skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
You're absolutely right that this discussion is not new, and nor is it news. Though there are some particular events that are new (for instance, the "no significant warming" quote being propagated without the statistical details that show that the quote is anything but anti-AGW), they contribute nothing to humanity's understanding of AGW, much less to this specific community.

That said, I continue to try to engage the HN community on the issue of climate change because I feel that if climate denialism is seen as acceptable by HN, that we as a community have very little ground to stand upon when we say that we are skeptics. Indeed, it seems to me that what is new is that the denialist mode of thought is gaining acceptance here at HN, and I think that presents us with the very real danger of a "herd mentality," as you aptly put it.

Once the basic issue of tone and community standards has been established more firmly, then that opens the floodgates for actual news, such as startups making money by making it easier to reduce CO₂ omissions, or about the wonderful hacks (and I use that word very fondly!) that scientists use to make observations. The basic issue of whether climate change is real is a decided and non-newsworthy issue, but there's a wealth of awesome HN stories in how we as a global society deal with it.
A NetHack adventure
This is why Python is the "web language" of choice for people doing any kind of scientific or numerical programming. Libraries really make a language for certain applications, and Python seems to have an extremely broad range.
Using Google Docs as a data mashup platform
How I reduced translation costs of 200 articles from $9000 to $46
Skip to Part 1 if you already know what NetHack is about. I found the narrative very entertaining to read.
this was explained in the techcrunch comments at the time, wasn't it? also here - http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1145073
No, because in my example America has no source of foreign exchange it cannot buy autos from Japan, it has nothing to offer Japan in return (it's a simplified example, but it shows an underlying dynamic that can and does exist).

EDIT: to clarify, there are also examples where increased foreign industry will benefit America. For instance, if Kuwait doubles its productivity, oil imports to the U.S. will be much cheaper. But my point still stands that this is not also the case. Increased productivity from other countries can be positive or negative to America, depending on the specific situation.
Also should note that on IE ver8.0.6001 each of the timelines are very, very laggy (core 2 duo, 5gb ram).
I particularly annoyed by banks doing this. I assume can trust the bank itself, but why would I want to also pull down content and scripts from cdn.whoknowswhere.com or tangentialservice.com?

If I'm signed in, doing monetary transactions, I don't want to deal with any other domain but the primary.
My vote is for Brazilian Jiu Jitsu (Gi or No Gi), Boxing, or Kickboxing (Muay thai).

I think BJJ will especially appeal to the nerd in you, I'm not sure why, but it does. The awesome thing about BJJ is you don't need to be very athletic to be good. Its also a very practical art and you'll get to spar everyday. In terms of self development, BJJ will crush your soul and teach you what your ego is all about. The BJJ journey is just a rewarding and frustrating as the startup journey, and you'll never stop learning new techniques and things about yourself. Good luck
Well, why not? I'm sure you could put a gig of space to use calculating an extended social network or what not. 0.2 seconds could be the difference between expanding use up to a couple of gig per request vs rewriting from scratch or not implementing the feature altogether.
We have to make it possible for everyone to live ok lives, even without having a job. We are rich enough. We didn’t get any poorer as a whole. We should be able to afford that.

It already is possible. The poor in the USA right now have a standard of living greater than the middle class of 1970, but tend to work less than 800 hours/family/year.

http://www.heritage.org/research/welfare/bg1713.cfm
By what rationale does that make more sense? The argument presented in the article is that for most people, the side-effects outweigh the protective benefits. How do you know that your suggestive diminishes the side effects to the point that even people who have a low risk for heart problems will have a net benefit?
Very Dustin Curtis.

http://dustincurtis.com/about.html
I don't remember where I saw this, but I recall reading that they actually considered it. Ultimately, however, the pure functional style just didn't jive with .Net very well, so F# was born to allow functional style to live along side of the rest of .Net comfortably. The F# lite syntax also takes some cues from Haskell.
avoidance is a whole separate thing. sure you may talk about it in your martial arts class, but the majority of your time is spent learning about what to do when it fails yes? I'm just ignoring the avoidance scenarios.

in a mugging type situation you hand over your wallet. in an imminent death situation yes you do aim for eyes, breaking bones etc. and yes, it is easy to break bones with certain holds, so much so that accidentally breaking them is a genuine concern in class. properly applied joint locks are pretty nasty.

basing your arguments on counterfactuals seems kind of silly. things always could have been worse. the point is to minimize your risk of grievous bodily injury or death.
I think that would be the Lorenz attractor, named after Edward Lorenz.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lorenz_attractor

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edward_N._Lorenz
I get that it's comedy.

