skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> Its nice picking your time scales and models to convey a message

Yeah, they're totally cherry-picking by only looking at the last four million years. Shocking.

You're right that if we go back, say, 100 million years, we find CO2 levels somewhat higher than today. Other things we find: temperatures 20-40 degrees C higher at the poles than today; something like half of Europe and the US under water.

(See http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/paleo/ctl/cliscibeyond.html for a bit more information, though it's not very detailed.)

> the sun is heating up before it goes super nova [...] whch is what alot of the global warming fear is based on

What?

> the biggest threat facing mankind in the next 30 years is the Grand Solar Minimum

Take a look at the graph at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_minimum#Grand_solar_mini... and tell us again, if you can with a straight face, that anything like the Dalton minimum (let alone the Maunder minimum) is coming in the next 30 years.

> When this occurred we had things like increased volcanic activity

So far as I know, there is no reason to think that solar minima cause volcanic activity. It is true that there was a big eruption during the Dalton minimum, which is probably the main actual reason for the "year without a summer".

> estimates suggest around 25% of the global population died

Whose estimates?

> whilst no one wants to create a panic

It looks very much as if you do.

> no one really knows whether our manmade CO2 is going to benefit us or not

No one really knows anything about anything. But you can look in the IPCC reports to see what a bunch of smart well-informed people think are the likely impacts. Or you can throw up your hands and say "no one really knows". Your call.
Netherlands Railways uses Wi-Fi sensors for modelling passenger behavior
While the other examples in the article are fitting, obtaining a pet is the one example that is almost exactly like when buying a gun in the US: when buying a puppy from a private seller, you don't have to go through any checks.
anyway Ethereum feels like a cult. There's something weirdly disturbing for me about the ethos of blockchain technology, and how it jarrs with "The DAO" (note the capitalised definite article. There Is Only One. Hardly distributed or democratic). Also look at how a bunch of ethereum shills pack its "Curator", for which, by the way, The DAO is "incredibly privileged"[1]. What? Your own organization is incredibly privileged that you appointed yourself to it?

Even the name "ethereum" is pretentious and showy, again anti-distributed ethos.

I don't get a strong comfort level that this organization is any better than the current central banks.

[1] https://daohub.org/curator.html
The interesting question for now is - is that illegal what that unknown party does? If The DAO code is the contract - then using the code in this way would be like using some fine print clauses in a contract.
Blog post from the makers of the bot.
http://en.promo-bot.ru/2016/06/15/robot-escaped-testing-grou...
I think the way they added classes was actually ingenious. I actually don't use classes or even prototypical inheritance, I only use functions, functions and functions. But they didn't really change Javascript at all under the hood as far as "class" support is concerned apart from some minor things at the edges - it's the exact same prototypical inheritance pattern as before, only that you write it differently. And if you do choose to use classes it's more readable now than before (yet yields the same result). So they satisfy the very big developer market of the "class people", those who like the old Javascript ways, and also those who like a functional approach. I'm content sharing the language with people who program very differently from myself and ignoring those parts.
I find it odd, that you don't care what happens to the Earth as a whole, given that is the only place you can live as a human :)

And the thing is that the prosperity of the human species in the last century has been made largely at the expense of the Earth as whole.
I think it might have something to do with the fact that the payment model isn't connected to a server instance, but how often your code is run. Heroku, GAE etc. are server-oriented. Your code is running on a dyno or an instance, and you pay based on the number of instance-hours you use. In AWS Lambda, or Azure Functions, you pay for the number of requests you process and the time spent processing those requests, how many instances are spent processing those requests are irrelevant. It's a serverless payment modell.
Alibaba Cloud
How to write fast and overcome writers block? Here’s how…
Statistically underpaid compared to what?
The only way any of that can happen is if most of the community agrees to run the software implementing the change. If you know of a way to get more decentralized than that, I'd like to hear about it.
Agreed, I studied in Montreal for half a year. Was amazed to find a cheap room, cheaper than back home in Europe, in a prime location in a similarly awesome city.

