skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
This chart seems really disingenuous:

http://wattsupwiththat.files.wordpress.com/2010/12/easterbro...

I don't see any explanation for how the dates defining the "periods" were chosen. It looks a lot like they were chosen to maximize the number of cooling "periods." Shift the cut-off dates to the right a bit, and you'll get four periods of warming in a row (1890-now), at which point it seems silly to divide that up into arbitrary periods.

The data he started with is relatively high resolution, with a data point for every year, apparently, and he's simplified that down to just four bits of data (four periods, each either warming or cooling). Then he analyzes those four bits at length. And he conflates "cooling" with "cool" and "warming" with "warm" in the process. He describes the second "cooling" period as "cool" even though the chart shows the average temperature is higher than the previous "warming" period, which he describes as "warm."

This doesn't seem reasonable to me. Frankly, his eagerness to slice up that high-res temperature data into big, discrete pieces, with no rhyme or reason, would alarm anyone who has ever designed any sort of feedback-based control-loop system; that's no way to find real trends in noisy data.

And his blog is full of ads. I realize pointing that out is sort of ad-hominem, but it seems unserious. Stephen Hawking's website isn't full of ads exhorting the viewer to "measure the age of the universe yourself!"
I think that has been a great deal in the past, but these days it seems frustratingly obvious that the April Fools Day posts are sometimes little more than market research. It seems to take some of the humor out of it.

Also- While the orig. idea was by ThinkGeek, the production isn't by them for this product, it's a third-party.
Resetting Motorola | asymco
Minor note: I'm a libertarian and not a GW denialist. Careful with the broad brush there, as denialists, Tea Party folks, etc. are most often bog-standard Republicans. (Easy test of a "libertarian": get that individual talking politics with your average Republican; if they aren't arguing in ten minutes, that individual isn't actually a libertarian, just pretentious.)

But yes, we do get quite a bit of denialism around here. Sorry.
Even if it were flawed, you'd expect some effect.

Why? If you improperly implement a system, you don't have to have any reasonable expectation of success. If I recreate a system incorrectly, I can't say, well, I should expect at least a 5% success rate. Often, poor implementations can cause negative results.

any bankrupt citizen of France who spent $1001 or more in taxes

That would be incorrect, because medical bankruptcies are the result of medical costs directly. For instance, being in a car accident or being diagnosed with HIV, neither of which directly result in a bankruptcy of any kind due to medical costs in those countries.
Maintenance renewals
BHE Consulting sells only the leading mid-market ERP software packagesand related and third party applications.Sales Partner for the Sage MAS 500; ERP software suite of products from Sage Software .
“Engineers and designers are much more powerful if they have built things."
Eurgh. Reminds me of writing Perl code to talk to .NET SOAP services in a previous job. Never again.
But the working poor who suffer only because they haven't had opportunities are the ones who "have life expectancies, security of food and shelter and rates of possession of consumer durables that mark them out as among the blessed of history." All of which isn't to say that we can't afford to do more to help the unfortunate in our country, but comparing the plight of the poor in the US to the plight of the poor in, say, the Congo is ludicrous.
Uh, no. :) I understand where with all the hype you might expect HTML5 video to have more support, but it's still a new technology, and requires that browsers build in support and then users upgrade to the newest versions. I imagine with the release of IE9 we'll see a big jump, and hopefully MS will be more aggressive in pushing out that update.
BHE Consulting sells only the leading mid-market ERP software packagesand related and third party applications.Sales Partner for the Sage MAS 500; ERP software suite of products from Sage Software .
HTML5 Guitar Tab Player
IHMO, yes.
Oh yes, because it’s SO HARD to support both HTML5 video and Flash as a fallback </sarcasm>
I would really recommend checking out iPython. It's easy to have it execute an existing script, and it plays well with matplotlib. I would use a script to load all my data into it, then use it interactively like matlab. If I found something I liked, I would add it to my script. I found it be a really enjoyable way to work.
Will you like a Kickstarter for startups?
Where users can invest, without getting company shares, in your startup
The IPCC goes into substantial detail on cost estimates for mitigation, in brief:

> Stabilizing CO2 concentrations at around 445 to 535 ppm, limiting the longterm temperature rise to about 3.6 to 5.4°F (2 to 3°C), is estimated to reduce the cumulative growth in global GDP 3 percent by 2030. This is equivalent to only a 0.12 percent reduction in annual growth rate of GDP.

