skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
You've hit the nail on the head -- our CO2 output has been going up all the while, which suggests that (dare I say it?) the increase in temperature isn't caused by man. CO2 output didn't decrease in the 50s, either, when we had our last decade-long period of cooling.
The Benefits of a Network - Gina Bianchi
I think that the only sane way is to "support Unix". Avoid conditional compiling and features that are only in one platform and use standard libraries. Of course this is the most difficult approach and usually impossible to make.
Can someone explain what a CSS framework is, and why I might want to use one?
I don't think DHH is being a jerk. He's just got an opinion, and I guess some of these folks are a little too sensitive.

He built Rails for him - and it has taken on a life of its own. And that's awesome.

I think the Merb guys are brilliant - I was really impressed by them at the MerbCamp in SD this past September. I'm excited about Rails 3.
Amateur crimefighters are surging in the US
The last time I heard about a study like that (maybe the same one), they explicitly stated that $1 had the same purchasing power in both circumstances.
I don't see any hoodwinking going on here. I do see a vapid piece about the same press that generally fails on fact-checking and not being a PR mouthpiece doing what they normally do.
If anyone is interested in doing a small project for us using Scrapy (and lxml and whatever else), please drop me an e-mail.
What’s Better for the Poor, Cell Phones or Laptops?
Global warming is a terrible term for what's going on in the world.

Heck, carbon dioxide isn't even the real culprit for green house gases: it's methane. Methane is a much more potent green house gas, yet we're hearing more about carbon dioxide. There are more cows than there have ever been, because we're eating more of them because there are more of us to eat them.

We're going to have the coldest winters and the hottest summers we've had for quite a long time. Yes, we'll have some weird weather mid-season (like now, in northeastern USA its 56 degrees F, 13ish degrees C), but that doesn't change the fact that people are introducing stuff into the atmosphere that shouldn't be there.

Global Extreming would probably be a better term for what's going on.
wget is synchronous while Twisted is an asynchronous networking engine. This means that you don't need to wait for a request to finish before making another one (or making pancakes, or doing whatever you want).

I essentially wrote a parallelized version of scrapy which has the ability to make hundreds of requests per second, depending on available CPUs. You could never achieve that level of performance using wget.
Ask YC: NewsCred looking for interns. Any tips where to find em?
Hi all - we're looking for one or two interns. Ideally, people in college who want to work in a startup part time and earn a little cash.

How have other startups on HN gone about finding good interns? University job boards? Word of mouth?

Any suggestions on the experience? We want to make it as fulfilling (and fun) for both sides as possible, so always looking to see what worked for other people. Thanks!
I kind of agree. It sort of highlights the conflict between the vapidity of the online press/blogosphere and the vapidity of the offline/traditional press. I just posted it because it said what I thought was obvious about yesterday's feel-good Amazon story.
What To Do Per Individual
Onellama doesn't stack up well against it's competitors whatsoever. Here's why:

ONELLAMA vs DEEZER.COM
To compare, deezer.com allows you to both make pandora style radios, discover new music, & make your own free to play playlists and it's all easy to do. Onellama only gives you the option of listening to 30 second snippits or paying for the rhapsody player to listen to your music + their new radio service. So why would you choose Onellama when there are better services?

THEIR MUSIC SEARCH FEATURE
When searching for music, it brings up only a few songs by the artist you're looking for and presents with other related options. This is sometimes good for discovering new music, but often you just want more songs from the artist you searched for and they don't let you easily do that. Also, the related music if often overly mainstream music - not cool if you like indy stuff.

OVERALL INTERFACE
Onellama has a penchat for developing confusing interfaces. Sure, they're somewhat neat as far as creative flash design, but they come together to make a pretty confusing experience. It's really hard to find what you actually want. For instance, it's great that they just launched their radio - but where did the music search feature go? Also, within their music search feature - it brings up some crazy interface for searching for related music - but I can only play 30 second of music each?

RADIO
The radio is not that bad. Despite the radio search feature being a little confusing to a new user (who will type a band they like and expect to hear that band - not some other music) it's probably one of the best online tools now for searching for radio stations that play what you like.

So overall Onellama, you have potential, but the way it's coming together needs some serious improvement to stack up against competitors like deezer.com. Here's what I recommend.

1. SIMPLIFY YOUR INTERFACE!!
- One your homepage, make one button for Radio, one for music search, and one for personal playlists. Right now you're hiding search functionality & putting way too many options for your radio on your direct homepage.

2. Make it free to play music
Downloading Rhapsody sucks and turns people off. Make it free to play on your website.

Starting with those two things will help the quality of your website a lot. But right now, it's substandard compared to your competitors.
That guy build a chemistry lab in his garage.

