skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I don't know if it puts the burden on the challenger, as Feynman said the duty of the scientist is to bend over backwards to explain all the ways that you might be wrong. The climate scientists do not do this; in fact they claim to understand complex cyclical systems that they've observed a small fraction of. I think they've greatly overplayed their hand and were very sloppy in their thinking.

So in this case, I'd say the burden is on them - they are making extraordinary claims that are difficult to verify. Climate science is extremely hard - lack of data, a huge complex non-linear system, lack of understanding of subsystems -- yet they claim to have it figured out.
Still, sending them an email is good customer service.
This undeserved downvoting I keep seeing might make me just vomit HN out of my life.

I agree with you, it was a bit melodramatic. And slow. I don't know if I should bother reading it.
A couple of minor notes on Feynman's claims.

First, a number of studies have concluded that by any reasonable measure, atheists tend to be more ethical than religious people as a whole. This shows up in under-representation in criminal activity, lower divorce rates, etc. (There are a number of sociological reasons for this, but those are the statistics.)

Secondly surveys that I saw a long time ago suggest that Feynman was wrong about most scientists in his day. At that time most scientists were religious. (Still at lower rates than the general public.) However most elite scientists were atheists. Which supports the thesis that the more seriously you take science, the harder it is to subscribe to traditional religion.

But this has shifted over time. While looking for that old survey I ran across http://www.nytimes.com/2005/08/23/national/23believers.html?... which says that today about 40% of scientists believe in a personal God that they pray to, etc. But if you look at members of the National Academy of Sciences (an elite group of scientists), about 10% believe in God.

So it seems that, in yet another way, Feynman was a man ahead of his time...
Why don't you create an app that solves that particular problem and give it away free on the condition that you can dish up and split Google ads on the app. Create a site where they can automatically update their hours. Some simple loan calculators made good money referring people to mortgage
companies a few years ago.
The dealkiller for me was it saves version info in it's application dir. Since my C:\ drive is typically very small it blows out the available space.

So... back to using gmail-drive
I think you are missing a certain perspective that some of the commentators here are sharing. If you take Swombat's perspective as an entrepreneur that both greatly appreciates Dropbox as a utility, but also sees how it's ease of use makes the company potentially very lucrative and wants the same level of craftsmanship for his own company. Then these things blend to make and awesome product. Similarly, the ipod was awesome for those who love music.

I don't know Swombat, so I don't mean to misattribute thoughts to him, but I believe there is truth to the perspective I described. Also, I am not suggesting you "just don't get startups" or anything dumb like that.
"Cars, electricity, furniture, plumbing, health, advertising, the economy, and most certainly, computers."

The list you gave is almost entirely technology and math-driven. I know plenty of people who would list "emotions, families, friends, sports, celebrities" or other non-technology-based lists and claim to be equally well-educated.

A focus on technology is not the only way "to understand the world around oneself"--there are plenty of people who understand non-technology parts of the world around us and expend just as much mental energy doing it.

I would say that "the central divide between this community and the world at large" is not a desire to understand the world, but rather a focus on intelligent use of technology. Other very intelligent and motivated people focus their understanding on other aspects of the world.
I'd be skeptical of any product that guaranteed to keep my data safe and only cost $3/mo.

Depending on usage, it could be really interesting to consider a Fog Creek Copilot-like business model: charge a reasonable monthly fee for unfettered access and a small fee for one-off usage.

That way, you could nail that $3 a pop sort of usage, and guarantee yourself a steady stream of income at the $20-$30 range.
Where did I say that I, personally had to empirically experience something to accept it as fact? I edited my post in case it caused confusion.

All I meant was that I will only accept science that is grounded in empiricism, because that is the only basis for concrete, logical, conclusions from science.

Where science and religion differ (the unempirical), I'm going with my own intuition and convictions, because science is no more correct or certain than religion.

