skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
For those without the time, this is the jist:

Accept that climate change is real & man made. Reject the panic that goes along with the acceptance of this. Most carbon reduction plans are very costly to implement & according to climate change models result in a very modest average temperature reduction. The many arguments presented in favour of climate change policy are not a rational use of these funds.

Urban heat related deaths can be prevented by painting roofs white & planting trees at a tiny fraction of the cost of reducing emissions. Polar bear deaths (1 per year due to warming) can more cheaply be prevented by not shooting them. Increased malaria fatalities (weak correlation between heat & malaria) can be more cheaply & effectively prevented by treating malaria.

Basically, the approach to climate change uses inefficient technologies & approaches because it is a dumb debate with alarmists promoting multi-billion dollar projects that have virtually no effect (holding global warming off by one hour at the end of 100 years).

From what I understand, he recommends investing technology, saving the money, treating the symptoms for now.

I disagree somewhat, but that is a different comment. The speaker is calm, rational, a good speaker. It is worth listening to.
If you are young, I suggest you give it some more thought. There's a big world out there, even bigger than Russia, believe it or not.
I agree with Lombory's philosophy of pragmatism over ideology but I think his excessive focus on things heat deaths and polar bears in this talk amounts to a straw-man argument.

The big danger of Global warming is that it shifts liveable areas in three ways. water shortages eg China, India anywhere draining from the Himalayas; more slowly general temperature increases moving productive zones outwards, eg desertification in North Africa and the possibility of Greenland's ice-sheet joining the ocean and raising sea levels.

Water shortages could be solved by desalination and water conservation thankfully California will probably pay for the development; general migration will require the generally richer countries in the north to take more people (or those people will come all at once) and rising water levels: lots of dykes? (this is actually one of the few costs of Global Warming that wouldn't be recuperable and could be v. expensive).

By picking small things that were never really advanced as the big dangers of Global Warming he seems more deceptive than the environmentalists he's attempting to criticise.
Talking to the police early is important for a number of reasons, one of the primary ones being you can say that you did if the worst happens and it becomes a full blown stalking.
Rails and Amazon: Libs and Plugs for EC2, S3, SimpleDB, SQS, FPS and DevPay Integration
Big 3 Autoworker Salary : $73/hour : Adding it up
Even in strict languages, there's rarely anything that absolutely prevents you from doing what you need to do; they just make it harder to do bad things accidentally. Languages like Ruby actually make it harder to do things correctly, and constantly tempt you with hideous shortcuts.

Again, I view programming teams as groups of nosy toddlers. Thus, any sentence beginning with "programmers should be..." is wrong by definition. Programmers are people, and people make mistakes. People also get lazy, try to take shortcuts, and therefore make even more mistakes. The way that people minimize mistakes is by setting up systems that make it harder to do wrong things. This is a fundamental tenet of engineering.
since when did joel redesign his permalink pages? nice stuff.
F#, don't forget. It has the backing of a major industry player and access to all of the .NET libraries and tools already.
It would be, if Amazon would ever ship it to me! Is it generally available in the US? I may just order from there and eat the cost of shipping.
I'm not trying to be a jerk, really, but how is this stuff still useful? It's been covered 1000 times on digg (and I'm guessing reddit) and every other "design" blog on the web. If you don't know where to find icons by now, you shouldn't be doing the design of your app.
You can read the short version on my About Us page at the site and the long version on the About page at my blog. Both are linked from my HN profile.

[Edit: incidentally, I agree, "charge money for value" will almost always be my #1 suggestion for a business model. In this case, value probably means "a tea I have never had before". Nobody says you have to grow or ship it yourself.]
reposting a comment I saw elsewhere, google it for more

--

Let me, as a chess player, say that I was much less surprised by the resistance the World put up against Kasparov:

A) Kasparov is indeed considered the greatest player by most and the reason for his strength when playing ‘over the board’ (OTB, as it is termed) was threefold: 1) he prepared more and better than anyone else 2) his calculating powers OTB were quite magnificent and 3) his understanding of dynamic chess was ahead of his time. Now when using the format of the Kasparov vs the World game these advantages largely (not completely) disappear: 1) everyone can consult books (in particular about openings), 2) everyone can move the pieces around on the board instead of inside their heads 3) the game was not a messy game Kasparov used to excel in but quickly went into a middle game with endgame features.

