skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
This looks like something that could be game-changing. But Google seems to dabble with ideas that don't ultimately go anywhere. Do you have a sense for how seriously they're taking this project?
Does "a week without wifi" mean "a week without internet"?

I hope people understand that you can also use a cable.
A commonly cited estimate is that fully half of the income of the Mexican drug cartels comes from marijuana. If you deprive them of that revenue they won't go away, but their influence will surely be substantially weakened.
Fair and balanced is an awkward way to approach a scientific question. If you want unbiased, probably the best you can do is to read some of the original papers and then rebuttals. This definitely is not easy lifting.

The "Hockey Stick" paper:
http://www.meteo.psu.edu/~mann/shared/articles/mbh98.pdf

The "Original Rebuttal":
http://www.uoguelph.ca/~rmckitri/research/MM03.pdf

Then having read those, and having formed in your mind the relative strengths and weaknesses of their arguments, start to do research on these. Then read the IPCC report, and then search through the "ClimateGate" emails for background.

Alternatively, delegate this to a trusted party. Find someone who has done these things and otherwise seems qualified and trustable, and simply accept their opinion on the matter. But it's hard to figure out who to trust unless you've read some of the primary sources yourself.

Personally, I'd choose an old physicist or experienced statistician over a climate scientist or computer modeler. If nothing else, they have less to gain professionally from offering a specific answer. But you'll have to make up your own mind.
If you are surfing Internet while riding your car -- you likely would not care much about exceeding speed limit.
The genius thing about git-svn is not that it only "talks" to svn: using git-svn (you could say subversively) converts your repo to git. One day, when somebody suggests dumping svn for git, you can skip the "but how do we preserve all that history if we switch" conversation, because it's already done.
Yet you're complaining about that option and saying that it doesn't support the branching model as git. It does support it, but you rejected it.
"The only accident, engineers said, was when one Google car was rear-ended while stopped at a traffic light."

Google robot > Humans
You're right.

However their margins are razor-thin in the previous quarters. Like Q4 of 2009 - net income of 1.4M (with 809M revenue).

We'll see how the restructuring goes.
The idea of "highway trains" is promising. Cars are still inefficient - only 1% of the energy they consume is actually used to propel the driver.

It's hard to get too excited about anything involving cars.
Yes, the cause of much controversy:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/dna/h2g2/A49097307
Women did not evolve against risk taking and startups: http://restructure.wordpress.com/2010/10/04/women-did-not-ev...
Kashmir Is Burning
Ha, I saw these cars multiple times this past week in San Francisco, including turning from Broadway onto Columbus in heavy traffic. If that was done autonomously, then I'd be very impressed since I have trouble navigating through those intersections without hitting the many bold pedestrians.
April 1 trick used during the launch of Gmail. Twice wouldn't be that great. (It was a great marketing idea, by the way.)
I personally hate sites cluttered with affiliate banners or google adsense.
True, but I give him credit for using words a little more precisely than your average media hack. It's clear to me from the context that by "scam" and "fraud" he means not the simple claim that the climate is warming, nor even the claim that humans may be causing at least a portion of it, but the whole edifice that's been erected to drive certain political policies that are not justified by the state of the science, and to suppress any suggestion that those policies might not be justified.
Google has self-driving cars… Self-driving cars
Women: Get married first, then focus on career
A Taxonomy of Architects
Get a service I've been working on for the past few months finally finished up and out.

Get the backend for a threat management service we provide almost totally automated.
Ignoring even Penelope Trunk's tendency to extrapolate from her experiences to the rest of the female world, the conclusion she's drawing doesn't actually follow from her own experiences. She says she's taking time away from her third startup to spend time with her children. Therefore women don't do startups because they want to have time with their children. What now? Wouldn't that suggest rather that women who want to do startups can do so and then have time for children afterwards?
Mercedes-Benz announces iPad integration
I imagine it should read *"to make public [that] policy is influenced by pressure groups...”
Extremely poor start - people have to sign in via Facebook or Twitter before they can even find out who/what you are.
In the short term, I could easily see the value in a souped up cruise control for driving on interstates. combined with infrared/night vision, this could easily make nighttime driving safer.

Also, this has great potential (though would probably generate a lot of controversy) for drunk driving. Imagine if your car had a safety mode that could watch out for potential accidents and prevent them even with a human driver.

Amazing possibilities ahead.
One thing I've done before is create a truecrypt volume that a privileged few folks have the passphrase to unlock. Inside the truecrypt volume, we had a text file with username/passwords and other notes. Additionally, we had folders within the volume that kept our company's SSL certificates and other critical security secrets.

