skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> It's only one of three different sources of the same information. Which is only part of the weight of evidence towards AGW.

Not so fast. CRU didn't do measurements - it did adjustments and analysis. Christy now claims that all of the temperature stations are pretty much useless for determining changes over a few years, let alone multiple decades.

If there's no observed temperature change, Christy's current position, then the other observed changes can not be due to temperature change.
Exactly. "Don't get a driver's license" or "don't go outside" are just as valid.

My thought is, if I die or become horribly brain-damaged, I won't really care, because the capacity to care is gone. Existence only goes as far as you can interpret it.
So is this Google's first evolutionary step towards something equivalent to Stack Overflow
I've had that thought before, when reading Yudkowsky's articles. But, given the number of misinterpretations of Eliezer's basic points even amongst the relatively erudite and incisive audience here at Hacker News, it's hard to say what he could've cut out without sacrificing even more reader comprehension.
More or less, yes. I think the control panels look different.
"What did they do? Shoot a missile through the fog?" ... They didn't have to ... instrument flight is notoriously difficult.
French Parliament approves Net censorship
Repository of Open Source Icons
I think it's perfectly reasonable to sell a cell phone OS to the carriers. If consumers like it, they'll buy it, and the carriers will absorb the cost. Sure, that cost will be passed on the the consumers somehow, but not necessarily in a "windows phones cost more than android phones" way.

All it needs to do to compete successfully with Android is to be more polished, responsive & bug-free (don't get me wrong, I like Android, but those are it's shortfalls.)

Plus, it's still going to be much more open/cheaper than the iPhone OS, which is it's more important competitor (from a market share perspective).
Your hunch is largely mistaken. Of course it can be done. But methods like a bomb or remote trigger are apt to leave forensic evidence, and sabotage qua damage to the plane is likely to be found either during pre-flight checks and/or a pilot reporting a problem tower before the crash occurs. Unless an air crash takes place at sea or a very remote location, the chance of sabotage going undetected within the USA is low. All plane crashes in this country are subjected to detailed forensic examination by the NTSB.
Isn't it the insurance company's problem?
Each of the original examples was important enough that you delegate to your professional. The whole reason you have a lawyer is so they can handle evidence rules, and correct your misconceptions.

But I'm never going to go to a professional to log into facebook. Or more realistically, understand what XSS attacks are and how to protect myself (or similar). It happens too often to be a consult-an-expert event.
How to Build Your Web Cred as a Designer
HTC introduces multitouch Sense UI
I really just want more RAM for the money. It's a sad day when my Mediatemple VPS (3 GB) is more cost effective than Slicehost.
> programming language design [...] All of these things depend on math.

Really? I'm currently designing and implementing a programming language, and I haven't (consciously, at least) used any maths concepts more complex than arithmetic.
In general. Small civilian aircraft are death traps (although maybe not as bad as cars); https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/General_aviat...

> According to the U.S. National Transportation Safety Board, in 2005 general aviation in the United States (excluding charter) suffered 1.31 fatal accidents for every 100,000 hours of flying in that country, compared to 0.016 for scheduled airline flights.

(One can imagine many reasons for this; more professional maintenance, more professional pilots, more redundancy in the systems of big airplanes; whatever. But the safety differential is not imaginary.)
Thank's Avand, your article is really hip and all. I'd really like to agree with it, and then go about back behind the school yard and smoke a cigarette and tell The Man go to hell.

However, I really can't do that.

Let's start with your high school experience. Going to a prep school in Boston means you (most likely, not assuredly) come from a privileged background. I went to a high school prep school too, and like you, I wanted to have the "too cool for school" attitude.