Just in case though, can you get on Skype so I can make sure I'm not arguing with an octopus? =P
Your damn right there smallblacksun. The IRA started a "proxy bombing" campaign in the early 1990's (the 1st modern terrorist group to do so). If they can do something like that, you can bet yer arse that the people who send suicide bombers wouldn't hesitate to do the same.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proxy_bomb
Yes, I meant hasn't. Sorry for not proof reading.
"Except this isn't true, at all, so you can throw out that invalid assumption. The things a religious believer does (at least, speaking for myself) are done out of love for a God greater than them, not done out of fear."

Isn't true at all? Speaking as an ex-Catholic, I was doing many things out fear of a particularly nasty and vengeful super-being. And I know I was not alone in this among my fellow believers.

Anecdotal to be sure, but it's interesting how often the pain and punishment awaiting those who step astray gets mentioned in some religious texts.

Seems pretty clear that the authors themselves did not expect love of the almighty to be sufficient to keep the flocks in line.

'At least religion calls our certainty in the unempirical "faith". In science, that f-word is a big no-no, it would be heresy to admit they have no greater certainty about the true unknowns (aka "why") than does religion.'

Again, YMMV, but my experience with the Catholic Church is that very few members spoke about god, hell, limbo, miracles, etc. as if they were interesting conjectures, speculations born from an absence of empirical evidence.

No, these things were put forth as being no less factual than the presence of the sun and the rain and the snow; you were to accept them as fact; this was your act of faith.

The most striking difference I've seen between science and religion is the degree to which people readily admit that what they are saying could very well be wrong, and the extent to which doubt and skepticism is actively encouraged.
That is part of the allure of being built based on LLVM. Recompile some C and C++ libraries using the gcc or clang front-end to LLVM and now HLVM has ton of libraries it can access.
I really like the dropbox experience but I really wish they didn't limit the download bandwidth.

My dropbox is about 35 GB, I just installed dropbox on a brand new computer and the download speed is 7KB/sec. It will literally take almost 20 days to sync my files.

That's terrible.

By the way, I'm an early adopter and have introduced dropbox to many people, I just hope download speeds were somewhat decent.
I'd have a room with rear-projection screens for walls. The wallpaper & hanging pictures would change depending on who came over.

It would be used to virtually attend concert events.

There'd be some sort of virtual reality mode that scaled images to adapt and make the corners invisible, so it could look like I'd be eating my microwave dinner at the top of Mt. Everest, or underwater in a coral reef.
Why CouchDB over MongoDB and Riak? Distributability.
Bend or Break: Choosing a Datastore for Web Applications. Why CouchDB over MongoDB and Riak? Distributability
Driving Distracts Cell Phone Users
The only time I can remember actually needing to write a binary search from scratch, I played it safe by copying it straight out of an algorithms textbook (post-1962)...and it had a much worse bug than this one!
Much more interesting to me is getting to see their pitch deck. That's reason enough to click through.
From my brief research into this area, it seems what restaurants want to do is increase profits. Information like who their best customers are and their preferences (like Casino VIP databases). Data on what is selling. The daily or even real-time profit/loss. Is this what the industry giant behind OpenTable does? Is OpenTable too big to fail (e.g. restaurants will continue to pay them annual maintenance because it is a legacy system)? Can OpenTable's database be cleanroom reverse engineered so that it can be migrated to a new competitor platform?
Bertrand Russell's writings on the topic are classics on the dealings of science and religion. This essay reminded me a bit of A Free Man's Worship:

http://www.philosophicalsociety.com/Archives/A%20Free%20Mans...

I read this collection of his essays on religion about a decade ago and would recommend it to folks interested in the topic:

http://www.amazon.com/Russell-Religion-Selections-Writings/d...