Actually, if you've got a gun you want to stay about 20 feet away from your assailant. They've done tests on reaction time, and someone inside of 20 feet can easily close and attack with a knife by the time you draw your gun. Conversely, if you have balls of steel and want to defend yourself against an armed assailant, start within 20 feet and have a knife. Corollary: be capable of hitting a target at greater than 20 feet range. (Not difficult but requires practice.)

There's something to be said for concealed weapons as a self defense technique--it's among the easiest to learn and the most effective. A month of firearms training can defeat someone with years of training in traditional weapons (which is kind of the reason militaries switched to firearms in the first place).

Awareness, keeping your distance, and not getting into dangerous situations in the first place are most of what you need. If you're focused on winning a fight at all you're not focused on effective self defense. There are a lot of good reasons to get into martial arts, but being able to win street fights isn't one of them.
At this point, I am more worried about the governmental attempts to take control of the internet (e.g. ACTA, the new Digital Economy bill, and other similar efforts internationally) than by Apple and other similar players.
I have Samter's triad and would benefit from daily aspirin use (325mg+), but the side-effects concern me and my default position is to avoid medication.
This is a shot in the dark, but is your jaw sore or tired in the morning? I clench my teeth when I sleep. When I'm stressed, I clench even more, causing bad headaches. It took me years to realize that the clenching was causing the headaches.

My dentist fit me for one of these: http://www.nti-tss.com/index.php?option=com_content&task...

Note this is different from a mouthguard; mouthguards allow you to clench, they just cushion a bit and protect your teeth from damage. This device keeps your teeth separated by a few centimeters. When your teeth are separated, you can't clench your jaw tight - which means the muscles controlling your jaw won't be fully engaged all night, alleviating the headaches.

At least, that's what caused my headaches. Again, it's a shot in the dark that it's what causes yours.
I found the whole online coverage of these Olympics completely frustrating. I'd be willing to pay some kind of "online access" fee to allow me to watch the live coverage online because I spend most of my time in a room on my computer without a TV. Early on I tried to find somewhere I could watch the live broadcast from my area but came up empty. I agree, either NBC doesn't "get it" or they're actively trying to frustrate people like me.
I bought andyking.eu when .eu names were first made available for just that reason, although I only use it for email and not for any web presence - I blog on a different domain.

Of course, having such a common name, very little about me appears on Google. In fact, on Google UK at present the first result for my name is a British strip-o-gram! There are also a former MP, a middling footballer and various British and American academics with my name.

I'm quite happy with the situation, to be honest. The less that can be found about me on Google, the more comfortable I feel. A friend has an uncommon name and every result on the search engine is for her; every fleeting newspaper mention, running club result and years-old web comment is hers. I'm glad I'm not the same.
shhhhh.

http://p2p4u.net/watch/13014/1/watch-canada-vs.-usa.html

PS: GO USA!
I won't buy a Lenovo laptop if you won't. After we run the Chinese out of business I'm sure they'll thank us for not exploiting them anymore.
I checked it out and see what you mean. I'll look into it -- thanks.
> I wouldn't say that scientists are uncorrupted or incorruptible, but it happens in degrees!

We're in agreement there. Indeed I suspect a lot of it is scientists producing their work in good faith with a serious commitment to their field and once the data leaves the "lab" (as it were) third parties are queued up to pull out of context quotes and make a story from it.

As it happens I think your stood at the "worst case" extreme (based on what your saying). I'm currently thinking, from the data I have read, there is both plenty of time to react and the impact is going to be nowhere near as dramatic as some people like to suggest :)

Which brings me to:

we should have a much higher standard of proof for the absence of severe effects and the absence of harm before we make such drastic changes to the Earth's atmosphere, biosphere, and primary cooling mechanism.

I think this is where we mostly disagree. While clearly we should approach this from the perspective of "we need to make changes and assume that climate change will have an impact on our future" I think ignoring the scientific process to such an extreme like your suggesting undermines the entire issue.

There is no requirement to be dramatic about any of this. Indeed it does a lot more harm than good to be so. We have the makings of a problem facing us - a problem we really have inly just begun to assess and face. The solution requires calm, level headedness and common sense.

Example: I've written several times to my MP to suggest he proposes a private members bill to add new building regulation requirements for new build houses. These would require Solar heating and/or solar energy cells to be added to every new build. The added cost of a build is negligible - but I think the cumulative impact would be as dramatic as any "green policy" currently being proposed.

These kinds of things make sense not only on a global scale but on an individual one too: and that is the sort of rational approach that is needed in the case of climate change.

(I also want to see studies into whether our habitat can and will adapt to a changed climate; I feel this is a much under explored area and is worth considering as potential solution. If we can mitigate things to bring about an adaption to world ecosystems that restores balance that would be a neat and subtle solution)

> PS: It's "she", actually.

Sorry :)
This has been a soapbox subject for me for a while.

