skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> He's not a good source on anything.

Perhaps you mean this in the sense that we should trust in science and not in authority? Because as hack writers go, his academic qualifications are better than most. He's an intelligent guy, and it seems fair to give at least some weight to his opinion. Equally, it seems unfair to presume a priori that he's not a good source of information. At the least, you'd should argue "He's looney about X, which we all agree is false, therefore we should not trust him on Y". Simply saying "He's looney about X" doesn't add much information and merely pits your authority against his.

I agree with your summary of computer models, and your basic judgement of climate scientists, but fear that many of the influential climate science papers don't adhere to this standard. Frequently the technique is to tweak the parameters of a number of models until each creates "realistic" results, generate a small number (1-3) of simulations with each model, and then create an unweighted average of this ensemble so that the high and low estimates cancel. The meaning of this is much harder to interpret than the case where all the models predict a similar outcome with identical inputs.

http://www.ipcc.ch/ipccreports/tar/wg1/347.htm#tab91

----

CRICHTON, (John) Michael. American. Born in Chicago, Illinois, October 23, 1942. Died in Los Angeles, November 4, 2008. Educated at Harvard University, Cambridge, Massachusetts, A.B. (summa cum laude) 1964 (Phi Beta Kappa). Henry Russell Shaw Travelling Fellow, 1964-65. Visiting Lecturer in Anthropology at Cambridge University, England, 1965. Graduated Harvard Medical School, M.D. 1969; post-doctoral fellow at the Salk Institute for Biological Sciences, La Jolla, California 1969-1970. Visiting Writer, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 1988.

http://www.michaelcrichton.net/aboutmichaelcrichton-biograph...
Does anyone else get the "Access Restricted: you're botnet infected" page?

Running virus scan... sigh
Snapguide Scores The First Mobile Integration With Pinterest
I work 7 days a week very consistently at my startup, but I don't put in many hours in a given day. I'm too embarrassed to say exactly how many hours. I take breaks when I feel tired or frustrated, and if a problem comes up in the afternoon that I don't know how to solve, I quit for the day. Usually I will be able to solve it in the morning.

I worry sometimes about whether I am working hard enough, so recently I started doing some time tracking to see where I am spending my time. I looked around for software and decided on the Web application toggl.com. All you do is write down what you are doing, and the software logs the time. Really though you could do the same thing with a spreadsheet or a piece of paper.

It's harder than it sounds to be honest about what you are doing, and why you are doing it. I have spent a bunch of time on Hacker News this morning reading posts and writing this. Is that productive, or is it just infotainment? It's hard to say. I wonder if the author of that article counted the time spend writing the post and responding to people as a part of work hours. Why or why not?

I haven't been doing time tracking very long, but I have found that sometimes there is this period of time at the beginning of doing something where I haven't really gotten into the task yet, and I feel like "Oh man I'm working! This is a drag." That feeling peaks maybe after 20 minutes or so. I find that if I'm able to keep working, I start feeling better, and then after an hour or so I feel fine, like "This is what I'm doing. It's comfortable. I could do more."

So I think that maybe sometimes I quit too early, and I could actually be doing more without feeling stressed or overwhelmed. But I think there are limits to how much you can push, and you have to be really gentle with yourself. Because if you force yourself too much, you get burned out and then it becomes very difficult to even get started on work. You can go days or weeks at a time getting almost nothing done.

I'm also studying a foreign language at the moment, and I think it is really important to study every day. Over on the language forum I visit, lots of people talk about how many flash card reps they do, and it's almost always more than what I do. What I do seems insignificant, both in terms of reviews and new cards per day. I feel it is another example of how I don't work hard enough, and I don't have enough discipline.

But I think the only real way to fail at foreign language study is to quit, so I hope that keeping my standards for serious study low and spending more time on fun stuff like reading comics and watching TV shows in the language, I will be able to stick with it. I haven't missed a day in over 6 months, but it's going to take years to get to fluency. It's a long process.

I hope working at a startup is similar. I hope it's just a matter of making progress every day, and not giving up. I hope it's not a competition over who can work the most hours. If it is, I'm afraid I will probably lose.
LinkedIn Will Eventually Buy Quora
Startups - Get To Know Your Users
I would add to the list: http://thelastpsychiatrist.com/2011/02/the_decline_effect_is...

The main point: Psychology is not "science" in the same way F=ma is science. It's a model.

The secondary point:

When the article then goes on to describe the breakdown of this
sweeping generalization in studies after 1994 (on other species),
it attributes that to the Decline Effect. It's not. When you
look at the studies together, what you should have inferred is
"symmetry is an associated factor in mate selection by females
in only some species and not others and more research is need to
explain why." Instead, the article attributes its inability to
summarize the variety and complexity of nature in a 140 character
Twitter message to an underlying failure in the 500-year-old
guiding principle of science."
Wouldn't asking friends to upvote your HN submissions count as gaming the system?