I guess it's more a thing of safety regulations than being able to create explosives or some drug. What if one of his experiments fails, and some deadly chemical substance or gas escapes? All the labs normally have emergency plans for such cases such that nobody get's harmed. He probably didn't.
That's exactly what I was thinking... Since it's all GET, a properly implemented RSS/Atom feed could go a long way towards a newspaper API, and might even be a better solution in some ways - no extra code to develop/maintain, no API key requirement, little need for documentation etc.
Many people think CO2 is actually a trailing indicator, not a leading indicator. In other words, when things get warmer, more CO2 is generated, not the other way around.

CO2 only absorbs energy in a certain spectrum. After that spectral "fingerprint" is removed, the remaining energy could care less how much C02 is present. I believe the math works out so that after ten meters, additional CO2 does little damage.

Here's an article I just googled. The author writes in a flame-bait-like manner, but he does make the CO2 absorbption case very well.

EDIT: Link -> http://nov55.com/ntyg.html
Ask HN: What type of Biz Credit Card do you have?
I am looking to get a business credit card. What offers the most cash back and best deals/points? What should I look for in a business credit card?
That's not what he is being accused of though.
I used Craigslist. In my experience part time student programmers are a waste of time. But you never know you could get lucky.
You forgot the link?
There are no mom and pop oil rigs in Norway (2002)
Nice. Good work on styling the form elements, particularly.
Whether DHH is a jackass is a matter of opinion in itself, of course. But he certainly seems to go out of his way to piss people off. Usually that's a sign of unresolved childhood issues. (Not to go all pop-psych on you guys, but it's kind of obvious to me that he and his father don't get along and that his dad is the controlling type. The book kind of writes itself.)

DHH has one (poorly stated, inflammatory) statement I do agree with at core: if you like Rails and it works for you, great. You don't have to like the guy to use the software.

But maybe the Merb guys, who have a reputation for being logical, accomodating, and nice, will inject some much-needed civility into the Rails core group.
I don't care about someone's unresolved childhoold issues, as long as he submits good work.
I bought an 08 Nissan 350z Touring ed. and I LOVE IT! For winter and getting groceries I drive an old beater, 1994 Toyota Tercel. If I didn't have the Tercel, I'd probably rent a car or something if I needed to pick up friends, or buy furnature.

As for snow driving I find the 3 most important elements are as follows.

-Driving ability
-Balance/Center of gravity of the vehicle
-Tires

I had a Nissan NX2000 that did wonderful in the snow. Thats 200hp in the snow. I never got stuck or slid off the road. When I sold the NX, I took the wheels (and tires) off of it, and put them onto the Toyota Tercel and the thing does HORRIBLE in the snow. I believe this is because it is not as well balanced as a Nissan NX (sports car).
That's a paradox. At that point surely the survey becomes garbage in, garbage out.
Hmm, interesting. Why was it a waste of time?

We're have a bunch of different roles we could fulfill - techie, but also more general community manager/sales/"help everyone on the team with everything" type role.

Looking back at my college days, I'd much rather do this than some of the crap jobs I used to have.
It's hardly a paradox. It describes the following two situations:

a) I live a postdoc lifestyle, everyone else lives a grad student lifestyle.

b) I live a full professor lifestyle, everyone else lives an investment banker lifestyle.

World b just has more goods in it than world a. That's not a paradox; Earth 2008 has far more goods in it than Earth 1908.
A CSS framework are a collection of files that provide defaults for you to customize or build upon when your writing your stylesheets. Whether its typography or page layout widths or grids/columns, the main point of a framework is to cut down on development time by providing you a base that you can build upon and customize.

I can't say for sure why you may want to use one, that really depends on the project at hand. One argument can be that you can just run with it without having to define and test your own styles. Also, a framework can eliminate a lot of cross browser issues that may arise and give you consistency across a wide range of browsers.
Right now I'm using American Express. I was using Visa/Mastercard for quite some time, but lately and after reviewing what it offers, American Express has been too good to pass up. What I found to be of maximum value, was its deals for shopping at selected vendors and you get three times the point for every dollar.

On a side note, like most of us, if I use a number a lot, I tend to remember it, and that goes for credit card numbers... comes in real handy when you don't have the card on your person. But switching to AE was ironic because it's not a typical 16-digit number, in fact, it's not even sixteen digits, but fifteen - but in an odd sequence(4-6-5), which I found to be interesting since every credit card I've ever used(even debit cards) have been 16 digits in groups of four numbers. :)
"For every Mark Cuban there are 1,000 entrepreneurs who succeed without working 90 hours a week."