I actually like the Olympics. I'd love to have it on in the background while working, I'd love to see most of the events, and I enjoy watching a bunch of people get together in one place, from around the world, and compete at the highest levels. It's great.

But I'm not about to subscribe to cable tv for it. I can't stand most of what passes for entertainment on television, I don't want to pay for it, I don't want it in my home. Nor do I want to limit myself only to NBC's coverage of the event, with their moronic and vapid commentators and waste-of-time interviews.

Unfortunately, the various countries are limiting viewership only to their own country, which I think runs pretty starkly against the spirit of the Olympics.
i'd say a pretty damn good marker is the devaluing of ones official currency. it at the very least generally led to significant regime shakeups.
well my .emacs is a lot of collected/revised cruft over the years. It's a mess really, and I'm always putting away refactoring for some other time - since it works for me. You'd also need all of the included dependencies and stuff (it's windows specific, but could be made to work on other OS' also). So I might zip up my .emacs with all of the dependencies files if you want me to.
Do you have a way to automatically create some of these through XML or something else? It may be a nice way to automatically generate these.
Doesn't really matter. Pick a few that interest you and try them out for a month. Try at least two different schools for each style. Saying Tien Shan Pai sucks and Liu He Ba Fa rocks, makes no sense. It's just whatever works for you. I know a guy that was absolutely in love with Hsing Yi Quan, had studied it for 20 years. I found it intolerably boring. Tang Lang on the other hand was a blast.

A lot of it depends on the vibe of the school as well. That's why I say try a couple.

If you want to ground and pound, and that's what gets you off, try a bit of some grappling styles. BJJ is ok, but depending on where you live there's probably some modern style schools you can give a go at also (usually some combo of Muay Thai and some kind of grappling).

If you want to enjoy something with a long history, and steep yourself in the culture, try some kind of Kung Fu style. I find Chinese styles exercise different parts of the brain I don't use as much for engineering and actually can be very relaxing. Most of it is highly impractical in a modern setting, but it's like studying painting or calligraphy or some such.

If you want to be tightly disciplined, Japanese styles, with their strict emphasis on form, ceremony and procedure can be highly enjoyable. I liked my brief study of Shotokan for just that reason, it allowed me to turn off the self-discipline for a bit and let something else take charge.

If you want something you can maybe take to high levels of sport and competition, Tae Kwon Do is probably the place to go. There are a bajillion TKD places around, so choose wisely. Lots of them will be belt-mills selling personal fitness more than the Olympic sport. Try to find a school with lots of Korean students.

But there are others, off the beaten path you can try and have fun with too like Escrima or Capoeira.
"If there any girls reading this or any of you who understand girls really well, let me ask straight out, why do girls lie about their true intentions/desires always?"

If you actually think women always lie, then why even bother asking us, since you think whatever reason we give will be a lie?

I mean... yes, as a woman, everything I say is a lie.

But if everything I say is a lie, then I am actually a man pretending to be a woman. But if I am a man, then what I say may be true, which means that I might actually be a woman.

Seriously, though, your comment is misogynistic.
Dropbox — How to get multiples instances on unix systems
My only problem in the past about using Ruby for this type of task has been memory usage and stability of long-running processes, but since I started using Ruby Enterprise Edition things are much improved.

Before I switched, I would typically have to log into the server several times a week to restart the Workling processes. I switched to REE a couple of months ago, and I just did a 'ps aux' on my server: the processes have now been running for over a month without a problem.

Also there is something rather appealing about using Javascript on both sides of the server/client divide. It's really very natural feeling.

I agree though, that EventMachine is potentially another option.
I'd love to know this too. I have a need for something similar to this situation and I'm interested in what he's doing. I would love to see some example code on how the file upload actually works.
Timeline for context:

1/12/09 - TechCrunch has article on Tweebay becoming Tweba (http://techcrunch.com/2009/01/12/startup-tip-dont-pick-a-nam...)

5/4/09 - Tweba featured on Digg (http://digg.com/tech_news/Tweba_com_Tweba_allows_you_to_buy_...)

5/8/09 - Tweba is selected Microsoft Startup of the Day (http://www.microsoftstartupzone.com/Blogs/Microspark-BizSpar...)

7/26/09 - Date of Tweba's most recent tweet (http://twitter.com/Tweba)

Now - http://www.tweba.com apparently gone without a trace!
Data, Data Everywhere
Have you considered the Scottish martial art? It's called Fuh Kyou.

