skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
>Money has a great deal of importance to a scientist wishing to study forests and natural, untouched wilderness. It has even more importance to a scientist who wants to build a supercomputer to simulate (over)simplified models of the atmosphere and ocean.

It has far more importance (and much more zeroes!) to a scientist who conducts studies on behalf of Energy Industry or for Corporations in said industry.

>As for Lewis, I suspect he loves the scientific method. Find data, generate hypothesis, expose your methods to everyone and pray that you spotted all the flaws in your argument/analysis. He expresses anger that this process has been subverted and the APS is trying to ignore it.

Well, I guess the only option in that case is to proceed with his own independent study?

>scientist who wants to build a supercomputer to simulate (over)simplified models of the atmosphere and ocean

So we shall conduct experiments only when we have complete model for everything?
Well, the advantage being that your home connection probably isn't the same, plus you don't have support people whose job it is to keep your home server up and running.

e.g. Say you're away from home, need something off the server, and it goes down. With this, you can call support and probably have it up and running again.
I've pretty much assumed this to be a given at some point in the next 75 years, but what's most interesting to me here is that rapid-iterating, money-is-no-object Google is doing this instead of a slow-moving auto giant or even an unpredictably-funded university program.

Could Google shorten the timescale for this massive shift to just a decade or two instead of most of a century?
Channel 4 news in the UK said 20-40 minutes per person, with the capsule having 90 minutes worth of oxygen in it.

They showed the capsule - it wouldn't be a place I'd want to spend 40 minutes of my life. (Although, obviously, it's better than the alternative.)
You make a very good point. However your point is not politically correct therefore it is being buries. Have an upvote.

I find the fact that people who make valid points that don't happen to be in lock step with party ideology are buried on this site very tragic and it has significantly reduced my interest in participating in this site.

Particularly ironic is that the ideological downvoting always seems to come from the left/socialist wing, yet this is ostensibly a capitalist/startup oriented site.
No, he's a scientist. Is there a significant difference?
Maybe they monitor the network for IRC traffic in an effort to detect rooted boxes? (though that seems like a lame/hackety solution)
Why the downvote, its an honest question. When all cars are automated, the accidents left should me near zero...
From TFA:

“The technology is ahead of the law in many areas,” said Bernard Lu, senior staff counsel for the California Department of Motor Vehicles. “If you look at the vehicle code, there are dozens of laws pertaining to the driver of a vehicle, and they all presume to have a human being operating the vehicle.”

The Google researchers said they had carefully examined California’s motor vehicle regulations and determined that because a human driver can override any error, the experimental cars are legal. Mr. Lu agreed.
I sort of like that revision naming, actually. As long as nobody does that, it does simplify things at times. Though no more than bookmarks do, and they can be descriptive instead of iterative.
Gack -- that was supposed to go under eogas' item.
I would imagine in some cases it's harder to navigate a poorly formed dirt road in the desert versus a paved road with lines, curbs, etc.
so i propably didn´t completely understand what the site is about :)

perhaps a simple slogan or some wording changes could make that even clearer

wish you all the best
> But then the first worry seems to be that someone is going to arise that is charismatic and honest. Umm- wouldn't those be good things?

Well, the clear allusion in the article was to Hitler. He was adored by the crowds, and he practiced what he preached.
2nd on that. By the way, I am from bkk too.
I can see that too, but I don't think it's impossible. I don't think it will be an instant transition from driver to computer, it will be more gradual. More and more things in your car will become automated, starting with the simplest until we've reached the point that the driver is there simply to be transported.

For comparison, I think about other methods of transportation that have already been automated. Autopilot on planes, fully automated airport trams, etc. To be sure, these are dangerous systems if something goes wrong, but the infrequency of catastrophic occurrences let's us mostly trust in their safety.
I would guess that the drivers behave just like they would normally. If the car hasn't started breaking by the time the driver would typically, he just does it himself.
Something I started noticing a few years ago is the amount of hype around marketing as a programmer. Seems like there's a neverending stream of self-help articles discussing the virtues of marketing yourself through blogs, open-source, SEO, etc.

Thing is I'm positive this has helped a lot of programmers become far more successful than they otherwise would have been.

Unfortunately this also increases the amount of noise in the industry and makes it really hard to find the get it done types. There also seems to be a lot more ego floating around, but my perception on this could just be a side effect of getting old and grumpy.
At work we use Kronos. It supports both card swipes and online log-ins. I do work for a University, so it's a pretty big employee base. Though I actually prefer to swipe my ID to clock in and out. It's easier to get into the habit. Currently I clock in and out online and I forget at least 2 or 3 punches a month.
Microsoft, Google, and Apple have profit margins that are roughly 3-4 times that of Yahoo.
The price I quoted is actually for prepaid do-whatever-you-want-with-it SIM card: €20 per 1.5GB bundle, lasts up to 12 months. You can go cheaper (€4/GB/month) if you're a heavier user or go for a flat rate (no idea how much they are these days). So yeah, sounds like you guys get screwed over for wireless data.
There is some seriously cool stuff on that site - "The Inertial Navigator Platform" looks like a piece of sculpture.
>Everybody is entitled to their opinions, but not everybody gets to have their own facts.
>Global warming is not a theory, it is a fact,

It seems you feel you are entitled to your own facts. The fact of the matter is, the planet is getting cooler, in recent history, due to the abatement of the solar peak, despite CO2 increasing. These facts are easily verified and disprove your "global warming is fact" claim.

