skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Climate skeptics are not arguing against GCM in general, simply that some very specific and precise conclusions are unproven.

For example, one specific point made by the pro-AGW camp is that global warming will be harmful if it occurs. There is a list of purported harms and apparently the case for some of these harms (melting Himalayan glaciers, increased hurricane frequency) is not so well settled.
You'd have to tell him "the director of engineering said it would be ok" of course.
Wireless everything. Why is my A/V receiver such a mess?

Yes! We moved house recently and setting up our projector, wii and mac-mini so that the cables didn't look horrific was way too much work. Maybe it's a bandwidth thing? I suppose wirelessly transmitting video and not interfering with your neighbors' setups might need quite a significant amount of spectrum?

Live events (sports, etc.) could be live-streamed.

Heh. Over the content-owners' dead bodies apparently.
Pew Internet: How the Internet is changing Americans' news habits
I just popped open the branch list for our product and started poking around with the feature. Its very cool, I especially like the compare branches option. If you click on the branch names in the compare branches screen it allows you to compare any specific revisions you want.

All in all this is a pretty great feature update.
Amazon headed to $150 Kindles?
proggit, other specific technical-topic oriented subreddits. There is an astonishing number of them.
"Playing devil's advocate; If the government takes over health care, they effectively set the terms. Just to be sure we are all on the same page here; we all know that this is where it's ultimately going right..??"

s/health care/fire departments/
s/medical care/fire departments/

To me, if you do the above, the argument loses no logical soundness. So then, do you advocate doing away with fire departments?
Maybe one way to do it would be to pick a problem, or several problems, and implement solutions in each one.

Hrm, maybe it's a book more than an article, although I don't think I'd buy it, given that it'd be out of date so soon.

The point being, as a casual observer of these things, I don't yet have a good feel at all for which ones might be good for what.
I too am enjoying VirtualBox as a way of setting up discrete development environments. I've got one for PHP, one for Rails, and a general Ubuntu box for anything else I want to try out (e.g. Clojure).

I documented my personal "get Ubuntu running via VirtualBox on XP" experience here: http://www.sharingatwork.com/2009/10/get-started-building-we...
It was an illusion. The cable he cut was a short piece of the same color cable he was just holding in his hand, not attached to anything.
oh well, Python hasn't really been a 'new' language since version 2.0.
It keeps crashing when there is over 100-something comments in a story. It would be great if that could be fixed
Just in case it isn't clear to everyone (and I don't think it is), this is an opinion piece from a libertarian think-tank, funded by something called "the Liberty Fund". Please don't confuse it with anything related to peer-reviewed economic research.

This is why I hate economics: many of its practitioners have absolutely no ethical qualms about blurring the line between publication of their political opinions and their research. Unless you pay exceedingly close attention to the source and context, you can easily be confused into believing that an editorial is somehow an objective analysis of economic theory. And while I'm sure the author raises a legitimate point about the shortcomings of GDP as a metric, this essay is filled with weak assertions and sloppy logic that probably wouldn't pass muster in a real paper.
That's a really good tip. Thanks!
The cloud package includes a module 'cloud.mp' (http://docs.picloud.com/client_adv.html#cloud-mp) which allows the cloud semantics to be used locally (using python's multiprocessing library).
Going through the archives of http://www.yosefk.com/blog/ should provide a couple days' entertainment.
Completely agree with you on the theoretical level; it's a (lazy) shorthand to contrast the typical NoSQL trade-offs with the ACID model that most relational databases employ.

In practice though, I think if you introduce (multi-'row') ACID into any of today's NoSQL database, you'd just end up with a bad traditional database (a 'relational' database without a strong theoretical grounding, without the ability to do joins and without a powerful query language.) This whole NoSQL movement feels like a re-run of the evolution of the relational database - those that don't know their history are doomed to repeat it.
"Unfortunately, the RPM based distro's such as CentOS and Fedora do not have 32-bit ELF support so we are, at this stage, unable to offer equivalent images for those particular distros."