Price of groceries really hit me though haha, but Montreal's living arrangements felt incredibly balanced, and that's a really hard thing to pull off.
An official statement was issued by Ethereum: https://blog.ethereum.org/2016/06/17/critical-update-re-dao-...

Since it is under load, here is a copy:

An attack has been found and exploited in the DAO, and the attacker is currently in the process of draining the ether contained in the DAO into a child DAO. The attack is a recursive calling vulnerability, where an attacker called the “split” function, and then calls the split function recursively inside of the split, thereby collecting ether many times over in a single transaction.

The leaked ether is in a child DAO at https://etherchain.org/account/0x304a554a310c7e546dfe434669c... even if no action is taken, the attacker will not be able to withdraw any ether at least for another ~27 days (the creation window for the child DAO). This is an issue that affects the DAO specifically; Ethereum itself is perfectly safe.

The development community is proposing a soft fork, (with NO ROLLBACK; no transactions or blocks will be “reversed”) which will make any transactions that make any calls/callcodes/delegatecalls that execute code with code hash 0x7278d050619a624f84f51987149ddb439cdaadfba5966f7cfaea7ad44340a4ba (ie. the DAO and children) lead to the transaction (not just the call, the transaction) being invalid, starting from block 1760000 (precise block number subject to change up until the point the code is released), preventing the ether from being withdrawn by the attacker past the 27-day window. This will later be followed up by a hard fork which will give token holders the ability to recover their ether.

Miners and mining pools should resume allowing transactions as normal, wait for the soft fork code and stand ready to download and run it if they agree with this path forward for the Ethereum ecosystem. DAO token holders and ethereum users should sit tight and remain calm. Exchanges should feel safe in resuming trading ETH.

Contract authors should take care to (1) be very careful about recursive call bugs, and listen to advice from the Ethereum contract programming community that will likely be forthcoming in the next week on mitigating such bugs, and (2) avoid creating contracts that contain more than ~$10m worth of value, with the exception of sub-token contracts and other systems whose value is itself defined by social consensus outside of the Ethereum platform, and which can be easily “hard forked” via community consensus if a bug emerges (eg. MKR), at least until the community gains more experience with bug mitigation and/or better tools are developed.

Developers, cryptographers and computer scientists should note that any high-level tools (including IDEs, formal verification, debuggers, symbolic execution) that make it easy to write safe smart contracts on Ethereum are prime candidates for DevGrants, Blockchain Labs grants and String’s autonomous finance grants.

— Vitalik Buterin
Just feels so relevant to the topic :

http://img.pandawhale.com/post-17543-tomtoroyestheplanetgotd...
Because you're an adult.
The Xen hypervisor uses a microkernel architecture. A kernel could implement a userland (e.g. traditional UNIX), a VM interface (e.g. KVM) or nothing at all (e.g. a unikernel). My point is that unikernels do not have a monopoly on small sizes and they are not worth mentioning as an advantage.
For many reasons:

* Because performance vary with time (personal issues, motivation, etc.) so today's low performer may be tomorrow high performer

* Because your metrics might not be good enough to actually discriminate low performers from high performers

* Because such a policy encourages rivalry between employees instead of cooperation (not in the benefit of the company)

And probably other reasons.

So I have no problem with:

* Letting go people because the company has to reduce man count, and choices have to be made

* Letting go people because their behaviour is hurting the company

However I'm dubious about the idea that you should keep churning employees perceived as "low performers" to hire new ones who may or may not later reveal to be better.
There are different ways of predicting. There is a series of research on catching fly-balls that claims there is no prediction in the sense of "estimate/predict end position, move to estimated position"; instead there is an ongoing process of "maintaining the visually perceived velocity of the ball". You end up catching the ball just the same.

http://www.mindreadings.com/OpticalTrajRM.pdf

http://www.mindreadings.com/ControlDemo/CatchXY.html
Heroku is much slower at resuming on incoming traffic, because it has to boot up a dyno to serve your code. A cold start on Heroku usually takes 30 seconds (for me anyways). A cold start on AWS Lambda takes 2-5 seconds, which the user won't notice on my services because the frontend is served from S3 and rendering is client side.

