skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
How did this pile of crap make it to the front page of HN?

To make it more hacker friendly, check out the Open Source Debunking of the paper and petition from October 2007: http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2007/10/oregon...

Now, that's real science: Peer reviewed, transparent, and, shockingly, based on evidence interpreted by people who understand it.
Be sure to post a follow-up. I for one would like to hear the outcome.
I think he's overstating how serious his "transgression" really was. If anything, knowing that one of your rising stars is so into coding that they'd rather be still coding for fun rather than anything else would make them _more_ valuable.

Not saying that working on side projects on company time / company equipment isn't dumb, but it's certainly not a major offense!
The Catch-22 of Launching an Innovative Product
I haven't experienced any of those problems with Hardy, but I have experienced several other issues.

There does seem to be a pattern of "Do things for the convenience of the the Ubuntu developers" rather than "Do things for the convenience of users and third party developers, so that the platform is nice and has lots of tools". They've introduced shell variables into the Apache configuration file, which is simply invalid syntax if you try to use any standard Apache tools (they did this because parsing configuration files would be too hard for their developers to handle). I've also found the network status monitor is just broken, and wifi won't start correctly on boot...I have to drop to the command line to start my wifi every time I boot up (it worked fine in 7.10 and 7.04). And this isn't one of the complicated wifi cards to make work...I bought this lappy because it has an Intel wireless chipset that works out of the box with all modern Linuxes.

So, I would agree, the quality control seems to be pretty weak in this release. And the simple fact that they willfully broke every tool but their own for dealing with Apache configuration is an abomination.
The author (David Ranson, not the WSJ board itself) is addressing the idea, implicit in Dem presidential proposals, that you can raise a meaningful amount of tax revenue with higher tax rates on high incomes.

The chart is directly relevant to that question: no matter what you do to high-earners, tax revenues don't budge.
Except it didn't. GDP grew faster in the fifties, with a 90% "millionaire's tax", than it did in the eighties, as top marginal rates were being cut to their lowest levels.

Numbers from here:

http://www.economagic.com/em-cgi/data.exe/var/rgdp-qtrchg

But this is something I noticed around 16 years ago.
You have missed the point of the article. It doesn't matter if a tax is "income tax" or "lolcats tax", economists agree that any tax creates a disincentive for productive work.

The question is, how much do tax rates impact productivity. This article points to some data that suggest that as rates increase, productivity decreases or evasion increases.
Y'know, as much as I wish this edw519 person well (at least in that I don't actually wish him any specific harm...) I really don't think that submitting and/or upvoting this was a good move on the part of the people who did it.
Pay close attention to the bit about being generated on a WAMP system. This is clearly an issue with PHP using a faulty random-number generator on the Windows platform, and not a general fault that necessarily exists in all programming languages' random number generators. (Just for the record: Windows has a number of random number generator functions in its cryptographic libraries, some of which are on-par with those that ship with *nix. It's just that PHP on Windows isn't using them the right way)
Less affordable for who? I graduated with a CS degree after going to community college then a state school. I graduated with no loans or debt of any kind. I payed $11/unit at CC and about $800 a quarter at state school.

You can't seriously claim that this would have been cheaper for me if only the government had gotten out of education.
The claim: GDP moves to compensate when this tax group's rate changes.

The evidence: Er, whoops, we didn't give any data for GDP.
Are you crazy. Save your money to make sure the company succeeds!

I heard this quote somewhere:
Run your startup like a one story whorehouse.

It was mentioned by a VC who has seen many startups come and go. Not to say they are the final word, but I think its very true.
How is it a strawman? I'm beginning to think your curt answers veil an inability to deal with the complexities of reality.
True.

"The implementation (in C) was based on the GADDAG data structure and algorithm explained in a paper by Steven Gordon"

Sounds like he was doing something more akin to research, which could certainly have benefitted the company in future development projects, than some guy simply wasting time with a trivial side project.
Long live Napster.
It should be noted that this is an op-ed by David Ranson.

