skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Dani, I understand that all fields of science (except those snobs in string theory) must use models. But not all models can be reasonably tested.

I trust the Bernoulli model across a certain parameter range because it has been carefully tested in more than one controlled experiments. However, suppose the Bernoulli model was based solely on one experiment: a videotape of a large body, of mostly known shape, traveling through a fluid of unknown density and viscosity. Now some guys just built a glider. Do you want to pilot the glider off a cliff?

Note: I'm only applying the same level of skepticism to climate science that I do to astrophysics or economics. I take descriptions of the internal structure of the sun with a similar grain of salt; they are a good educated guess, but I'm not going to make claims like "95% certain."

Incidentally, I don't think anyone really trusts the models. If the models are as accurate as claimed, then we should be open to the idea of geoengineering. If we can accurately pinpoint the effect of CO2 among other forcings, we can predict the results of any reasonable forcing. Injecting sulfur dioxide into the stratsophere is a short term solution:

http://climate.envsci.rutgers.edu/pdf/GeoengineeringJGR9inPr...

If the models are accurate, all we need to do is run some simulations to figure out which geoengineering scheme is optimal. If the cost of geoengineering < cost of reducing CO2 emissions, then we should pursue that.

Of course, if one brings up such possibilities, environmentalists will deride them as "playing god", and point out that "who knows what will happen?" But that's silly; the models are either accurate or not.

By the way, I think you might be using the existence of nutty and incorrect skeptics as a straw man. There are wacko environmentalists out there too: notice the opposition to nuclear energy. But this doesn't make environmentalism crazy, just a few of it's proponents.
What's with all the terrible articles today? Just desserts, I suppose.
Science has nothing to do with opinions or university degrees; it's about proving thesis right or wrong, whoever happens to hold them.
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If I were MS I'd have some fun with this. Offer $5/share and wait for the market to catch up.
The 90/10 Rule of Marketing a Job
Burt Rutan is the CTO America needs. He's a true Renaissance man. And he knows about working with government.
Cisco warns of severe drop in orders
Rails-powered Open Source Killer Apps, Anyone?
My Favorite Wordpress Plugins and Yours?
What kind of alternative policy to laisser faire do you have in mind?
Jeweler Directory, Antique Jewelry, Fine Jewelry, Costume Jewelry, Unique Designs
JewelryJeweler.com contains a lot of listings about antique & estate jewelry, unique designs, manufacturers, gold, silver, platinum, diamond, gemstone, watches & clocks, costume jewelry, fine jewelry.
Google scraps ad partnership with Yahoo
Review: BBEdit 9.02
Yeah it's weird, 'cos there are devices that people do care about, like the power management and wireless networking in their laptops, that Linux is badly trailing, well, pretty much everyone else.
Shouldn't we ask first if it is necessary and wise to "save" the American auto industry? Isn't the decline of the American auto industry the creative destruction of economics at work?
that might be illegal even though it shouldn't be.
Never get involved in a land war in Asia, but only slightly less well-known is this: never go in against Microsoft when time is on the line.
don't use a laptop for benchmarking operating systems!

Why not? Laptops are poised to overtake desktop PCs. It seems valid (even necessary) to test your product on popular consumer configurations.
At my day job, I can't, here I am. At home I have two computers, an unconnected desktop where I program and a laptop that has net access. I try to keep the laptop shut as long as I can.

Also I've developed a mental filter, an attitude of "did I really want to read this?" comparing the feeling before and after reading the article. Now I see the headline and try to figure which will be my reaction after I see the article. Most of the times, the conclusion is that I'm really not interested.
Someone wants to buy my site, how can I value it?
In the interest of anonymity I would prefer not to reveal my real username.

I have a site that does about a 150,000 pageviews and 5,000 uniques a day. It is profitable, making about $50,000 a year, not from adverts. The average pageviews per visit is over 30.

At the current growth trend I would expect it to be making over $150,000 in a couple years. It is also an influential site for its niche, market leader in its own right.

It comes top of google for any keywords pertaining to the market it targets.

What do you think is a good price?
When do games grow up?
It is really a 2 step process.

1. Stop reading the internet.

2. Get to work.

If you can't do that maybe you find the internet more interesting than work. If that is the case, consider making a change so that reading the internet becomes your work. No sense spending your life fighting yourself.
I'm tired of the blame the unions meme. Honestly. If the cost of labor is too high invest in robots. The Japanese do it. Or stop building things at a loss, call it quits and go home.

