skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Humans won't be around in 1,000 years. Our shelf life is nearly at expiration. We'll become some other configuration of life.
s/robots.txt/freedom.txt/g ~ Take Three
The trajectory of a software engineer… and where it all goes wrong
Sorry, I really screwed up with that one. Totally typo'd that one.
Screenshots in Safari just captured the FOUT (http://paulirish.com/2009/fighting-the-font-face-fout/). Not sure I'm totally convinced about those IE8 + IE9 screenshots - I've tested those and 9 is pretty good, 8 is a bit lame and anything below 8 is appalling. What version of Windows was that?

It really takes the fun out of a project like this to make it not die in IE.
personal bias, sorry :-)
Would you prefer the (more creative) way Tiny Tower approached Zynga for blatantly ripping their game concept + design? yes, its embarrassing for both sides - but people SHOULD know these kind of things

https://s3.amazonaws.com/nbpromo/dearzynga.jpg
Well, of course people shouldn't take many of these things personally. What he describes is just slightly modified actor-observer bias (or asymmetry), a well-understood phenomenon in psychology.

(For those who had not yet heard of the term, Wikipedia has an article on it that seems to explain the concept well enough: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Actor-observer_bias)
ad hominem attacks are never appropriate
The first two top-level comments I see here amount to:

a) Beating bloggers, especially hippies, doesn't count

b) If we had only prevented the protests, we'd be doing better

Still more reasons America is in a slump in these rankings
"In fact the best way to lower humanity's impact on the environment is to reduce third world poverty and thus reduce population growth."

False. When you reduce poverty in a third world population, they simply breed more. This has repeatedly been observed. If you want to loosely throw around words such as "fact" and "best", then I submit that the following, although potentially unpleasant to you, is closer to the correct usage: "In fact the best way to lower humanity's impact on the environment is to eliminate third world population."
I've tried Adobe Edge and the biggest issue I found was with the amount of HTML output and the human readability/context of elements. There seemed to be a lot of wrapper elements used in succession and named long, generic names with numbers. In my brief trial it looked OK in the browser but due to the excessive HTML, it would be a huge burden to edit in anything other than Adobe Edge if you wanted to go back and change anything. In a text editor, I can create a page using only 20% of the elements Edge did and have the opportunity to name them something relevant (e.g. #author_info rather than #generic-1-3-15).
I just looked at in on a Win7 VirtualBox machine running IE 8 and it looked like the Litmus screenshot. I am convinced it looked bad, not surprised, but certainly sad :(
Scientific issues are decided by who has the best evidence. Consensus comes in where there's any debate over who has the best evidence.
One case where the rant should have continued.

That they don't spend as much time and effort trying to disprove their owns theories, is the prime indicator that something is wrong with the conclusions being drawn.
Jobs was given millions of dollars in stock options. His total compensation was far far beyond $1/year.
The SOPA stories seems to have left the impression for some that HN is a place for political discussion.
I have only looked at the slides. This looks like an interesting overview of Haskell, but, like most functional programming talks I see seems to think the rest of us really want to be using functional programming.

Notice the slides that thinks the connection between C/Java and Haskell is that C/Java programmers envy Haskell, and take ideas from it. No envy or ideas ever flow the other way.
Setting up a VM for Raspberry Pi Development
It's not really a conservative or liberal issue. Yes, many liberals are pro anthropomorphic climate change, and many conservatives are anti, but it goes both ways.

Nothing is settled science until you can prove it beyond reason of doubt - i.e. see it in action.

If the earth does warm dramatically in X years, then we can measure the temperature difference against our CO2 output and past warm periods like the Medieval Warm period. That is REAL science. Anything else is speculation or...wait for it...a HYPOTHESIS.

Keep in mind, even minorities can be right, even when it seems completely foolish or counter-intuitive. Remember when everyone thought the earth was flat, and that we lived in a geo-centric or helio-centric universe?
If we are going to be using crops for food by the time global warming effects become significant we deserve to die out. They are already using bacteria to produce amino acids industryially, few decades in that are is inevitably going to bring us to a point where you can have a shallow pool of water with bacteria in it under UV lights, stacked on top of each other producing amino acids, carbs and fats. Maybe even directly synthesize some of those using a large scale chemical reaction.

That's sort of the answer to "global warming problems". All of those problems are going to exist anyway and a far simpler solution is to modify our environment (eg. large protective domes around cities that can withstand the stress of a tornado, filter cosmic rays, etc.) and technology instead of trying to regress to "organic farming" and cutting energy consumption. That might sound like SF but considering the technological progress, I don't think it's unreasonable to expect advances in nanotechnology/materials/construction/food production etc. in that time-frame. The biggest hurdle seems to be energy, with Thorium and micro nuclear reactors looking very realistic in that timeframe. Who knows, maybe we get efficient nuclear batteries by then.
Dave, I wanted to tell you that I think the way you were handling the situation with DHH on Twitter was great! I saw a video on YouTube titled "the last lecture" a while back, and the biggest takeaway for me was how the guy defined an apology:

Proper apologies have three parts: 1) What I did was wrong. 2) I’m sorry that I hurt you. 3) How do I make it better? It’s the third part that people tend to forget…. Apologize when you screw up and focus on other people, not on yourself.