Wow. I didn't know Slicehost was on crack.

Can somebody explain to me WTF they mean that RPM-based distros don't have support for 32-bit ELF files? CentOS and Fedora have been using 32-bit ELF binaries forever.
Hmm. I think a lot of people are aware that GDP has its shortcomings. I think many would embrace a metric that fully captured well-being in an economic manner, but I didn't see the author suggesting any new metric that we should be following instead. I think we use GDP because it's the easiest thing we can use that isn't subject to [much] interpretation. And yes, that sometimes leads to problems.
the two papers he got published were in VLDB and SIGMOD, which are the two top conferences in databases and data management ... even pre-google, this guy had cred!
> FYI: If your a staunch republican for government health care(i know not likely); one day a democrat will be deciding your fate. If your a staunch democrat for government health care; one day a republican will be deciding your fate.

Oh, the lovely American political dualism. I hope you will find a way to bring back more biodiversity to your political ecosystem some day.
Until browsers stop sandboxing developers, there will always be a need for plugins. As some dude from the silverlight department said (paraphrase) "plugins will always move faster than a standards committee."

What with firefox's reluctance to agree with h264, you can see that the standards can take time. Plugins are a way for users to decide the features they want, faster.

Plugins ain't dead yet. If you think about it, how long did it take for HTML to catch up with flash? Flash has the potential to extend web capabilities further.
Intelligence dedicated to solving abstract or impersonal problems is worthless for a leader. Therefore, the kind of intellectual talents that show up on an IQ test are not very useful. Someone who takes a problem-solving approach to the world will not make a good leader. Someone who takes a problem-solving approach to his parents, friends, classmates, and so forth will do well.

That's because leadership consists in large part of stating and forging a group consensus, perhaps not in that order. A leader rarely suggests a course of action that doesn't immediately make sense to other people. If education and elucidation is required, he does that beforehand. A leader doesn't bother with courses of action that his followers aren't already one little nudge away from accepting, and then he provides that nudge. For this reason, it's best for a leader not to devote too much intelligence to actually solving problems -- he will just come up with useless and distracting ideas. A leader with a lot of credibility can get people to accept a new course of action solely on his own credibility, but if it doesn't work out, he loses a lot of credibility. He mostly needs to stick to courses of action that are credited to other people or which just feel right to his followers.

Leading by surpassing excellence is an invention of propaganda. Only after you already have a lot of power and loyalty can you start manufacturing such a myth.
Another suggestion: Please link to http://movielistr.com/recover/ ("forgot my password" page) on the login page. The only link I could find was on http://movielistr.com/account/, which requires that you log in first.
I think it'd be cool if you had a setting to make DDG look roughly identical to Google. It's hard to judge it fairly when I'm so biased in favor of Google, and DDG is constantly reminding me that it's not Google.
Can you discuss your approach to game design and development? Do you use well-known game libraries for a lot of the game mechanics or do you roll your own?

How did you go about populating the game world? Did you create your own game editor?

Great game!
I'd err to caution you about this kind of thinking, namely because people who spend careful time memorizing the names of fallacies rather than spending that time, explaining to other people with whom they're debating where they were mislead, tend to be assholes whose arguments boil down to spouting ad homenim, no true scotsman, Loki's wager, etc. Which is a more pretentious way of saying 'u r wrong' and being generally allienating the people with whom you're trying to converse. And yes this is from personal experience.

Also something of interest is: http://www.paulgraham.com/disagree.html
I wish there was a way to clear the resources tab without reloading the page.
> Take it from this "denier", the vast bulk of my "denialism" comes from what you're saying. Where there should have been humility in the face of chaos, there was claims of certainty, and where there should have been more research, there was a push to rewrite the foundation of the global economy in the service of dubious truths.

This is a classic example of the flaw in so many GWD's reasoning. You deliberately choose not to base your opinion on a scientific matter on actually reading studies, listening to experts, observing evidence and learning about the underlying physics.

