skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I wasn't actually projecting anything, just asking for clarification on his position.

'Just because it is unnatural and you are philosophically opposed to it?' is very much a projection of what you think the grandparent's underlying message is.

But while I'm at it, how do you know we will suffer a great deal?

I don't know, I speculate that there is a high probability of such because accelerated climate change seems to increase the probability of extreme weather events, both sudden and seasonal. Tornadoes and hurricanes fall into the former category, things like droughts or extended rainy seasons fall into the latter. While I don't think current weather events should be held up as evidence of climate change, we can look at current weather events to gain an idea of the potential costs and difficulties if the probability forecasts are accurate.

I don't see anyone saying climate change will kill hundreds of thousands of people, but we are far more willing to put into effect a tax on our economy to prevent that but not a tax on our economy to build [...]

You can't be paying much attention if you don't see warnings about increased loss of life. This is a major risk over the long term, from extreme weather as described above to damaged agricultural prospects, to intensified competition for access to shrinking resources such as land or clean water. We do not know the exact outcome or the costs, but we can form reasonable estimates and weight them in accordance with the known predictive ability of our models to do a cost-benefit analysis.

It strikes me as odd that those who are most skeptical of predictions about climate change are also the most sure of themselves when making statements about the economic impact, insisting that all 'green' expenditure constitutes a tax as if there were no positive externalities to be had from energy efficiency or less polluting forms of power generation.
Also, Dreamhost's $8.95 a month shared hosting supports Ruby (via passenger).
The mistake of writing "you temper" instead of "your temper" made it hard for me to see either one as correct for a moment.
Attention economics, social media, and effective marketing
A look at the challenges of flows, streams, and feeds -- for commercial campaigns, influencer metrics, and analytics.
Creating an easy mechanism for declaring a web service signature AND it's models makes this work. Does this pick up where WADL left off?
Why? How do we know you're not someone who works for a competitor and is out to discredit Facebook?
Amazon Releases Browser-Based Kindle Cloud Reader
More because it's extremely rapid, and potentially very dangerous. Major climatic change would endanger the food supply.
Well, climate change is damaging to humanity, and if we can do something to prevent climate change that is less damaging to humanity, we should do it. Regardless of whether it's solar or anthropogenic. To be clear, though, it's very certain nowadays that much of the observed climate change is due to humans, primarily through emissions of greenhouse gases.

As far as incalculable trillions: really? For one, monetary figures don't really cover it. A Bengali life is economically worth a couple tens of thousands at most, while an American one is worth millions. Their well being isn't captured by purely economic measures. That doesn't mean we should trade hundreds of Bengalis to save one American. There's also the libertarian point of view that, no matter how many SUVs an American might want, that doesn't give him a right to destroy a Bengali's home without his or her consent.

It's easy to hypothesize maybe some alternative policy response that involves a massive Marshall plan to... well, all the world. Do you think that's even vaguely plausible, though? I can't speak to European politics, but within America the chance of that ever happening is zero. Nada. Nil. No one wants to pay taxes even for their own schools and roads, let alone handouts, let alone foreign aid.

Why is it that most people who are concerned about the effects of climate change and invested in dealing with it think that pushing for more prevention is the best use of their efforts, not mitigation? I assume you wouldn't say they're all stupid.

Lastly, it's extremely controversial to suggest that the costs of prevention outweigh either (a) the costs of climate change itself or (b) the costs of mitigation. Unlikely, even--many places that use far less energy per capita than we do are hardly anti-technological dystopias.
For me the main problem with laptops is the bad ergonomics.
My observations for the popularity of PHP are this:

1) It's old. You're alternatives to PHP 12 years ago are all bad. The most popular alternative was perl CGI scripts.

2) Since it's templated, it feels more like markup . Someone with absolutely no programming background can go: HTML -> HTML with a javascript "onclick" handler pasted from the web -> HTML with a bit of PHP pasted from the web -> writing my first original PHP code
You have to come up with a username AND password!
Any particular reason you're linking to Symfony instead of Symfony2? I find the latter so much easier to read and work with it's not even funny.
I understand why it prints zero is false, and personally I feel that it makes perfect sense. Indeed I approve of it. The fact that strings can be evaluated as numbers is great for accepting input from GET or POST because it means that there is no need to worry about explicitly casting strings to numbers.

Of course, input type validation is still important, and if a variable input by the user is supposed to be numeric, that is why there is the is_numeric() function to validate the type of a variable.

But once I've used is_numeric() and know that the string is numeric why should I bother with an explicit strtoint call? I feel that this feature of PHP if used correctly takes away complexity and repetition related to converting strings to integers.

In a realistic project the framework for your app should have a layer between user input and your code anyway. At this layer it will be validating that input from the user is of the correct type anyway, and once that variable passes the is_numeric() test the layer can easily cast that input string to an int so that it is the right type for JSON encoded objects or any other output from PHP for other languages that needs to have specific types.

