skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
In my mind, the question is not whether the skeptics have a point -- it's whether they are doing science. We are presuming that the IPCC is doing science and that the skeptics are doing science. The skeptics may be wrong, and they may not have a point, but they are doing science.

Drawing an analogy to evolution skeptics of the ID variety confounds the issue, because there is no presumption of science being done by the skeptics. I suggest you choose a more faithful analogy.

EDIT, in consideration of

> "These things are not science and do not deserve the dignity and resources of scientific consideration."

That is a bold claim by anti-skeptics, and the burden of proof is on them. Claiming that ID is not science is not so bold, and I can back that up if you really need such.
Major legal victory for open source in US (Java Model Railroad Interface case)
Isn't a BA in the U.K. considered to be perhaps 3/4 of a US BA? That would tend to indicate you should do some serious study, even better do some real research and coding.

The best way to get accepted by a university's graduate program is to get one of the professors to say "admit this guy". Arrange some research with a professor at a target university for the next year and that could solve all your problems.
People who think they are impervious to illness who do get sick without insurance are a measurable part of the reason for high medical costs. Those people end up not being able to pay for their care, so everyone in the system has to absorb the cost that was incurred and could not be recouped.
It seems a bit odd that they don't say much about attribution. That's probably the main reason people are reluctant to share data -- at least for systems neuroscience, where I am. People don't want others publishing results on their data before they do, and when others do publish results they want to be cited or possibly authors.

It's also a bit unclear what makes data that different from content.
I built (and sold) cli.gs, one of the 13 final complaint services. The system that evolved was effectively strict border controls along with frequent police checks:

1. When a new URL shortening request is received, the requester is checked and the destination is also checked. If both pass, the new short URL is returned.

2. When a short URL forwarding request was received (i.e. the bulk of the traffic), the destination is checked again at a configurable probability. If the destination is now deemed malicious, it is disabled on the spot and a message is shown. In times of spam attacks, the checking probability would be set to 100%.

I blogged about this when it launched and started evolving:

http://blog.cli.gs/news/new-anti-spam-and-anti-malware-featu...

http://blog.cli.gs/news/more-anti-spam-and-anti-malware-prot...
Hospital uses Twitter to update ER wait time
I agree if you don't like the violence aspect don't call yourself a communist.
The legal system, unfortunately, is where patents are disputed. If there is prior art, the patent will be thrown out.
Body-part replicator coming on market
Hmmm. I'm not sure URL shorteners should be "secure". The service I want from them is very well defined: take this long URL and make it very short.

I am certainly not asking them to make a judgment on whether my request was well conceived.

What's next? Blocking NSFW URLs? Pornographic URLs? Politically offensive articles?
Yahoo Traffic Server: 700k lines of code, 9 months
Does anybody other than Yahoo use Traffic Server?
Sort of like when Stormfront invaded reddit? ;)

I don't think so. People with a libertarian mindset, which is plenty consistent with a community of mostly US-based entrepreneurs, would naturally find the policy recommendations that follow from climate science being true to be very much against their principles; it's only natural that scepticism of that science would be given heavier weight.
Personally, I would either get a meaningful internship or spend it partly relaxing and studying.

A meaningful internship doesn't have to be at MS or GOOG. It could be anywhere where you'd build a real system so you'd get to see first-hand how such systems are built(technical and non-technical challenges). Bonus points if you can do something that relates to field you wish to pursue(so distributed or AI or graphics...)

If the internship is a no-go, I would spend the time relaxing a bit and preparing. Most MS students that I've met are bright when it comes to academic questions but don't have a clue about how software is built. So I would use the time to build what I would've built in that internship. Preferably on an open source project so you'd get to interact with people.
Or a darkroom. Or just a closed closet in a dark house on a moonless night. Black is black, it's hardly beyond most of our experience to be sightless.
congrats!
I agree that the software business is new, but it's still business, and the laws of business still apply. You need to have revenues greater than costs and steady cashflow to keep the doors open and the lights on. Lots of us in software forget things like that.
Yeah, I don't see how this would be of use for things that are not analog synth, shortwave, or HAM radio, whose enthusiasts usually already have scopes.

Even 10-50MHz could be mildly useful, but not 1MHz.
Revisiting Simon-Ehrlich
Which is why toothed whales evolved echolocation.

On a related subject: why is the blue whale referenced on the chart? It's big, but doesn't dive particularly deeply. It eats krill, which themselves are tied to photosynthesizing plankton which are tied to the surface waters. There's no reason for it to be interested in diving beyond there.
Hash, Hookers, and now High Speed Fiberized Internet
How slums can save the planet
How a Tax Law Helps Insure a Scarcity of Programmers (1998)
Little C communists are just big C communists who haven't had the chance to implement their ideas. The idea that the capitalization of a letter means a significantly different ideology is silly. Libertarians don't go around calling themselves liberals because they know it means something different now and don't want to be associated with the new definition of liberal.