Instead you write 3 paragraphs that reduce, "I don't like YOU or how YOU are saying it." You reduce a complex and ongoing field of study down to a personality judgement. Does my personality or personal failings in any way change the science? Of course not. But somehow that's so relevant to the issue at hand that it's the majority of your post.

All I can do—as someone who's expertise and education lies in computer science and math—is understand some of the underlying physics, read some of the less dense papers, and listen to the experts. I don't like all the experts, but they're experts. I don't have to like them for their opinion to be right.

But, if you're trying to suggest I'm committing a specific logical fallacy, please name and explain it. Otherwise, your character judgements don't really bear relevance in this conversation save as a mean-spirited attack.
Wireless electricity demo at TED...
http://blog.ted.com/2009/08/wireless_electr.php

So it's on the horizon. The speaker actually powers a mobile phone as one of his examples.
That's really nice having an image with the Rails environment installed. Maybe I should do the same for slime/emacs/sbcl? (I'm not sure what the demand would be)
Python has been around since the early 90ies. (Or even late 80ies?) Of course it's a much better language today than it was back then --- e.g. it got lexical scoping.
A .net and .org cost about $10/year each. I probably spend about $20 on dosas every week.

So if you value your friend's brand name more than 3 dosas, yeah. Buy all versions.
That's mostly because of IE's fault wrapping security thing around normally embedded flash.
Firebug is obtrusive, buggy, and slow. However, for the reasons this article suggests, and some others (no right click - delete element in web inspector), I'm stuck with using Firebug for the foreseeable future.

I can't wait to replace it with web inspector. I try to use the latest one on Chromium and it works for very small things, but Firebug is essential whenever I'm doing heavy hacking on DOM elements.
i don't think python got super popular until ~2004, but it's been around and used for research prototypes and niche hacking since the mid-1990's
The tweet is in a much larger typeface than the actual title. It seems to me like a bad design choice -- and I'm not just saying that because I made the same mistake you did :)
Top 5 Tools for Improving Linux System Performance
> In Climate Science, you hear this is the consensus, not that we have data for 30 years of 10000 year cycle and we think that this will happen. In my opinion it's not honest.

I don't know how much more honest an admission that a prediction was wrong by respected scientist can be. What do you want? This AGW issue is so politically charged that we want the scientists to be constantly going over the data and trying to reproduce it.

It's not like the IPCC was trying to hide this. If anything, the entire way this scenario played out should be a reassurance that the IPCC and cooperating scientists are acting in good faith. They're not trying to "cover up" failures; they're acting on the established scientific process.
Schema-Free MySQL vs NoSQL
Is it Becoming Cool to Root for Microsoft?
perhaps there's a quasi-inverse correlation ... e.g., superstars like sergey don't care about putting in a ton of time to polish up their resume and make it sound all fancy and stuff (they're busy building google in their dorm room), whereas people who are good (but not great) make all sorts of efforts to polish up their resume and look their best.
Mozilla Drumbeat - developing projects for a better Internet
Readability is good. Support for Twitter and Email would be great. Just have popup Echofon or something.
Microsoft offer 4 other browsers when users boot Windows in Europe [VID]
"Do you remember learning to factor quadrilateral equations? x2 -32x +12? Why were you taught this?
Why did they spend hours drilling you on such clearly useless content? Simple: you were being
trained to be a compliant cog, someone who could mindlessly follow instructions as opposed to
seeking out innovation and surprise."

I agree with this. He's right.
" ... global warming should cause less hurricanes."

Do you mean lesser, or fewer, hurricanes?
How to make online newspapers profitable
I once heard a Math professor say that children were able to use more methods for doing basic arithmetic when they first started school than when they'd gone to school for a year, or something of that nature.

My anecdotal experience correlates with this. First grade, with its required use of "bubble math," was very detrimental to my arithmetic abilities I'd acquired at home and during Montessori-style preschool.

