skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I'm not so sure they're as analgous as you might think. In this case, a central part of the controversy surrounds allegations (based on the leaked emails) that the researchers at East Anglia were attempting to manipulate the peer review process itself. In my opinion, this is by far the worst part of the whole climategate fiasco. If you assume all their research and methods are solid, it is still inexcusable to try and prevent contradictory evidence from going into the literature.

A good example of this is Barry Marshall's initial work on stomach ulcers (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barry_Marshall). The common wisdom until the 1980's was that they were caused by spicy food and stress. Marshall and a colleague had isolated Helicobacter pylori from the gut of patients afflicted with stomach ulcers. They were unable to show the bacteria were the causative agent (a crucial point if you're alleging infection). Nevertheless, his initial paper was published. Subsequently, he actually drank a flask of the things to prove that they caused stomach ulcers (and later published those results). This wasn't 50 years ago either, it was only in 1984. His initial paper could have easily been spiked by the reviewers since extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof. But it made it through, even through it contradicted the position of the vast majority of physicians. I often wonder what would have happened if his peers had spiked his initial paper and labeled him a crazy 'stress caused ulcer denier' who should be marginalized for threatening the safety of patients.
it's also evidence of premeditation and if it forms a pattern, that bodes very badly for the sentence
University will go carbon neutral
As someone just starting out with an SaaS product this is an extremely helpful article. I've put together much of this from various sources but it's nice to have it all in one place.

xal/3pt14159/others - are there any other saas metrics articles you've found useful? I'd love to check them out as well
SEO-friendly: jQuery allowed us to represent all of the data in HTML, so Google and other search engines can gobble it up and help us make it more discoverable.

If the map was done in Flash and embedded with SWFObject, you would also be able to place alternate HTML data (in the <div> where the SWF is placed). So, this point isn't really valid.
deify is the word. but we get what you mean.
This was really interesting.. seems like a whole new take on API in a sense..
IMO (and this seems to be supported by modern American culture), if a man isn't wearing suspenders he should be wearing a belt.
To answer your questions: Probably yes, and certainly yes. The intelligent design movement has made a whole documentary film about their systematic exclusion from the scientific process, for pete's sake!

For a specific example, a biology journal associated with the Smithsonian published an intelligent design paper -- and as a result, its publisher was immediately forced out, and the newly installed publisher printed a complete retraction. Further, many evolutionary biologists don't just work to prevent ID papers from being published; they actively advocate shutting down any journals that do publish it...

The thing is, if you believe that evolution is on solid footing, and the ID movement's attempts to cast doubt on it are junk science, then all of the above is perfectly appropriate -- but if you believe that evolution is actually a flawed theory, then all of the above is evidence of ideologically driven 'bad science'! The parallels continue.
that's probably the right thing to do. i'm thinking about it.
length of ellipsis is proportional to how far I felt you'd missed the point of the original joke
Buy some fancy clothes before the IRS takes half. haha

Congratulations. Breaking into any top ranks of the app store is always exciting. I would ask yourself if there is a long-term, after-work, or short-term play here and act accordingly.
This could be intentional. Like how human perception sometimes requires exponentional changes to perceive a difference. Example: The audio decibel scale.
No Joke: How to Get an Ivy League Education For Free
How about we want an open standards Internet and the 90% monopoly Microsoft has on the desktop really endangers that? After all, ms wouldn't give a crap about open standards unless pushed.
I think the question is, did the person make the previously private information available more widely, or did Google (or Facebook, or whoever else controls the big database and previously implied that access to that data would be restricted)?
Motorola Droid OTA Android 2.1 update [video]
Safari books online or Books 24 x 7. I may never buy a paper copy of a technical book again.
I bet if you tracked our internet habits you would come to similar conclusions.
While some of the bloggers are just using this to add fuel to the fire of the "there is no such thing as Global Warming" movement, the evidence against what these 'scientists' were doing is pretty damning.

What we have here is a dishonest person that fudged his work in a dubious manner attacking other people who used the evidence of his transgressions to further their own political goals. It's literally like the pot calling the kettle black. Though there are probably some moderate bloggers caught in the middle somewhere, but that happens when you make blanket statements with things like "all bloggers" in them.
I'm definitely following this and waiting for when you get the browser rendering complete. The could be really great.
My point was that I don't see how the two are related - if you're building off a branch you can still write a pom that builds your particular branch and the rest of the trunk code and gives you all the benefits of CI.
it's impossible to buy non-group health insurance for a planned pregnancy. and there's enough scary stuff that COULD happen that you wouldn't want to be pregnant without. Old people have medicare. It's young people who have any medical needs at all who are screwed by the current system.
If you can create arbitrage situations for customers you can generate a decent amount of buzz in certain circles. Off the top of my head one way to do it is to offer to buy gift cards for more than 95% of their value. Some people have credit cards that give them back 5% on grocery store purchases and many grocery stores sell gift cards. If the folks on FatWallet Finance (http://www.fatwallet.com/forums/finance) get wind of it (heck, post it yourself) they'll jump all over it and you've got immediate exposure to hundreds of people. I would set limits though and do it only sporadically lest you end up w/ a huge surplus of gift cards that may take you a while to sell.

