skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
>You can discuss and discuss and both sides will bring arguments and you will never find a conclusion. It's a sham.

If we can't solve this problem then anything we do to save the environment now is just a band-aid.

>Germany, for example, is investing quite a lot into green energy. Just for fun? Or probably with a reason?

I think most everyone is on board with polluting less (with the obvious exception of people like the Koch brothers), it's just a question of how.

People point out, for example, that creating green technology can be more damaging then the potential savings in using it. I personally don't give this this argument much merit because we tend to get better at things when we do them more, but it just goes to show you that people who care just as much as you do still don't agree on how to tackle the issue.

>It's easier to accept the argument that everything is fine, not care about it and live as if nothing happened without reflecting.

I'm not sure as many people do this as you think. They may not agree with the severity of the issue but everyone understands that we are destroying at least parts of our environment (e.g. poisoning the oceans). That's not controversial.

>The quintessence is to not look away but do something.

We are. Not as fast as some people might like, but people are trying things. The reason is simple: there's money in it.
Impressive... Looks like many american movies, too :)
Heard this one before, and it made me think of the barometer problem:

http://www.snopes.com/college/exam/barometer.asp
Oh, you must do "customer support"! Otherwise, they will use your code and report 1) that your code does not work or that 2) their code is better because they did not use your code well.

And for code that is not easy to install (e.g., requires many libraries, frameworks, dev tools, etc.), you need to spend time on documentation and even then, you often need to answer questions like "how can i create an eclipse plug-in to use your code or lxml failed to install"...
I agree with all parts of that statement. A contemporary C book (as applied to servers etc.) would be much needed, before the world turns into a morass of webdev frontend programmers…
What I have seen so far is that very bright and capable scientists (physicists, for instance) who are non-programmers[1] are usually extremely ashamed of their code. I'm talking even CS Professors, who spend most of the time proving theorems. Structuring code well and making sure it's correct is hard, and they know.

[1] Programmer = somebody who spends 8 hours a day at it.
Farmville-maker Zynga is Now Worth More Than EA Games
What happened to Dremel (software)?
Some friends of mine had posted, on Facebook, the results of some online autism-spectrum awareness test they had taken—or rather, the test app had posted their results and a link to its own page. So I followed the link, and the first thing I got was a dialog box asking me to give the app permission, not just to post to my wall, but to access my private Facebook information. I declined.

I will assume that my attention to boundary management proves that I am not autistic. The jury is still out on the authors of that app.
http://foursquare.com/

http://www.kingdomsatwar.com/

http://vimeo.com/

http://tripadvisor.com

(just examples, on the top of my head, that are using Facebook Connect).
It’s Easy to Be Great…It’s Hard to Be Consistent
It's also a useful case study in how co-founders can try and screw each other over, and how important it is for them to be on the same side. That's a pretty general lesson.
More interested in seeing the Soviet Synthesizer that's providing the background music!
It would be so funny if one of the examples were: Herse's Trotsky with Lenin. Wow now he's gone!

edit: like here: http://www.dutchcowboys.nl/images/upload/trotski.jpg
Some of those "retouchings" near the end don't seem like they would be possible, even with today's technology. The bearded guy with with the cool hat goes from being very blurry to very sharp, with a lot of extra detail seemingly added out of nowhere (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t2PsiJXswiM&t=02m27s).

Note: I have a hard time using MS Paint, let alone a modern image editing suite, so it's entirely likely that this magic is indeed possible, I'm just unaware of it.
It's a simple matter of incentives.

We all want scientists to share their code because that's the positive sum action. But individual scientists aren't paid based on how well the scientific community is doing. They're awarded positions, grants and prestige on their individual performance against other scientists. So scientists worried about their career think in zero sum terms: if I publish this source code, will I be pipped to the next paper? Well, I'll publish this other piece to make myself look good, since I'm not following it up; and then I'll collect the citations too."

We can wring our hands about scientists acting in bad faith all we like, but it's obvious we just have to change the incentives. Funding agencies just need to award higher weight to journals that demand source releases, transitioning to only weighting those journals.
Hgiyiyi: Amazon test page has 11 customer reviews
I think I understand that, but without actually writing it out, it's going to be impossible to test.

The types I was talking about go as:
type Context a b = (Adj b, Node, a, Adj b)
type Adj b = [(b, Node)]

It definitely allows traversal, and adding nodes seems to be possible, too (judging from the api, of course, it ought to be :)
The Brothers Karamazov - Fyodor Dostoevsky

The Sun Also Rises - Ernest Hemingway

Chess Openings for Black, Explained
I'm guessing you aren't currently a part of the east london startup community.

I'm excited. When we moved the company here, one of my co-founders was deported (back to America). Not helpful. The investors here are very good (Index, Atlas, Accel, Eden, etc), but there's not a huge number of them. Official momentum like this has a good chance of getting other investors to have a more official presence here (a few from NY visit with some regularity, but we rarely see the valley's firms).