This has stuck with me and I noticed you were following on it very well, patiently and with humbleness.
http://www.curebit.com <-> http://kinoma.com

And more copying from 37Signals:

http://twitter.com/#!/dhh/status/163295779593785345

http://twitter.com/#!/dhh/status/163298220322209792
me too. but you'ld think that it would help to at least say somewhere (like a subtitle in the banner) "tame + coffeescript"
One workaround would be to create a Page for each topic and let people subscribe to each one.
You can't. If you can, it means you don't give a carp at all what people think about you (as in NOT AT ALL), which means you're a psychopath. It's good to take some things personally. At least, I don't really see how one can improve him/herself if he/she doesn't take anything personally.

And to be completely honest, I tend to be of the opinion that how much one takes personally is pretty hard-wired and can't be changed easily. <Put nature-vs-nurture debate here> I don't think you can 'decide' not to take something personally. (Perhaps you can see it wasn't personal in retrospect, and make the decision not to take something like that as a personal thing, after 'deciding' this many times, in the future.)
Here is a thread on AskScience regarding this article: http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/p04l4/how_accura...
If you have a thread longer than your window, that's one scroll bar. Gmail creates it.

If you have a reply, for example, in that thread longer than a few lines, it is scrolled within a view in the thread.

If you have your chat contacts displayed in the right pane, the browser window's scroll bar scrolls that pane.

That's the case I'm describing.
Congratulations for the awesome tutorial. Really helpful.
The fact is that CO2 is not a pollutant. CO2 is a colorless and odorless gas, exhaled at high concentrations by each of us, and a key component of the biosphere's life cycle.

Ok lets play this game. The fact is that H20 is not a pollutant. It's a molecule that sustains life and a key component of the biosphere's life cycle.

Bring on the ice age!!
It is news that the WSJ is continuing to print articles of this nature. Regardless of the truth or quality of the op-ed, the fact remains that the WSJ has a large audience and this article will be influential. Such an event warrants discussion.
This is great! I've been looking for something like this for awhile but all of the other concepts seemed too cumbersome. I really hope this product reaches its funding goal. Cool idea.
I think both donkey.bas and donkey.net try and demonstrate the platform's abilities rather than promote elegance.

Things have just got a lot more complicated since donkey.bas.

I don't like the Mac platform as a whole - it doesn't and has never delivered the software environment required for industrial grade business softwarae development. UNIX and Windows have provided that for about 30 and 15 years respectively now. The Mac has end user elegance, but that is it. A large chunk of iCloud is on Windows Azure if that gives and credence to my claim.

Side note: I don't necessarily think that complexity is a good thing and would rather like an 8-bit Z80 powered dark age for 20 years.
The "It's took [sic] expensive to address the problem" argument

It’s amazing how common this is. It was smart of Gore to use the phrase “an inconvenient truth”, because so many arguments boil down to “it isn’t happening, because if it were we would have to do a lot of work”.
Legal: a friend recording a TV show on a VCR and giving you the tape.

Illegal: a friend recording a TV show to an .avi file and sending you a megaupload link.
It would be interesting to follow the money trail on these 16 scientists.

I do somewhat buy the plausibility of the economic arguement that reacting to global warning is more efficient than trying to stop it.

The "it's not proven" crowd seem to be in the same camp as the folks claiming you can't prove smoking causes cancer.
I'm not the person you asked, but I employ a similar strategy as them, and I'd be happy to accept your offer of a trial period.

Remember that the negotiation is the 5-minute tip of the iceberg. I try to build the negotiation by knocking your socks off at every point of contact, using whatever resources I can muster. (Want to see code? Then I'll apply all the professional spit 'n polish. Want me to present something to your team? Then I'll consider all angles, including business angles and software engineering analysis, trying to make it as intellectually interesting as possible.)

If you give me the chance and a premium, I'll continue that game to your trial period. (Though I'd maybe try to slip in a higher number, because I'm assuming more risk. ;)

But yeah, if you accept my first offer immediately, then I'll feel I've failed at negotiating. (I believe there's something absurd and horrible about the whole situation, but that's the madness of a market economy, with its built-in antagonism between buyer and seller. Graeber's _Debt: the First 5000 Years_ explains why so many people are repelled by salary negotiations.)
Finally switched from apache 2 to nginx 1.0.5
Making the decision to switch from apache to nginx was never for me a question about which web server is faster or better, but getting to know a new web server which has gained a good reputation in the last years. I already knew that both web servers are pretty good in what they are made for. There has been a lot of talk about nginx, lately. So I got interested in this web server solution because it has also build up valuable reputation just like apache, and competition is always beneficial for the customers. Installing nginx was as easy as installing apache.