Mr. Ranson is head of research at H.C. Wainwright & Co. Economics Inc.
Memory usage and random access times are far better in arrays, but for dynamic resizing, deletion, insertion, appending, and splitting, that is, operations that deal with data structure rather than the content, lists are far superior to arrays.

I used to hand-code linked lists back when I used C/C++ heavily. They have some very significant advantages for modeling certain kinds of data.
Thanks, finally someone is pointing to real data rather than just waiving a magic wand in the air.
Heh, I can't imagine how crazy we would go if we lived in Bagdad and actual electricity was as unreliable as Twitter.
It's annoying when Twitter is down, but man, it makes me realize how spoiled we are.
Well... Not in the dumpster.
It turns the iphone into a little headstone for the Vista grave. How sweet.
I don't think it's implying causation where there's only correlation. It seems to be implying non-causation due to non-correlation.

I'd say the bigger flaw is that it only looks at the very top tax rate without looking at the point at which the top bracket cut in. In the 1950s the top tax rate was enormous but it only affected a tiny number of people. Now it's a lot lower but affects a larger slice of the population.
http://www.econ.umn.edu/~tkehoe/U.S.GDP.gif

US GDP growth hasn't changed, even as this highest marginal tax rate moved by a factor of 3. It was actually highest in the 60s and 70s, when the top rate was still in the 70% range.

GDP and total revenues are just too big to be affected by the tax rate of a single group, even, the most wealthy.

What this budget shows us is that total gov’t spending must never be over 19.5% of GDP. That’s the only solution. Then, we can start lowering taxes and see if revenues stay up.
iPhone 3G Launch Date Confirmed
Now this is a useful website.
tipjoy is pretty neat. I have it on one of my smaller blogs that I own and it's got me a few payments. Biggest problem is the fact that someone tips the minimum 10 cents but 90% of people do not actually follow through. Of course, it's just in its early stages so good job so far
As the author points out, php's rand function is garbage on some systems. mt_rand (based on the Mersenne twister) has been the suggested replacement for many years; it's built in, fast, and consistent across platforms.
It's an interesting article and comparison, but (in general) I think people tend to obsess a bit too much over "true" randomness. I am not worried about my random dice having a seemingly repetitive pattern. If I am flipping a coin or even rolling dice, I might observe certain reoccurring patterns in the results of the coin flip -- perhaps out of sheer randomness.
He raises a good point. I think there is a lot of internal friction that keeps bloggers form posting about competitors sometimes, but there really shouldn't be any fear of it.
Any pseudorandom stream generator is periodic, with the period at best proportional to 2^n, where n is the number of bits in the internal state of the generator. But you're right that the period in the example seems way too small. A correctly chosen 32-bit linear-feedback shift register (LFSR), would have a period of 2^32 (about 4 billion), which would be hard to see.
Yeah, you can see it has a small period from the presence of a repeated pattern. I think if he had used the Mersenne twister algorithm the output would be indistinguishable.
This article is laughable.

First of all, all of this controversy has to do with the Large Hadron Collider (Black Holes) and the Low Energy Antiproton Ring (antimatter). Much else goes on at CERN.

Secondly, they are going to be making extremely tiny amounts of antimatter (just enough to study it's effects). Not enough to blow up anything significant. Antimatter is really, really hard to keep around and control.
See: http://public.web.cern.ch/Public/en/Research/Antimatter-en.h...

Third, the "mini black holes" they are making are nothing like what a layman would consider a black hole. They will be only the mass of a few thousand protons and if our current understanding of particle physics is even close to correct they will evaporate almost instantaneously. The funniest part of this whole thing is extremely high energy cosmic rays have been making much higher energy collisions on earth for it's entire existence.