That didn't really happen though, instead of being bored, I got something that was challenging (athletics, which I sucked at). Yea, it was way cool at the time to pretend that all those classes I was acing (well almost, shouldn't have slept through AP Chem as much as I did), didn't matter and that I knew what I wanted to do as a jock 17 year old. Looking back, I was damned lucky to have such good classes and not be in some (unfortunately) underfunded public school. And also, it turns out now that I'm glad someone forced me to take French, I'm heading to France next month to work with a client. Didn't see that one coming as a 17 year old either.

Avand, likewise your take on college is quaint. I understand now that you've been successful with no college degree it's cool to keep rolling with the same theme of "skoolz lame!" It's actually kinda shame you're so biased though that you think college is just about increasing the number of facts you know, otherwise I'd bet you'd do well at the real point of college- giving you the tools to think about difficult problems in a number of different ways.

But that's cool, I've met plenty of intelligent/motivated/successful people who didn't go to or complete college (or went all the way and got a PhD). However, if you really were the intelligent person, motivated person you claim to be, I don't think you'd be half-assing it just taking night classes and then writing with such supposed authority on how college is worthless.

Here's what it really comes down to- you seem to be doing well marching to your own song, Avand, and that's great, keep it up! However, don't confuse your half-finished experiences as showing that school is worthless and expensive. You simply don't have any real authority to talk on the subject.
Bill Gates and the 'nuclear Renaissance'
a few degrees error per century is unthinkable for these computer models.

Yes, but in which direction? The bigger the error bar, the greater the danger of a really bad climate result.
Having played a small part in the general migration to Linode ( http://journal.dedasys.com/2008/11/24/slicehost-vs-linode ) , I think it's unfortunate that Slicehost doesn't up their game a bit more. I actually started with them after moving away from Layered Tech, and Slicehost are good, competent people with a good product. They wouldn't be that far behind Linode if they'd ditch the "64 bit only" thing. They don't seem to want to change though. I wouldn't have even written that article if they had said they were working on 32 bit support.

Also, I hope that the influx of people to Linode doesn't degrade their ability to do the good job that I've experienced so far.
It's true. General aviation is reasonably dangerous, approaching motorcycle levels. A link mentioned earlier in this discussion cites some statistics:

> If the average speed of car travel is 50 miles per hour, those 1.7 deaths occur in 2 million hours of driving. This makes general aviation, with 16 deaths per 1 million hours, roughly 20 times as dangerous per hour than driving.

http://philip.greenspun.com/flying/safety

If you look at "danger per mile", GA is only ~10x as dangerous as driving. I prefer the "per hour" statistic, though, but not for any good reason.

Of note: every insurance company I've ever dealt with for life and property insurance has asked if I'm a private pilot. My last renter's insurance policy had a rider exempting me from coverage when flying. Insurance companies are historically pretty good at assessing risk. Profitable ones, anyway.
''Because your point on "consistent and clear" is based completely on a made up discussion between what sounds like 3rd graders (or politicians)''

Unfortunately, it's the politicians that are making the decisions - and a lot of the interest in current affairs from the general public is around the level of the third grade. Look at the writing standards in many tabloid newspapers for evidence of that.

Without spending an awful lot of time examining the data (which I am not willing to do), I cannot see a way of having a view on AGW. The entire issue is so politicised and so tribal (with astonishingly naive, provably false claims from both sides of the argument) that I've given up caring. I just don't have the time or energy to make a sound judgment precisely because of the tone of the debate.
Very nice, I did noticed it :)
Internet humour is Serious Business.
As 'blah' as the release of a new IE is, it's nice to see that there's some progress being made. It's still far too painful to fix code that works identically between Firefox and WebKit and breaks in weird and wonderful ways once IE is in the picture.

I hope their focus on correctness is as strong as the focus on matching JS speed in the other browsers, however. You can't do all the cool stuff that speed enables when you spend half the time figuring out when your elements need layout.
To be fair, at least in my personal experience with slicehost, it's been extremely quick on resizes (automated), and they prorate as well.