Nginx is running on my life site (http://www.joelle.de) since about 2 weeks without any complications, yet. My site is about 20% faster than before, but this is a pretty vague measurement.

So it would be nice to evaluate nginx's power if more traffic would hit my site.
Sure it questions it. As a helpful thought experiment, try this: look at how many phrases are placed in quotation marks in this piece. Each time the writer encloses a phrase like "global warming" or "pollutant" in question marks, he's trying to cast doubt in your mind. It's a very transparent and sophistic technique.

The writer (Claude Allegre) is, in fact, a climate-change denier. He's not merely trying to foster more scientific investigation into climate change or slow the pace at which we adapt to it (although it looks like that's what he wants you to believe here). He doesn't believe that humanity is causing climate change at all (a view that flies in opposition to the long-settled science on this subject), and therefore he's trying to get you to believe that simply slowing down our response to climate change is perfectly OK. But this just isn't the case; it's a recipe for permanently hosing the environment.

At the end of the day, there's an Occam's razor test you can apply to this kind of thing. If this were real science, it'd be published in a peer-reviewed journal, not a conservative mouthpiece of big business like the Wall Street Journal.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reach_(advertising)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Megaupload#Statistics
37Signals is making their point heard, but it's not the professional way to handle things. I completely understand the reaction, DHH is rightfully upset. It's usually best to take some time to cool off and then respond when you're a little less emotional.
The thing that amazes me most about this whole debacle is how completely unnecessary it was. Web designers are popping up everywhere like fucking mushrooms, and these guys (presumably pretty intelligent) chose to just steal a design.

Developing a nice-looking design is the easiest part of a startup. Generating the idea, interest, and funding is what stalls 98% of them. They had all that, but screwed up on the most doable aspect of the company. That alone greatly calls into question the judgment of the founders (not to mention the moral implications).
Contact me and I'll set you up. We (NewsCred) have fully licensed news and archives from 750+ news sources. All available through an API. You can use it for commercial use but there is a fee. I can give you a HN discount ;-)
I don't think anyone has a final answer, but really _how close_ do designs have to be so as to lack integrity?
(assuming that they hadn't straight up lifted the CSS, images, button etc... which they did, which is clearly wrong.)

Ex: DHH says http://elance.com is inspiration, not theft. Ok.

Ex 2: A more difficult edge is http://coursekit.com I instantly recalled their design after seeing this scandal, although I'd initially taken note of it for its effectiveness.

Their similarity to basecamp is on the front page only, and no assets stolen. (full disclosure: competitor, vaguely, for a hackathon-started education product I'm working on.)

Like, we can think up a MILLION edge cases. That's not the point. I'm really, really curious to hear what you guys think the difference IS.

and please, please, PLEASE don't respond to this with vitriol on other side. if you think there are problems happening here in the way we treat design, and how ppl react, just DON'T add to it in that way.

EDIT: edited to match repost, because of downvote(?) here
Altair BASIC was Gates' masterpiece. DONKEY.BAS was probably just a quick throwaway.
Thanks, much appreciated. I hope to keep it up as long as possible!
I find climate projections to be very similar to financial projections of startups. A typical chart will show hockey stick like growth (temp vs revenue) over a long period of time. Since both groups need to prove that they will have an impact in order to get funding they are motivated to show the most drastic/promising future. As a statistician I tend to discount any long term projections for complex systems because I know that there are too many factors that will influence the results.
It's not "dogma" to say that gravity exists or that fire is hot. Just because science is a constant process of investigation and discovery, it doesn't mean that we can never arrive at any conclusions or take action based on what we know to be true.
I have a vague sense of what the service does after several minutes of staring at it: it appears to either make your cover photo look like the bottom was torn off (why??) or it can make it look like your profile photo is part of your cover photo (which is kind of cool.)

To the OP: I would provide larger example images that show what this is and why I care. Also, it took me several minutes to figure out what to click on, as someone else in this thread pointed out.
The last time he took options was 2003. His total compensation for the last 8 years has been $1/year.
You could just learn to maintain/repair the store bike

Personally, I find Ubuntu like a store-bought bike that uses a bunch of non-standard parts. You may have a complete tool kit, but you don't have the right tool for this bike.

Or: when I troubleshoot Ubuntu, I learn Ubuntu. When I troubleshoot Arch, I learn Linux.
I know sarcasm when I see it, but judging from the earlier exchange this would actually not be surprising.
Who concluded that copyright infringement is not stealing?