IF you go back far enough you can find that the earth has been warming since the last Ice age. If you go back further you can find that the earth has gone thru many of these cycles, including having CO2 rise as the temperature rises, even before there were human societies.

I believe you believe in this "fact" because it is a religion to you, and you believe in it like christians believe in jesus. Thus, you are the target of your own criticism of rejecting things out of hand.

IF you were being the least bit honest, you would recognize that global warming is a theory. And a very dubious one at that, with a long history of fabrication and dishonesty behind it, that originated in political, not scientific circles and which shows a clear political purpose.

The politicians have the motive- to gain extraordinary control over the economy. They have the opportunity- control over scientific funding and a clear mandate to defund projects that are not consistent with global warming theory. And a history of falsifications and other frauds coming to light.

This makes you a religious zealot who thinks that simply calling something a "fact" is some sort of an argument.
Tips for saving power and How it will save you.
Great news for terrorists. Now all they have to do is bomb Google's data centers and kill everyone on the roads :)
IRC servers tend to draw DDOSes like honey draws bears.

That and if the admins aren't paying attention, someone will use it for botnet C^3.
I agree with you, but the point is damn well hidden behind one of the crappiest analogies of all time: using duct tape is an indication that you're great engineer - but only if you are one of the naturally talented "pretty boys" who know what they're doing.
> Only one credible climatologists is vehemently disagreeing with the consensus.

How is "credible" determined, and do statisticians familiar with their work generally feel the same way?

> The science of greenhouse gases was figured out in the 19th century. Given how much we're spewing into the atmosphere, critics should be proving that something else is causing the recent heat records.

If it was really that simple, I doubt there'd be much argument: "Measured increases in CO2 levels correspond to a change in atmospheric absorption from X% to Y% in Z wavelengths, which works out to W petawatts. This is P% of our energy budget, and requires a temperature increase of T to dump that energy through other wavelengths.".

But of course we also have to deal with clouds and water vapor, and the models rely on accurately guessing some ginormous amplification of any CO2 effects in what appears to be basically a chaotic systems, so...

> Merely pointing out that models aren't perfect predictors, or that some esoteric and uncontrollable phenomenon is responsible for some of the warming does nothing useful to help us decide how to act.

It says that we can't actually expect that things will be as different as the models are saying. When the entire reason for acting is that the models are saying we're basically doomed, this really is kinda relevant.
According to the article, Google's lawyers decided it was OK, because a human was sitting in the driver's seat ready to override the system at any time. I guess it's a little bit like student drivers being supervised by experienced drivers, but who knows what a random cop would think?
Funny Computer & Tech Related Quotes
>In order for America's airports to be police states, they would have to be states. They're not. They're airports.

You are a good german. A useful idiot. The kind that enthusiastically joined the nazi party and made snotty arguments to anyone how expressed concern.

It is you, and the millions of unthinking bovine people like you in this country that are enabling the destruction of capitalism and the massive loss of life that it will entail.

You do not belong on this site, since you are obviously a socialist troll.
Breaking Twilight News
if you say so. some day all schools will teach us exactly how so that authors needn't be bothered
Same as today, I guess -- whoever is responsible for the bug, but only if criminal negligence can be proven.
Clarke's first law.
My C is terribly rusty, so I decided to not cheat with python: http://sprunge.us/GiDD

How terrible is it?
What happens when this is due to a hardware bug, like with the Toyotas recently? I don't think criminal liability is involved except in special circumstances. Why should software be any different.

IANAL however.
Actually, most of the time we hear about their failures (Wave, Buzz, etc.); but this is to be expected if they are as fearful of opportunity costs as they're reputed to be.
This experiment, if I recall correctly, was done by Shii. Shii was (at one point) involved in 4chan, and along with moot and W.T. Snacks implemented the period of forced anonymity on /b/.

He has his own website, where he talks about lowering the barriers to participation: http://shii.org/knows/Anonymous
> I can see that too, but I don't think it's impossible.

Honest question, how do you automate this: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=85dzsA-qKPw&feature=relat... ?
I am pretty sure the default response to a lack of connection is going to be revert to manual mode with loud siren, not zig-zag like crazy in traffic.
Chomsky is amusing to read periodically (but please not on hacker news) because he's usually right on context but totally wrong on his conclusions.