I'm sure people do this regardless, but to just admit so on your blog seems a bit careless.
That's some dedication to Bobby Tables just one person. ;)
Menjadi Teknisi Komputer Yang Terampil 
Tema blog HTC kali ini adalah Menjadi Teknisi Komputer Yang Terampil ...? Apakah kalian ingin Seperti saya seseorang yang tidak pandai namun bisa Menjadi Teknisi Komputer Yang Terampil.
Timothy Ferris on the Voyager probes' "Golden Record"
Call Spain Knowing How | Shortcode International
Unfortunately, many banking web sites require short passwords with no special characters. Likely, due to legacy databases and storage. I've even seen 6 character max restrictions. Or worse, the 4-digit pin ones (10,000 combinations yikes, I sure hope they have a limit and lockout for incorrect guesses).
McDonald's wouldn't fire you for giving your friends burgers from your backyard grill, even if they all got food poisoning afterwards; while this business would fire you for doing anything resembling financial advice in your own time, even if nothing bad came of it to anyone.

It's the controlling attitude towards off-duty behaviour that strikes me as particularly insidious.
Unfortunately it can't be helped, adhering strictly to the standards loses market share. Yesterday Internet Explorer, today webkit.
Government tries to shut down paleo diet blogger
I actually have some ideas, I'll drop you an email.
That's pretty.
逆龙道中文网
Intelligence is overrated....What you really need to succeed
10 ways to sell more mobile apps - with Pretzil co-founder Kyle McInnes
I thought it was "Puncture", starring Chris Evans.
Culture in Melbourne City Wiki
Culture in Melbourne City Wiki
The haystack of unqualified applicants (people lacking the skills needed for the job, people who can't even program, people who aren't a good cultural fit, people who don't take pride in their work, etc). You'd be surprised at the crazy shit that comes in via the jobs@mycompany address, or the sheer amount of obviously poorly matched resumes that come in via recruiting companies. It's enough to make you tear your hair out in frustration, and that's just at the initial resume scan phase! The general scarcity of engineers only exacerbates the problem by lowering the needle ratio.

It's hard to grok how difficult and complex hiring good people is until you find yourself on the hiring side of the equation. The leaked Valve manual does offer some insight, but even that's barely scratching the surface.
I'm a fan of the white-hole theory (big bang is opposite side of a super massive black hole in another universe)
Ask HN: Would you be interested in a book on hacking face-to-face conversations?
"Real Programmers Don't Use PASCAL"
I use it rarely in Python, although it's sometimes useful. I use it more often in other languages to replicate Python's enumerate, since zip(range(len(seq)),seq) is basically enumerate(seq) (although with this implementation it's not a generator).
check out this guy who tried to drive his car into the Paris metro.... Apparently there was a sign that said"parking".

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-17829438

Some compare cars to guns. This is in terms of danger to life.

some research suggests car accidents should be treated like an illness or disease.
Youtube-dl tool for downloading youtube videos in linux
"HTML5 Apps Will Suck Until Your Mobile Browsers Improve”
Because they're not using a crawler, that's why. Or, at least, that's my sense of things.
One man's approach to beating the prisoner's dilemma (game show video)
> steal
While I understood the sentiment of distrust that many put in giving more information to Google that they can _use_ to show targeted advertisements, usage of the verb _steal_ makes me angry.

What I am not sure about is whether I am being irrational because I am biased towards Google (while also using, loving and respecting Dropbox) or everyone else here seems to have the same sentiment because (1) Dropbox is YC backed (2) It is a little-guy vs big-mafia war.
Theory or "idea"?
Creative! What type of opportunities are you looking for?
I wouldn't call it inappropriate.

It would be bad if I was creating fake accounts or something. If I'm trying to launch, I don't think reminding friends to share and talk about it online is improper. These are obviously the technical bunch of my friends and colleagues, and they won't be voting on something if they think it sucks.

It's more about the timing, getting activity all at the same moment to rise above the noise.
Education in Melbourne City Wiki
Education in Melbourne City Wiki
Don't add printf, add unit tests!
Music-mixing technology could assist with music production
The Cloud is Scary
Jimmy Wales Says Irrelevance, Not Piracy, Will Doom Hollywood
More the other way around.

Widespread over-the-counter antibiotics, over prescription and agricultural use are the reason there are so many resistant organisms. Healthy people with the organisms going into hospitals full of sick people is the reason they get there.