> the modern conception of communism is the resulting economic system, not the means to achieve it.

Every socialist I've ever talked to has always said their about the good ideas not the bad results. Where do you think the bad results come from? Do you think Mao thought the great leap forward would really kill 60 million people?
Obligatory comic link: http://m.assetbar.com/achewood/uuacCdS9V
Please add any others I have missed and I'll update the list.
Wasn't the earth considered flat when hell became a concept? How could it have a center?
When I lived in Oslo me and my wife would go walking all over the place and take different and often random trips. Back in the states we don't have a sidewalk in suburbia (one bike trail near by which is the only place we walk) and have to drive so when we drive it is usually to the same places. So I would say I am much more predictable now then I was before.
I wasn't talking about Facebook, I was addressing your general claim that "custom solutions are always better."
I am having this same problem with our development team (mostly c) at my job. They find subversion too arduous but then don't understand why there are so many problems and bugs in their releases.

Thank you for mimicking my sentiments precisely. I want to fight battles that aren't over trivial technology problems that already have solutions!
Somewhat limiting for some purposes. I've got a 'cheap' 60mhz scope here, but I rarely use it at that speed. I'm mainly measuring some audio signals or calibrating something on a synth.

Keeping one of these in my travel case for my music rig is a lot easier than carrying my large scope around. Definitely going to get one- or two.
A complete list of things caused by global warming
It's impossible to buy car insurance for a planned wreck as well. This is by design and exactly why this new health care bill is already a failure.

People who take care of themselves and reduce their medical risk are being required to pay just as much as people who, every day, consume a liter of coke, 3 packs of cigarettes, and 8 hours of television.

It's not equitable. It fosters resentment, inequality, and discrimination. Not good.
Am I the only one that finds the title very misleading? This is about the browser choice when installing Windows, not a windows monopoly.
Also not trying to be snarky... but what's your point here? It seems to be an explanation as to why you personally find one scientific community trustworthy, but not another. Fair enough.

But this: "excluded, shunned, de-funded, and ostracized" is exactly -- word-for-word -- the alleged situation for vaccine-autism researchers and "darwinist" sceptics. I don't see where you've demonstrated any real divergence in the parallel dynamics between the scientific consensus and its external critics.

(edit: added 'parallel' for clarity)
"See how close those dots are to the line of best fit?"

data is roughly elliptical, R^2 is .464 hmmm...

after reading I'm still left wondering, is there a correlation between education and happiness?
Errr ... OK. So the GHC runtime that supports (supported) GCC (and that now will support LLVM) doesn't depend on any special cooperation by that level below it, and does the GC on top?

Hmmm, Gambit-C shows you can do this with good results, but ... uck. Still, I could well see how this new arrangement would be much better than using GCC as a back end.
Were they supposed to be safe? How can they be classified as "safe" or "unsafe?" It's like calling tar or zip utilities insecure because the archives produced might contain malware.
You're comparing "discredited scientist lashes out at his critics (some of whom are poor journalists and/or political mouth-pieces)" with "scientists try to silence someone who doesn't tow the party line."

The only reason that I would find the latter to be okay, would be if the paper itself was fairly substandard. Then I could see a boycott of (or outrage against) the journal in question for publishing something that doesn't meet certain standards in an effort to maybe gain readership through controversy (e.g. if they publish a paper where the only 'evidence' presented that supports certain conclusions is quotes from the Bible or the Qur'an, I wouldn't think it that outrageous for people to be disappointed in the journal for even allowing it to be published).

I would appreciate a link to the incident that you are talking about as I don't follow the news that closely anymore.
Social Experiments using Amazon Mechanical Turk: Coin Flipping
> The skeptics may be wrong, and they may not have a point, but they are doing science.

If they were really doing science, you'd think they could get something published in a peer-reviewed scientific journal instead of just blogging, wouldn't you? ;)

(Aaaand we've come full circle!)
I have no problems paying taxes - but let's not be disingenuous about it claiming that they are forcing the young to pay for insurance for their own good. If we need taxes to pay for services of the elderly, then let's call it like it is.

The screwed up part of the system is that the idea used to be that you'd pay into the system with an expectation that you would eventually get the same services as you got older - but have you even looked at the actuarial tables lately? Practically ever western country has massive unfunded liabilities especially as the baby boomers retire.