So naturally, when a child goes to do an IQ test, which is basically a test in problem solving, he/she wouldn't know how to do it, because he/she would have been used to not having to solve problems.

Some IQ tests seem to test certain kinds of problem solving, like identifying patterns in a grid. Some few individuals may be able to identify the patterns without any prior experience, but I suspect most who answer such questions correctly do so from knowledge of a general class of problems, not intuition.
Electricity without wires can be transmitted now.

http://blog.ted.com/2009/08/wireless_electr.php

A lot of the other things the OP wants already exist as well. Including monitors with about 10x more pixels than a 1024x768. Batteries in some devices can last months or years.

Most of the things that person wants are just too expensive or unnecessary or beyond the "i'm ready for this" stage of marketability. People don't want all electric cars. People don't want the expense when other things are "good enough".
Canada’s Marvelous Mortgage and Banking System?
That doesn't hurt customers. If anything that just doesn't give customers as much as they could have. But if you read my (short) post you'd know about the cost/benefit aspect too.
Displayport would go a long way to doing away with wires. We should be able to dock our laptops with exactly one cable connection.

The energy density of batteries is dependent on basic chemistry.

The ideas about locks on our houses are pretty key, however.
Thanks for the note. Can you link me to the story it's crashing on? Sometimes it's the content of the page that breaks the parser. I've tested it pages with 250+ comments, so this is curious.
Everyone knows that GDP is an awful measure of economic health and resiliency. No real news here.

Huricane Katrina? GDP goes up.
War? GDP goes up.
Banks need bailed out a tax payer expense. GDP goes up.

This might be a close to infinite list, so I'll stop.

What is the GDP good for? Fooling an ignorant population. So, it does have some value to the elites.
I like the layout better than Google's. It's nice that it's centered on the page and that the zero-click info stands out.
Same here. And I really only use it when I really need to get down and dirty. Web Inspector works fine 99% of the time.
The author makes good points. Especially:

"But Firebug feels much more like a text-editor, and Web Inspector like a passive, well, text-inspector"

Personally, I use Safari as my main browser and like Web Inspector because it feels more "solid" and works for me in most cases. But anytime I need to tweak HTML and CSS (for layout for example) I use FF/Firebug. Adding elements, changing CSS is much easier and intuitive with Firebug.
How I Made $6K With My eBook
I don't think electronic locks are especially "better" than old-style mechanical key locks. They're slightly more convenient, but what happens when you lose your key and need a new one, at night on a weekend? I had exactly that experience with a VW transponder key last year, in England. If the local VW dealer hadn't had an unprogrammed key on hand that they had ordered for another customer, it might have taken two weeks to get a replacement.

With an old-fashioned mechanical key, I can go to any dealer or most locksmiths with proof that I'm authorized to use the vehicle and have a new key cut by code in minutes. I don't find using a mechanical key to open my house especially inconvenient, and don't see any benefit to a more secure key; there are weaker points of entry for an intruder.
Flowing Data: The State of the Internet
I suspect what they mean is that Fedora doesn't support running at 64-bit kernel with a 32-bit userland. The problem starts with the initramfs, and I suppose slicehost is not in the business of modifying to underlying OS all that much.

http://www.mail-archive.com/fedora-list@redhat.com/msg47714....
Unlike the litotes in your Orwell quote, "not uncommon" and "common" mean different things.
Feynman had the advantage of built-in syntax highlighting, a gift I would absolutely love to have:

"When I see equations, I see the letters in colors - I don't know why. As I'm talking, I see vague pictures of Bessel functions from Jahnke and Emde's book, with light-tan j's, slightly violet-bluish n's, and dark brown x's flying around. And I wonder what the hell it must look like to the students."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grapheme%E2%80%93color_synesthe...
If you ever have the choice of living in a country with $1,000 per capita GDP and $10,000 per capita GDP, I suggest you choose the latter (unless, of course, you are there for humanitarian work). That's the difference between Haiti-size earthquakes and Chile-size earthquakes.
"My car will unlock itself when I touch it, and will start without me putting the key in the ignition."