(Yes, I deserve every down-mod I get for that)
If you want skepticism go to Climate Audit or Watts Up With That, then use your brain to decide if their arguments have merit.
That's a pretty awesome trick. I've been playing around with Node.js for proxying a bit as well (see http://github.com/simonw/dogproxy ) and I've run in to the same problem as this snippet - writing a full featured HTTP proxy is a bunch of work that I don't really want to do just for my little experiments. If anyone's looking for a neat project, writing a spec-compliant HTTP proxy library for Node.js that makes it easy to plug in additional functionality (like load balancing, rate limiting, caching etc) would be incredibly useful.
One of the next major iterations will include an API, which a few folks have asked for.
Nobody really understands anything but us. It's one of the best parts of being us.
A lot of people here in the UK seem to bemoan the BBC for being overfunded and, basically, crap.(Which I always find amusing having had to suffer US telly at various intervals :P)

Anyway: point is the BBC have run consistent coverage of the whole of the winter Olympics every night over here. Solid stuff.

Everyone should try the model, I think, of tax funded TV.
Why do I need to create an account to create a timeline? Wouldn't it be much better to let me dabble around and if I want to protect my timeline from anyone else, I create an account?
There was initially erroneous data reported for S3 EU West. The post has since been amended to correct this data.
Helvetica requires a license, and the license stipulates a Flash implementation. Perhaps the foundry will release an embeddable @font-face font soon, in which case we would likely make a switch.
Just like it's important to learn multiple languages to be a well-rounded programmer, you should train in multiple styles of martial arts to become a well-rounded fighter.

I recommend kickboxing for learning fundamentals of open-hand stand up fighting, Sambo or BJJ for ground fighting, and Filipino martial arts (Kali/Arnis/Eskrima) for weapons and to tie it all together. Wing Chun fits in nicely as well, and JKD is worth your time too.

I echo the sentiments of the people who say it's less about the style than the teacher. A good teacher will expose you to outside concepts. A good teacher will teach you to be practical and not flashy. I strongly recommend you focus on practicality. Always ask yourself, "how will this actually help me if I have to defend myself?" I've seen practitioners of certain styles get completely taken down because they were not taught to be practical - nothing to do with the style per se, but they didn't have good teachers. In particular, I recall a Tae Kwan Do fighter try to use spinning kicks while sparring. As soon as he started to turn his back, his opponent simply stepped forward and kicked him in the balls from behind.

Value practicality over all else.
And I, on the other side (or perhaps in the middle? Is there a middle?) see the AGW debate as important because it teaches critical thinking, it's a great example of how hard science (such as the absorption spectra of CO2) can get muddled with softer sciences (such as paleoclimate research). It's even a great example of how the activist scientist is his own worst enemy, a lesson that we still seem to not have learned. It's a great discussion about causality -- surely the climate is changing, so the term Climate Change Skeptic is somewhat rigged. From there we can drag out Chomsky and Wittgenstein and talk about how language and definitions are critical to informed debate. And we can hit the Philosophy of Science concepts which usually causes all sorts of consternation.

But still it's not news. And still it's the same old discussion. And still the same people vote the same other people up or down based on their preconceived notions.

Green startups are awesome. Let's hear more about them. Hacking science measurements is also a great topic. I'll read stuff like the VASIMIR drive all day long. You're not going to find people trashing a startup because the startup is solving a problem that they may have political issues with -- at least not that I've seen. (They may ask if you are solving a real problem and if there is a real market, but they'll do that regardless)

Like I said, I'll go another hundred rounds if I have to. It's that important. But I know a topic that people aren't going to change their minds about, and this seems like such a topic. So I'm going to try to restrict my new posts to real news about AGW. Or about how this scientist-as-activist/standards-of-research story develops. But not the I'm-right-and-the-other-guys-are-assholes stuff.
See http://celeryproject.org
I lived in Seattle for 6 years, 2 of which were completely car free. It's possible, but you're swimming upstream. I'm now in NYC, and it is far easier.
It's not just a matter of protection -- how do you work on it a day or two from now?

One way to do it would be to generate a long, random URL that you can use to get to and dedit your timeline. Anyone who has that URL can contribute to that timeline, regardless of whether they have an account. Would that work for you?
So in essence, Microsoft just handed this off to one of their junior programmers and he wasn't aware of how to do random correctly.

I don't see this being a result of Microsoft's malevolence, merely a programmer's ignorance. I doubt that Microsoft would do something that would be caught while fighting anti-trust charges.
To be fair, that and being faster than both nginx and lighthttpd. I don't know anything about it but to say its only claim to fame is the web admin isn't quite accurate.
I'm not sure of that injects a sense of urgency or just useless speculation.
I'll be writing my congress people with something to the effect of "do not want". You should too.
One issue with this approach is that the author is allowing users to start the background work, rather than putting it into a queue like he had been doing with his prior site. If his site gets slammed, this will be a problem, whereas with a queue he could set up his interface to let the user continue browsing the site while his/her work makes its way through the queue.

One nice find from the article is the link to the Flash implementation of websockets: http://github.com/gimite/web-socket-js
Wow … shame on me ! I did too much of special relativity :-)