Little things like good internet will help a lot. My office has just 7 or 8 people in it and we're using a combination of two home DSL connections and a 3G modem. That's the best we can do and it's outrageously bad. Larger offices (20+ people) face an ongoing and unending battle just keeping their team online.

I don't really get the objection to the big tech companies having a presence.. in an ideal world would you want to boot them out of the valley, too? They offer jobs which are both an attraction to new tech talent from all over the EU and a fallback in the case that a startup doesn't work out. Without the presence of big tech companies, you also lose the primary acquirer of small tech companies.

Finally, and most importantly, they didn't just choose some arbitrary "poor" spot on the map. The particular area in east london they're targeting is arguably the best startup hub in Europe, and is undoubtedly the best in the UK. Lots of great founders are already here, and I'm pleased that there's some official support.
Could the multiple-kinds-of-contacts issue be handled if social-networking sites explicitly allowed one user to have multiple handles? E.g., a user could be “Bess Smith” to her family members, “B. J. Smith” to her college friends, and “Elizabeth Smith Jones” to her clients, and only her five closest friends would have “friend”-level access to all three identities.
I don't even know if I'd agree that alcohol is worse. I guess you are in part referring to David Nutt's research. I'm sure his findings would be different if some of the other drugs on the list were decriminalised or legalised. The media haven't been that sensible with the reportage on that report. At least it labels alcohol as a drug and takes into account the bigger picture.

It's all law and nanny state - don't we give humans any credibility any more? It's good to have the debate. I've brought this up with family, my mum sees drugs as a black and white issue - but she's happy to be drinking wine whilst she's damning pot smokers. There is such a thing as moderation mother.

(There's a lot of that - I don't agree - so I'll down vote you mentality up here in the cloud :))
I just want to say: Thank you. This is the first time someone has actually explained the science without bullshit or a large number of holes ("oh look here's a graph with CO2, and here's a graph with temperature, they seem to be doing the same thing - that explains everything").
"Learn C The Hard Way" would be my choice for the next one.
I don't sort my contacts into groups, and I really doubt whether 'a fair amount of' other people actually do.

Distinguishing between for example work and personal contacts seems pretty hard, I'd say even for google.
I love how they call it "restoring damaged images". I suspect the primary goal was "blot out enemies of the state".

http://www.newseum.org/berlinwall/commissar_vanishes/vanishe...
Mostly you only concern about the criticism from within scientific community. Since your result is published, generally, people with background will spend time to figure out how to use it by themselves. And their criticism is only relevant when it gets published. At that point, you are surely obligated to response such criticism. Most of the time, it is really not relevant that some random people send you email and have such "eclipse plug-in" problem.
>or that you shouldn't start taking action based on it.

Those who are convinced should indeed start taking action.

>And where do you draw the line?

That's up to the person. Some people have a threshold so high it will always be beyond our grasp to meet, some have a threshold of "higher probability score than any alternative" no matter how low the probability actually is (e.g. 5% chance vs 2%, 1%, etc.).

>at what point do you stop arguing and take it as fact?

Again, it's up to the person. But again, if the person doesn't accept something as fact I'm fine with that. I'm not fine with them presenting their unconvinced-ness as some kind of alternative "theory".

>When are you allowed to start actively advocating a particular theory?

When you have one. "The other guy is probably wrong" isn't a theory.
I'm not sure if the author is being sarcastic or not. Nevermind. In Perl 6 one can use non-keyboard chars to represent stuff, like operators, etc. Ergo, you could define ANSI color codes as operators so the code could be color-dependant in theory.
/funnymodeoff
It’s Easy to Be Great… It’s Hard to Be Consistent
Does your "we" include the people of, for example, Bangladesh?
Seriously. Forget alaska, I live in the northeast and this time of year it is dark before I go to work and dark when I get out. And it is mostly gray inbetween. Right now it is borderline freezing and pouring rain out there, I choose the gym over my usual jog this morning. There was no Vitamin D to be had anyway.
> WardCunningham is using GitHub to share code with you!

The times they are a-changing.
Intel ordered to provide PCI for 6 years and to take compilers back
I agree that PHP is a noisy language and I feel that it has a few sad inconsistencies with some of it's more common functions. Remembering parameter order in functions like in_array($needle, $haystack) is sometimes difficult as the choice they've made is arbitrary.
I code in PHP everyday and have to look up functions every few days to remind myself of silly stuff like that.
I don't think I've ever heard of someone giving up cable/TV and regretting it. I don't have a TV, and I don't watch shows online either. I've been entirely TV-free for close to a year, and I haven't missed it once. I watch movies once a week at most, usually much less often. Don't miss that either.