This is all about laymen getting up in arms about things they don't understand. The scientists shouldn't have called them black holes in the first place as it incites ignorant people to speak out when they know very little. With all the science fiction surrounding black holes anyone could have predicted this kind of outrage.
See: http://public.web.cern.ch/Public/en/LHC/Safety-en.html
Strategic Imagination: Why Academia Hinders Progress
What do you guys think?
Actually, it was my understanding that web 3.0 will have photorealistic textures in rendered in super mega HD resolution, with weather supplied by 2 crays working together, along with economic simulations from the university of tokyo and a unique "circle of life" designed by peter molineux. as an homage to linden labs, they are going to call web 3.0 "Real Life".

unfortunately, all structure and order will be seen as elitist, discriminatory and requiring too much "lock-in" and as such, it will provide no use to anyone seeking to accomplish things.
Job: Backend Hacker at Boston area Startup
Wistia ( http://www.wistia.com ):

Want to work for a company which has built an exciting product in the web video space AND actually has customers and revenues? Then Wistia is the place for you. Our video sharing and collaboration platform is changing the way that companies use video. Our customers include companies in lifesciences, video production, and the Global 100. Our vision is making video as simple for companies to use as email and Word documents. We're early stage (i.e. lots of opportunity), well funded, and passionate about what we're doing.

Position:

We're looking for a highly motivated individual who enjoys working with a small, tight knit team to create cool and exciting web applications. While our platform is built in Ruby on Rails, you only need strong coding skills, excitement to learn, and experience with some other similar language in a Linux environment (e.g. PHP/Python/Java). Skills are important, but passion and drive to build something amazing also counts for quite a bit with us. You should have a strong entrepreneurial interest and enjoy working in dynamic and extremely exciting startup environment.

Desired skills:

-BS or higher in CS or related area
-2-3 years experience in designing and developing scalable websites and applications
-Solid programming skills in Ruby or a simlar language (PHP/Python/Java)
-Development experience in Linux/Unix environment.
-A strong knowledge of relational databases
-Experience creating and using backend REST web services
-Creative, thoughtful, and detail-oriented personality
-Must be authorized to work in the U.S. currently
-No contractors or consulting offers please

Wistia provides competitive salaries, generous stock options, and top-notch healthcare/dental. We are located just off Rt. 2 (inside I-95) in Lexington.

Please feel free to contact us at jobs@wistia.com
I recently upgrade my Gusty laptop to Hardy and it fixed a very annoying video bug that I'd been having. So far I'm quite impressed by it. I haven't yet run into any of the issues that others have been complaining about.
We can't conclude from this chart that the two curves are independent - only that they have been independent historically. One explanation that leaps to mind is that the total tax level will remain constant because the government will always tax sufficiently to fund its programs, and those have stayed roughly constant as a proportion of GDP. This leads to a seeming noncorrelation between any segment of the tax code and total tax revenue.

Even if the above explanation is far off-base, I hope it shows how a historical noncorrelation doesn't necessarily mean a lack of causal connection.
> the purpose of HN is to serve YC -- that's why we don't see ads on the site.

We don't see ads because the site is run by millionaires and hardly takes any computing resources or bandwidth.
Facebook Traffic Declines 10% in April
This is ridiculous. They should change the name back to YC News since they've decided to shill for their own investments.
Great post.

I've done work for 2 kinds of people, those who visualized the possibilites once they saw what I could do and those who were threatened once they saw what I could do.

Guess which kind I seek out now.
"As far as I'm concerned, that counts as showing a negative attitude towards women."

Well that's fair enough, if that is your opinion. Nothing to argue about, just different viewpoints. The 3boobs women are not IT workers, though (not that I know, anyway).
Fixing Compiler Warnings the Hard Way
WTF! so renters get shafted no matter what. If house prices are rising they rise to fast to save a deposit / keep pace with salaries. And if they fall rents rise again eating into your ability to save. Its even worse with banks requiring 25% deposit for 1st time buyers

eg £180,000 purchase price
deposit £45,000

Average UK salary is less than £30,000 and the average graduate can expect £10-20,000 of debt to pay off first.
Interesting. Then I got to the line "RateItAll, is the only consumer review site that shares revenue with its contributors"

What about the other million consumer review sites? Get paid for your opinions?