What? I've never heard of such thing. What car does this?
Ask HN: Advice needed re: adsense vs. adbrite
I built a site with a few friends over the weekend and it's getting some significant traffic. I'd like to maximize as much as possible, and I'd heard that Adbrite was a better choice than adsense, so I went with that.

2 days later, I've made 2.75 from 20 clicks in adbrite. a friend with a blog using adsense has 3 clicks and has the same profit we do.

am i doing something wrong? or does adbrite really suck? i heard that you need to somehow optimize and select ads in adbrite, but I wanted confirmation from someone on HN with solid experience.

btw the website is http://www.thathigh.com

thanks
After a certain IQ, I think it's 120, the rest is about emotional maturity and how deeply your understanding goes.

It would be a mistake to underestimate the importance of people like this. He may not be the largest "producer" or whatever your personal metric for being successful is, but even solving a small problem that you or I won't ever be able to will have a unique, lasting, permanent effect on the world.
How to discover 3000 "infected" websites in 30 min
That point only applies if you think of Google as a 'search' company. I would argue that Google is an internet services company (that is funded by advertising rather than subscriptions) that 'owns' search. Arguments can be made on whose office suites are better, whose maps systems are better, whose social networks are better and whose phone OS is better, but Google has picked search and, boy! Do they own it.
3000% increase in sales
Right. If I had substantial net worth and owned a home, then I'd want to buy health insurance in order to protect those assets.

I think this, more than that we're healthier, is one of the reasons people in their 20s opt out. Health insurance is useful in the semi-bad cases (e.g. a $25,000 one-off expenditure) but has plenty of mechanisms (life caps, rescissions) that enable it to abandon you anyway in event of catastrophe. We (young people) are as vulnerable as anyone else to catastrophes-- and if health insurance was any good during those, I might consider buying a plan-- but the mid-sized stuff rolls off of us because we're young and don't have much (materially) to lose. So why buy health insurance? I know my chance of preventable death is slightly higher, but not monstrously so.
> I think if you introduce (multi-'row') ACID into any of today's NoSQL database, you'd just end up with a bad traditional database

Strongly disagree, although there is truth to the converse (adding sharding to a traditional database yields a bad nosql implementation :).

There's a sketch of how Google added multirow transactions to bigtable for app engine (via a layer above bigtable called megastore): http://perspectives.mvdirona.com/2008/07/10/GoogleMegastore....

The key idea is that "a per-entity-group transaction log is used. One of the rows that stores the entity group is the entity group’s root. The log is stored with the root, which is replicated like all rows in Big Table."

This is basically a version of the approach advocated by Pat Helland in his paper on "Life Beyond Distributed Transactions" -- http://www.cidrdb.org/cidr2007/papers/cidr07p15.pdf -- namely, that the most sane approach to distributed transactions is to redefine the problem, and restrict transactions to be within "entities" that fit on a single machine. Which, as App Engine demonstrates, turns out to be enough to do an awful lot.
I'm a fan of the NoSql movement and have been exploring Cassandra as an option for data storage.

I had a conversation with an engineer who works at a pretty well-known company here in SV and their sys admins are dropping Cassandra and pushing all the engineers back to MySql. I don't know the whole story but it seemed to be implied that open-sourced Cassandra had issues and supposedly Facebook had a much different version they were using.

Of course this is all second hand, so I tried to search on the experiences of other people using Cassandra (with decent volume). Unfortunately most of the threads I found had people just like me, at the exploratory stage. Or they hadn't been live with it for long.

If there were any pitfalls or hairy parts with maintain Cassandra, that would be good to know. Also, examples of clients who have decent load and have been using it for a while.
Do you ever get the font problem? I try to use Chrome, but the fonts get screwed up approximately every other time I boot up.
This is almost a year old, but it is still a very enlightening read.
The original article indicates fewer, but slightly stronger.