skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The paper making these claims was only presented (not published) this week, presumably with the intention of allowing other labs to try reproducing the results. Quite a few places should have samples of the liquid already; this research team has no monopoly on them, and the rainfalls excited a fair amount of scientific curiosity. The analytical methodology presented is not especially complex or exotic, so if their observations are founded in fact then I would expect multiple independent verifications.

You seem to think that the normal practice is to get widespread experimental confirmation before publication of any kind. It isn't. The point of scientific publishing is to make a result available for verification or invalidation by people who have no connection with the original experimenter. In peer-reviewed journals the referees serve this purpose, but there is nothing wrong with offering up the result for testing by others, especially since the required equipment is available in just about any biology lab.

Your original comment complaining about 'nine years with no verification' suggests you thought the scientists in question had been making these claims since the red rain fell back in 2001. this is not the case either.
Do you use OpenCV?
Node.js Knockout Winners are ...
riding people isn't the solution, the problem is usually structural. Take any product and there are 5 to 10 teams involved in it's development and they all push their own little pet ideas. Rarely is there ever a single leader with a single vision that is also involved in the day to day development and decision making. Instead the person that should do this does what you suggest, they swing in every once in a while, complain complain complain, then switch focus to some other project for a bit, while never taking to time to solve the real problem.

well, that's my sad experience from a couple of big companies.
Perl makes sense. It's a matter of degree of sense, and personal opinion. Python's use of semantic white space doesn't make any sense to me. But I know plenty of sane people who disagree with me.
Bigger than Ruby? Really?
> The IPCC has 3 panels from what I remember: the scientific stuff, the effect these will have on society, and ways to prevent them. The former gives proper scientific assessment but the later two less so. One of the problem of the IPCC is that many of its complains came from mistakes in the latter two groups, but they cast a shadow of doubt to the first one (the scientific one) despite the three groups have little connection to each other. (the stuff about the Himalaya melting, for example was something added by the second group, not the first one).

Which group was Hansen part of when he said that "deniers" should be jailed?

Scientists are people and often behave as such.

For example, most of the scientists who sign the various petitions don't have relevant qualifications and haven't done relevant work. Their signatures are tribal support, not scientific evaluations.
Multiple Inboxes > Priority Inbox for me.
Want to do Forex?
hell, some of us still use bash

As opposed to what? (Do all the cool kids now use zsh? That's my best guess.) Bash just had a major release, as well as a point-upgrade to that. How is Bash now a poster child for out-of-date good tools that people won't let go of?
When I saw that, I immediately thought it was a joke on someone else's website. Then I looked at the domain, and I too was frightened.

Edit: Other than that, I don't see anything alarming in the diffs.
...its total lack of movement is due to it bein' tired and shagged out following a prolonged squawk.

...actually, it's probably pining for the fjords.

http://www.mtholyoke.edu/~ebarnes/python/dead-parrot.htm
I love Bend! Too bad you aren't a python shop. :)
For example, why Amazon doesn't "scrobble" every physical object I use instead of only showing the things they sell that I deliberately review ...

A lot of people are going to want to present a different music profile than their actual listening habits.
You are correct that different courses favor different body styles, but comparing someone like Paula Radcliffe (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Paula_Brooklyn_NYCM_2007_c...) with a top cyclist shows max power is less important in distance running.

Relative to the average American they do have similar thin and muscular body types. And, I think it's easy to underestimate how strong these people are because they have so much less fat than the average person. But, as you say the relative cost of drag for increased body size helps support a more bulky cyclist.
Less annoying than most traditional captchas, I think it may cause problems for international users. You are asking for relatively specific words (I noted pencil, saw and puzzle) that not everybody will know. Also, the pencil sharpener on one challenge is not a common type in Europe AFAIK.

Idea: why aren't you using photos instead of vector graphics? They are also much easier to create (and more difficult for a machine to recognize, especially if you add some random noise).
He's speaking mostly from a theoretical perspective. For me, and everyone I know, the investment necessary for the super-pro equipment just isn't going to happen. That those things exist aren't really relevant to me.