I know everyone loves Ron Paul on the Internets, but one cannot seriously argue in favor of market solutions to problems and somehow believe labor agreements reflected anything but a supply/demand equilibrium price between capital and labor when made. Collective bargaining secured lower labor costs up front in return for imposing obligations on companies to invest a certain amount of funds to cover worker benefits in the future.

And yes... many companies have gutted their pension funds, or entered bankruptcy to foist their obligations onto the government. And others have deliberately underfunded plans to increase short-term profits and management payouts..

The anti-union bias in these comments is a right-wing talking point, and not a very good one unless people really believe that debt obligations on capital are somehow more sancrosanct than similar obligations made to labor. And frankly, when the senior management at General Motors starts spouting right-wing talking points I consider that prima facie evidence that the company is managed by a bunch of idiots:

http://www.reuters.com/article/latestCrisis/idUSN22372976

There is a cost to having major sectors of your economy run by a bunch of idiots. This is it. If there's a lesson relevant to this forum, it's to ask for your cash up front, and start your own business so your pension isn't in the hand of someone with short-term managerial incentives and the ability to screw you.
Agreed.

In my experience I have found that XP boots and runs faster than Ubuntu 8.10 on my laptop. This was not the case on the same machine back in the 7.04 days.
Except a lot of internet software has second-rate installations and support for Win32.
Eugh. I quit the site as soon as I saw it was divided into 10 pages. No thanks.
The 10 Most Expensive Movies of All Time
No adverts, trailers, or fancy introductions for this article – that’s how things end up going over budget (and word count). I’ll just note that all figures are either officially reported costs or estimates collated from various web sources.
I don't think that it's entirely symmetrical. There are regions of confidence with any model. If you only have one shot, it's probably much safer to gradual remove, or at least reduce the magnitude of a forcing term from a nonlinear system than to add one that you think will counter it, even if you think you have a very, very good handle on what's going on, because it returns you to something you've seen before. This is especially important if that counteracting term has never been tested on the global system for even small magnitude changes.

It's like an amateur barber trying to balance a haircut. You can risk error in the model on one side to deflect the other, but it's probably wiser just to ask the clippers be put down. With each rebalancing the system gets further and further from the familiar.

As for geo-engineering, I'm not against it in principle as an alternative, but so far I have yet to hear of any schemes that might conceivably be cheap enough. Apparently Teller proposed some kind of balloon floating scheme, but, like his starwars proposal, it was entirely nutty; the math turned out that the assumptions were that balloons cost a tenth of a microdollar. And the sulfur dioxide model would be great if it were cheap enough to make, and there were a way to make sure it wouldn't come down and produce acid rain, which I'm afraid seems like quite a challenge.

I don't think I'm making a straw man argument. I mentioned the skeptic Tim Ball only in direct reply to a post quoting him.
He doesn't have to point it out. RMS' issue isn't that Microsoft make money. It's the way in which they make it.

Similarly, I support and enjoy capitalism yet that doesn't mean I support Rockefeller murdering his competitors.
Three little words so hard to say - "I don't know"
I don't look down on these people. I dislike them.

And my view on books is that it's open. There are no constraints, so I don't see my viewpoint as narrow. A book is what you make of it.

I grew up on books and nothing else. No TV, no Radio. I read books at random, without a system, and I judge them by if I like them or not. And not by if others tell me I should like them or not.

Humility is not really something that can be explained easily, but when you finally become humble about the books you read, you will know it.
He's just trying to drive the share price back up.
It's OK to expect little payoffs constantly. Split up tasks in small chunks and tick them off as you complete them. Large tasks seem daunting. Small tasks are just that "tasks". Stuff you do without really worrying about it.

Using a TODO lists when you already know roughly what you have to do can help enormously. The mundane act of ticking off a box next to a small task is enough motivation to get started on the next task.

Especially in the morning it can be tempting to "catch up" with all the HN posts, but if you go through your TODO list and see that you have to "fix link on page X" it's really easy to just do it. Only takes a minute. You know what you have to do, and it doesn't "feel" like work. And when you've started the next task automatically follows.

You can even put off simple tasks so you can do them whenever you're not feeling motivated, just to help you get started.
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Web services in Grails
Review of web services in Grails, focused on consuming services - client side.
I can't give you a figure, but I do encourage you to consider not only your current traffic figures, but also potential traffic figures that will result from your site being introduced to the acquirer's user base, if that makes sense in your scenario. If they get 10x more pageviews and uniques a day and they give you a prominent position on their site, your traffic could instantly double.