Poor hospital cleaning, high occupancy rates and especially people using keyboards is the reason they are huge.
On the other hand, here's another quote from the article:

"Without a GPO contract, it doesn’t matter how good your product is. Even if I could wave this wand over your body and cure you from cancer, chances are I couldn’t sell it to hospitals"

The core problem is, big manufacturers offer discounts (or bigger kickbacks) for bundling. A niche product is unlikely to succeed, even if it's obviously better. A product that has pros and cons is not going to have a chance.

Also, I'd imagine that a detached needle could be a greater legal liability than an infection. It's easy to prove that a needle detached in a patients arm. It's a lot harder to prove that an infection was caused by a needle without safeguards. "First, do absolutely no harm for which you can be sued for" is not a great creed, but it's one some hospitals will follow.

If you're a supplier, perhaps you're best shot is to license to a big manufacturer, to break in, even if you're capable of producing and marketing your product; because you'll be locked out of the supply stream if you go it alone. That's a pretty sad state of affairs.
You make an excellent point, in many jobs consistency is valued far above outstanding results and should be. If that is not for you, do not work there.

But, having worked in a couple of call centers, I feel obliged to point out not all of them are that way. I have been in call centers for major products where there were no scripts, the representatives (or "agents") were expected to think and help solve problems for the customers as well as provide feedback to other departments making the products. But I will agree those are a minority and in some call centers they are separated out into "level 2" or something equivalent.
Name one regulated market in the us that have fair competition.

Btw. It's not only in the us. Regulation today is the most secure form of monopoly
Web Ads Need to Get More Accurate
Why I can't return to Tennessee
Before I found a python user group in Minneapolis, I had only heard about the Ruby user group. So, I installed ruby, made sure I could run

>> puts "Hello world"

and then went to the Ruby meetup. It was a good call. At the time I really just needed someone to talk shop with and no one there cared that I was mainly a Python dev. It's not like we talked about block scoping and multi-lined lambdas.

One huge benefit of going to the Ruby meetup was that I learned of a bunch of other meetups in the area. Smaller ones that didn't have a web presence yet. There may be a Python community in Jacksonville that some Ruby users might know about.
The sheer size of the core memory, e.g. measured in millimeters, will prevent it from having access times in comparable orders of magnitude as silicon-based DRAMs, whose dimensions are measured in micrometers.
Building Clickatron (Metrics at Bitly)
This was obviously a difficult decision for Rails Machine. I put food on the table from an application we've hosted at Rails Machine for several years: they are simply a fantastic team to work with. I can't imagine using a different Rails hosting provider.
Is vendor prefixing really worse than UA sniffing Paul? Your employer is one of the worst offenders of the latter (not blaming you). Maps, for example, falls back to a very primitive version in Firefox Mobile despite it being perfectly capable of rendering the more advanced site.

My attitude is that if you don't want to test on anything other than Safari Mobile and Android Browser then fine, don't test, but let the site degrade gracefully or not on other browsers.
Perhaps so, but that does not mean that situation will last forever. Do you think the entire world will still be editing all of their documents in MS Word in 10 years time? 20 years? 50 years?

There are growing numbers of alternatives, from cloud based systems and from LibreOffice etc. Not to mention that the "word processor" itself as a category of product may become less appealing. Word Processing fit into a world where communication and documents were primarily pieces of paper sent by post and fax and this is the metaphor that it is built around. I think this is mostly still in place due to the stubbornness of the generation who are currently in charge at most companies/governments and grew up around this.

One project I will be working on in the near future is for a company who currently use Office. It will essentially be a modified Wiki that will allow them to share information & documents internally (converting existing .doc from outside sources into wiki entries will be one part of it, also automatically adding incoming emails to the wiki in some cases). It will also allow things like producing high quality PDFs for clients.

Once this is in place they will pretty much be able to uninstall their word-processors.
Show HN: Visualizing Artificial Intelligence with Raphael and CSS3
RabbitMQ Performance Measurements, part 2
Nope, a "fan death" joke:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fan_death
Great advice Matt, thank you!
He was employed in a heavily regulated sector. He knew the rules. He chose to break those rules. He suffered the consequences for breaking those rules.

The financial industry probably needs tight regulation; some parts of it are pretty sleazy.
There's a movie based on this guy's struggle, but it's pretty terrible.
Patio is a successful "small tech consultant", and enjoys blogging and sales and marketing. Some people prefer to lean more heavily/exclusively to technology and math, and they are needed and well rewarded to work on large technical systems. (My team is hiring. )
Google Drive, And Why Dropbox Really Is In Trouble
Funniest thing I've read all day
Ah, but this is:

from itertools import izip
izip(xrange(len(seq)), seq)
Great, could you point me somewhere to learn more about the topic?
Didn't know eSATA externals were so rare...
Are Your Employees Slackers (Infographic)
Do you know of good resource for how to compute minimax polynomials that approximate transcendental functions? My Google foo appears to be failing me.
Eh, depends on your definition of "forthcoming". Valve stated last month that they won't have a console out in the near future, but this month Gabe Newell clarified that they want to make one, but haven't gotten past the planning stages yet, and they posted a job listing for an engineer to create "platform hardware". (Admittedly that could refer to something like a gaming keyboard specialized for Half-Life 3 or something, but it's definitely a move in the direction of the hypothetical "Steambox".)
The stats page pyalot2 links to is his, at http://webglstats.com/ which is great. I'm really looking forward to pointerlock and geometry instancing, which should allow for a lot more complex scenes.