Then he says that digicams are more expensive, and that film cams and their lenses last forever. The thing is that, in general, the lenses for 35mm cams are generally usable for DSLRs as well. My Pentax DSLR can accept any lens ever made for any Pentax 35mm.

While he does mention workflow as an advantage for digital, I think it deserves greater emphasis. That's not just because there's no need to send out to a lab (or go in your own darkroom with all the chemicals). It's also because of the availability of tools like PhotoShop, allowing us to do all kinds of post-production. Basic editing like exposure correction you could do in the darkroom. But color balance pretty much requires that you shift to digital. And of course there's really fancy editing like removing unwanted objects, changing sharpness and contrast, etc. The extreme flexibility of digital images is a killer feature.
Was trying to think of this last night -- has giant company with scads of cash successfully "cold started" a social network in the past?

Let me ask my friends on Buzz...
How Nate St. Pierre Has Made A Business Out Of Changing The World
I remember reading this when it first came out, at a time when I was still on Windows. I remember thinking, "Finally! Microsoft products are bound to improve after a letter like that from Gates."

Two years later, nothing about XP had changed, and I moved to OS X, just in time to avoid Vista...

So, while the letter is, itself, excellent, I'm not sure how much it did to help out Windows in the long run. (Maybe Windows 7 represents a change.)
I am certainly not a believer, but this kind of skepticism == unscientific bias. He's cherry-picking reports. I have seen plenty of modern reports of UFOs moving at incredible speeds, including one from about 10 years ago from NORAD.
Step by Step of Launching a New Service
I kinda like downtown los gatos and Los altos a bunch, although they are very different. Mountain view always smells good. Palo alto is trying too hard, IMO.
What technologies did you use?

NodeJS, Python, etc?
> If there’s such a thing as a socialite in the start-up community, Chris McCann, the co-founder of Startup Digest, would be it.

don't these guys run a startup too? I'm not sure if being called a socialite is a compliment :)
>We need a new name for that thing

I've always hated Apple like the pox, but I give them this - they made it fashionable to carry around a pocket computer.
This is not surprising. There are all kinds of places now that I pull out my iPhone and read HN or Reddit while waiting for something in real life. Before iOS, I'd probably read Network World or Infoworld or some such freebie magazine that gets sent to me at work.
I was just scanning 40K c++ header I'd written..

1K block limit seems like it could be a useful device for making functions understandable at a glance.

As I remember, Steve McConnell said studies have shown the most bugs can be found in very long and very short functions...
Just a reminder that there is also a spreadsheet.

https://spreadsheets.google.com/ccc?key=0At7Zl0IkSUKrdGl4RE1...

I will update it from this post when/if i get free time over this weekend. Any help doing the same will be appreciated.
Javascript Engineer @ Meebo - Mountain View, CA / New Yawk, NY USA

We're looking for people who really enjoy coding Javascript as their core language. Stuff we're working on right now:

* A completely vector driven UI layer (in SVG/VML/CSS3 where available)

* Improving the way our applications are delivered to the browser (app caching, css parser and inline image encoding, code optimization engines)

* Improving our JS network transport layer that talks to the server gateways. Almost everything we do is asynchronous since we do IM and notifications (comet/async)

* Fast session and UI state transitions across page loads

* On the server side, we do a lot with couchDB too.

http://www.meebo.com/jobs/openings/ or ping me directly: jian AT meebo-inc DOT com

We don't normally do remote/tele but we should still talk if you find this stuff as interesting as we do. :)
> I would hope the dealership takes care of this during a regular service.

Except that I don't take my car to a dealer.... (I do all minor maintenance and used to do major as well.)
>>But it's not great for rapid webapp development

Interesting, do you know what you talk about and have references?