I guess what I'm saying is that the synergy that comes from an acquisition (or any strategic relationship) can sometimes have a value all its own.

And there's almost always an emotional component to consider that supersedes spreadsheet models. If you enjoy running the site, then it might be worth more to you than if you don't.

Best of luck!
I'm more interested in the banner picture used in that blog. Incredible cool holographic effect when you move your mouse cursor over the banner. Never seen that before
Yeah. I have a simple way to find out if Ubuntu is getting slower:

1. How many people are assigned to adding features and making upgrades? What level of authority do they have?
2. Same questions, but assigned to performance monitoring and enhancement.

Software is such a product of the culture that produced it that sometimes you don't even need to run benchmarks.
I found that getting work done on the train or other places without internet conneciton does wonders to my productivity. Only works well though when I'm really familiar with what I'm working on and don't need to research things, and when I have whatever documentation I need installed locally.
A tax increase helps the people affected by it make more money? How?
The solution that has worked for me:

1. If possible, use two computers. One for work. One for fun. I do all my work on my macbook and browsing etc on my ThinkPad.

2. Use OpenDNS to block all the news sites. You can add reddit, HN and all the other news sites to the blocked sites list. Most often than not, I used to land up on reddit/HN by "accident". That is, my fingers would go Cmd-L -> redd -> return.. even befor I realised it. Having a blocker works.
Sometimes, I consciously want to browse HN/reddit, but OpenDNS takes 3 minutes before the block is lifted. By that time the urge would have passed. Or, as I do now, I get up and move to the "fun" PC .

Why am I on HN now?
I unblocked all the sites on election day to read the news from the fire-hose :p . Sine I don't own a TV, internet is the only news source....
PC users to invent ideal machine
Just because something can't be accurately measured using current technology doesn't mean it doesn't exist.
Regardless of Bill Joy's qualifications, this is difficult to accept considering Bill Joy is a partner at John Doerr's firm. I'm not at all opposed to the idea of a national CTO, but this article appears to be a blatant attempt on the part of this firm to cozy up to a new administration. Any advice that primarily benefits the one giving the advice should be taken with a grain of salt. That's not to say Bill Joy is not qualified, but I have no doubt there are other equally qualified candidates available. I'm surprised this would even be posted here.
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An interesting marketing strategy: They'll get, if they can figure out how to filter the data, excellent market feedback, but their competitors will have the same data.

This is something to keep our eye on.
Previous coverage: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=319975

Generally I don't get much out of multiple stories on the same issue but this post does add a little additional detail. I need to read more into this.
In some economic times, surviving is beating a recession.
Something similar happens when I'm on a trip and bring my camera. I can take home either pictures or memories.
"Healthy lifestyle.."
Japanese researchers make brain tissues from stem cells
Are you disputing that it is possible to learn from (fiction) books?

Or are you disputing that some books do that better than others?

Or are you just disputing that some people have a preference for books which teach them interesting things as well as entertain them?

Or perhaps you're just accepting that all those concepts exist, but you simply find that learning from books is of no import to you?

I'm not quite sure what your argument is.
By definition all probabilities lie in this range. It doesn't change the fact that within this range of R (Real Numbers) the number of logarithms are uncountable.

In simple terms... for every real number >1 (let's call that number x) the number 1/x also exists. Mind blowing huh!

.. Also I was primarily talking about the TTAPS equation which seemed to be the main focus of the parent's threads.
But Dani, if the model is accurate enough to determine that warming is caused primarily by anthropogenic carbon, then it must also be accurate enough to correctly identify and estimate all other effects. After all, if we can't estimate them, how can we rule them out?

Perhaps the models are only valid in regions of phase space we have already visited, but in that case the model has little predictive power! We have a theory which fits some data from one experiment, and has no predictive power. Sounds like little more than a complex data fit to me.

Incidentally, sulfur has been tested for small magnitude changes; Pinatubo provides a natural experiment.

Anyway, I'm not trying to push any geoengineering scheme. I don't think we can accurately predict the effects of such things. But then again, I also don't think we can accurately predict what the earth's temperature would have been absent human intervention.

I'm just pointing out the fundamental point: if we understand climate well enough to determine the exact cause of a small change (which I don't believe we do), we also understand it well enough for geoengineering. But most people don't actually believe we can do geoengineering, even if they do believe AGW is proven.