Once again, if PHP is used properly, with a decent code architecture this feature of PHP is not a problem.
TwitPic Founder’s Heello Launches As A Simple Twitter Clone
Actually, that debacle is one of the reasons why I decided that my next job would be at a startup. So yes, it definitely matters.
File under: Unintended Consequences. Also, Postel's law could probably be tricked into admitting itself as an accomplice.

1. Browser based Javascript provides a location object for managing and accessing the current browser location, and this location object is available as a global variable.

2. Browser based Javascript also provides a special case in the interpreter/processer/etc., where setting the location object equal to itself will reload the current page. This is also true for certain properties of the location object (href)

3a. There is also a more conventional reload method on the location object which accepts either a location object or string href. Also, many of the "go to this URL methods" exposed to Javascript will interpret "go to the url I'm at" as a request to reload the page. Many of these methods will accepts a location object, or a string representation of a URL as a paramater.

3b. location.href is a string representation of a URL

3. There are many ways to access global variables in Javascript. There are many ways to assign a value in javascript. There are many ways to call a method in javascript.

4. All of the above can be combined into lots (likely more than the 535) of ways to achieve the same thing.
Chill: turntable.fm for video from team behind Namesake
> instead of client side loader code, why not optimise the data/server behaviour instead

This doesn't make any sense for a javascript-based client. The server code by definition is already as lean as it can be, because everything that could be moved to the client already has been.

We can argue about the merits of having a client-heavy vs server-heavy code base, but that's not what this is about.
I'm not going to say that there isn't an overlap, because I suspect there is, but you'll have to explain (for example) which so many forms of identity politics, which by definition oriented around tribal loyalty, considered left-wing causes? For example, feminism, minority rights, and class consciousness? (Your average proponent of these causes are simply expressions of the more general fight against injustice, which is true to some degree, but your average skinhead will say the same thing about his cause.)

In general, I'd say that your average right-winger and your average left-winger (in American politics anyway) care the same amount about reducing injustice and harm but have radically different understandings of what constitutes injustice and harm and that's where the difference is.

EDIT: re "I'd expect them to be more inspired by an idealist past attributed to their tribe or authority." In my experience, as often as not, they are just curmudgeony.
It's a bit comparing apples to oranges. If you were comparing say Cake or Zend to RoR and Django then it would be a reasonable comparison.
Apple goes after the Xoom in their patent dispute
Steve, how to recruiters themselves find their jobs? Do you guys find your respective jobs via the traditional resume-interview route?

I ask this because looking for word-for-word matches etc imply a lack of unfamiliarity with the process as viewed from the other side of the table. I understand that you have been a developer previously and probably understand the technical specifics better. But my guess is be that most of these recruiters might have gone the resume-interview route for at least _some_ job; I am surprised that they don't seem to understand how hopeless their techniques are.
On a slightly related note, I often wonder if posting these images on the public internet will in some way render them useless (inadmissible?) in court, or otherwise put the poster in hot water for pinning the blame on people who have not yet been proven guilty...?
Facebook is down... Anon to blame?
Can somebody explain to me why the JRuby crowd think invokedynamic will lead to massive performance gains even though IronPython/IronRuby have had similar (to my understanding) capabilities for a long time but not seen massive gains?
This is unfortunately true. I'm a PHP programmer (currently writing a book, A Highly Negative Book About PHP, that I've been billing as "like Essential Java but tells you what not to do") and, I like to think, a fairly good one; reading this article made me cringe because this guy is emblematic of most of the problems in the PHP community. He:

-accepts uncritically gobs of code dredged up via Google

-considers something "robust" if it doesn't break old code, when the rest of us hate it because we have to live with register_globals and other horrors

-considers "universal support" of craptastic versions of mod_php to be a good thing (some, but not all, major shared hosting messes use FastCGI)

-modifies files in production and thinks that's okay

It makes those of us who do know what we're doing and focus on disciplined code look bad, because the article author is what most people think of when talking about "PHP programmers".
> Mibbit was the closest but it's a bit ugly

sob :(
Accessible GMail On Android — Eyes-Free Email On The Go
posting while driving failure...

meant to say - if you're posting as Anonymous, you're Anonymous.
I'm not.

I'm using a fairly "non-noob" ISP (ssh access, crontab, etc...) and they still don't give me access to much more than PHP. I can install Java but I can't even run it as a CGI because of the HTTP request memory constraints they impose. This is pretty standard, I don't blame them for doing this, and I would go with a VPS if actually needed all this.