Personally I like Megan McArdle's solution - let people buy catastrophic loss insurance and fund the rest out of your own pockets. The premiums would be relatively minimal - but the idea that we have to have the government provide insurance / or that even what's proposed in the current legislation solves this problem is frankly nuts. I find it absolutely bizarre that as a Canadian, that while the US government spends more per capita on publicly funded Medicare/Medicaid than Canadians do, coverage for Americans is spotty at best - and you want the US government to get even more involved in healthcare through regulation and direct interventions?
I don't know. The Greeks figured out the earth was spherical, but maybe everyone before them thought is was flat. Go ask the voices in the hole in Kola.
Unless of course it's litigated in a jurisdiction like the Rocket Docket AKA the Eastern District of Texas, in which case the plaintiff generally wins. And it's very expensive to litigate this, to defend yourself you'd have to retain one or more very expensive expert witnesses. While I like the idea of putting money in the pockets of MIT professors, this is not the best way ^_^.

Anyway, we're still talking about adding so much friction to the writing of software that it would utterly change the field and curtail most development, especially in small firms ... well, I suppose a healthy underground would develop. But there wouldn't be much for YC to do.

No thanks.
This is already being done lots of places. And if you take the literal definition of the word algorithm, then all web API services are algorithms as a service. So I don't like the name, but the general idea of the post is interesting.

Thinking along these lines, something that I would find more useful would be a web service that makes a well defined managed infrastructure available to me to run my own jobs or algorithms on. For example a service I can use to submit my own map/reduce style jobs to and have it run on a big cluster of systems managed by someone else; Or a service that allows me to submit jobs to run on specialized hardware, like a cluster of systems packed with NVIDIA CUDA cards. Providers of these services could also have a library of pre-canned jobs for common tasks like text indexing, link extraction, parsing W3C logs into stats, etc. With a library like that then you've got what this post is describing and more.
This seems dumb. The site's function, as defined, is to do a redirect. Not redirect plus a bunch of mysterious stuff.
Applications invited for Recruitment of Project Assistant
I've been meaning to blog about this for some time -- AGCC has reached the point where it is included in just about any other piece of research, no matter how tangential -- but haven't had the time. This site just throws the data out there for your perusal.

Cato the Elder had the habit, no matter what the topic, to include the phrase in his speeches "And Carthage must be destroyed" -- Carthago delenda est

No matter what came up, he always added "Carthago delenda est" The farmers have had a good harvest this year, and Carthage must be destroyed. I am very happy to receive this honor, and Carthage must be destroyed. Nice toga you're wearing, and Carthage must be destroyed.

I think this list stands on it's own. No matter what the topic, climate change is presented as a big factor. It's become the universal plug-and-play prime mover. This is especially interesting in the context of no statistically significant global warming in the last decade or two. Of course, all generalizations are false, change doesn't necessarily mean warming, micro-climate is not the same as macro-climate, etc, etc. But you get the point.

If the list isn't enough to make the rhetorical point well, perhaps somebody with more time than I have can write it up in a good essay. I know I'd like to read it.

Link: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carthago_delenda_est
I believe people should be required to pay according to their ability. Right now, a young person 20 yrs old right out of college earning 40k a year, will pay < $200 a month for insurance. Under the new health care plan with the same premiums for the young, an older person who earns $400k/yr will pay about $600 a month for insurance.

See where the inequality erupts? This is the vision for the new health care plan and it is carrying much future baggage.
The Internet in 2020 - What the Experts Predict
Sheriff D. Gillespie Tax $$ to Witch Hunt Female Employees. Lt.Juanita Goode
Lb2010
Hey Tom, I'm sending you an email.
Those are some funny numbers you're throwing out there; I'd love to see some citations. (Disclaimer: I work in the health insurance industry and I specifically deal with health insurance rating systems, so linking anything generated by politicians on either side of the fence isn't going to cut it.)
Profit is not the problem. For a site about startups/building businesses, that's a rather bizarre argument - ie this is asking how can anyone can care for their customers and their bottomline at the same time? (so is that an argument for effectively nationalizing everything?)

This assumes that the alternative maximizes efficiency - and can you honestly say that about how the US government administers Medicare? Look at education - sure it's not "for profit" if you ignore the ever increasing profits that accrue to teachers' unions.

Besides, despite all the handwringing over those profit maximizing bastards at private healthcare insurers, guess who is the largest denier of healthcare claims? http://biggovernment.com/ptuohe/2009/10/05/ama-endorses-larg...
Our minds are not adapted to sensory deprivation. Hence, prolonged sensory deprivation can induce hallucinations, and exceedingly long sensory deprivation (combined with restraints to prevent movement) can impact sanity.
I'd agree with this and add that merchants/affiliate networks should further encourage better publisher sites by measuring and paying out on metrics around the lifetime value of a customer. A better customer experience on an affiliate site will drive repeat purchases and ultimately the lifetime value of the customer will be greater than the margins on the initial sale. It would be great if quality publishers could be compensated for "better" customers, because it would reward valuable affilates and cut down on a lot of the thin landing pages that currently plague Google on long-tail keyword searches.
You're mistaken. Every algorithm used in software can be created as a specific integrated circuit. Software is a means of controlling a general processor that performs sets of operations based on instructions it receives. No matter what level of programming you are doing (from interpreted web dev down to assembly) it gets translated and passed to the processor the same way. The problem isn't that it's too difficult to be specific enough in the patents due to the complexity. The problem is that there isn't a REQUIREMENT to be that specific in software patents.