B) Kasparov may be “much better” than other GMs and than Krush in particular, but this difference in strength should be qualified. The difference between me and most tournament players in the US player is much larger than that between Kasparov and Krush! The median rating of US chess players [those who play tournaments and actually do have an official rating] is somewhere around 1000-1100, mine is more than 1100 points higher. Kasparov is “only” about 300-400 points above Krush (and like 150 points above Khalifman).

C) There is a good comparison with correspondence chess here: this is where people play by email, for instance, (it used to be by snail mail). I just started playing this myself and the tempo in most games is about 1 move per day. Now I play several people whose OTB ratings are way below mine, indeed a 1000 points below mine. But I don’t have an easy time beating those players in correspondence chess. A difference of 1000 points implies I can beat them, when playing OTB, literally blindfolded (just seeing the board in my head). But in correspondence chess it’s much much harder. They can use opening books and look up how grandmasters have played in the position we happen to have on the board.
Development is one thing. What's the percentage that is of platforms for deployments? So I develop my rails app on the mac, if my production system is actually 20 machines and linux, that's a 20:1 ratio of servers deployments to development deployments.
There's no such thing as old jokes. To a newborn, every joke (every article) is a world premiere.
I used Slimtimer. There are tons and TONS of timer applications. Then I use the powers of CSV+programming or excel to massage the data into whatever inane format people want it in.

(Then I got a salaried job ;) Though keeping track of the time you spend on things is important for another reason: those "I'll be done in a few days!" declarations are either backed up by fact, or provably wrong.)
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Withitness is actually a standard term in the research it was coined by educational theorist Jacob Kounin in 1970.
Left after 5 secs because I didn't like the colors.
"For what it's worth, this has recently become a 'standard' interview question for developers."

I used to ask interviewees to discuss what they didn't like about their favorite language. If they had a hard time finding stuff to criticize, there was a good chance they didn't really know the language. or were not particularly critical developers.
No, how did you infer that from what I wrote? A dynamic type system, as you pointed out, may be better at enforcing restrictions than a static one. The notion of 'strength' that I was talking about is separate from the enforcement mechanism.

Some questions that pop into my mind when i consider type systems are:

1) What are the criteria that a datum must fulfill in order to be considered of type Foo?
2) How is this to be determined?
3) Why would I ever need to know this?

1 & 3 impact the strong-weak continuum, number 2 does not. The less that type impacts allowed (at run or compile time) operations (#3), the weaker the type system. Note that you often can implement the manipulation of metadata in your language if your language does not already provide these features.

As for #1, the more stringent the criteria, the more 'strong' the given language's type system. A very weakly typed language may have no mechanism of checking for type (in such a language, the type system may only be used internally to the object for things like method resolution.) The criterion for being of a particular type may be 1) the datum supports all operations defined for a particular type 2) the datum supports all operations defined for a particular type that are used in the current execution scope 3) the datam has the name of the type in a list of types that it claims to be 4) the datum is at least as large as the size of the given type .. and many more ..

In the context of re-factoring, the less frequently type is checked and the less rigorous the criteria when it is checked, the more opportunity for type substitution (and thus more flexibility) we have.
I know this may come as a shock, but not everyone goes to reddit or digg very often, if ever.

Not that I'm necessarily advocating the use of cookie-cutter icons that have probably been used on who knows how many other sites already (even though some of them are indeed quite pretty).
Answering my own question here, but I found some good pointers in http://www.softwarebyrob.com/2007/07/05/startup-studio-excel...
WaveMaker Launches First Open-Source IDE for the Cloud
Amazon EC2 now in Europe
I've no idea if they're common in Europe. They're not common here, and they're available. Common people couldn't be bothered even if they'd knew what they are, not to mention know how to use them. This is a good thing I believe. Hey, I know what they are and how to use them and I still don't bother :)
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Hm, it sounds like you may end up sitting near me (same department at least).

Hope I run into you, sounded like you did cool stuff.
That's a cool story - I submitted it here:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=392642
Well put. And very Zen.
Indeed, I think everyone knows what ID is really about by now.

The time scale issue is one that I have sometimes thought of in the same context though. To a person who does not see how any version of the Bible could be the inerrant word of God, it seems eminently possible that the units of time that have been translated as years could well actually be units of time that are much longer than years.