TipJoy could be pretty big though. Tough problem to solve, but fun :)
About 30% of pledged tips have been paid - but these numbers are really early. We haven't prodded tippers too much yet, but we're about to start subtly pushing them towards payment.
Exactly. I was at school with Gates (used to see him hunched over the PDP-10 TTYs late at night writing his Basic), and we all used the ARPAnet for mail, ftp, etc (though it was pretty new in '73), but we didn't think it was anything that would affect our entire lives much later.

I also remember working with Len Bosack later (1980-ish) on a consulting project at HP and hearing about Cisco, and wondering who in the world would buy IP routers?

It just wasn't obvious back then. It was simply "part of the air", as Gates has said in interviews.
Actually, they were claiming that raising the top rates hurt revenue because it tanked the GDP (while it left revenue as a percentage of GDP intact). However, they did not present evidence of that claim.
The fact remains that the Wall Street Journal's editorial board has an obvious agenda and few scruples about pushing it with bad statistics.

Other arguments I've seen on that page: America is a classless society (evidence: if you look at people who are poor when they're 20, they're often much richer when they're 40). The poor are "lucky duckies" for having such low tax rates (evidence: tax share statistics which take account only of the income tax, ignoring the state, local, and payroll taxes which make up the majority of the burden for the poor). I'm sure there have been others. I don't know if these have been mainly by the editorial board themselves, or op-eds.

I have nothing particularly against market liberalists - I respect the Economist, and Reason Magazine. The WSJ just doesn't seem honest.
People have been generating this kind of graph of years, often with more meaningful techniques. For example, you can get another dimension of information by looking at the difference between one number and the last one generated, and plotting it on the z- or color axis.
The right question to ask is whether a source is random enough for your purposes. The weaker source might be ok for a game, but the patterns in the visualization were certainly not caused by chance. That level of predictability would not be ok for crypto.
And perhaps your strawman argument veils an inability to debate the topic at hand. I never said anything about doing away with public education. Small government != the doing away of all social programs.

"yeah, we'd be much better off if all these programmers we hire from state schools weren't able to afford an education."

Your comment superficially sets up an argument I never made, which is the definition of a strawman.

Anyways...

I'm all for government sponsored programs that work along side the private industry (and force competition) in order to contribute to the general welfare, which is what the constitution states. For example: defense, infrastructure and education among others.

However, I'd love to rid our government of all the pet projects, pork, worthless organizations (and employees) and general waste that rape our income.

It's near impossible to fire a government worker, which is a crime in and of itself. Our government is so inefficient that consulting firms are rolling out in mass "staff augmentation" programs that take over the responsibilities of a given agency/department.

Think about that...you hire government workers to do job X. They are so incompetent at job X you hire high priced consultants to complete job X while not firing any of the workers. The end result? Job X is completed at two - three times the original cost. Ridiculous. If you ever want a first hand look at how inefficient the government is, live in DC for a few years.
"Survivalist" implies far more than thinking about what to do, and considering the possibilities. Afaict, it also includes a lot of people that truly believe that sort of thing is just around the corner. There's also a psychological trick there too: all their planning begins to look a bit odd if everything is smooth sailing, so I think there's an incentive to start "believing". There is a significant portion of these folks that is 'fringe', and some in what I consider unhealthy ways.

Anyway, the short version: the guys behind that site set of some warning flags in my mind, and I would be less inclined to believe they're doing serious science. Call it a gut feeling.
Scott McCloud started a micropayments furor awhile back.

http://www.scottmccloud.com/home/essays/2003-09-micros/micro...