To get a sense for the kind of exposure you can get here's a thread from another arbitrage situation (buy dollar coins from the US government at face value, collect credit card rewards/cash back, deposit coins into bank account). These guys went nuts and the US Mint policies were actually changed to combat it. There's an article somewhere from a press conference where the US Mint publicly addressed it but I'm too lazy to dig it up right now.
http://www.fatwallet.com/forums/finance/837472

Also, on occasion people post in the forums questions like "How can I turn $X credit limit into cash." Set up relevant topic alerts (http://www.fatwallet.com/forums/alerts.php) and respond by letting them know they can buy gift cards and then convert them into cash on your site.

I'm a regular in that forum so let me know (contact info in profile) if you want any guidance in posting to FatWallet Finance.
I'm crossposting my comment from a very similar Reddit thread (although that thread was more about "omg, insurance companies are teh evilz"). Hopefully I get some more meaningful discussion about it here.

------------

Insurance companies are not money piñatas. They are insurance. The premise is that you have a low probability of having a massive expense. You pool your money with others (via the insurance company) to cover it if it happens to be you who gets unlucky.

The insurance model falls apart when somebody is already sick. Then it's no longer a low probability of having the expense, it's almost guaranteed. So now insurance is the wrong financial model. Charity, or a publicly funded option is, since it becomes a moral issue (we don't let people die of stuff we can fix), rather than a financial (I pay in a bit, possibly need large payout).

That's not to say they aren't evil, and want their profits, and go out of their way to be dicks about it, but all the hubbub about existing conditions just shows that insurance is the wrong model for health care coverage.

I fully support a public option, which is effectively an insurance company that also has the moral backing of paying for blatantly unprofitable cases. It won't be perfect, and might suck in many cases, but it sure would be much better than any insurance based health care system could be.
California's 'Pacific Gas and Electric' becomes 'Pacific Google and Electric'
Restuarants regularly give away free samples to gain "word of mouth" reputation.
1) I assume that by using "We" you mean you and I and a few others because it's painfully clear to me that approximately 90% of the browser using world could care less.

2) Is using force the only way to accomplish the goal of open standards?
Demos not Slides, Young not Geek
You think allegations of peer-review manipulation don't exist for vaccines or intelligent design?

http://justgetthere.us/blog/archives/Scientific-Censorship-o...

(The allegations of censorship far pre-date the email leak -- the leaked emails simply added fuel to the fire.)

(Edit: one too many "don't"s)
Yeah, it had a pretty small mention in the 1.6.6 release notes, but you can learn about it here:

http://www.kernel.org/pub/software/scm/git/docs/git-http-bac...

It works great - we'll get it supported server-side on github soon.
hehe you think you get >= 50kbps without ever going under for more than a few seconds ? I guess you've never been on dial up
They have a 90% desktop monopoly, and have had one for almost two decades. The Internet, mobile devices and the browser will finally fix this problem.

Competition is good for consumers and the Europeans are making an effort to increase it.

Imagine if General Motors sold 90% of all cars. Good for consumers or bad?
Someone build this
analytics, fulltext search services and recommendation services are live examples of this in the wild already.
What evidence do you have that any papers where blocked? The papers discussed in the email - McKitrick and Michaels (2004) and Kalnay and Cai (2003) - where both published and even referenced in the IPCC.

One frustrated scientist doesn't have the power to "redefine what the peer-review literature is"
which is not payable via twitpay.
And, of course, some categories do more volume than others. I hit the top 10 in a category and was making < $100/day
> The intelligent design movement has made a whole documentary film about their systematic exclusion from the scientific process, for pete's sake!

And so on with Astrology, Alchemy, and the Humours theory of medicine. These things are not science and do not deserve the dignity and resources of scientific consideration. ID is an unverifiable postulation (with no explanatory power) about the origins of the universe, whereas the IPCC kerfuffle is all about scientists wanting to do science, review the data, etc.
FCC wants schools to become community Internet hubs
I agree that bad laws are worse than no laws, but how long exactly does it take? It's really not that hard to think through the consequences of modern technology providing massive data storage, fast data mining, and a worldwide communications network with near instant data transmission and plenty of bandwidth. It's also not as if these are new developments or things we could not see coming.