But as we both say, this would of course mean that one would have to be open to the possibility that a text originally based on oral history, which has been translated into and out of who knows how many languages, subject to all manner of surreptitious political motivations in the process, over the course of thousands of years, may be subject to some inaccuracies.
I think it helped. It wasn't the ONLY factor (the search engine was pretty good too ;)), but I think displaying results faster (smaller page size, more focused UI), contributes positively to the experience.

Perhaps there are UIs that would have resulted in faster growth or more total marketshare, but there are definitely UIs that would have made things far worse. I think the "headroom" for growth is pretty low, there were so many competing services then, if you can remember, that I find it hard to believe that there was only Google with a different looking interface.
The most interesting about the results IMHO is JRuby's performance. It's now faster than CRuby1.8, and, for what I have read, solves also the scalability problems associated to it(threads, GC, etc...).

And there's a lot of room for improvement, specially with the advent of invokedynamic. I wasn't eager to learn Ruby because of their alleged performance and scalability problems, but it seems that JRuby is changing that.

(If I'm mistaken, and things aren't so bright, please, enlighten me).
I agree that these are straw man arguments. I also reacted to them at first. But then he doesn't seem to rely on them too much. He admits that they are a metaphor.
To be really convinced I would have liked to see him address issues like the likely major food shortage (technology will probably not solve this) & the likely major regional problems caused by mass migrations and/or wars over resources. However, his general argument is that a lot of money is being spent stupidly, very stupidly. I think that he is correct & that he makes that point.

I am still hesitant to take his side on this. I have some major problems with this approach:

(1) World Government - At the best of times governments are inefficient. For normal maintenance issues like how to run infrastructure, hospital systems, school systems & such they make mistakes, but they get by. Once issues become election winning issues, the debate gets really dumb. this is not only a central focus issue, it is a very technical issue. As he suggests, this is complicated & technical & every action needs to be weighed up. It's inefficient to simply take an ideological stance (renewable energy, energy efficiency, hybrid cars, etc) & get behind anything that promotes it. It is exponentially more rational to make this decision like an accountant creating a cash flow strategy.

Unfortunately, it is impossible for a political process such as this to take on an accountant like decision making process. Political debates need to be much more dumbed down to be possible. In this case, this process can be seen as being conducted by the 'Government of the World,' a body very weak in the existence department, never mind the efficiency department. So in a real sense, if a policy can't be chanted by a mob, it cannot be pursued. Certainly not over the 50+ year period necessary. I just don't think that his 'plan' is a possibility. The political structure & decision making process here is our tool. We have a wood. He is proposing building a house from bricks.

(2) Maybe panic is Necessary - Many predict that there is indeed a need for panic. That is possibly because of point of no return due to feedback. There are two kinds of feedback: the physical kind such as methane releases from melting permafrost, the political kind due to climate related political consequences such as a Chinese famine or a Pakistan/India war related to river flows.

(3) Economic models break down at these sorts of concepts. Comparing economic outputs between two scenarios where one of them includes mass starvation is apples to oranges.
I guess it just seems much more elegant and simple to me to have only one kind of scope in the language. One is all you need.

No, closures refer to the j variable that doesn't get incremented, only assigned to.

"Doesn't get incremented, only assigned to." I don't know what that means. How is "i++;j=i;" any different, really, than "i++;j++"?

The assignment is by value - no vars get "passed by reference", whatever this means.

"Passed by reference" ==> all the closures reference the same "j" variable. The phrase "pass by reference" is, of course, a bit of a mixed metaphor, since it's not really "passed" as an argument to a function, but rather trapped by a closure. Same difference.

The actual issue is that all invocations of the loop body alias the same var j, even though it's declared inside the block.

"Even though"? There are no blocks in javascript; only functions create scope. That's what's so awesomely simple about this language. Eh, to each his own, I guess.

Lexical scope could be introduced in the new additions to ES3.1, but I'm pretty sure it won't be. A javascript engine would be crazy to try to shoehorn it into the language now, since it would, in fact, break a lot of code in the wild.

Time to man up. :)

Modern Scheme compilers are quite clever at eliminating unneeded activation frames and closures, sometimes even converting closures into inline code.

Isn't that roughly what tracemonkey does?
I've had a similar problem (ethnic epithets -- it was disgusting).