And the way services are coupled to the app is about the same. I've used both Heroku and AWS a bit, there really isn't that big a difference here, except that Heroku as a lot more third party services that can be connected.
Calcutta university admissions for the Academic year 2016-17
The University of Calcutta (CU), Kolkata has invited applications from eligible candidates for admission to Bachelor of Arts Bachelor of Law (B.A LL.B) program in the Department of Law, University of Calcutta for the session 2016-17. Last date to apply is 17 June 2016
Oh, so this is about Postgres and not about Paul Graham doing screencasts? I totally failed to understand that from the title and skipped it. :) I see the clarifying "Postgres" there now, but didn't before. D'oh.
Nor “insanely great”. Is this a font for the post-Jobs era?
...but they didn't halt trading until they were asked to, so clearly it wasn't totally in their interests?

Exchanges are in a difficult position once the 'head' of ethereum tells them to stop. It's a sign that the blockchain might be forked, so any further trades they make might be undone - they simply have little choice but to stop after being told to do so.
I feel "escapes" wrongfully implies intent in this situation. "Accidentally leaves training area" would better explain what happened.
While I don't necessarily disagree, I might argue that the power of JS comes in its flexibility. JS is as near to a 'universal' language as there is, and people are coming from a variety of different backgrounds to use it. It's convenient that it supports so many flavors of programming.
The few number of changes speaks of the already inherent quality of the language.
But all libraries had their own implementation of createClass, the idea was to pave a cow path that was already there, not to invent some completely new pattern.
With all due respect, this wasn't very constructive. HN is full of new and strange acronyms. Most of us either skip the article about it if we're not interested or simply google the term.

Ethereum is a blockchain based cryptocurrency that also lets you submit programs to the blockchain that nodes around the world run in exchange for a small fee.

I don't know what Uncles are, other than the brother of your father.

The DAO is a smart contract, basically a program, that runs on the Ethereum network. It's a bit of a venture capital fund that was open for 30 days to new investors. People submit investment proposals to TheDAO, and the investors decide if the investment proposal should receive funding. If it does, profits are sent back to TheDAO and distributed to the investors

EtherScan is a block explorer for Ethereum.
This is an attempt to explain a controversial experimental result that appears to violate conservation of momentum. The experiment consists of flooding a resonant cavity with microwaves and measuring the thrust produced, which should be zero but is measured to be some small positive number. The explanation in the paper uses the quantum vacuum. The funding of these type of experiments are always interesting to explore.
how is that decentralised? [..] Halting trading is a show of force too

Decentralisation does not preclude "force". The one really has nothing to do with the other. Unless your idea of "decentralization" is actually the solipsist view that every person is an island, and social structures hold no benefit for survival.
What ridiculous nonsense. I've never seen a "free guns to a good home" sign.
It looks like it stopped at 6am central us. Maybe someone ran it as a scheduled job thinking they could be sneaky about it before becoming inattentive?
Anyone gone through Andela, here? What is the pay like after graduating?
Except that would require human intervention. And the whole reason why people love cryptocurrencies is removing the "man in the loop", with administrative power to deny, reject, roll back, or deem illegal their transactions.

It's like these people have never seen War Games.

(It also attracts the kind of people who think that banks, financial institutions, VISA and Paypal are "very likely" to defraud them while something entirely new and unproven with no legal structure is somehow less likely to defraud them or lose their money. See also people who think that bitcoin might be more stable than the US dollar.)
Louisiana DMV Hacked, Data for Sale on Dark Net
Apple ripped off Chinese smartphone maker for iPhone 6 and iPhone 6 Plus
> Yet in the 1970s it was global cooling.