I can completely accept not rushing out a law in five minutes, but this has been coming for at least a decade, and it's been a huge and blindingly obvious issue for several years, ever since the social networking sites and data hoarders like Google got big. There have been plenty of serious data loss cases, including those with very serious consequences. There have been plenty of cases where databases have come incorrect, deliberately or carelessly, and those have serious consequences too.

Failing to update privacy and data protection laws by now isn't caution, it's negligence.
Google doesn't know which of her most-emailed contacts are likely to abuse her. She does. It's her responsibility to set her privacy settings and buzz accordingly. I'd support laws that would prohibit Google intentionally misleading people about what is public and what stays private, but Google buzz is not a good example of that.

Schmidt's address is certainly not a matter of public record. Read the original source [1]. The town and his wife's name were found through a local newspaper, and his home address was found through her political donations, which she unwisely entered as originating from her home address, without realizing that those are a matter of public record and would be published by the FEC. The only role Google played here is indexing the newspaper article and providing an the software The Huffington Post used to visualise FEC data. Google did not "collect" this in any sense appropriate here.

1. http://news.cnet.com/Google-balances-privacy,-reach/2100-103...
I agree. As a rule, if a site contains those pesky double-underlined links that display "contextually relevant" advertising on HOVER, I won't read the article.

That said, nobody really gives NBC much credence these days. Another big media outfit on its way out -- for exactly this sort of stupid behavior with regard to coverage. And Bob Costas, hate to say it, has never been "genuine". He's the biggest schmooze in the business. Always has been.
I don't understand this big hold up about advertising. He's making a living. As long as he provides excellent content, what do you care? I have advertising on my blog as well and it pays a lot of my bills right now and helps me work on my startup more, but none of my readers have mentioned that the ads annoy them because I always have good content. For example I live-blogged Startup Riot 2010 on wednesday http://paulstamatiou.com/live-blogging-startup-riot-2010
Why do people in the software business feel the constant need to compare it to other fields? I don't know of any other profession that does.

I think the restaurant analogy is flawed because the accounting for fixed and variable costs doesn't jibe. You can bootstrap a software company with minimal investment - as YC itself proves, but restaurants require a building, cooking equipment, tables, chairs, dishes, etc. Plus, you can start a software business in your spare time - something I doubt too many restaurateurs attempt.
"It's a TAX on the YOUNG to care for the OLD."

<sarcasm>
Yeah! Who do those old people think they are, getting all weak and sickly!?
</sarcasm>

Most of the western world believes that society should be taxed to provide health care for everyone. Like education, welfare, and social security, it's something we all pay for to live in a moral, civilized society. Thank God Ayn Rand doesn't run the universe and the government forces you and me to pay for Grandpa's medication.
The issue is availability of information. The further from the point of purchase you get, the more difficult it is to properly credit parts of the funnel with driving purchase intent. Most analytics tools don't do a good job of crediting multiple parts of the funnel for the purchase attempt. Google Analytics, for example, can only credit one campaign per conversion event, which by default is the most recent one (it can be configured to the first one, within a time window). Engagements earlier in the funnel that drive purchase intent aren't properly credited, so they look like a less efficient place to allocate funds than the really are. The result is that resources are being allocated correctly based on the information, but the information is wrong, so as a whole the market is inefficient. Ad allocation tends to be relentlessly data-driven in optimizing, but also rather heads-down: people trust the data too much, without necessarily recognizing the flaws of the tools.
Minor quibble: patent prosecution is the process of getting a patent from the PTO. Patent enforcement is suing a startup for infringement.
Please refer to my post below that starts out with "Insurance companies are not money piñatas". Explain why a planned pregnancy is a candidate for an insurance payout?

(not that I don't think pregnancy should be covered, just not by an insurance company, but by a morally based public plan without the profit motive, or insurance model).
It certainly has to do with their data centers. It is not unusual for a company to take over handling one of their dependencies to reduce risk and cost. If they do it as good or better than others already established in that market, then the smarter companies will turn around and convert that into a revenue generating business which on the surface does not appear connected with their original core business.

Amazon did exactly that with cloud storage and EC2. The difference is that unlike the energy industry which is regulated they did not need to get the gov't's permission.

Similarly, its just a matter of time before Apple starts selling on the open market the processor chip they developed exclusively for the IPad.
Why I'm dropping Google
One problem with opening the upper echelons to lower classes, is that the lower classes are more desperate for money and thus more easily corrupted. You couldn't offer GW Bush much that he didn't already have as a result of his family's status, but you might have more luck with the son of a poor steel worker like Rod Blagojevich.
How to create network diagrams online for free
Ask HN: What to do after graduation?
I will graduate with a BA in computer science from a top-ranked university in the UK this summer and I am not sure what to do next. I applied to some PhD programs in the US but didn't get into any of these. My goal is to do get a Masters from Stanford, but I will have to wait another year until I can apply.