It is not "illegal aliens" or "blacks" that will be the victims in the new regime, it is capitalism.

You can see it already. We have a president who just signed a bill giving the government the power to dictate what appears on websites (eg: for accessibility, but these things are never used just for their stated purpose.) who has sought the power to arbitrarily cut off internet services (eg: the kill switch) and who, at every opportunity denigrates and attacks those who are capitalist or successful. ("The rich" is just code words for capitalists and capitalism.)
> Noam Chomsky is America’s greatest intellectual. His massive body of work, which includes nearly 100 books, has for decades deflated and exposed the lies of the power elite and the myths they perpetrate.

Should I keep reading?

See, I've actually read some of Chomsky's political work where he's defending the Soviet Union, North Vietnam, and Khmer Rouge. "There's no concentration camps in Cambodia, that's made up propaganda" type stuff.

Despite the fact that we now know that 2 million people - one third of the Cambodian population - was brutally murdered by the Khmer Rouge, he's never retracted that or apologized. He did some interesting work in linguistics, but his political theories are whacked. Mind you, I'm not left or right, I try to be a pragmatist. But this guy is not a pragmatist, he's someone who doesn't understand the real world and has defended and apologized for and lionized almost all of the most murderous regimes since the Axis powers fell. And then he wags a finger at the United States, which for all its faults, is still one of the freest countries in the world. His points of view are bankrupt and not to be taken seriously on politics.
These "splitting hairs" comments are lame and unnecessary.
Hadn't been to that site in a while...or ever? My first thought? This is how I expect Target's website to look.
Who is the Velvet Underground of Science?
That goofy picture they used of Léo Apotheker supports your point.
During working hours, in the office.
The actual problem, of course, is that the bad science and the political happen, in this case, to agree.

There will always be bad science to support an idea that is politically useful. The superficial quality of the science, its apparent professionalism, depends on the power and wealth that depend on the political idea. That is sufficient to explain the prestige and apparent professionalism behind global warming.

On the other hand, every issue has its cranks and skeptics, and whenever somebody stands to lose a lot of money because of an increase in human understanding, they will fight against it, demonize it, and cast doubt on it as effectively as possible. Cranks can tell a compelling story of the establishment's arrogant dismissal of them and refusal to engage intellectually, but their very unreasonableness creates the story. Sane, successful people exploit their position to marginalize cranks because debating with cranks on an intellectual level is a waste of time and effort. And the plum prize for a band of cranks is an aging genius of yesteryear, declining in his powers and feeling ignored and left behind by younger competitors.

On the other hand, "everything-fun-is-bad-for-you" hair shirt crowd has definitely moved on from Sex to Consumption, and they're joined with the "we-privileged-deserve-nothing-we-have" hair shirt crowd. Attacking our primary energy source is a game-ending strike for people who are against consumption, so you can count on their instant unexamined enthusiasm for the idea. (I'm one of these, though a lazy and indifferent one.)

On the other hand....

On the other hand, I'm never going to get anywhere reasoning like this.

simply invest in my own sustainability and remain healthily sceptical about any new GW science

A cop out, to be sure, but I can't come up with anything better.
There you have the argument for Die Hard 11, vengeance with a diaper.
It would be amusing if the original developers got bored one evening, and decided to spend some time on MT... and saw the very tasks they'd been assigning their off-shore team there.

And then did them.
Actually the article says the legal counsel for the California DMV 'decided' it was o.k., which is even better!
Bizarre road conditions, mechanical failures, the percentage of humans who insist on driving old cars or operating their smart cars manually, improbable edge cases which the software fails to account for ("race conditions"?), illegal drag racing, hackers playing pranks which turn deadly...

Probably lots of other scenarios. You'll never eliminate error completely, but I think we'd all be a lot happier if car crashes happened with the frequency of airplane crashes.
I just canceled my home internet precisely because I had no self-control when exposed to it constantly. I would get up, get online, waste hours, barely get any work done, then waste the rest of the day on it, especially when I had tedious work to do.

It's much easier to get and up and get work done if I don't have internet in my home, so it's not the first or last thing I do every day. I've also started reading before bed again.

Maybe asceticism is just my natural response to things, after all, I don't drink or have a TV or (now) have home internet. But writing a dissertation does demand a little bit of a monk-like existence, as I imagine other major projects do.

I can still get internet with my iPhone or library Wi-Fi, but in the former case it's harder to waste hours surfing on the iPhone, and in the latter case I can simply avoid going to Wi-Fi-enabled places on campus if I need to.
I'm still reading up on this, but I'm very curious as to the tradeoffs between this and a Linode or Slicehost or other VPS system. Seems this would have the advantage of a lot more capacity, and while I'm not sure of the performance of the CPU it should be essentially guaranteed. If you just keep it for a year, and consider the $140 for the plug a total write off, this comes to about $16 a month.