AFAIK, there are some quite neat libraries and a better OO system than the usual competition (Ruby, Python, Java et al). Etc.
This looks very cool! My one concern would be popping up a chat window to a customer and saying "Hi, it looks like you're having trouble with our site" which could come across as creepy. But maybe they'd have to initiate the chat and I'm not understanding this correctly..
Groupon is hiring for multiple engineering positions in Palo Alto and Chicago. Take a look at our job board or contact me directly at my username at groupon.com if you are interested in doing anything tech related.
You're right and the anonymous commenter on their site said it well:

"The Steve Jobs version: "If the MovieMaker download site isn't working by tomorrow at 6 am I will come down there at 6:01 am an choke the living ___ out of all of you.""
Neat trick, wmeredith! How did you pull that off?
Top Tips For Face Fitness And Formula...
So what's awesome and new in Ping that's never been done before?
Ok take 5 minutes to learn the following, and you won't make the mistake again:

definitely. def-in-it-ely Always say it like this as you type.
Hey, I'm using Python (Django, gunicorn) for the web site. The chat uses long polling and live-tracking in the panel is done using WebSockets.
True, but my point was that the actual key exchange (that is, the exchange of the symmetric keys used for the bulk of the encryption) is done using asymmetric-key encryption. Since this was in response to the question of how keys are exchanged, I thought it was the relevant phase to discuss.
C programmer - Seattle, WA. Email me.
Q: Why did Wesabe shut down, while Mint did so well? A: by Jason Putorti
Fantastic idea! love it!
My target market is intelligent developers who want to get a desktop or web application done as quickly as possible, somebody who gets a lot of value out of being more productive while not being limited by external factors. A YC founder rather than someone who combines snippets of PHP found on the web to make a site for a client.

There are people paying for IDEs (e.g. IntelliJ IDEA & Resharper, Visual Studio), but this is an IDE for an already very widely used language backed by big companies. All of the attempts at developing a new language for a profit seem to have failed or at least not made it big (e.g. Lisp vendors, Dylan, Smalltalk vendors, Rebol) despite being better than the free alternatives in a lot of ways.
I got to this bit:

> LaserJet 6MP attached to it via parallel port.

That got me looking for the date this was written.
They probably are unlocked, but don't have the radios for all networks...
It appears to be sprint, which is a different network?
Thoughts: ugly and mostly useless.

The problem is not beating bots. There are all kinds of ways of achieving that (some fairly effective ones without even requiring user interaction).

The hard one is stopping an outsourced third-world cubicle farm of human spam submitters. Solve that one and you're on to something.
Boohoo, he was on the losing side Schrodinger and de Broglie. I'd give a kidney to be named on the losing side of a problem of this level, with guys like these.
Personally, I think pay-per-hour incentivizes me to "work a standard day" and then quit. Where the standard day is whatever fits into the company's cultural definition of a day.
As opposed to Perl for tasks that would be much easier with Perl scripts than with shell scripts. I know SysAdmins who do this. Perl won't be replaced as A SysAmin language of choice for while now, I don't think.
Cool. Why did you decide to use gunicorn over Apache? Easy installation?
I suspect that the grandparent meant "write shell scripts".
The New York Times is teaching people how to blog
Assuming no friction and given a fast tug of the rope I still don't think the near equal weight would hold still or sink while the other near equal weight flew up quickly.

With the large weight difference, I think the required speed of pulling the rope to make them both rise just becomes impractically fast.

Imagine the system in space - all the weights would move up, so they all have an upward force applied to them from the rope tugging. It's just a matter of pulling so fast that that upward force overcomes gravity.
Douglas Crockford on JavaScript -- Scene 6: Loopage
Try using Outlook web access, or windows genuine advantage or MSDN download in firefox
Look at the 3 genres of music he chose, then look at the suggestions. Just try and justify Yo-Yo Ma. Don't get me wrong, I love his work, it's just that the blogger here didn't choose classical.
> Lower MP gives you less noise but it won't give you more resolution.