That only works in when the secrets need to be shared among a very few people. When more people are involved it gets very very difficult to segment out who has access to what.
I could live with that. But what made me quit right off the bat was that by signing in with twitter I have to follow you. Annoying to say the least: make it a checkbox.
With clones: article seems confused as to whether these are local clones or multiple remote repos[1]. If multiple remote repos: != branching, and horrendously wasteful. If local: almost exactly what I described, though they're making a repo for every existing branch; many other suggestions online suggest maintaining a "pristine", and it then becomes what I mentioned. And read the disadvantages section, it's pretty large. And this is one of the most-described means of branching; duplicating the repository because named branches are such a PITA.

Bookmarks: local only, no info ever reaches the server - ie, no label on a separate branch, it's just yet another anonymous branch.

Named branches: new head even when merged and closed, default push pushes all branches, so very difficult to use locally only if you have more than one remote branch (say, prod, qa, testing, dev. You now have to "hg push -b prod qa testing dev" just to prevent pushing your local branches. Or is it a separate push for each branch? I forget. And what if there were 20? 2000?). If you allow new remote heads, suddenly everyone will get tons of branches as you add more developers, name collisions / too many useful ones used up long ago (mybranch12a7c9?) - this is desirable how?

Anonymous: an artifact of any concurrent version control software, not a feature.

[1]: 2nd paragraph of: http://stevelosh.com/blog/2009/08/a-guide-to-branching-in-me...

edit: summary: Git = friendly to multiple developers. Such as effectively every business environment. Mercurial = friendly to a single developer (in that case, yes, it's admittedly much easier), as long as you always push all branches.
And in the event of an accident, who would be liable — the person behind the wheel or the maker of the software?

The insurance company, just like today. Possibly paid for by the manufacturer and entirely included in the sales price, or possibly paid for by the driver/owner like today.
Why not link to the actual blog post?

Topix.net forums on fire: the Ni-chan paradox (2006)
http://blog.topix.com/archives/000106.html
I totally love the idea of playing infocom games on the Kindle. Text adventures are a fairly good match, as the K3 direction pad stinks. But, I've not spent much time on the kindle keypad either, so maybe I would be able to type commands in very quickly either.

It's too bad imo that Amazon hasn't been very quick with getting the KDK out to developers and allowing open development and sharing of apps vs. the inevitable jailbreaking. There are so many cool things in Java (even though it is J2ME) that I'd like to try on it.

This type of thing is a good case for hacking though:

http://gadgets.boingboing.net/2009/09/02/photo-and-descripti...
I'm adding "integration" to the list of words losing meaning. This is no more an iPad integration than a visor clip is sunglasses integration, or a cup-holder is beverage integration.
That's very promising. Living in a pretty safe place (Canada), driving is probably the most dangerous thing that I regularly do. I'm very happy with the safety advances of the past decade (more airbags, electronic traction control, brake force distribution, better crumple zones, more high-strength materials, etc), but it's not quite "active" enough to make me feel truly safe (especially because it doesn't address human error).

Truly looking forward to the commercialization of technology.
>back in 2000, I knew almost nobody in the web dev business using windows, but Macs instead.

Either you had a very eclectic group of friends, or your memory is slipping a bit.

The big in-rush of web developers to the Mac platform did not take place until Macs became Unix machines. Back in 2000, there was no such thing as OS X, unless you count the public beta. 10.0 suffered from abysmal adoption. I don't know any developers who used Puma, much less Cheetah. Most of us were using various Linux distros. However, by somewhere around 2003ish, with Jaguar, the switch had begun in earnest, but Mac's didn't predominate among web developers for a while longer.
I think this might be a bit harsh. ;)

However I do agree it would be much better to set up user expectations for the benefit of linking their account: explain to me why you need this information in a simple, preferably visual way.

Also, would be great to have a way to unlink my Twitter/Facebook credential from the app.
My point is that the creator forces the user to choose to sign up or leave - there's no discovery or guide to help the user make that choice.

Of course this is a side project, so user experience may not matter. But he asked specifically about experience, so...
Daniel ---

Your statements create the implication that the Hal Lewis, the author of this piece, is being paid by someone to intentionally spread misinformation. Is this a misreading? For while he may be scientifically wrong, I wouldn't make this accusation lightly.

According to the article the last straw for him, was that he obtained 200 signatures from members of the APS (all scientists) asking for the creation of a group to look at Climate Science. These 200 presumably thought there was room or need for debate. Given your "few"/"many" construction, I have to wonder: how many of these were being paid off and by whom?
Money has very little importance to people who advocate for reductions in fossil fuels...