Opposition to SOPA etc does not necessarily mean people don't believe in copyright. There is a very broad range of views on that particular question.
You are allowed to express your opinion. Your comment is still here. People dislike it (to the point of considering it trolling, it would seem) and downvote you, though.
My #1 doubt always comes from what constitutes a statistically significant temperature change on a 100-150 yr scale (or however long we have had consistent measurements). What is the variance in 100 yr temperature differences over the last 100K to 1M years? Even if the current historical models are accurate do we really have accuracy at this resolution? 2 or 3 degrees C change over 100 yrs may be a common occurrence.

To me it like trying to judge whether a stock price movement over the course of 10 minutes is significant based on historical daily stock prices.
I so envy you font guys. If I had more time I would invest it in typography. Good design always starts with awesome fonts.
the kinoma link is much more of the accepted face of imitation, it just rubs a little after the previous issues.
Agreed.

A curious question that immediately popped in my head was: would it be ethical to use the fear of the public for disruption by global warming (whether it's true or not)? This fear could be used for good purposes, such as trying to increase funding for fusion. (I mean, good graces, it'll be at least 2033 before DEMO becomes productive!)

Understandably, I'd prefer all people to be scientifically (and 'engineerically') literate on these issues and be able to make good decisions for the good reasons. However, I'm also realistic enough to see that this probably won't be happening anytime soon.

(Also, on a more personal note: no, I would not consider this ethical.)
More Global Warming denialism from a Murdoch news source? I'd pretend to be shocked, but really the only thing surprising is that the WSJ is still even vaguely respectable considering it's ownership and bizarre bias.
No public shaming means no disincentive to do the same thing again to some other company.

And given that they also seem to have stolen someone's logo, seems like they're in need of a lesson.

http://yfrog.com/odx67yoj
And I remember reading book from 1906 (not when the books were first published, obviously) from scientists who were convinced that the unavoidable warming due to enhanced industrial carbon dioxide emissions would actually be beneficial, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Svante_Arrhenius#Greenhouse_eff...

And the trend in global temperatures has changed quite dramatically since the mid-70ies http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Global_Temperature_Anomaly...

So in 1974 there were reasons to suspect that some powerful effect might have reversed the expected human driven rise in global temperatures typical for the first half of the century in spite of continuing strong carbon dioxide emissions. Today we see that these decades were just a temporary deviation from the expected trend, caused mostly by vulcanic ashes and soot in the atmosphere.
It's interesting that zynga mostly gets a free pass from name-calling when they ripoff game ideas. The only way to explain it is that zynga is a public company that makes lots of money, which surprisingly gives them some sort of immunity.
Even if the oceans were going up 10m in a week it seems counterproductive to panic -- it might be better to buy a boat or build a dike.
Introducing... CENSORED Tweets?
You might want to go back and read the exchange on Twitter.
The Verge article consists almost entirely of quotes from the source document. They did nothing wrong here.
Unfortunately, it's not just the WSJ, it's anything related to News Corp and Murdoch.

Here's a list of media sources you shouldn't trust:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_assets_owned_by_News_Co...
Coding Horror: Don't Ask Us Questions. We'll Just Ignore You.
Senator Ron Wyden's Favorite Techdirt Posts Of The Week
This will be controversial, but if it were real programming code i would be angry. Since it's just html/css, static stuff, one may say it's not a big deal. In fact that was curebit's first response: they asked if they should keep the code and just add credit. I know it's wrong, but in the broad internet ethics it seems to be considered a certain form of fair use.
Explaining why the methodology used by the "press freedom index" is solid instead of making ad-hominem attacks would go a lot further in winning people over.
SPJ actually discusses this a bit in his talk. He says that Haskell has tried to achieve the ease and intuitiveness of imperative programming through things like the "do" syntax sugar for monads. He agrees that there's still plenty of improvement to be made; on several occasions he jokes about how Haskell programmers envy other programmers' ability to get things done quickly.
> why would you want to steal from him in the first place

Read your own answer here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3453379
Show HN: Web Timer, a Chrome extension to keep track of how you use the Web
Microsoft makes the Windows kernel source available to a number of entities [0], but this source is not to be distributed freely. Open Source is usually construed to mean that the source, if you have it, can be distributed to freely.

[0] http://www.microsoft.com/resources/sharedsource/windowslp.ms...
Really interesting slides. As someone who has only briefly played around with Haskell, I do envy some of its features, particularly the type inference. I wish there were more languages that could combine the ease of scripting languages with the maintainability of compile-time typechecking.
Eh, his comment was fine. I think too many people have access to the downvote button again. PG should raise the threshold to 1000 karma.
I don't envy you right now. It must be akin to apologizing to your neighbor while your pet donkey is run amok in their flower bed.