This is not a generally true statement (that is, it is sometimes true, but it depends). Sometimes the higher percentage of overhead on the chip required by smaller pixels reduces the overall amount of "actual" information collected. That is, more extra noise is being added than extra signal.
Perhaps a true windows believer would 'defiantly' want Windows Live ?
Oh! I thought the claim was that there was an error in the blue-grey box somewhere, and I was feeling dumb for not seeing it. Then I finally read the sentence at the end about the Gates Foundation, and I understood. :)

Aside: based on the percentages, it looks like there were 85 schools per decile, or 850 schools total (give or take a few); in which case the total percentages indicate that a total of 58 or 59 distinct schools made it onto the Top 25 over a four-year period (23 of them from the smallest-decile schools). So there really is a lot of variability in the winners. I'd be interested to see a similar decile breakdown of schools that managed to get in the top 25 for at least two of the four years studied. That would seriously damp the noise.
Yup. I'm sure every network programmer who's worth his salt has a version of stackable abstraction layers library that runs of epoll or a variation thereof, and supports various transports from plain IP through domain sockets and to exotics like TLS over ICMP. It's like a rite of passage into the circle of network programming enlightenment :)
I'm surprised nobody has provided this link yet.

Perl is Dead. Long Live Perl.
http://www.oreillynet.com/onlamp/blog/2007/08/perl_is_dead_l...

It's an essay from 2007, but I think it's still relevant today.
No, it isn't dead by a long shot. We're just busy doing stuff. Core development (including the release frequency) has been more active than it has been in years. Most of the new developments happen around things like Catalyst and Mojo (Web Frameworks), Moose (OO and Meta-OO), Plack (Web Application Deployments), KiokuDB (Object-Graph storage), syntax extensions, Dist-Zilla (release management) and others. The testing and documentation "movements" are still strong and getting stronger. The toolchain is still being improved (telemachos named a few good examples). If you want to take a look at what the community is doing, I'd suggest reading the IronMan planet at http://ironman.enlightenedperl.org/
As others stated for me, to parse large text files of data.
Jobs may well provide more severe threats than Gates, but I still think there's an important distinction between firing/choking/maiming employees and refusing to ship (or canceling) a product.
I see your quote and raise it...

"Good artists copy great artists steal" - Pablo Picasso
The specific post I think he meant to link to:

http://voltagecreative.com/editorials/no-means-thank-you/
Duh (aimed at myself). Right, sorry. Whew. I got scared there for a minute that I was so terribly behind the times (insofar as I still use Bash as my primary shell).
Arxiv is not a peer-reviewed journal where papers need to be accepted or not; it's more like HN for scientists, where anyone can present a result for consideration. Without digging into the history in detail, it's worth noting that one of the co-authors on this paper is at the University of Sheffield, and was vocally critical of an earlier paper on the same subject; his co-authorship may be a signal to other labs.
There aren't many people using Perl for web applications, but there's lot of other (and in my opinion, more rewarding) work being done in it: email security, bio-informatics, "devops" (infrastructure as code) tooling. In addition, from what I know, Amazon still uses it extensively. Generally, however, these jobs (e.g., my last one in an email security company) usually combine Perl and C/C++ rather than being purely in Perl.

That being said, Ruby is close enough to Perl to where it would not be difficult for you to pick it up and in all likelihood you'll actually enjoy it (especially if you're been writing clean, object oriented Perl). If there's a Ruby-based job that interests you, go for it.