Honestly, I don't see how people find the time for it. Between work, keeping up my home, and spending time with my wife, I already feel like I don't have any spare time.
Could it not be a real opportunity to monetize google maps if google were to integrate suggested flights to get from point a, to point b, should actual driving/walking directions not be available?
UX Bloat Nonsense
I don't know about that - I've seen a lot of industrial/manufacturing processes over the years that were damned impressive and had lots of complexities that I had no idea existed.
But you have to ask yourself what your new hires are going to be bringing to your company? Are you going to be hiring dinosaurs or mammals?
Exercise makes an amazing difference. I began a marathon training program six month ago, and it has dramatically impacted my energy level.

I haven't gotten sharper in the past six months, but I'm more robust to energy-sapping conditions. An occasional bad night of sleep doesn't ruin my work day. I have a lesser mental block when starting big projects. I'm not worn out after a long work day, so I've worked more on pet projects without sacrificing time with my girlfriend. I have a major incentive to eat light, since nothing is worse than a hard run with a stomach full of grease. As a plus, I now understand the value of working incrementally towards a large goal.

I didn't find it difficult to work into my schedule. My highest-mileage week only took six hours of my time, and most weeks were less than four hours.
I had a copy too. I remember having to tweak the code a bit to get it to work on whatever dialect of BASIC I was using at the time, but it seemed a fairly straightforward conversion. I was most fascinated by the hexapawn program. When I first saw it, I'd never heard of a program that improves itself over time. More recently, I tried generalizing the hexapawn program so it would work on larger board sizes, and the bot could play either side (or both of them). Putting a learning bot as player 2 (on 4x4 and 5x5) against a random bot, it seemed to learn in reasonable time that it could not force a win, but a learning bot as player 1 never seemed to learn to do so. Unfortunately, the learning strategy was essentially a list of bad moves to make, so it doesn't scale well to larger board sizes.
People with background usually don't have the time to really discover how it works to make it run. They'll just ask.
Opt Out of a Body Scan? Then Brace Yourself
I don't think I agree with a blanket statement like this. Features of a language can be used to make the code easier to read, if that's your goal (eg, to have other people read it and understand it -- including your future self). Sometimes, though, your goal is just experimentation and exploration. Why do you think obfuscated code contests exist?
Woops, I read this as Spideroak pays less money :)
that and "The Practice of Programming" are my two favourite programming books. They are succinct, yet easy to read, and contain minimal bullshit. Perfect.
Just ordered, been waiting for this one - I find it much easier following a book like this when it's printed and sitting beside my computer, not as a browser tab to be constantly switched back and forth.

+1 for LCTHW from me

(ps coupon code LEAF305 will get a small discount on the lulu order).
At the very least, they should give directions to a place that sells kayaks before leading you into the ocean.
Some backstory from the article: "Last month, the LSE made the important step of allowing more IT personnel into its datacentre, expanding co-location beyond trading firms and to software firms – to install hosted systems and their own market data distribution platforms. It is not known if any of this raft of new companies entering the datacentre played a part in the outage."
China Mobile Joins Linux Foundation as Gold Member
The Perfect Desktop - Linux Mint Debian 201009
I hope that happens, but I haven't noticed the US government being quick to imitate good ideas from other countries.
SEO Design Tactics: Before You Write Even a Line of Code
The only exception that I can think of is GPS (not the receivers, the system). Most people simply know that it involves satellites somehow. That system delights me in its cleverness, effectiveness, and scalability.
Yes, taxpayers fund science, but commenting, beautifying and documenting code is not what a physicist/mathematician/climate researcher wants to spend his time. Usually you want to be doing research, may it be by direct coding or by doing something else, related. Doing this kind of stuff is far worse than filling grant proposals or doing other bureaucratic stuff.

On the other side, I disagree with "most scientists are not great programmers". What is a "great programmer"? In my definition, it is someone who can write a program to solve a problem without too much hassle. And a lot of scientists I know satisfy this to terrific levels. Of course, they use no orthogonality, nor source code control, nor do extreme programming and usually don't write test cases. They just do what is asked as quickly as possible to keep on doing what is needed to do.
This band was practicing one afternoon when Mormons came to the door

http://www.myspace.com/captaincreationandthegodrobots

They said they liked the music, but I never told them the name of the band - I kind of wish I had.
> Just because you disagree with someone, doesn't mean what they say is nonsense.

Do you understand what you did here? I explicitly said "pro-X or anti-X" to abstract out the truth-value of X. I don't care whether X is true or not [EDIT: for the sake of this argument]. Yet, because I used your keyword "nonsense", you assume that I'm calling human-global-warning (AGW) skeptics' arguments nonsense.

