a debate.

Consider a column of air in the atmosphere, the bottom end is at say a temperature of 14 deg C and the top end probably at -60 deg C, add different gases, plus water vapor - which in itself is a greenhouse gas, introduce more CO2 and other pollutants, account for the variability of the Sun's output and try and predict the surface temperature (a vaguely defined term in itself) and you will become skeptical. Even simpler thermal analyses for example that of a building's internal temperature cannot be performed to the required accuracy.

I am also skeptical of the way the Carbon trade is being developed, but that is another story. I can be a skeptic on the Climate debate and an environmentalist on many other issues.

These are issues that touch all of us and do belong to HN.
It's sad, yes, but my friends in the non-CS research sciences could tell you that that code is actually pretty good compared to theirs.

Think for loops that iterate over one element hardcoded arrays. Yea. That bad.
short behaves the same as char. int, long and long long all implicitly cast. Very odd.

gcc v4.4.1, x86
David Brin: Distinguishing Climate "Deniers" From "Skeptics"
/Any suggestions?/

My suggestion would be to step back, realize that climate change is not a religion, and that you do not have to convert others to your cause.

If at that point, you still find it engaging and rewarding to debate the science and policy, go right ahead. But if not, you can ignore it all with no worries
Why husbands need to have female companions?
> When comparing a signed and an unsigned value, the compiler helpfully promotes the signed (-1) to unsigned.

So what do you think the compiler should do? Convert the unsigned into a signed? Disallow comparison/assignment/addition/... without an explicit cast?
In my case, I'd be more skeptical of AGW if there were better theoretical explanations of how large changes in atmospheric CO2 concentration might not cause macroscopic climate changes. As far as I can tell, most of the debate is over the instrumental record, i.e. an argument that as an empirical fact, warming isn't happening. But we do know that CO2 concentrations have increased (I don't think those measurements are controversial), and as far as I can tell the theoretical understanding is that this ought to produce a warming effect. Are there contrary theoretical models that predict that CO2 levels could increase at magnitudes approximately around those we see and yet not produce a warming effect? (Not a rhetorical question; I'm curious if there are.)
They better not screw this up. Adobe has had a lot of bad press lately as their exclusion from the iPad has unearthed lingering annoyances.

If this makes android devices sluggish or causes crashes, it will lend credence to Apple's decision, and old complaints once again get rehashed.
Highly recommend Sperm Wars. Interestingly, it was recommended to me from Tucker Max's reading list, who is the topic of the linked "The New Dating Game" article.
First Look at Notion Ink's "Adam" Tablet
"She maxed out on federal loans, borrowing $152,000 over four years, and sought private loans from Sallie Mae to help make up the difference. She also took out two loans from Wells Fargo & Co. for $20,000 each. Each had a $2,000 origination fee. The total amount she borrowed at the time: $250,000."

Am I reading this incorrectly? $250,000 for 4 years? Thats insane.
That video was hovering around 88% CPU usage whilst playing. It's hard to get excited about a technology you know'll ultimately just burn your battery at a dire rate in comparison to a native app.
Full of unsupported claims. Reads like fiction.
Catching up with the umbrella seller fella (Part 2)
Great, thanks for sharing this.
Ufone GSM
Having done some research work in CS I'm not inclined to cast too many stones at the poor climate scientists just for having outrageously bad code. I was on a project with $N million in funding that had no source control, a concept I was totally ignorant of the time. We had one of our profs attempt to edit the sole copy of the code, running in production, during a customer demo. This is a "Physician, heal thyself" for the academic branch of our discipline.
There's also preference for small businesses, service related disability, veteran, etc. on certain contracts. I'd like to see female and minority preference phased out over time (which it is) due to their success in the overall marketplace, but at present I can see some benefit to keeping preference.
The Complete Sherlock Holmes Cannon
Never understood evolutionary psychology and for that matter any kind of psychological or evolutionary theory because all such theories explain things post facto and don't have any predictive power. It is easy to cook up a theory to explain a whole bunch of facts and evolutionary psychology is one such theory so any time it comes up I completely ignore it.
I blame the sensational state of scientific reporting. Content providers have been in a rush to scare people for as long as I can remember.

It feels that anything reported on in the scientific community I read today which gets enough coverage to become "common knowledge" will have that popular stance make several 180° turns over the next decade. The climate feels like it's in the same vein as vaccine links with autism, or drinking wine while you're pregnant.

To quote Operation Ivy, "All I know is that I don't know, all I know is that I don't know nothing."

What I do know is that climate related science has more revenue, and green products are seeing more investment than ever before, and it's now big business.
I was semi-seriously considering placing an order when they first announced it, but feared pretty much exactly that -- sounds like my fears may not have been unreasonable. Hopefully you can get that dealt with.
Why you should start a business in the university
So they're sorry for the "concern", but not the action? Can they really not understand what was the problem with what they did?