More importantly 'what it would cost' is pernicious to calculate. Especially when 5% of global GDP could conceivably be a huge number of people: http://www.fivethirtyeight.com/2009/06/how-to-destroy-almost...
Wait, what’s the fraction on Mobile? Because it’s not like the percentage of mobile web users who have full Flash is anywhere near 50%, it’s gotta be less than that!
Interesting, thanks for the example, works exactly as you said.

There is a race when dev A deletes master though, right? What if someone else made a commit between when dev A last pulled and when dev A deletes master, wouldn't that commit be lost? In the process of testing this I managed to lose dev B's work a couple times, so I still think this kind of operation is too risky to be worthwhile.

In case anyone is interested I made a test script based on Xurinos's example: https://gist.github.com/769904
Innovators, Imitators, and Idiots
Is HTML5 a Flash in the pan?
Blogging, Excuse Me, Content Marketing Will Rule 2011 | Joanna Ciolek
I love the wording here: "not unusual". So what does it make it? Usual?
European Exascale Project Drives Toward Next Supercomputing Milestone
See this: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2079237
I didn't say that all text ever should always be 72 columns in length. A git commit message and a Hacker News comment are used in completely different ways.

Also, I probably would have moved the ', so' to the next line, so that it reads a bit better.
Humans are far more like bonobos than bovine.
And there... not so much difference between male and female.
Trick question: the correct answer is you eject immediately.
Please split them out.

What many people here are looking for is a snapshot of the choices a group of smart people have made : Going to rackspace.com is a whole different choice than heading over to slicehost.com.
Computer Scientists Look to Biological Evolution to Strengthen Computer Software
Does anyone else misread Unretina as Urethra?
Steve jobs knows what is the difference between owning a company and working for a company. When you are an employee you get a fixed salary, when you own a company you get whatever the company makes.
Commitment to Keeping Quora High Quality
1and1 is almost always cheaper than GoDaddy. Currently it's $4.99 for the first year and $8.99 afterwards. GoDaddy is $11.99 per year.
The poor work the hardest and most dangerous jobs and the most hours.

Utterly wrong. 80% of the poor don't work at all (and are not seeking work), and only 10% work full time (mostly by choice).

http://www.bls.gov/cps/cpswp2007.pdf

Please stop repeating propaganda.
2. It's not hard to do. apt-get install postfix and dovecot, invest a couple of hours munging config files, and you're done

Bullshit. There's troubleshooting when things go wrong, patching, maintenance, etc.

edit: don't forget adding additional storage, managing spam and malware filtering, user admin, backups, and other tasks.

5. Stealth. It's much less likely that someone will try to break into my server than into Google's servers.

You wish. Your single server is much easier to target and break into than Google's.
I mentioned this in your Blog Comments but I thought I'd bring it up here. I mentioned that it would be interesting to see a portion of your QA spreadsheet you mentioned in your article.
ActiveRecord-like Database Migrations for Cassandra
Because it's funny, in a roast-y sort of way. And more importantly, it makes it easier for people who completely disagree with the middle part of my post to at least read what I have to say. Ironically, this is similar to a technique which Tim talks about in 4HWW (he calls it the "compliment sandwich" - cheesy goodness) and it's a perfect example of how Tim recycles and condenses old ideas because this basic social tactic has been around forever (How to Win Friends and Influence People, the biblical book of Proverbs, etc).
NASA tries to waken robotic Mars rover
I'm on a 16:9 ratio "notbook" (ThinkPad x100e) and with xmonad set to split a two-up view at the golden ratio, I get a 80 columns on the left pane (for certain values of Terminus). Love it.
Ask HN: Getting started with Amazon Cloud & Zencoder
Hey HN. We have a client who wants us to build a user-submitted video website. I can't be much more specific, but we're considering Amazon's cloud hosting and Zencoder to offload the video processing.