Same for Ruby on Rails, obviously.
Study finds 50% of intelligence is attributable to genes
Thanks, it totally makes sense now. "Where we are going" was an affirmative (sub)sentence because the interrogative is already expressed in the "Do you know" part.
What happens if Proxino goes down?
Absolutely it would be great for logging. Assuming that you don't need atomicity for your logs (eg, I want to see that log line reflect in my reports _right_ _now_) Couch is a perfect way to dump a huge amount of data really quickly. For reporting, the map/reduce system of Couch is a great fit. There's an initial learning curve -- as with anything, really -- but you'll find that Couch would be a great way to get logged data (which can be pretty unstructured) and report on it easily and quickly.
except facebook isnt down...
I'm just glad we're at this point where there are so many quality languages and frameworks available that we can fuss over which one is best. That is all I'm going to say on the subject.
Facebook is working perfectly fine here.. (Canada)
Adly to create celebrity-based social network/destination site
Ask HN: When/Will IOS support file upload?
This is the only hole in my mobile web strategy right now. Apple won't support file upload on the iphone or ipad. I don't want to build an IOS app just to allow users to upload files. I cannot see why they can't come up with a solution for this. My question is will they ever? Searching on the web I can't seem to find any definitive answers as to why they don't allow uploads or if they ever will. Frustrating!
Absolutely, and I'm sorry if my article didn't carry this point across.

I would never use PHP for anything big/complex, my post was mostly in response to the universal sneering and mocking that PHP always gets. I think it's unjustified.

Since I only modify my web sites a few times a year, I am pretty sure that I would be much more reluctant making these modifications on a RoR app than a PHP one.
Congratulations! I've been independent for about a month now, and the most important lesson I've learned so far is that NOTHING feels good except shipping.

I'm in a similar boat. I quit my day job and I'm living off of the (moderately) passive income that I receive from Routesy, my public transit iPhone app. I've got a few more things in the pipeline and I too am doing some freelancing in the meantime.

It's really nice to see a post from someone who's on the same path as me. I look forward to keeping up with your progress. :)
We do client work that encompasses everything, C++, ObjC, Java backends, Java Frontends, Flash, HTML/JS, etc. I'm not sure what serious dev work implies?
21. The best thing you can do is get traction

Why is the supposedly most important idea listed last? It's no wonder startups waste time on the wrong things, if this is the way advice is structured.
this is a really great idea.... if the too 1,000 celebrities were to get 80% of the advertising on their pages they would really crush twitter IMO
Force-cooling the climate by artificial means is not a trivial undertaking, in either scientific or political terms. Even though it might become necessary in response to natural variations, those tend to happen across fairly large timescales. Accelerating such changes by artificial means, as seems to be happening right now, is a bad thing not because it's artificial but because it likely increases the cost and difficulty of future mitigation, much like hitting the gas pedal on a steep downward slope would. In other words, I think it's going to be more expensive later than now - not to the point of shutting down all industry or anything like that, but to the extent of budgeting 1-2% for efficiency/mitigation.
Exactly: "But I wrote an article about how great our company was!!!"
What's lacking for me is something that explains what currently is and is not possible in the 2.0 branch. For instance, it's not immediately clear what's going on with the UI components, datastores, and routing. Are these planned, implemented, or never going to be ported from 1.6?

I'd also love better documentation on how to integrate 3rd party UI libraries like Closure, YUI, Jquery UI.
Where I work, we've standardized on PHP and I have no choice but to use it. It isn't as bad as people say that is! Our organization's product is a large application written in object-oriented PHP with unit tests for every method of every class. As a team, we use continuous integration and have regular code reviews to promote quality. We've done some things that we're not proud of, but on the whole our codebase is pretty clean and elegant, and at the end of the day I'm almost always proud of the work I've done.

What worries me about PHP is that innovative ideas don't appear to be coming from the PHP community. They come from Python, or Ruby, or Erlang, or Java projects and are copied by PHP developers afterwards. I worry there's a risk that PHP is being left behind as the developers who solve new and challenging problems turn to other languages.

Furthermore -- and this is just my sense of how things are where I live -- while it's possible (and not even difficult) to write quality PHP code, it seems to be difficult to find developers who care about quality. My manager complains about this constantly and I'm inclined to believe him since, when I was a freelance developer, I saw tons of PHP code that was simply and unambiguously terrible. Conversely, a developer who wants to write quality code in PHP has to look pretty hard to find a PHP shop that recognizes quality and values it. I suppose that these issues aren't tied to a particular language, but they seem more pronounced with PHP.
empty() is an alias for 'isset($x) && $x', so this example is semantically identical to the previous one (since $x is always set). PHP doesn't have any special concept of "emptyness" to check for.
It's peculiar you find interesting he associates the toolbar approach with Meebo, rather than Facebook.
Groupon updates IPO filing, admits it's unprofitable
Here is the question that this immediately raises in my mind: if this drug can cure any viral infection, then why haven't any species evolved to produce the drug in their own bodies?
Should I plan ahead, or figure out programs as I'm writing them?
Or from ipython, even better:

In [1]: abs?
Type:	builtin_function_or_method
Base Class:	<type 'builtin_function_or_method'>
String Form:	<built-in function abs>
Namespace:	Python builtin
Docstring:
abs(number) -> number

Return the absolute value of the argument.
I agree with the fact that doing it at Defcon is ten times better than doing it at, say, LeWeb.