No pointerlock has been the bane of my game project, but I still have a long way to go, so I'm sure it will be out long before my game is completed :)
A company needs to protect itself from things that could potentially be tied back to it, even indirectly. This is especially true for employees that are presented as representing the company even some of the time.

I work as a SQL Server DBA and occassionally publish articles about technical aspects of SQL. But anything that rises above the level of a comment like this one gets vetted by the company before I publish it. I am quite comfortable with this because I agreed to it ahead of time and I understand why the company wants the right to review.
Having 1 VC invest is a problem as the company is dependent on them to invest in the next round or face signalling problems. The VC may use that to force worse terms. Having 9 VCs is less of a problem. Or at least if all 9 VCs that have followed your company since seed round refuse to invest in the next round, you probably have more serious problems to worry about than the signalling issues.
The traveling robot problem
The other negative signal is all their talk of doing "massive" things. Did fb ever talk this way? Not to my knowledge ... they just DID things. Lot's of hype / cockiness on this one.
"I’m The Guy Who Ranked You For Snuggie Dog Bed"
"Even though Steam invites its own problems (it's ultimately a form of DRM, a closed platform, and a closed-source application)"

It's the least restrictive DRM I've ever encountered--in fact, I've never encountered it and actually forgot it was even there. And I don't care if it's closed source. So to me, those two things aren't even problems at all.
Using Cohort Analysis to Measure Customer Loyalty.
No, the distribution bit is key and critical.

"OK, so we're going to do a Linux version. How are we going to get it into the hands of our customers? What, we need to set up a download infrastructure for that? No, that's way too much overhead for a Linux version. What, we're supposed to partner with a small niche digital distribution platform we've never heard about? No, not worth it, either. Wait, we can just upload the Linux version to Steam, where we already upload our Windows and Mac versions? Sure, why not."

As for distributing binary blobs: You're overstating the issue, IMHO. ABIs in Linux userland are fairly stable these days.
Because that's defamation.
AMA - I get hired to remove mongo from codebases
I've been using 1Password for the past few months.

It's been incredibly useful. All my passwords are exponentially more secure and synced across my devices.

Can't recommend it enough.
reminds me of the 400 dollars the hospital charged me the other day for part of a splint (the wrapping cloth) which was probably manufactured in China for $.50
Nice work on this, very creative.
What I get from this is the guy was fired because he felt he was so special that the rules didn't apply to him. He knew the rules going in, he repeated them several times, and for him to whine about being held to those rules is the indicator of his huge ego. It seems he was going to describe this huge bureaucracy of compliance rules he had to constantly go through in his day-to-day yet the only thing he seemed to do wrong was he gave advice which he was specifically forbidden to do. Add to this the fact he knew the legal ramifications of him giving advice and yet he did it anyway. His big ego doesn't let him understand it wasn't just his job on the line if he gave bad advice, everybody sitting around him were at risk as well.

Those compliance rules may suck but they are there for one purpose, to protect the company. As he said, if he gives bad advice then the company can suffer legally. He was not hired to give advice, he was hired to answer questions with answers already printed out for him. Sounds like he really wants a job advising people on investments, why is he getting a job at a call center that is not allowed to give advice?

To stand out is to be fired? If your definition of standing out is to break rules you are clearly aware of that can have serious legal consequences for the company; then yes, your ass will be fired.

Also, if you are fired for breaking compliance rules then you are not the bottomless pit of compliance knowledge you think you are.
I have heard lots of speak around this sort of user monitoring recently. Sure, sounds great but how important is it? Is it a priority for a startup?

Sure it may help in converting some new customers. May help existing customers. But is this where you want to spend your time and effort?
Those terms may be standard for "countless websites" but Google has lost all credibility IMO as of recently for things like this, which is why people are freaking out about this. Otherwise people would give Google the benefit of the doubt.

We don't trust Google anymore... they are evil. THAT'S what this furor is all about.
I personally feel this is a symptom of underemployment.
Computer Science Fiction
My bank upgraded from a 4-digit pin code authentication to a 6-letter ([a-zA-Z0-9]{4,6}) system. About legacy databases ...

Naturally, I complained and they told me it wasn't that big of a deal, because the actual transactions were protected by TAN generators. I had no answer to that.