I think it's time for micropayments. Web advertising is not turning out to be some all-wonderful thing. Rather, it seems to reach the less affluent web populace. If people can directly reward good content, we will eventually see more content people will like.
Hmm. Running that in Bash would result in an error as backslash characters aren't escape sequences inside single quotes.
Interview: Coding Competition Becomes Spectator Sport
The year-on-year figure is up 56%, and myspace is also up y-o-y and down from March. Could it be that as spring kicks in, people leave their computers more? Or as end-of-year exams approach, students procrastinate less?

I wouldn't cry wolf just yet.
I think Steve Jobs noticed importance of production design during the time he worked on Next. I remembered an old profile for him in Time sometime around he going back to Apple. He criticized the design on laundry machines and used a rare German laundry machine that's very quiet in his house.

I am a programmer myself and I know I don't have so much talent in design. I noticed that at least in web industry before Web 2.0, web designers were treated pretty badly by most management teams because they think designers just need to type in some HTML code/cut and paste some photoshop and site is done. What they don't understand is a good designer has to put himself/herself into users' shoes and experiences it when they make design choice and a bad choice will kill the site.

I am actually happy that at least now when you meet a management team that ignores the importance of design, you can raise the popularity of good design such as iPod, iPhone as counter point to persuade them that a good design helps sales. In this part, I really appreciate what SJ and JI has been doing for rest of us.
Huge beefs here:

1. To suggest taxing the rich at a higher rate is the sole reason for a drop in GDP is simply ludicrous. Being that government spending is a part of the GDP equation, it's much too complex to attribute to a single cause. For example, given that the public's appetite for taxing the rich would increase in hard times, it would also stand to reason that governments are reducing spending concurrently, and that is the reason for the stagnation.

2. The implicit suggestion that GDP increases are inherently good and GDP decreases are inherently bad is outdated. You could get a GDP increase by dropping a nuke on LA. The US doesn't even use GDP to measure economic health anymore, but rather GNP.

3. I would love to see a graph that uses the total net revenue as an adjusted dollar amount, and leaves the GDP equation out of it. I'm pretty sure the results would be rather different.
Startup Junkies Earth Class Mail on Hulu
Tis the season... As I recall, way back before we had social news, mailing lists (even the most technical) would end up filled with political discussion in the runnup to the US presidential election. Because even if you're a geek, you're affected by politics. And even if you're in the Antarctic, you're affected by US politics.
Season of Usability
edw519 is a top contributor to yc: http://awurl.com/ueuqua68821

I don't see what's wrong with a community doing something nice for one of it's most active members.
New OLPC Concept Features Dual Touch Screens
How to answer 23 of the most common interview questions
It doesn't say which crimes.

Many places outside of the US have a high degree of property crimes compared to violent crimes. I wouldn't consider property crimes like vandalism to reflect a degree of safety though. I could use murder rates alone and show opposite results.

That's my point though. "Safety" is unmeasurable, really, because it is a perspective.
Choosing Erlang IDE
it's obvious the PHP's rand() function is using the operating system's random number generator, because as the results from Window's are awful (the image doesn't change when re-running the script), the results from the Linux environment are far superior.

Chances are, the Windows version not changing is a feature, not a bug. Random number generators require a seed. The same seed always provides the same stream of pseudo-random numbers. This is useful if you're, say, debugging a simulation that depends on pseudo-random numbers.

I don't do Windows system programming, but I'll be there's a way to change the seed, and then change the stream of numbers. So, I find it more likely that the people who implemented php on Windows were using the generator incorrectly, if the intention was different number streams.
School's out and it's warm. I'll get back online when I get bored of the pool.
Ruby && DTrace!
I wonder if there's some sort of fundamental relationship between the powerful elites in every given society and the rest reflected in the graph? Is there some sort of relationship like Boyle's Law for gases?
I had glanced over that paragraph, and indeed, it's wrong. One, the stream only changes if the seed is dependent on the system time. Two, if you modify the result with another pseudo-random number, then you have a function whose randomness if as only as good as its inputs.