The pricing isn't so good, though.
My experience: I'm a college dropout. I have 96 credit hour and am one class shy of my associates degree. I feel like I did get a lot of value from the liberal arts portion of my education. I was exposed to a lot of different ideas and disciplines that I may never have studied in any other setting.

My major was computer science, and that was the rub. I came to college already somewhat accomplished as a developer. I had published a small shareware game on one of those value-ware CD's you would pick up at the register at WalMart. I knew the basics and had already learned some very hard lessons. I suffered through the introductory course material largely doing independent study projects (thanks Dr. Forbes!).

My moment of crisis came in a computer org. class. I was really looking forward to taking this particular class. It was supposed to give me some more detailed exposure to the hardware side of things. Instead we spent literally half of the semester counting in different number systems. At that point I had enough. I wanted to actually solve real problems and do real things.

Thankfully I had my opportunity. I took a job with the local behemoth tech. company. I was given the opportunity to write a book on basic game programming (I didn't execute on this very well... I just wasn't responsible enough at 21 to do it properly). That book opened the door to my first real job at a very small startup. Quickoffice was my first chance to shine, and over the 6 years I was there I feel like I took full advantage of it. Now I'm an entrepreneur, and things have gone well so far.

The point being: I never completed my degree, but I do feel like I got what I needed out of college. I learned how to learn. I learned to appreciate classic literature and to more completely examine the culture of the world around me. I became a scientist with a deep understanding of the scientific method. Those are all invaluable assets to me today.

However, my lack of a degree has not proven to be much of hindrance thus far. I hope it never is:)
SQL Databases Are An Overapplied Solution (And What To Use Instead)
Does anyone else find the editorializing in this article disturbing?

This is the second paragraph of the article:

Employees at the electric carmaker — a company that has done everything but paint its logo green in a bid to sell itself as environmentally-friendly — have always had a penchant for gas-guzzling private airplanes. But that's sort of been the Tesla way. An electric car without compromising speed or style. The roadster's perfect for the Hollywood and Silicon Valley elite — environmental credibility without having to give up your private plane.

3 people just died. Is it really necessary to slam the type of people that buy electric cars in an article reporting on their deaths?
Given so many fine gradiations of slice-size, it'd be interesting to see an analysis, for distributable workloads, when it's better to use more smaller slices vs. fewer larger slices of similar cost. (On what sort of jobs will 12 256slices for $240 beat one 4096 slice for $250, and so forth?)
I do not see any flowery language in the article. Eliezer is, as he often does, making subtle points about rational thinking, knowledge and basic probability analysis. These topics require precision. Unfortunately, being precise sometimes means using a lot of words to make sure you've covered all cases.
Let's go the other way... Let's suppose I am a hacker and I am looking for a business type or partner for YC, what kind of guy am i looking for?

Assuming that there is already trust and respect - I would want someone who can bring this to the table:

1. someone who understands a particular market & its needs 100%

2. someone to bounce design/sales/marketing discussions off

3. someone who has social and professional connections that I don't have

4. someone who can cook (because I don't have this skill)

Out of all these 1 & 2 is most important - as hackers don't usually have a good sense for UI and users.

If you find a hacker you want - sell yourself with these points.
Seeing that we have about 170 paying Sortfolio customers, we find it highly unlikely that 86 would sign up because of one promotion.

This Pro-only rule was mostly done as a value-add for our existing Pro customers. If new customers sign up that would be great, but even if no one did that would be completely fine with us. We don't need to fund this redesign with Sortfolio money.
Although this topic is frequently discussed on HN, and the portion about document stores is well-hashed, I found the tidbit on binary assets/file uploads very interesting, as I had only used disk before.
matter could not accelerate to the speed of light

That was Kevin Spacey's claim in the movie K-Pax.

For all I know, we're falling through time at the speed of light.
Forget how they did it. After looking at the first 20 slides, I'm more interested in getting in on the closed beta.
It comes with the territory - for instance,

Subset of AGW people overlaps quite heavily with subset of environmentalists.