As for Tim Ball, my bad. Didn't notice that.
There's Free Labor in Video Games
"The smart money always knows when to sell."

Does that say anything about Zuckerberg?
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I did much better on this checklist than the many checklists for startups: I only broke one, though pretty badly.
As most good story tellers are he was surely a skilled manipulator of human thought and emotion.
Computing Science: Achievements and Challenges, by Esdger Dijkstra
Google Apps isn't even close to being better than Office+Exchange+Sharepoint. You can get hosted Exchange and Sharepoint for $15/user/month, with no setup fees.
That emotional attachment exists, I made this from scratch, and watched it grow over time.
Cash Advance for Normal, Everyday Folks.
Right, but I don't necessarily want alll of my messages vulnerable to compromise. Once I've deleted it from the server, I don't have to worry about somebody getting into my account, or the possibility of unscrupulous practices by Google.
I use stickk.com. I decide a time period over which I'm not going to use the net (typically, between starting work and 4pm, for an entire week); I then pay out $20 to an anti-charity of my choice if I fail. Works a charm.
"Officials at the FBI and the White House told the Obama campaign that they believed a foreign entity or organization sought to gather information on the evolution of both camps' policy positions—information that might be useful in negotiations with a future administration."

Or you know these 'hackers' could have just watched CNN. For some reason this story seems pretty farfetched.
See http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=288894 for more info on the technique.
I also loved 8aweek and was sad to see it go away. :(

Now I use LeechBlock which is good (and has some good features) but doesn't feel as smooth:
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/4476
In reality, that's not so. If you suspect that Google might be "unscrupulous" with your data, what makes you so sure that a delete is truly a delete?

There are, essentially, no degrees to trust. You either trust someone or you don't.
I don't even think about President Elect Obama being black, and I'm shocked that people factor it in to his message of hope, as if that's partly what it's about: that a black man can be president. It's nothing of the sort.

Each person sees and hears what he wants, I suppose.

Whether you think about it or not, Obama's skin color is of great importance to many Americans, particularly black Americans. It isn't important to me, but I don't see any reason to deny it or minimize it either.
This is a really difficult problem, specially for developers. A solution I use is:
a) decide the times you want to access the web. In my case is early in the morning, and after lunch.
b) If this is difficult to stick to, maintain a timer of how much time you spent away from the web. Try to maximize this quantity as your secret personal task during the day. This works really well for me.
Which is what I just said...
Historical prices are a good indicator of which stocks are dependent and which are independent, no?
Because if you use 9, instead of 10, it makes it sound like your choices are so well researched and vetted that you'd never sacrifice your integrity just to make it a "top 10".
BBC ignored botanist for denying man-made climate change
A comment on your first point:

It does not get spent on American businesses. I wish it did, but a large share (~40%) goes to entitlement programs (Medicare, SS). Then you've also got defense spending, which benefits some companies, and also you've got other things like debt interest, homeland security, etc.

http://www.wallstats.com/deathandtaxes/ is a pretty good visualization.
Seeing benchmarks conducted by Phoronix always fills me with emptiness on the inside. While I really welcome the idea of benchmarking Linux, their methodology always seem lacking for me.

All we get are a bunch of numbers, without any actual investigation of what those numbers should represent, what can be the reason of the outcome, and sometimes the measurements make simply no sense.

For example, according to these benchmarks, Ubuntu 7.04 reads memory twice as fast as newer versions. There is no possible way it can be a valid result. At least assuming that the exact same compiled code was used on every installation. Which brings us to another problem: no information on the tests. All we get is a software name, a version number and the result numbers. Which would be almost fine if they were prepackaged binaries, but with FOSS different compile time options and compiler flags can make quite a difference in the results too.

About the nonsensical tests: RAM speed should be the same regardless of the OS. So dedicating a full page to RAM speed tests should be senseless. No. It's actually a nice control to the tests, and the numbers show that there's a problem somewhere. Either the tests, the measurements are off significantly, or there is something flawed in either the 7.04 configuration or the others that cause almost 50% difference in such test.

Also, measuring compile times. They managed to measure the time it takes to compile 3 software written in C using an unspecified compiler with unspecified options.

At the end, no conclusion were drawn, just the results summaried in English instead of plain numbers. The whole thing gives me the feeling that they don't really know that they are testing, they're just running a bunch of programs and reporting the numbers they output.

I'm sorry if it seems like I'm just ranting, but I've tried a couple times sending emails that point out the flaws in their methodology, to no use.