I don't have any experience with either of these two services. Does anyone have any advice, tips or links to useful tutorials?
That's some amazing stuff. Thanks for posting.

I was curious if you're using off-the-shelf sensors or if you're using your own custom sensors?
Great. How long did the move take? I'm assuming u started during the beta days of rails 3 and eventually made it to 3.0.1?
Did I mention that I like the word mention?
Obvious trolling, but the slave trade and child pornography probably wouldn't be down with most libertarian principles. The core I've seen from most libertarian folks is "Do what you want to yourself, but don't harm other people." Slavery and child pornography are fairly obviously harming others. Heroin is trickier.
Cherokee Web Server faster than Apache
The power of ‘convergence’
#4 Google Apps lets you require SSL.
Very surprising so many people use Godaddy for their DNS, given it is very slow as far as DNS servers go. I've been running a Pingdom speed/reliability test for a few popular DNS servers for the past few months, and here is the data:

Guide:
<dns provider> <uptime %> <downtime> <outages> <avg speed>

October:
Godaddy DNS	100.00%	0h 00m 00s	0	68 ms
Dynect SMB	100.00%	0h 00m 00s	0	31 ms
DNSMadeEasy	100.00%	0h 00m 00s	0	39 ms

November:
Godaddy DNS	100.00%	0h 00m 00s	0	67 ms
Dynect SMB	100.00%	0h 00m 00s	0	26 ms
DNSMadeEasy	99.98%	0h 10m 00s	1	43 ms

December:
Godaddy DNS	99.99%	0h 05m 00s	1	58 ms
Dynect SMB	100.00%	0h 00m 00s	0	28 ms
DNSMadeEasy	99.00%	7h 25m 00s	22	40 ms

So basically Godaddy DNS is reliable but slow, DNSMadeEasy is relatively fast but had some uptime troubles in December, and Dynect (Dyn Inc) is fast + super reliable.

As for pricing:

- Godaddy DNS is free (I think?)

- DNSMadeEasy runs about $2-5/month (max of 10 million queries/month)

- Dynect SMB runs between $30-95/month depending on what you need (max of 1.8 million queries/month)
I can see it now: the moon spirals off into the sun, and some "expert" is going to say that it's "not unusual".
Mathematical model shows how groups split into factions
Oh, a bit of a side note on hosting for startups. I know many people want to save costs by centralizing hosting, but as a word of advice keep your database, mail, and web servers separated. By not doing so you've created a single point of failure. Not only that, but it makes securing things appropriately more difficult (ie. you are unable to create only web server specific firewall rules for the server).
You may already be doing this, but keep a record of all the different ideas you have been coming up with. Do it in a text file or a Moleskin. Then challenge yourself to revisit them after a week. See what you can prune and improve upon. Spend time to polish it. Don't abandon it too early.

I get excited about the ideas that I keep coming back to and keep building off of. If you can stay optimistic about an idea for over a month, then you may be on to something.
Loopt is self hosted? Is that actually cost effective? I can understand a company like justin.tv being self hosted, but loopt makes less sense to me.
I think a large part of this has to do with programming language choice. I suspect there is a large group of ruby hackers out there who can only use Amazon, and not GAE.
This is an empirical question, and ought to be resolved by actual user data from a usability study.
5. Stealth. It's much less likely that someone will try to break into my server than into Google's servers.

It's more likely that someone will break into your server than Google's, isn't it?

A thing I learnt while running my own server was that all you needed to be a victim of automated attacks was to have an IP address.
Er, I'm pretty certain iOS supports HTML5 video just fine as it is. QuickTime doesn't exist on iOS.
You can also pick an idea that you yourself would use ("scratching your own itch"). This removes the uncertainty of "will other people use it", and give you motivation at least until you get a demo/MVP done, to show others. It can help to start with a problem to solve, rather than an idea (that might not address a problem).

All-or-nothing thinking can lead to those dramatic swings, from excitement to uselessness. Instead of asking if it will be great or terrible, a solution is ask if the idea has some value.