Subset of AGW people overlaps quite heavily with subset of "catastrophe is coming" people.

Subset of AGW people overlaps quite heavily with subset of "regulation is the answer people".

Subset of AGW people DOES NOT overlap much with pro-thorium/pro-fusion people.

It'd be like if I made the argument that I'm against income inequality, that we need a "fair distribution", and things like that for an article - but wrote a couple sentences that I'm not in favor of taxation/redistribution. I'd be one of the few alive that thought that way. "AGW is happening, but isn't a big deal" is a rare position. "AGW is happening, but we've got bigger fish to fry" is a very rare position. "AGW is happening, and so I'm for nuclear" is also relatively rare.

For the record, I believe some global warming is happening, much of it isn't human created, some of it is, it won't be a catastrophe, bureaucratic regulations would be poorly implemented and accomplish very little, there's more bang for your buck in working on local ecosystems, and better nuclear power/batteries does to energy what modern farming and biochemistry did for food while largely ending problems of air pollution. Finally, I think people in the future laugh at what a panic those silly folk back in the early 2000's were thinking.

So yes, when you go heavily against the grain, you've got to keep disclaiming every paragraph or people will just assume you're for the things that everyone else with those positions is for. Walks like a duck, talks like a duck, and all of that. If you use terminology and speak of things in a certain way that almost everyone else who speaks that way is in favor of certain kinds of solutions, people will drift into thinking you're in favor of them. That said, enjoyed this article quite a bit besides that.
That chart of sunspider performance tests makes me laugh every time. The scale is so skewed by IE7 that IE9 actually looks competitive. They should have just thrown in IE6 numbers to really flatten out any differences.
The Mathematical Work of Jon Kleinberg
I think the big deal about IE9 is the major improvement in Javascript performance. Given that, emulating some of the various web standards IE lacks using Javascript will become more practical.
Yeah, really. It's the project that pays for itself!
Elon Musk has written this note on the Tesla Website:

"Three Tesla employees were on board a plane that crashed in East Palo Alto early this morning. We are withholding their identities as we work with the relevant authorities to notify the families. Our thoughts and prayers are with them. Tesla is a small, tightly-knit company, and this is a tragic day for us."
- Elon Musk, CEO
Also: http://www.google.com/bsd
The Caltrain station was insane. I got off one train and then just turned around and got on another.

Red Rock in Mountain View is the most crowded I've ever seen it. Employee had to tell us to get off the floor of the hallway due to fire hazard.
Ban worthy IMHO. I think the whole Gawker network should be banned here though, all bottom feeders.
Some of the things you point out are largely true, in your 20's, if your only concerns are "getting a job" and making money. However, a good liberal arts degree confers a number of benefits in many areas of knowledge, and provides a foundation of education and articulateness that is quite helpful throughout one's lifetime. There are, of course, many bad liberal arts programs that confer little of these benefits.

I have a couple of friends who forwent college for similar reasons, and they did make more money early on. However, as time passes, they find that there is a pay and advancement ceiling that is lower for them than for their higher educated coworkers. They are also more fearful of losing the income they have painstakingly built up, are more rooted in their company, generally have not saved and don't have a lot of equity (especially with the current housing market), and don't use their monetary head start to now get the education that would help them. They then complain to me that they've hit the pay ceiling and are watching their (always less qualified) over-educated co-workers advance and make more money for doing less. I am sympathetic but skeptical.