I feel like Feynman (and Russell) are asking a much more interesting question than the typical interwebs atheists and jesus-ists debate that this is already turning into: not, "Is religion right?" But, "What is the future of religious experience, thought and practice in a scientific world?"
Make stuff. Make new stuff. Make the old stuff better. Find people who are good at making stuff. Make stuff with them. Get them to tell you why your stuff sucks. Make your stuff suck less. Find stuff you like. Study how that stuff was made. Make stuff like it. Do not read stuff or listen to stuff that does not help you actually make stuff. Realize that making stuff is easy but making the right stuff is very hard -- optimize efforts accordingly.
Ah, Dresden Codak. I dropped him from my RSS a long time ago. Nice to catch up with his latest work. He always makes me think.
People often "give up" on a site a few times before they become a regular user. I do this all the time; For example, I signed up for HN "675 days ago" but I think I might have made 1 or 2 comments in the first 200 days.
> The part about having 0 posts was explained by Meaghan all the way at the bottom of the page. The RSS feed shows deleted posts.

The screenshots that Pitchfork Media posted would have to be RSS screenshots because that is the only place that you can access the old posts right now, no? Pitchfork Media had no reason to screenshot the old pitchfork.tumblr.com before this whole drama-fest started.

I think that it's telling that Pitchfork Media also dealt with a 'Megan' (the same person?). To me, it's equally likely that this Meaghan was the person that deleted the account and turned it over to Pitchfork Media, and now she's trying to cover her ass by saying that the person was notified, and that the blog was completely empty. Has she really stated anything that could not be a lie on her part? This whole thing looks like it could just be a he-said-she-said deal.

[edit]
The best I can come up with is this:

http://74.125.155.132/search?q=cache:HRNL2z4fQcwJ:pitchfork....

The Google cache for his last blog post was fetch on Nov 24.
This seems more like a limitation of the language implementation than a program bug to me.
Never.

I use a RSS reader rarely browse the site. I also don't see a RSS feed for http://news.ycombinator.com/newest .
For the Open Hours feature, is there a way for a restaurant to tell you (the service) that "we're closed for the next 3.5 days because the cook is sick/waitstaff is on strike/owner is attending a funeral," or something similar? For some reason I seem to end up standing outside quite a few restaurants with little handwritten signs saying "closed", right next to the sign listing the hours they're open (which include the present one.)
I think you totally misread the motivational factors here. That guy (aka Tumbledore) could easily want to lie to bolster the justification for the indignation he obviously feels. Meaghan, OTOH, has many more reasons not to want to lie, foremost of which is that she is representing an entire actual company. Tumbledore has nothing to lose and everything to gain, since all that's at stake here is his internet "personal brand", for which notoriety is the stock-in-trade.

UPDATE: sh4na is correct that I misinterpreted "that guy" to mean Tumbledore, not Ryan of Pitchfork. The 10 minutes vs. 72 hours discrepancy is significant, but to presume that Ms. O'Connell is lying over-reaches. That is, unless one presumes that she's personally conducted an investigation of the support staff's emails and the account management history in order to satisfy the ego of an entitled netbrat, and is now knowingly misrepresenting the true facts of this very important matter.
This is in a similar vein to an earlier essay by the same author: http://ieet.org/index.php/IEET/print/2181/

In the aforelinked one, he skeptically critiques the idea of evolution into hominids from the perspective of a primate. It's an enjoyable read, if not exactly the soundest case for a Kurzweilian singularity.
Honestly, that doesn't really look too bad to me. Meghan told us how it went down from her point of view.

Its refreshing to see a response that doesn't contain loads of obfuscated spin.
I'll repeat the quote "The popular data sets show a lot of warming but the apparent temperature rise was actually caused by local factors affecting the weather stations, such as land development."

If the apparent temperature rise was actually due to other factors, what's the basis for the claim that there is warming?

> certainly haven't even put a dent in current estimated global climate change

So what? It's an estimate, one that happens to be wrong. If the estimate and the reality are different, why should we pay attention to the estimate?

As the leaked emails said, the models don't predict what's actually happening. Why should we act as if they do?
It seems to me that this "fix" just pushes the bug off by a factor of 2. What happens when you have an array with more elements than can be expressed by an int?