My question is: what do I do for one year? I am not looking for a job on this platform. I am not trying to get hired - yet. Instead, try to put yourself in my situation. Just got a BA in computer science in the UK, want to do a Masters in the US, but need to do sth for a year in between. What would _you_ do? Would you just travel around and take it easy? Would you try to get a job? If yes, what kind of job? A regular job? An internship at Google? Try to get a research internship at Stanford? Try to join a startup?

I realize that in the end I am the only one who can answer this question for myself. Yet, given that most of you guys are more experienced than I am (concerning startups and maybe life in general), I am curious as to what you would do if you were in my position.

I am sorry if I come across as unprepared. And I realize this question might be too generic. Yet, if someone can give some useful insight, I am all ears.
Your plugin looks great. Is it released under a specific license? I didn't see any mention of one on the page.

(http://www.newmediacampaigns.com/page/a-jquery-plugin-for-zo... for anyone who's curious)
Wasn't this in a William Gibson book? edit: Virtual Light, I think.
I don't know. I don't think it's black and white. I suppose my concern with software patents is this, why are software engineers in another category of intellectual from mechanical engineers, chemical engineers, and civil engineers?

For example, almost every computer system can be represented by a physical equivalent. I could write revolutionary software that enables the push of a button to do a lot of work, which previously required an entire factory of employees perhaps, and right now, I could patent that. Without software patents I couldn't.

However, if I invent a big machine, that does the same thing my software did, and I build it with gears and levers and conveyor belts, I could patent that. No one argues that I shouldn't be allowed to patent a physical device or the design for a physical device.

But people argue that I shouldn't be allowed to patent a software device that does exactly the same thing as the hardware device.

Why the bias toward the physical? Why don't abstract inventions carry the same worthiness of intellectual protection that physical devices afford?
> Let's imagine, company which will not depend on any other company.

And, pray tell, where would they get the cash?
opencalais, alchemyapi, websolr, and directed edge come to mind.
what category is that? seems like it would be a good optimization to try to hit parts of the store that don't have much competition.
That's incredibly shortsighted. The young are the only people who really do need to insure their health, because by and large they're the only people who don't know how they're going to die yet, or how much it's going to cost. They're the only ones with any uncertainty.

The fact that a healthy young person can fail to buy insurance because they "don't need it" (because they're never going to get sick - hah!) and then obtain it later on in life when they need medical coverage is completely broken. How are insurance companies supposed to make money like that? Why, by dropping people when they actually get sick.

Who would ever buy this product? How on earth can you sell it? The only way that it even begins to make sense is if you have to have it for your entire life.
Ahh... Makes sense, that was a pretty bad analogy. Just be glad I didn't try to make a joke ;-)
Agreed. Software patents hinder innovation. Large companies can afford to create and license patents; startups launch products/web services and hope not to trip any of those "landmines" when they become successful.
A big problem for this would be the transfer of data to and from the API. Imagine an algo to analyze gigabytes or terabytes of data.

Also, protection of the data as it is being transfered, stored, and analyzed is an issue. This is both data integrity and also protection for privacy or confidentiality reasons.
"Our online services platform will require a maximum of 50kbps of available bandwidth, so even with the slowest connection, gameplay won’t be affected."

What on earth are they transferring to/from the server that requires up to 50Kbps of bandwidth? The only legitimate thing I can think of would be if the were logging user's movements through the game, and even that is kind of sketchy...
Let Your Data Go
That's the fremium model, yes. I was referring to people who demand that all software is easy and should be free.
I think that this will also be good to make users aware of what a browser is, since a lot of people just think of IE as "the internet".
Right effect, wrong explanation. IP products don't become cheaper because creators magnanimously lower the prices, it's because they become less valuable because they've used up the market and are replaced by new products from competitors and creators.

For instance, when people stop seeing movies for full price, they go to second run or dollar theaters. Paperback books come out when hardback sales lag (note - this is on a predicted schedule based on experience, not on real time signals). Windows Vista costs a lot less than Windows 7 does right now, and everyone has seen the disgusting bargain bins of DVDs for $5.

IP creators would happily charge high prices until the end of time but competition prevents them from doing so. In circumstances where competition is limited or markets have failed, they can do so for a long time. Windows + Office is a good example - they're so embedded in people's and companies' experience that they can't be commoditized, so they have maintained high prices and profit margins for a generation.
This is true. A possible solution is if the service was run in EC2, you could leverage the speed on the amazon network if the data was already stores in S3.