My personal opinion is that if the patents required a pseudocode implementation using a common-standard language to represent the components and operations, it would be much easier to determine patentability, would prevent generic, wide-sweeping software patents and require the investment of actual invention rather than just an investment of dreaming to be patented. Physical device patents are required to be specific enough that it can be used to create the device using only the patent and references in the patent. The same should be applied to software patents, with the translation from the pseudocode components to whatever language or platform be the same as physically constructing the components of a machine.
As long as I'm not being sold on "how to get ripped in 1 week" or have ads shoved down my throat I think it's fine. The interview starts off with 10-20 seconds of ads and there it is.

Did you guys notice Andrew monetized the site now? With a "how much would you pay model" where the users can choose what to pay per month.

(pay to access older interviews)
Can you show the derivation steps you take?
Quite the contrary sir, I'm thinking 10 decades into the future, because that is probably how many I have yet to live. The older generation is thinking just a decade or two, maybe three.
Thanks for posting this. It provided the best explanation so far (for me, at least) of the law that so pissed off Joe Stack.
Good one. Thanks for sharing!
8 Rules For Building a Team That Raised Millions
Advanced JavaScript ebook only $3 
"Advanced JavaScript" is a 62 page e-book which will teach readers to:

* Create a jQuery clone
* Advanced meta-programming techniques
* Behavior Driven Development with JSpec
* Prototypal Inheritance
* Server side JavaScript with Node.js
* Closures, Scope & Context
* and more!
Techcrunch's problem is a far smaller and simpler one than Wordpress's. Four or five ISP switches now, and it's clear with each move that they are grasping at straws, hoping to just throw money at the problem and it will go away. Websites don't work that way.

Wordpress.com has a problem that is many magnitudes more difficult and complex than just keeping one blog available.
Techcrunch could do a far better job by keeping their TTLs low, choosing a secondary datacenter site for replication. In the frequent event of an outage they just perform a master promotion, change the dns records in order to get back online quickly.

You don't have a redundant site if all of your eggs are at layeredtech. Throw SoftLayer or Equinix into the mix.
> "discredited scientist lashes out at his critics (some of whom are poor journalists and/or political mouth-pieces)" with "scientists try to silence someone who doesn't tow the party line."

But here's the rub: How do you know which is which? Well, if you agree with one party, it's the former; and if you don't, it's the latter.

The incident I mentioned is the centrepiece of "Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed" -- a documentary about how the evolutionary biology community allegedly silences anyone who doesn't tow the party line.
This is probably what you were going to do anyway, but here goes:

1. Reduce the price by a dollar. Track for a week, see if profits increase. If they don't jack the price back up.

2. If they do, reduce the price even more, track the profits. If this causes profit to decrease, jack the price back up.

The idea is to figure out where the ideal market price is. It might be lower than you expect.
You're not stable yet, since volume goes WAY up once you're in the Top 25 of a category. It then goes through the roof when you're in the Top 5. Even though you're seeing great sales now, you need to push into the Top 25 to see phenomenal sales. To be safe, get into the Top 15, that way you have more margin to work with in the day to day rank fluctuation.

Drop to $1.99 for two days and see if you continue gaining in rank. We were able to blast past tons of 99 cent apps with Free Audiobooks at $1.99 and get to #2 in Books within three days, so it's not a big deal. Games is way different from books, though, so try $1.99 for 2-3 days, then give 99 cents a shot.

Also, grab Applyzer (applyzer.com) for this, it's awesome- hourly rank tracking for $3/month. If you stall out or otherwise see your rank starting to slide, drop to 99 to give a boost. That recovers your momentum and, after 24 hours or so, you can put your price back to $1.99. There's a LOT more to rank management, but this is how we're able to maintain the #1 and #2 paid positions in Books for weeks on end, barring when Apple features a competitor.

Good luck :)
"Technical is not always foremost in what distinguishes a particular business model for success."

Indeed, and if you're a disciple of Clayton The Innovator's Dilemma Christensen the technology itself often isn't what's so innovative as the use to which you put it.

But it still has to work ^_^. At least in this case we can have serious confidence that the once and future CTO will make sure it does.