Obviously, a bit of trust/optimism/faith is required. If that sounds too... religious... consider that a true scientist will do the experiment, instead of going by what he supposes. "Don't think, try". And Feynman: nature's imagination is greater than your imagination. Do the experiment, just to find out the reality. This helps to remove your ego, that can feel hurt by a failed idea... the ego protects itself by never testing the idea.
I largely agree with you, but I think framing the argument in terms of "status seeking" is slightly disingenuous. Etiquette is not all about status seeking.

Placing cutlery at 4:22 when you are finished with your meal seems like a silly etiquette rule, but it signals the wait staff that you are finished, and increases efficiency for the restaurant, the staff, and the dinner guests.

Knowing who to tip and how much increases the happiness and satisfaction of everyone involved in service transactions by managing expectations and fulfilling them, increasing stability for everyone.

Keeping an up-to-date address book for your acquaintances is something that I never heard of growing up; I have one childhood friend who has asked for my address three times in the last year.

I could go on, but the real point is that the ability to operate with proper etiquette is a signal to others who are doing the same. You are telling each other that you are friendly, respectful, courteous, and have an attention to detail. When it comes to getting things done, a group of people like this working together are going to be more productive than a random group of people lacking the same social skills but otherwise having similar abilities. Removing friction and conflict by following seemingly-silly conventions is not zero sum.

Among the truly wealthy, this is not status-seeking behavior, it's simply what one does. It only looks like status-seeking to those who are not "playing the game." I first realized this when reading YouTube comments for a dining etiquette video (e.g. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YIj5Rt-7b9I). The majority of Americans (myself included) were not taught these methods, and they think that it's absolutely silly. Those who grew up doing this are wondering what kind of barbarians do not eat in this way. Those who host parties know that if everyone eats with "proper etiquette," you can fit more people around a table and limit the spread of germs (e.g. placing dirty silverware back on the table).
"Libertarian" isn't a pure term or concept. There are many Tea Partiers who consider themselves libertarian, although I would agree with you that they really aren't, as they tend to be socially conservative. The Koch brothers themselves are, or at least claim to be, libertarian.

In linking GW denialism and libertarianism, I'm simply noting a fairly strongly correlation between the two. Of the groups that tend to deny AGW, libertarians and conservatives, both paleo- and neo, are at the forefront.
Ahh...ok. Will try and get it.
I’m surprised that no–one is using Linode.
It could be that the app isn't hosted at the same place as the public site (which this chart reports on). That's how it is for Zencoder.
French kids play with "vintage" technology (CDs / GameBoy / etc)
Should we build our startup in HTML5 or go native?
Surprised to see no one using Linode.
I'm not going to have an imaginary argument with a dead man here, nor do I mean to condemn him for what he did. I accept that it was a long, hard struggle, and that he lost. The only person who could have found a better solution was Mr. Zeller himself, and he has settled that question permanently.
Sure there are. The standard rationale is that when hiring, the cost of a false negative is far lower than the cost of a false positive.

I guess it's also true that the cost of a false negative is unknown and not felt. It would be a really extreme case to be forced to say, "Hey, remember that woman we didn't hire two years ago? She went off and founded Company Y that's now eating our lunch." With a false positive, you feel the pain of cleaning up their messes until after they're gone.

Finally, sad to say, the majority of job applicants are not competent to do serious engineering work. A negative bias is right most of the time.
There is a race when dev A deletes master though, right?

Yes and no. I could say that this is where communication can help a little, and it depends entirely on your local group's policies, but that would be the easy cop-out. Let's say it really happened.

Dev B's git pull --rebase will also lose the change; it was assumed to be pushed up, and a git fetch means that you are reflecting exactly what is in the remote branch. But changes are never truly lost+++. Dev B can check his reflog, find his original commit, and cherry-pick it in, resubmitting it. Afterwards, he can bonk Dev A over the head for not pulling before pushing.

There is a danger that Dev B would not notice, but from a little test I just did, he is going to get some nasty messages during his git pull --rebase that should indicate that something interesting just happened.