Myth. In the 1970s no one was quite sure what was coming, a few people raised the possibility of "global cooling" and one or two journalists hyped it up as journalists are wont to do, but in so far as there was a consensus it was that warming was much more likely to be a problem.

> eugenics

Not, so far as I can tell, a case of the science turning out to be wrong. What happened was that the Nazis were keen on eugenics and most of the world decided that that wasn't the company they wanted to be keeping. It's a change of values, not of scientific understanding.

> positive effects of global warming

The IPCC impact report, for instance, does talk about positive effects. It talks more about negative effects because most of the projected effects are negative.
Reading and understanding EXPLAINS and planner, FTS.
77% of Businesses That Don't Effectively Track KPIs Remain Small
Specially now with the Eurocup. Try to get into a bar an propose to change the channel to something else.
FICO Producing analytical program to measure cybersecurity risk
That is nice, but it is very different than the statements of unikernels being more secure from being smaller and being more performant that I have heard lately. The more I learn about unikernels, the more I think these are false promises.

By the way, I am a fan of rumpkernels, which also offer the ability to do experimentation. Rumprun is apparently a unikernel design, while rump kernels are building blocks. Rump kernels need not be used in unikernels. They can be used in whatever you want them to be, with unikernels being one place that they can go.
How to: See all inbox views and filter content
Yes, but that's probably because the HN submission bookmarklet puts the site name behind the dash.

It annoys me every time I'm submitting something. But evidently not enough to finally edit the bookmarklet.
The longest fork wins.
The initial min cost is 62 million. In the short term they are trying to reduce the price by 30%. That would make the price something like 40 million. The Upperstage is not reused and it costs about 10 million. 30 million for launch and refitting of equpiment seems to be reasonable.

Longer term they hope to reduce the price to much less.
Response from the official Ethereum Foundation: https://blog.ethereum.org/2016/06/17/critical-update-re-dao-...
I often worry that with every new standard the platform becomes more opaque for newcomers. You know, average people who want a shot at making their own webpage and learn to program for something with an immediate use case.

It's not like you have choices of language on the web, the JS jungle is intimidating enough for newbies as it is. I know many will tout compile-to-js as the solution, but that's an even higher barrier to entry and you get too-much-choice syndrome.

Not that I haven't been glad with the ES6 additions myself ...
As I see it, there are two options here. One is that a lone hacker succeeded in making it look like the Russians. The other is that the Russians failed at making it look like a lone hacker. Faking stuff is hard, so I'm betting on the failure.

DNC also said they believe it's a Russian intrusion, but we don't know if they rely on the same evidence for that - they potentially have access to a lot more.

Another thing is that Putin's government doesn't seem to be terribly concerned that you know they did something, as long as they can spread just a little doubt or have a fig leaf of plausible deniability. (Otherwise they'd probably not go around poisoning people with polonium). It makes sense if you view them as a sort of mafia: a mafia boss may not want it to be an official matter that he killed some people who got in his way - but he sure wants similar people to know.
Reductio – an exploration of code homeomorphism
Thanks so much for taking the trouble to comment. Glad to hear it was helpful.
The only thing that makes certain guns more dangerous than other instruments is the ability to kill more than one person in quick succession. Unfortunately a bomb can do this even better -- and bomb building is old knowledge (except for atomic bombs which are too difficult and expensive for the average person to build.) We already make it very hard to acquire a fully automatic weapon. Bombs however?? TNT can be purchased in the form of those blockbuster fireworks. I am not sure what the solution is to terrorism. It doesn't seem that banning guns is a proper solution. And I'm not a fan of the great surveillance state either.

But if practically, arms cannot be made totally unavailable, and love cannot be taught -- then isn't the only solution to use intelligence to root out the pernicious?? I am just in a world of hurt over these tragedies and wonder what our best defense is against these loons.