I also question the mergesort assertion. I've implemented mergesort several times, almost always expressed in terms of writing to/from pipes of data (that under the hood eventually wound up going to disk I/O in some way). Those solutions will not suffer from any form of this bug for the simple reason that you never access anything by index.

The curious might wonder why I felt a need to implement such a well-known algorithm myself. Well in addition to the times I did it for fun, one time I had a large dataset to process that had already broken the database, and the computer I had to process it with didn't have enough disk space for the whole dataset. So I needed to do a mergesort while keeping all data that hit disk in compressed form...
Unfortunately, his basic premise is incorrect. Key to every Carbon Management program I've ever read about involves Carbon Sequestration - I.E. Net Negative Carbon reduction. (Think about Planting Trees, growing carbon hungry algae, etc..)

Still, a really great presentation.
I remember reading this (back in 2006?) and looking at the versions of Binary Search and Merge Sort that I had recently written for the Data Structures & Algorithms class that I teach. I found that my versions did not have this bug, despite the fact that I had not given any thought to it.

The reason my code did not have the bug is that I represented the range to be processed, not as low & high subscripts, but rather using a pair of iterators (this was in C++). And you cannot add two iterators. So instead of mid = (low + high)/2, you get something like size = high - low and then mid = low + size/2, where size is an integer, and low, high, mid are iterators.

There is a lesson to be learned here, certainly. I am not exactly sure what it is in its full generality, but I think we can conclude that the endpoints of a range, regardless of how they are represented, are not things that should be added together.
I'm a massive Spotify user and fan and I pay $16/mo for its "all you can eat" model. As much as I love it, this post seems to reflect my fear that it's probably not going to last too long..

I used to spend perhaps $50 a month on albums on iTunes and I haven't bought a thing since Spotify (and have listened to a much wider variety of stuff that I wouldn't have "gambled" on previously).

When a regular music buyer like me decides a $16/mo service is "enough", that's hardly going to thrill any musician, let alone the record companies.
The purpose of the site isn't to discount non-technical cofounders. Being a product guy myself, I recognize the important of product vision, strategy, as well as other non-technical expertise like contract law, etc etc. That said, from my personal experience I've had a lot more people ping me about intros to good coders than to non-technical folks who want to start a company. After evaluating the other tools/services out there to meet interested parties I decided to build techcofounder.com b/c I felt it served the greatest void in this area.

-Ben
There's a popular misconception that science answers questions like "Why?" or "How?"

But that's not the heart of it. Strip away the math and jargon and theories--all the messy details that make the engine of science turn--and it all comes down to answering "What next?".

Making up silly stories about why something happened is perhaps humanity's second-oldest pass-time. Science is the unprecedented art of making up silly stories about what hasn't yet happened, then throwing out stories that didn't come true. The astonishing part is that many times, when people started extending those stories to things they hadn't known of when the story was invented, or that they couldn't easily see happening--the stories kept working!

It may be the case that these flights of fancy, increasingly accurate in their predictions, describe reality, or answer questions like "Why" and "How"--but if they don't, it doesn't really matter.

So when you tell yourself a story about things that happen, and use that to form expectations of what will happen next, and most importantly get rid of stories that led you astray--that's Doing Science. And if you tell your friends about that story, and it helps them form expectations that work--that's where scientific knowledge comes from. It's not about truth, or certainty, or very formal and proper double-blind experiments, or answering Great Questions, or any of that stuff. It's about "What's next?", nothing more, nothing less.

So, what's left? What is it that science isn't? I suppose--stories that aren't expected to predict anything, perhaps; ideas without implication, freed from the burden to inform today your anticipations for tomorrow, to guide your actions with the knowledge of expected consequence. So the question is: What is the purpose of an idea that impacts not at all what one thinks will happen in the future? Answer that, and you have found what science will never touch.
What the Brain Values May Not Be What it Buys
> The problem is that a lot of people are irrationally scared of anything with the word "nuclear" in it.

A lot of people are also scared of spiders.
"Being arrested and accused of what is probably one of the worst crimes known to man, losing my job, having my reputation run through the mud, it's a living nightmare."