It does look as if they've addressed several major concerns, but they're still bulling on ahead. And it's kind of ballsy after all of that to say that "tens of millions of people had tried the service in its first 48 hours" when "trying the service" appears to have been an unavoidable consequence of checking one's gmail, at least during that window of time.
Just so you know, when you use a pejorative label for those who disagree with you, some of us take you much less seriously.
This has been a problem lately and it isn't confined to the Climate Change debate. There was a recent article from "The Mail" concerning the dissolution of the Euro that was devoid of any real content.

While the possibility of dissolution is real, the article was not. We should avoid sourcing from purely sensationalist sources like spiegel.de and the WSJ opinion page as well, although the latter is clearly more popular on this forum than the former.
True, it is a big deal. Google goofed. But it was incompetence, not malice. Google fixed the problem. Let's move on.
The biggest problem I have with defense contracting is that the people in the contracting office often are not subject matter experts in what they buy.

This is less true with vehicles, pencils, etc. It is particularly true with IT. I'm not very familiar with the huge weapons systems purchases -- those are probably subject to a lot of other factors since there are only a few firms who can compete.

Part of this is due to the general government skills shortage in IT, but more that the top IT people tend to remain in operational roles, vs. going over to contracting.

The problems happen at the requirements phase -- government asking for very specific terms which exclude functional products, e.g. specifying file formats, number and type of hardware, etc. Sometimes this is for integration with existing government equipment, but more often it is because whoever specified the contract doesn't understand the set of possible solutions. In a lot of cases, too, a 95% solution that is COTS (and thus has less schedule risk, lower cost, etc.) is superior to a 100% solution which has to be custom built.

They HAVE gotten a lot better at this in the 1990s and 2000s. Part of the problem is an essentially limitless budget.
Due to a bug report of mine, Calibre's[0] ebook reader uses hyphenator[1] to hyphenate ebooks, but it's a useless feature for now because the WebKit it uses doesn't insert hyphens at the ends of lines, just breaks the word in half. Funny, a test just now shows that Chrome works as expected.

[0]: http://calibre-ebook.com/

[1]: http://code.google.com/p/hyphenator/
Even better would be a resizable div that the user can drag around to see how the text reflows.
Buzzard Strike
Agreed about making that the default.

Another workable approach are keeping a full history graph, and only showing visited links on the site where you originally clicked on them.

Or, the browser could highlight visited links in a way that can't be detected with JavaScript code.

This isn't hard to fix, so obviously we just haven't been complaining loud enough.
Sometimes the Defense department intentionally overpays certain contractors for cheap items as a means of funding secret, off-budget programs.
Because they are less likely to use them. They tend to be more likely clustered in urban areas, less likely to own vehicles (and less vehicles on average) and served by public transportation (trains & subways supported by fares and charged with being self-sufficient) that receives far less in subsidies than roads which are built on the federal dime.

On food delivery and utilities, more externalities imposed by exurban users (more affluent) than urban users. New York City residents are much "greener" and use far less energy than country/exurban dwellers, despite paying for the same Kw at a much more exorbitant price.

Stadiums and public recreation areas are frequented by the affluent, not those living paycheck to paycheck (on average).

Also, I did not even get into all the upside down craziness that tilts tax favoredness to the affluent, but you can check out writings of David Cay Johnston (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Cay_Johnston) who details extensively how the wealthiest Americans enrich themselves at government expense (http://www.democracynow.org/2008/1/18/free_lunch_how_the_wea...).

I will cite one that he begins one of his books with — the burglar alarm subsidy — each time police respond to an alarm (95% being false alarms), it costs the public $50 or more ($2-3B per year), in essence a subsidy, and a diverting of police resources away from other areas (that either go unmet or result in additional costs and increased crime).

Note: edited because for some reason, keep thinking this forum supports Markup…
Predictions: even in a society which has eliminated gender discrimination and doesn't impose any pressure to conform to stereotypical roles, there will be more female teachers and more male engineers, more women than men will quit their jobs to raise children, and males will be overrepresented among criminals, the homeless, and the very top achievers in most fields.

Granted that will be hard to demonstrate, because the very fact of any disparity in outcomes can also "prove" that discrimination still exists.
Garmin GPSMAP 76S GPS SYSTEM
The GPSMAP 76S has a built-in electronic compass that provides bearing information even while you're standing still, and its barometric altimeter tracks changes in pressure to pinpoint your precise altitude. You can even use the altimeter to plot barometric or ambient pressure over time, which can help you keep an eye on changing weather conditions.
Evolutionary psychology already supports predictions concerning the mating behaviors of all other animal species; there's no special additional reason to make the theory more complicated by excluding us from it.
Perhaps notes taped to bricks delivered by volunteers wasn't the sort of message they were trying to send.