I personally, "moved on" (for non-trivial personal projects) onto Scala and OCaml: I actually like static typing (when there's type inference to reduce verbosity) and the mixed paradigms and "terse syntax" in these languages appeal to my Perl hacker DNA. The fact they're also blazingly fast means I don't have to "go down" to C++ (really, not all that hard in Perl with XS): the scalability of these languages (being suitable to whole variety of tasks, from simple scripts, to full systems) also appeals to me.
Do people's desires expire when they do? If we do not call irrational a will directing someone's worldly goods to his descendents, why would we call irrational Hunter S. Thompson's wish to be shot out of a giant cannon?
I did no user testing (just did what I thought was obvious), I only had 3 months, I worked by myself (mostly), and my site, http://like.fm, doesn't suffer from most of his fail points. I think apple just wanted to add a slight social layer to their store.. You know, to drive sales. I mean if you are one to buy stuff from the iTunes store, you'll probably sign up and follow something. Other people who use the service aren't immediately going to be much value. I mean why else would they make a "social network" embedded in iTunes. You just can't expect something like that to get enough meaningful adoption if it's exclusive to a single platform in a heavily segmented market. So apple wasn't crazy (they just can't be that blind), they just wanted to add a light social layer to iTunes store to boost sales.
They don't need to work 100%, just better than it works now.
I thought we were de-finite-ly geeks around here.
I agree with most of what you said.

However, you don't need to be knowledgeable of a particular field to find faults in a scientific study.

Logic, reasoning and mathematics can be used to identify methodological errors regardless of the subject matter or your knowledge of it.

Also, many seem to forget, science is a process not a conclusion.

We can certainly say a scientific theory is a strong theory supported by numerous scientific studies, evidence and rigorous testing. But all scientifically supported theories, by definition of using that methodology, are subject to modification and falsification based on new research.

I only point this out because of the predilection of some to brand as "kooks" people who dare question scientific conclusions. In fact questioning science is part of science.
Agreed. This can also be applied to dating.
If this really isn't trolling, check jobs.perl.org instead.

As others have written, Python and Ruby fill the same niches and have about the same features.
Wow - now that could be a seriously powerful ordeal!
Chats can be initiated both by the website visitor and the website owner, so the website owner has the freedom to choose whether to initiate chats. It looks like sites which use the chat actively have improved conversions though.
You know, no one took away the check boxes that let you choose which Windows Live programs you want to install when you're trying to run the installer. The installer doesn't even download any of those apps if you leave them unchecked. If you don't want Messenger, Photo Gallery, or even to sign up for a Windows Live ID, you don't have to get/do those things.

Most people find that this is actually helpful, though, because signing up for (or using, since the vast majority of folks already have one) a Live ID enables a bunch of convenient features like easily uploading your photos and videos (either to Microsoft's services or to Flickr, YouTube, Facebook, etc.) And most users who use Movie Maker also want to, for instance, organize their photos. Let's not forget that iLife also comes as a suite for a reason.

On the other hand, signing up for a new throwaway account just to trash Microsoft... yeah, that's classy.

(Usual disclosure: I work at Microsoft.)
Call them jeejaws. That phrase in Anathem just so elegantly wrapped up what cellphones really are like.
That was precisely my first reaction too. On the other hand, there are a lot of places where the stuff you might call the "whereas" clauses---i.e. why we do this---is also excised; the result is a bit leaner and probably easier to read.

So, maybe not too scary. But yeah, that diff was alarming.
Microsoft has gone a long way to address their first party problems but as soon as you choose to install a third party Windows application all bets are off. Most Windows apps still lack a way to automatically update themselves. They still pollute the start menu and add/remove programs menu. Application installs still take too long.
Would also have a insignificant share of desktop and server market.
As opposed to Apple: http://www.blahedo.org/blog/archives/001060.html
Microsoft has made a bunch of very good products:

- Windows 3.0 and 3.1 clearly hit exactly the sweet spot between DOS and OS/2

- Word and Excel were legitimately better than the competition (and still are, although there is not much competition left).

- Internet Explorer 4 was so much better than Netscape 3 and 4 that it wasn't even funny

- Windows 2000 and XP were very good operating systems
I bet there's a premium market for software and hardware that "just works"...

Nah.
This principle is called Diffie-Hellman key exchange ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diffie–Hellman_key_exchange ) and is vulnerable to a man in the middle attack. The man in the middle would complete key exchanges with both Alice and Bob. All that A and B see are valid key exchanges.

This is why we have trusted third parties like Verisign.

The further problems with this are discussed in the article.