The phone company (AT&T) required a subpoena to release the name/number.
The Erlang Journal is now free.
And you listen to both kinds of music, country AND western?
What about variability and stride? A teacher's performance is likely to vary daily, as well between years. How do we know, rejecting a mediocre teacher, that she wouldn't have blossomed into a superstar? How do we know that the trigonometry teacher won't become cynical with age?

The second problem can be solved by gathering data every few years, but what about the first?
There is such a thing as "old news", however.

That being said, I just don't care for this class of "stories"
What I wonder about is why nobody seems to be talking about the lack of correlation between global temperature and global warming theories. My understanding is that there has been increasing cooling in the last decade, with the coolest year this past year. Where exactly is the warming? (This is not to question the warming that occurred up to 1998)
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I think this is an inevitable consequence of politicisation.

Economics, for example is much more of a religion in countries (like the US) where the cold war had that sort of a political impact. In some places, history is more of a religion.
Warming / cooling pattern for the last decade or so:
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/8/8c/Global_Warming...
Similarly, there are many tasks you can do far better in Java.
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The genie effect tells you where in the dock the window is, and the expose effect tells you which desktop you're currently on.
The reaction you get has nothing to do with what you say, and everything to do with the way you say it. If you act apologetic, they'll be sad for you. If you're enthusiastic they'll be happy for you.

A fellow I know is a financial planner. Yawn. But I watched him explain what he did to a woman he was trying to pick up and, damn, it sounded exciting and noble. He helped people achieve their long term dreams and become independent.

So be kind to your family. Give them a Christmas present and make them all happy by telling them how you've got the greatest gig in the world writing software to make the world a better place. You might be surprised how much it changes things.
Jerk removed my comment because I thought the oxygen icon set from kde4 should be included. Notice how all the comments on his blog say amazing and lovely.
What are the questions you should ask before refinancing?
Home refinancing helps us in a number of ways and we can easily save a great deal on our mortgage by refinancing. However, if we don’t pay attention to details while signing up for home refinancing, we can easily get into trouble and at times we may even lose money, which is defeats, the purpose of refinancing. To save ourselves from all such problems, we must make sure to ask few basic questions before signing up.
Agreed, I do 99% of my work in Python and I only use perl -e '....', but I enjoyed Higher Order Perl more than most other Python books. Python books seem so boringly practical - Higher Oder Perl was fun!
I think it's a combination of factors luck, knowledge, practice, that ultimately their result may be called random.

However my opinion is that Forex is not gambling. In wagers to win big you must either combine different bets with odds that pay as someone predefined. If you combine more, the need for luck increases. If you bet a large amount of money on high paying odds then again you need luck.

In contrary, foreign exchange you just trade the currency according to your prediction. The only way to automatically lose the negative lot is going off your margin. To win big, your prediction doesn't need to go against the odds like a soccer bet for example.

But, I will check out that book. Thanks
Oh God. The Diggbots found us.
(country and western are like metal and hardcore.. might sound the same, but have different roots and cultures, and have experienced a great cross-pollination.)
Just as a comment. I barely ever read the front page. I check the "new" page once every couple of hrs (and read/post al that).

The wealth of information is great.. the front page has.. well.. loses it's interest after a couple of hrs of the day..
Home refinancing helps us in a number of ways and we can easily save a great deal on our mortgage by refinancing. However, if we don’t pay attention to details while signing up for home refinancing, we can easily get into trouble and at times we may even lose money, which is defeats, the purpose of refinancing. To save ourselves from all such problems, we must make sure to ask few basic questions before signing up.
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On Tumbleweed site: "Our Prairie Tumbleweeds are 100% Y2K compliant"

:) -- Now I see why they survived the dot com crash around year 2000
I would also add "Perl Best Practices" by Damian Conway to that must-read Perl list.
Hiya, blog author here. Glad you liked that. I'd just like to point out that the post is written largely in the present tense but was last touched about a year ago. (You think I would have known to future proof it... or at least put the date somewhere.)

In the interim, I've changed jobs and tripled sales, among other things.

Just pointing it out for accuracy's sake.
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I like how a language invented 20 years ago for writing telecom switch software is now used for poker servers.
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That would be 39090.
I'm sure 49090 would be even more faster, in a year or so =)
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