I love how downloading a stream of bytes - simply copying a file from A to B - is now "one of the worst crimes known to man". I wonder how long this kind of crap goes on before the average person considers it a good use of their time to learn about encryption.
I can see why Tumblr though it was abandoned:

From March 14, 2009:

DON'T FOLLOW ME

I AM NOT A REAL TUMBLE BLOG, I AM USED AS A FILTER
SINCE TUMBLR TOOK AWAY MY REAL FILTER.

From Nov 18, 2009:

I Have Found The Tumblr Filter

This Filter is Obsolete

How can this guy claim (with a straight face) that he was actually using this as a blog, when he has posts on the blog explicitly stating that it is not a blog?

Personally, I think there is enough blame to go around:

* Meaghan is probably trying to cover her ass because she over-stepped herself in removing this blog without notification to the user because she though it was abandoned.

* Tumbldore is just using this to generate drama and publicity. It's also possible that Tumbldore is just a giant troll that had this whopper of a piece of bait dumped onto his lap, so now he's just going to milk it for all it's worth.
i think very soon Buzz will gain Wave-like text editing capabilities. You can run a whole blog from within Buzz.
Facebook | David Bradford Hall
A few minor corrections:

When the BBC talks about "two new power stations" what they mean is "two new AP1000 reactors being added to an existing site". So this is actually a single power plant. But I find it more productive to talk about reactors anyway.

Second, the largest reactors today are about 1.6 GW. The reactors being built here are 1.1 GW AP1000s. That affects your numbers.
Tell HN: Melbourne Hacker News meetup this Sunday.
A reminder to Melbourne Hacker News readers that the Melbourne meetup is on this Sunday from 3pm at Match Bar in the city.

Meet your local hackers and founders and maybe get some advice on your YC app from a YC-funded startup.

More details on the Facebook page: http://www.facebook.com/event.php?eid=272449838595&ref=ts
> 2. Have the politicians and pundits turn their attention to funding and/or raising money for the literally millions of clean energy startups out there. Because the easiest fix here is energy entrepreneurialism. Space based Solar Power alone could fix this problem.

How about not. Politicians don't "raise money" - they take it, by force.

Invest your money in whatever you'd like. I hope that you get rich. But leave me out of it.
Clickable link: http://www.facebook.com/event.php?eid=272449838595&ref=t...
Before Dropbox, there were already 80+ attempts at doing exactly the same thing by various other companies (Microsoft by itself was responsible for at least eight of them concurrently.), and none of them worked well enough that they were ever adopted by anyone you've heard of. Dropbox is just right, and not for technological reasons, but rather for perfect customer fit.

To put it another way—it takes more people to build a bridge than to craft a samurai sword, but which metalworker brought more experience to bear? Games are regularly pushed out by developers just starting in the industry—all that's required of them is a willingness to be on the bleeding edge of graphics hardware APIs, and precious, precious manhours. Dropbox, on the other hand, could only have been designed by someone with an extremely high aptitude for user interfaces.
More like "Bill Gates no longer makes his own PPTs"
Was the last time you checked thirty years ago?
Reminds me of an erstwhile Egyptian colleague of mine who said that he was "randomly selected" for screening every single time that he passed through the check-in gates at an airport.
Freemium Design Pattern: Scale Pricing with Customer Success
> It's hard to see what could have gone differently

Really??? It would have been trivial for them to check and see that the child porn was purchased in Indonesia they should have been able to do a very quick check on his border records and see that he did not visit there. Instead they were just lazy and cast a wide net and pulled everything in. I hope he considers suing them.
This could be an MIT alumni composite - http://www.dropbox.com/about

Scary smart folks.
Total US power consumption is about 790 GW. An AP1000 reactor is about 1.1 GW. A typical installation like this one has two reactors. Therefore it would take about 360 of these power plants to provide all the US's electrical needs.

To just replace coal, build 150 of these 2.2 GW power plants. I'm taking these numbers from

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_in_the_United_States#Ele...