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.

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.
Is he a climatologist?
You want reasons it might be practical to imprison innocent people? Homelessness, insanity, youth, unpopular opinions, unpopular religion, guilty friends or relatives, wrong place at the wrong time, looking suspicious, bad taste, ugly, body odor, to name a few.
Either way, expect a discount, at least after the technology is proven. I know I'd rather insure a robot than an often sleepy, distracted, intoxicated human!
It's interesting to me that the cars are legal under California law. It means they could theoretically partner with car makers to sell it as an expensive option -- advanced cruise control. Much less scary sounding than automated vehicles. Once you get enough early adopters on the road it seems like the public opinion would likely shift pretty quickly -- is there anything people resent more than driving?
Very cool, but I sometimes worry that the illusion of safety is more dangerous than the original danger itself.

In Boulder, where I live, several crosswalks were identified as being particularly dangerous for pedestrians, and pedestrian crossing signs with big flashing lights were installed at these locations over the past 5 years. This spring, a report was released[1] that showed accidents at many of these crosswalks had actually increased since the lights were installed. "Taken together, the data suggests that approximately eight additional crossing accidents per year occur at these locations," says the report.

There are lots of theories about why, but I think it boils down to one thing: when pedestrians can hit a button and light up these big signs which are supposed to make everyone stop, it makes them feel much safer, to the point that many people will hit the button and start walking almost immediately, without taking the time to make sure that all lanes of traffic are aware of their presence and stopping.

The prospect of automated cars scares me because, obviously, they cannot be perfect, and they will not be able to identify every dangerous driving scenario. Of course, there is a manual override, but I fear that the car being right 99% of the time will lead to such a complacency in "drivers" that, in the 1% of cases where the car is wrong and about to hit something, we will not be able to stop in time. The more accurate the car is, the more safe we feel, and the less likely we are to monitor it as closely and notice when it is wrong.

Anyway, I rather hope I'm wrong. I'd really like to drink my coffee and read during my commute as my car drives me to work.

[1] http://www.dailycamera.com/boulder-county-news/ci_14859190
The Un-Sexy Truth About Online Money Making - Infographic
It’s time to take your blogging business seriously, you must think of expenses and earnings to know your real profits, check out this blogging profit infographic
Me too. I bet this could bring accident rates down substantially and maybe we will also get rid of those insidious traffic jams. But the best part: I'll have a ton of free time on my hands during transit!
Let us all pray that it doesn't agree with you.
"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."

Neither does obfuscating the data and the models and how they work. Another commenter mentioned "transparency", and I think that's a key element that's been lacking from the climate scientists. They say they're "terrified", but when they're asked for the raw data and the source code to their models, they refuse to provide it, making it impossible to verify that their terror is justified.

What information they do reveal does not inspire confidence in their analysis: for example, read the latest IPCC report and see how many key causal factors have a "low" level of scientific understanding. (It's true that greenhouse gases are not in that category, but the fact that we understand them pretty well does not justify simply ignoring the other factors when we admittedly don't know enough to judge their impact.)

Also, the IPCC predictions for how much the climate should have warmed by now, given the actual increase in CO2 levels, have basically been falsified: CO2 has been increasing faster than all but their most pessimistic predictions, yet climate has been warming slower than their most optimistic predictions. So as far as deciding how to act, I don't trust the IPCC predictions, and since those are driving all the policy recommendations from those who are "terrified", I don't trust those recommendations either.

"critics should be proving that something else is causing the recent heat records."

No, the burden of proof is on those who want to implement highly disruptive policies without adequate justification.
Styling is part of design, but not a major part. Am i clear, now ?
Totally agree with this - We're working on improving this + explaining the value of the product better before you sign in.

We definitely don't want to trick a user into signing up - we want to be as clear as possible.
FREEMAN DYSON wrote a very good article about the need for heretics in science

A quote: "I would like to ask two questions. First, if the increase of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is allowed to continue, shall we arrive at a climate similar to the climate of six thousand years ago when the Sahara was wet? Second, if we could choose between the climate of today with a dry Sahara and the climate of six thousand years ago with a wet Sahara, should we prefer the climate of today? My second heresy answers yes to the first question and no to the second. It says that the warm climate of six thousand years ago with the wet Sahara is to be preferred, and that increasing carbon dioxide in the atmosphere may help to bring it back. I am not saying that this heresy is true. I am only saying that it will not do us any harm to think about it."

http://www.edge.org/3rd_culture/dysonf07/dysonf07_index.html
Chomsky: I Have Never Seen Anything Like This In My Lifetime
I remember as a child of about 11 watching a Vulcan doing a very low pass over the small village where I lived - what an awesome sight!