There is also a smugness in posts like these that rub people like me the wrong way. It is easy when things are going well for you to look around and say everyone else is doing something wrong. I encourage you to look deeper.
Nope, that is not interesting, it is plain dumb. The intruder here has neither knowledge of the situation nor intent to kill you. You might as well put such a switch on a public sidewalk and shoot anyone approaching it.
Thanks a lot for the comments Frazz, they're definitely great input and I'll try and start working on a lot of the items on the list, especially on the import feature.
A long time ago I had to use some legacy scientific code stored in SCCS repos on a Solaris server. It's even more arcane than RCS.
A Hidden Cost of Javascript [updated]
Genius!!!
I agree that making software developers legally liable for bugs would be detrimental, but if worse comes to worst, a simple workaround would be to compile an application to an intermediate representation with a well established formal semantics (LLVM?), which all parties agree constitutes its entire specification, and guarantee only that it will perform in accordance with that.
Two Kinds of Status
After being with Slicehost for about a year I was really hoping they would at least keep up with Linode.

Linode eventually sold me on their new datacenter in London.
There's a picture somewhere on the web (sorry, no link) of a severed high-voltage power line linked to this crash.
That's what voting is supposed to be for. I find this site disturbingly ban-happy.
Harvard, Princeton, MIT, and other colleges explicitly say so. Check Common Data Set item C3 for the colleges that post their common data sets online.
To call an NTSB post crash investigation rigorous is still a gross understatement. They will piece every little twisted bit of tin back together to find out what happened.

Sabotaging a plane is easy, sabotaging a plane and leaving no trace is almost impossible.
I'm interested in the project, but the author's decision to write out his lecture notes on a series of 110 slides is a bit off-putting.
Yeah, I truly think NYC Seed is the worst case scenario for any startup. We have met the people behind it, and I don't think they are capable of helping in the way Y Combinator can.

Even the application should be a turn off. The questions they ask are not asked in a way that someone with startup experience would ask. They are asked in a way a finance person would ask. Not necessarily a bad thing - if you a are building a finance company.

Finally, I would also argue that their portfolio companies are not really inspiring...

Not trying to hate, but there are so many better options right now. NYC definitely needs a strong seed program, but this is not it.
I don't think it's the owner that was saying "wait until February," but rather just one of the other employees - one that wrote many of the original tutorials and was hired on because of that.
Bus plunge!
Exactly. How do you get that internship as a high school dropout? Thinking back to high school, I couldn't even get a job at McDonalds (probably deemed too nerdy for customer service). My parents aren't computer programmers, and did not know anyone in the field.

I also had a similar attitude for the first half of my university studies. I figured I could already program quite well, thank you very much, and classes were a waste of time. So, after failing a bunch of classes, I decided to go work for a year. Got a job hacking on an awful mess of PHP code.

Then I actually got interested in school. It turns out just because something is hard doesn't mean it's a waste of time. Hardware is actually interesting, as is theoretical CS. Now that I want to learn more, I can't get into grad school because of my too cool for school attitude earlier.
I completely disagree about the website design, I think it's amazing.

As for the announcement, a $25 slice, a little more bandwidth, I agree, unimpressed.

I don't think it mattered that they matched Linode's prices like others are saying. Their prices are fine for such minor differences.

Personally, I was hoping for backups on slices over 2GB.
https://the-deadline.appspot.com/login?continue=%2Flist%2F
I also don't agree with the tone of the reply; however, I sympathize with his irritation. I share it. I agree with you that the reply should be re-thought: one shouldn't post on HN with anger, but with a contribution to the conversation that is likely to generate intelligent discussion.

Edit: "re-through" to "re-thought"
I particularly hope that <canvas> can be implemented using the Direct2D engine they're touting so heavily. It would be beautiful to use a proprietary standard to forcibly implement an open one. :)
I agree, voter apathy due to political shenanigans is a huge problem. People just disengage from the process.

Straw man arguments don't fix it, instead they perpetuate the same useless bickering. Trumpeting dishonest scientists or shifty politicians without seeming interest in rising above their quality of debate is just more of the political game.
It would be awesome if they posted this in a real text format rather than lots of slides with (sometimes) very small text. I highly recommend the read, very interesting.

Their blog has an excellent article (http://www.hackers-with-attitude.com/2009/08/intertactive-pr...) on using Clojure interactively with GAE.