But I question the overall value of this activity for the society, compared to other things.
One man's trash is another man's treasure. I love mibbit and have been a happy user for years. It's been doing wonders for a wider acceptance of IRC.
>To filter out the total idiots, I ask people to give me a one-paragraph answer to one of 5 technical-ish questions.

from my recent job change (several offers). After supposedly reading my resume and after half an hour on the phone the company's staff recruiter asked me to write a paragraph on how i see my fit to the company. It became immediately obvious to me that there is no fit. Somehow that wasn't obvious for him. Next day he's calling and emailing - they really like to talk with me in-house and where is the paragraph? Couple days later - the same. Day after that - they really like to talk with me in-house. The paragraph somehow isn't mentioned anymore. Good luck guys. I hope you find the programmer(s) with a hobby for essay writing.
Ask HN: Machine Learning? Where to start?
What are the best books/websites to learn about machine learning? I have a solid background in math/cs/algorithms.
The "complex doesn't mean complicated" counterargument always feels like people are just playing the semantics game, rather than making a real counterargument. When somebody says "complexity is bad", he or she already uses "complex" to mean "intricate, complicated".

If you can hide complex functionality behind a simple user interface, it's not really a complex user interface, right?
Would this be more of a content destination or a social platform?
Woot! Finally, we can now read kindle books on Linux. Thanks amazon.
You might be right. I'll confess to a limited knowledge of this subject :)

As for which groups have more tribal loyalty... maybe there is something to be gleaned from which have an easy time keeping their members marching in lockstep, vs which have a hard time with that.
Engineering Salaries In Silicon Valley
Ask HN: Have you been offered money for a disguised ad on your website?
I just got an email from a company offering me a fixed annual fee to display an ad on one of the pages on my personal website. The email was professionally written, their website looked legit and I have Google Ads now which pay me almost nothing so I decided to ask what kind of ad, how much they'd pay and so on. They promptly replied, said they'd pay from 120-175$ annually and this would be a text-based ad, and they were only interested in one page on my site. There were two options for me:

1. Simple text based advert, which will "appear in the content area of an already existing page on your website".

2. Their team of content writers could write a new page to put on my site, which would fit my content.

To show me an example of their ads they sent me a link to another webpage, which they said had an ad for a company. I checked it out and it had a link to the company in the middle of an article, right in the text, with no mention that it was an ad or anything. It just said something like "We used Company X and their staff was so helpful".

So, my question is, how common is this practice? Now I feel like every time I see an offhand mention of something with a link, I'll think, wait a minute, did the author just get paid for that?
A tricycles greatest strength is that it doesn't require balancing on two wheels.

For those who can't ride a bicycle, tricycles are great.

Once you understand how to use a framework/language like RoR, I don't see how PHP is more useful (unless you have size constraints). ActiveRecord::Base.connection.execute("SELECT foo from bar where x = y") is just as simple as mysql_query("SELECT foo FROM bar WHERE x = y"), and you get the benefit of abstracting away the database in database.yml so you can run it in different environments.
When I meet such corporate bureaucracy I'm always reminded of this paragraph from one of PG's essays[1]: "A group of 10 managers is not merely a group of 10 people working together in the usual way... for a group of 10 managers to work together as if they were simply a group of 10 individuals, the group working for each manager would have to work as if they were a single person—the workers and manager would each share only one person's worth of freedom between them... the result is that each person gets freedom of action in inverse proportion to the size of the entire [corporate] tree. Anyone who's worked for a large organization has felt this."

[1] http://www.paulgraham.com/boss.html
Hey man, don't be sad, you inspire us! : )
Does a clean-room implementation of java.util.Map interface qualify as interesting? I ask this because someone might be perfectly capable of writing quality code, but might not be thinking up an idea that comes off as cool or interesting or original to you.
It's an XSS-prone templating language, as the default correct syntax for outputting variables is:

<?php echo htmlspecialchars($value, ENT_QUOTES);?>

which is far from encouraging safe best practices.

PHP namespaces aren't any better: http://pornel.net/phpns
Does anyone have a current benchmark showing initial load and view-indexing performance on a single mac mini (i7/ 8GB/ dual 256 GB SSD)?

That's the demo I'd want to see before taking another look.
And sending tens of thousands of messages per day I might add...