Looks like a visit down to East Fortune is called for!
Sources of information going missing (article written before climategate): http://www.nationalreview.com/articles/228291/dog-ate-global...

(Sometime before this occurred, Mann sent emails saying they would delete data rather than respond to a FOIA request. A FOIA request occurred.)

As for suppression of debate, this APS episode is just one example of many.
>they cannot be perfect

Two things:

1) neither are people; far from it. (you already knew this though, so...)

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.

The transition is almost guaranteed to occur at some point, unless we reach mass transit for everyone prior to that (and who drives those?). It has to start somewhere, and that start will probably be harder than at any other point along the road.
agreed, the main tone of his article is somebody lamenting "scientists behaving badly" and remarking on the changes since the good old days. no idea whether or not he's a denialist, i was just trying to highlight that the language he uses could lead people to assume that.
If anything goes wrong, there won't be time to hit the manual override. Mainly because we as passengers won't be paying much attention to whatever is going on outside. At the same time, panicky breaking maneuvers made by humans randomly overriding their steering system would probably be a bad idea anyway.

Besides, humans are really lousy drivers. They should not be trusted to operate such vehicles at all. Machines will makes mistakes too, but I bet we'll see a lot less of them compared to the era of human pilots.
IMHO, these contrived puzzles, while fun, are really unrealistic and don't map well to problems you'll encounter on the job which requires knowledge, experience and creativity and do not have just one answer.

Of all of the jobs-page challenges, thesixyone's is probably the most practical and I've seen:

http://www.thesixtyone.com/static/jobs
I think children and the whole biological clock thing are a huge factor in this (and in the low percentage of women in any job that has crazy long hours, like law or medicine). But I also believe that the effect is both more subtle and far-reaching than is generally appreciated.

There are studies that show that people from a racist culture who believe "racism is wrong" will still tend to believe secondary and tertiary things that are basically racist but aren't directly about skin color per se -- like conversations I have had with people who say they would vote for or hire a black person if they were articulate enough and claim it is not racist, it is just that most blacks aren't educated/articulate enough. My reply to that is "If articulation were the issue, then George W Bush should have never been elected president. He is infamous for butchering the English language." Of course, he's white and male and went to the right schools and came from the right family. It makes people very uncomfortable to point out the flaw in their logic and point out that this is a social form of "Jim Crow Law".

So, basically, I think there is kind of a female version of social "Jim Crow Law" going on: Even women who don't specifically want to have kids may still make choices that are rooted in the goal of having mom available to the kids. Or may be discouraged by subtle social things that are rooted in those assumptions. People who make such assumptions usually don't even realize they are making them. So it gets hard to root out.

My 2 cents.
I consider any tax at all penalizing.

Heh, so all taxes should be abolished because the government shouldn't be penalizing us for making money, right?
If the computer driver is correct 99% of the time and the human driver 98%, then it is a vast improvement. I imagine that ultimately this technology would result in almost 0 human input other than e.g. typing in a destination.
It is / can be surprising who on your team will have the most problems on a Git from SVN migration. Sometimes ol' CVS/SVN warhorses have too much to unlearn, sometimes simple devs who never bothered to progress beyond the minimal clicks with SVN/IDE to get code up and down discover the true Qi of source control management as they discover git's capabilities.

One nice thing about git vs. svn is when you reach enough mastery you can make that repo dance to your tune. At some point you and git are one and working together. SVN was always some kind of imposing, opposing force; one that I had to fool into doing my desire.

One clueless contractor could put your SVN repo into hell-and-gone. With git I told the team, "don't worry, go for it; unless you do something really strange, there's nothing you can do that I can't recover from."
I agree that most of the slides would require further explanation but I still found a bunch of commands I've never heard of and actually could make use of, eg git bundle and git rerere.

So it's not totally worthless.
I had no idea the technology was this advanced. Last I heard was the DARPA challenge where they were still struggling to navigate traffic-free dirtroads. Google blows mind once again.
Yes, actually. Incredibly useful is an understatement, considering that before this wonderful little product, the only way we web developers could test various versions of IE and various versions other browsers, was to have countless virtual machines wasting tremendous amounts of hard drive space, and sucking up gobs of our precious time as we waited for the VM's to boot just to properly test a site.