As we pride ourselves on elegance of technological and purely algorithmic or sociological solutions, as HNers, it is hard to succumb to a state where "The cost of life is a risk of death at the whim of one who does not value life."

In some countries, this fragility of life is an accepted cost of living. Even if we confronted a person from that terorized country and asked them about terrorism, we'd probably be met with bitterness, nihilism, and support of practical solutions like vigilantism and an armed vigilant populace.

So where does the intelligent, socratic, and elegant hacker solution lie?

Because technology has always been about giving us more control of our environment. Making us live longer and more securely. Giving us freedom from the unexpected so we can do whatever it is that we want to do, as long as it does not hurt others.

And it seems rather terrible that despite all our advancements, someone with the least scientific or intelligent minds carrying antiquated tech like a metal tube and pieces of iron with black powder, to be able to destroy that security.

Will we all wear bulletproof suits in the future when polymer technology allows for paper thick protection? Effectively removing guns as an attack vector. And beyond that, much much later into the future, opting to upload ones brain into the cloud or a robotic body, effectively protecting against any and all physical attacks?

Since these futuristic solutions don't exist now, and have their own flaws like digital hackers -- whats our solution for the current day?

Looking forward to responses and discussion about full solutions. Because the classic rhetoric about gun control merely appeals as a way to decrease statistics but doesn't actually solve the issue in its entirety.
> Yes, the app is built using web technologies and uses Electron

Right. It's a chromium window wrapped around some HTML and JS, aka a website.

> AFAIS it's a fully fledged client, not just a wrapper around a website.

Nope, just a wrapper. True, it's a local webpage served on your desktop they wrote themselves, but it still has all the disadvantages that you incur when your client is just a web page in a browser.

> If it was built with C++ and Qt someone would come and say "why didn't you use Gtk?

Electron has enormous drawbacks which C++ and Qt do not have.
Well I mean the topic just assumes one knows everything there is to know about the subject, and to me, that's just wrong. I had no idea what any of that stuff meant, so I went to research it, and came back even more confused than I was when I started.

Nevertheless, I thank you kindly for taking the time to explain.
Fighting ISIS with an Algorithm, Physicists Try to Predict Attacks
I was giving it until the splitting time was up. So much idealistic naivety. Would have been interesting to watch. I'm sure there'll be more attempts at DAOs yet. Lesson learnt at least.
> it looks like the robot would even have difficulties climbing stairs

Don't underestimate Daleks.
Really? I am assuming you are speaking about "Be civil. Don't say things you wouldn't say in a face-to-face conversation. Avoid gratuitous negativity. "

First of all. I think that was a bad rule to be introduced in the first place. I don't think there was proper user input on that change, and the backlash was mostly ignored. That being said though...

While I can understand my comments were not put in the nicest of terms and verbiage, I in no way became uncivil. Please indicate precisely to me where I became "uncivil", and please make clear your definition of "uncivil".

Sure, I cussed a couple of times, but last I checked HN wasn't against cussing. As a matter of fact, reviewing my comments in this thread, I see nothing you could take as violating the negativity rule at all, unless you are applying an excessively broad scope to the rule that would set a precedent that would harm HN as a whole.

I do think perhaps this part might be in violation: "Also, the real discussion is in my other comment in this suspiciously flagged thread." That though, is not being uncivil, and would be a violation of another issue, and I shouldn't have said that. It's too late to edit now though.

In short, dang, you don't seem to have provided very clear reasoning for your comment, so I would like you to please clarify. I admit in retrospect this is probably why the article got flagged, perhaps rightly so, because it is a contentious subject that was/is bound to create charged debate. My comments were heated but not uncivil, and your insinuation that they were is concerning to me, especially when the other commenter at one point was making attacks on me based on my PTSD. If anything I would expect you to be saying this to him for that comment.

Dan, I eagerly await your reply, as I have always tried to be a good commenter on HN, and I am open to correction if my errors are pointed out properly.