In effect, I've triggered your auto-rant based on a keyword. It's ok, I do it too. In fact, we all do it. In this sense we're no better than chat-bots. Or, turning it around, a well curated chat-bot has the possibility of providing answers that are at least as good as some of our worse answers.

> Here is someone providing no thought and adding nothing to the discussion, by definition, he is providing noise.

Why use the phrase "by definition". This is just a dogmatic assertion. You have to work the argument.

Thought can be recorded. If I hand someone a leaflet, is it noise, by definition? Of course not! So, if thought and care and good arguments are recorded, then handing out appropriate ones at appropriate times is far from noise. The actual arguments may or may not be nonsense, but that depends on their content, not their delivery mechanism.
A Designer at the Helm
One of the comments reminded me how great Deluxe Paint was (I used the PC version):

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deluxe_Paint
If "Programmer = somebody who spends 8 hours a day at it." then my students of Numerical Analysis are programmers, and not mathematicians. They are currently coding an assignment on continuation of zeros and (at least looks like) they are spending a ton of hours each day on it (and making me loose a lot of time answering email questions, by the way)
Here's something a bit unorthodox. I worked for 7 years in the grocery industry, and still shop at the same store I worked at years ago.

At Wegmans at least, in the Northeast US, always pick the longest line. The one with the most customers.

Why? Visible long lines are bad for business. Front-end (checkout) managers hate long lines. As soon as they see them, they start bringing in more people to start running more registers, and then pull people from the back of the longest lines to these newly-opened registers.

This doesn't work so well if there aren't any long lines to begin with, but during the weekends and holidays, I always pick the longest line, and I always get moved to a line-less checkout lane. Never fails.
I just dropped my cable TV, I never watch it and anything I do watch comes from Netflix, including TV Shows (like Mad Men and Dexter right now). Still playing with what / if I want to get a replacement box (Google TV / Apple TV / Roku) but for now, now cable tv for me, and frankly I won't miss it either.

Of course Charter in their infinite wisdom decided that they were going to cut of my "cable" which means TV AND Internet. The level of incompetence of ISPs have reached these days is mind boggling.
Maybe this is better addressed to his site than this one, but I'm curious what type of job he netted with his reverse job application. Many people postulated it would be something in marketing, I wonder if that's true.
When I try asking for directions to other countries, I get a “kayak across the Pacific Ocean” step for China, but everything else just gets a “we could not calculate directions...” response.
Afaik, the free version of MySQL doesn't let you do a live transaction-safe database dump of InnoDB tables.

A pretty basic feature I thought, which is included in the free version of PostgreSQL.
Eh? You are responding to the wrong guy. I just said politics doesn't belong here.
Trillions of dollars of world economies are at play because of historically trusted parties' supposed scientific analysis and you think there's no political interest in known false published data, or the blatantly biased 'investigation' to date? If I worked in the field I'd be hell bent and pissed off at the disrespect brought upon the profession.
You mentioned Sound Foley and art, but you left something out, so maybe people aren't aware of this one:

Try this, type dingbat into the editor and hit tab.
I did go.
Looks like it was very low contrast rather than blurry.
It's easy to view Microsoft as an evil corporation that is trying to keep the little guy down, but this story is remarkably similar to how Google has treated the little guy on YouTube. Google and Microsoft may have more in common than folks here would like to admit.
This sounds plausible, but is quite naive really. We are talking about huge amounts of money which is at risk if the cat gets out of the bag. Please remember that these sleazebags also do everything to prevent raw data being available. They just want us to accept their "findings" and pocket the next multi-million dollar check.
How exactly does distributing MySQL as part of your application make your application GPL as well?

It doesn't. The acceptance of the GPL (as of V2, haven't read V3) for a software component does not compel you to use any particular license for your own work. You can, by distributing the GPL'd work with you own non-open software, be in violation of the license on the GPL'd work, but the repercussion is a loss of the right to distribute the GPL'd work potentially enforced by injunction, and not an automatic change of your own license as the phrase "make your application GPL as well" implies.
To quote myself from another thread:

My main concern is reducing interface design as a craft (I view it as an artsy craft, not crafty art) to stitching together elements other people have designed that have proven to work well and thus are popular. It is not what we do and we are in trouble if people start perceiving it that way, and unfortunately that is exactly the kind of behavior that is encouraged on Dribble — show as much eye–candy as possible in a 400 × 300 rectangle so you get to hang out with the popular kids. Sorry, but I won't have it.
I'm curious to hear more about what you learned from the offer, aside from the emotional repercussions of putting a price on your baby. Going forward, do you intend to set a minimum threshold above which you'll sell the company? (You say you have a real sense of the company's value - is it the price you named or something else?) Have you been able to identify characteristics of the offer that will be red flags in the future, e.g. symptoms of a quick pull out? You seem to have answered these for yourself, but I'd be curious to hear more about the process and outcome.
Can someone please translate to non-legalese?