I have not looked into this, but does anyone know if it is possible to lock a remote git repo (aside from the automatic push lock)? If one could manually lock the repo, the process would be to lock, pull, push-delete, push-for-real, and unlock.

+++ depending on your git configuration policy. I think you have 30 days before dangling commits are truly pruned permanently.
ReadWriteWeb are linkbait whores. I'm totally serious. I stopped taking them seriously a long time ago.
That's very much a risk for Quora. But if they're still showing me my friends' activity that could ameliorate the problem. My friends are still going to be asking/answering questions that I am likely to be interested in.
One of the main benefits of self hosting is the MTA logs. When self hosting, you know if the message has got as far as the recipients mail server, and you know if the recipients server has attempted to deliver mail to you. You also have ultimate control over the spam filtering, which I find very important.
Apple is the company that Jobs founded and whilst he was ousted (and sold his shares) at the time, I'm sure that it will always be his 'baby'. He obviously loves what he does and doesn't need the money anyway. I can't remember where I read it, but he leads a relatively frugal lifestyle in comparison to his peers. Do what you love I suppose :)
Our company (Gamador) is listed as hosting from "Global Net Access LLC" which I had never heard of - we just use Linode. So there might be some Linode undercounting going on.
I won't get into a long debate, because I doubt it can be constructive (I had a longer post, but it wasn't going anywhere), so I'll just leave it at this: I disagree.
I can't believe that 16 years after forms first appeard on the web we're still having this discussion.

Using "submit" as your label? So are thousands of other sites. Your users won't be confused.

Using something more descriptive? That's fine too. Maybe it looks a little nicer and less generic. But it's not a usability problem.

Don't worry about this for a second. Instead focus on the real problems, like creating usable and accessible form fields with associated labels. Write easy to follow directions that explain which fields are required and what format you're expecting (or write better error handling techniques to accept a variety of inputs.) Write and make visible appropriate error messages to help your users through the process so they don't make mistakes. Record the mistakes they make so you can use that data to engineer your forms in ways that reduce user errors.

There are so many other things worth your attention.
Dynect has been super fast and reliable for us. Their customer service is also top notch.

If your serious about availability, this is the place to start.
With Google email hosting you just have to worry about a few hundred people who can read all your email, their data retention policies, and who can subpoena your private communications.

(conspiracy theory:
Google gives the public one text box on a webpage to search the Internet. Do you think they don't have a text box on an internal webpage to search all of Gmail? Do you think facebook doesn't have one internal webpage capable of searching all private communications? Facebook used to advertise "spy on your friends!" as an employment perk.)
We (Gamador) are using Linode, but it lists us as being from some no-name hosting. So something is awry with the Linode stats.
I'd like to move my email away from Google Apps, for various reasons, but they have the best spam filter by far. It's worth sticking with them just for that.
You never have to pay full retail at GoDaddy. Not for .com at least. There's at least one coupon available 365 days a year; check retailmenot.com.
You're right, I meant Media Player framework.
" "Libertarian" isn't a pure term or concept. "

Not as a single doctrine along the lines of the Democratic or Republican platforms/talking points, no. However, the group that called itself "libertarian" or "right-libertarian" before the word became the new term of choice for faux-independent Republican voters is one that's rather distinct from your average Republican.

ETA: and they agree rather well on positions on issues that are anathema to most admitted Republicans.

And that group is not remotely of one mind on the subject. Some of them are denialists, and even those of us who acknowledge warming distrust the suggested government solutions or the use of the issue as an excuse for expansion of government authority. Hence my advice against the broad brush.
We (Gamador) are using Linode but it does not list us as using Linode, so I suspect this is a problem with the script.
Yes, you are being overly sensitive.
"prioritization by whoever shouts the loudest"

...I'm actually not getting why this is a bad thing. The people shouting on your crash-bug-reporting system are unhappy enough to go out and yell at you rather than simply grumbling to themselves and continuing to use your program. Doesn't it make sense customer-service-wise to appease those folks who are going to yell about the bugs in your program and negatively influence peoples' opinions?