Is this a good deal compared to VPS offerings? It seems like it would have to be, unless the CPU is very slow.

Amazon micro instances are close, but you can't run a web service from them since they can lose their CPU for seconds at a time (as I understand it.)
Too Many Magazine Apps Are Still Walled Gardens
>1. The earth is getting colder, not warmer, while CO2 levels continue to rise.

evidence?

why are Arctic Ocean, Greenland, Antarctica and mountain glaciers losing so much ice all at the same time?
If these systems can be trained to learn your habits, you might be surprised to find your car driving you to that spot where you used to see the other girl...
It's gone way beyond that. The Stanford team is now trying to race up Pike's Peak in an autonomous Audi, drifting around corners at full speed. They already are doing trials at 130mph, drifting, in the Nevada salt flats.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=exdUD02JryI&feature=chann...
women get paid less, are taken less seriously, are subject to glass ceilings, harassment, discrimination, have a higher probability of being raped, etc etc, every single day.

Conversely, men are less likely to attend college, are more likely to be unemployed, are more likely be injured in the course of employment, are more likely to be the victim of a violent crime, are more likely to be incarcerated, etc etc, every single day.

Just because there are no laws preventing women from doing something does not mean that the playing field is equal.

Just because there are inequities in one direction does not mean that there aren't also inequities in the opposite direction.
Ok, why don't you tell me exactly where this quote comes from? It won't be hard, because you have read it.
In Google's blog post, they said that they think automated cars will "significantly reduce car usage". I have no idea what they're basing that claim on.

Automated cars eliminate many of the costs of driving--lost time, frustration, etc. When you decrease the cost of an activity, people are going to do it more, not less.

In fact, if you ask people that can afford cars but commute by train why they do it, many will say that it's because they can work on the train and not have to deal with driving in traffic. Those people would definitely consider switching from the train to automated cars.
You could say this about any new technology. Mass demand will solve this problem.
When has Chomsky said that there were no concentration camps in Cambodia? What book was that?

(I mean these as serious questions.)
Here you go:

"Space limitations preclude a comprehensive review, but such journals as the Far Eastern Economic Review, the London Economist, the Melbourne Journal of Politics, and others elsewhere, have provided analyses by highly qualified specialists who have studied the full range of evidence available, and who concluded that executions have numbered at most in the thousands; that these were localized in areas of limited Khmer Rouge influence and unusual peasant discontent, where brutal revenge killings were aggravated by the threat of starvation resulting from the American destruction and killing." - Noah Chomsky, "Distortions at Fourth Hand", 1977

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Criticism_of_Noam_Chomsky#Posit...
Yes, someone on our blog raised a similar point.

The reason we are asking for advice is because we have zero experience running an app in a cloud environment. Well, we did build our own custom CDN using DynDNS and vps.net, but that's just a small part of our service. I'm scared of the cloud for running everything, so just asking for anyone with experience to tell us what they think of the idea.
He may be great, I don't know him. HP I know better. Their board is beyond confused.

Read this, for example:

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/10/09/business/09nocera.html
Just replied to another comment, but I'll post it again:

"Space limitations preclude a comprehensive review, but such journals as the Far Eastern Economic Review, the London Economist, the Melbourne Journal of Politics, and others elsewhere, have provided analyses by highly qualified specialists who have studied the full range of evidence available, and who concluded that executions have numbered at most in the thousands; that these were localized in areas of limited Khmer Rouge influence and unusual peasant discontent, where brutal revenge killings were aggravated by the threat of starvation resulting from the American destruction and killing." - Noah Chomsky

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Criticism_of_Noam_Chomsky#Posit...
I was referring to power loss. Although in the cloud, it's not actual "power loss" that's the issue, but the end result is the same - the database is shut down uncleanly and must be dealt with before coming back online.
NoSQL: If Only It Was That Easy at Marked As Pertinent
I liked the article and I think it epitomizes this bullet list I saw here a few days ago

1. Make it work

2. Make it right

3. Make it fast

All Joel is saying is that If you're up against a time constraint (like trying to ship code) ... its okay not to get to 2 or 3 right then and there.

I think thats a good lesson for hackers to learn.
2) I wholly agree... as long as other people are driving. Get rid of people's irrationality / drunken behavior on the road, and automated car driving becomes a much easier problem. A computer can take more into account than a human, and decide faster.

Even if you have near perfect data about where the other cars are there's always uncertainty about other objects on the road: tree branches, deer, a child running after her puppy. I'd speculate that it's better to rely on a vision system that can recognize those as well as cars well enough to be safe instead of treating different classes of objects differently.
Honestly, I have not seen a different in FB since this change. Groups look a little different but that is about it.

Is it that no one has attempted to add me to any groups without me knowing?