Is there are tangible evidence for this? I agree with the idea of diminishing returns, but also think that one needs to put in more than 40 hours a week. But so far, the arguments are anecdotal.
That sort of depends, but for the most part CSS frameworks can provide:

- Sensible defaults for sizing and other attributes that tend to differ across browsers, including typography and such (see Y! CSS Reset)

- Helper classes for forms, info boxes, so on (see Blueprint's forms.css)

- Grid-based layouts to cut down on dev time (see Y! Grids)

Basically, they attempt to cut down on CSS development time by making things equivalent across browsers as well as providing many common styles you would have made anyway. Some also provide various grid-based layouts and others go beyond these things to provide even more, effectively creating something that truly is a framework (I prefer to think of most of them as CSS libraries).
I Love Politics
Make sure your home environment is one that you want to spend time in. If you are "avoiding home", you are at work for the wrong reason.
I didn't bother with the article, but I'm curious: what temperature circumstances would give you doubts about what's going on? (Not "cause you to disbelieve in 'Global Extreming'" or anything; just make you uncertain that it's well understood).
we all should be arrested because we are one of the ingredient in making hydrogen bomb
I wish I could upvote this a hundred times. It's been a couple of years since I've consulted, but almost every piece of advice in this article is good.

I take some issue with his finance section, but it looks like he's a set up as a Sole Proprietorship (it's a bad idea if you're consulting by the way; set up an LLC or a Corporation, and spend a few bucks on a CPA). It's risky to run all your personal accounts in line with your business accounts; I think most people here understand why (in case you don't, this is where "piercing the corporate veil" occurs).

Otherwise, there are tons of great pointers in here, including more than a few that I wished I had thought about when I was consulting.

If you're thinking about consulting I would seriously print this out and read it multiple times; I know it would have saved me some heartache when I was getting things figured out.
I found it wasn't really the time that was a problem, it was attention. Even when I was at parties or with my families, I wasn't really mentally there, since there was always this cool algorithm or new approach that I was turning over in my head and wanted to try out. That tended to make parties not all that much fun for me, and me not all that much fun for the party. So even though I was only working 5-6 hours/day of actual coding, the mental effort spent thinking things through was all-consuming. It was depressing enough that I'm going back into the corporate world again - I'm not much of a work/life balance guy by nature, but I'd like more work/life balance than I had as a founder.

FWIW, none of the startup founders I know have much in the way of work/life balance, at least for the first 5 years or so of the company's life. It was not uncommon for them to work 12 hour days, 7 days a week, and take their first vacation when the company was about 4 years old. This doesn't mean it was a daily grind - just that their life became the company, and that's what they wanted to be working on even when they weren't officially at work.

Edit: I should make a distinction here between startups (organizations that are intended to grow really fast) and small businesses. I know several small business owners with good work/life balance: you kinda need it, since a small business is a long haul that'll consume you if you don't have some other sort of life. I don't know any startup founders with a life, during the startup phase.

Know what sort of business you want and be honest up-front with family, friends, investors, employees, and yourself. You aren't going to get rich in 4 years with a small business. But you can make a good living for yourself, sacrificing less of your personal life, with significantly less risk. If you're going to shoot for the moon, figure out what it would take to prove that you're aiming right, and bail out before you sacrifice too much if you're not.
Actually, Amazon is kind of sharding their database: They encapsulate every kind of data into a program that manages it:

>What I mean by that is that within Amazon, all small pieces of business functionality are run as a separate service. For example, this availability of a particular item is a service that is a piece of software running somewhere that encapsulates data, that manages that data.

(see http://queue.acm.org/detail.cfm?id=1388773)
This is the model that brought fame and fortune to Bungie.

"The team focused on the Macintosh platform, not Windows-based personal computers, because the Mac market was more open and Jones had been raised on the platform."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bungie#Founding

They had a clear and open field making quality games exclusively for the Mac platform, and this brought them a devoted following and a steady flow of profits. They later branched out into Windows, and of course Microsoft bought them out so they would focus predominantly on the XBox.

So, while ignoring Windows indefinitely may not be a great strategy, ignoring it at first can be.
DHH is definitely not being a jerk. The quote the author supplies for DHH's "being a dick in the past" is “I’m not in this world to create Rails for you. I’m in this world to create Rails for me and if you happen to like that version of Rails that I’m creating for me, than you are going to have a great time.”

There's nothing wrong with building your project, for you. David isn't being paid to do Rails by anyone other than 37signals. As we recently touched upon with Capistrano's "800lb gorilla, but it's not _my_ gorilla", there's nothing that makes you a dick for not developing features you don't need.

In fact, I don't ever really think I've actuality seen DHH be much of a dick, to anyone. Linus Torvalds, now he's a dick! Maybe DHH needs to man up and talk some shit about GNOME and C++ more often?
I've seen this and I think you might get ideas: http://www.btgains.com/credit/card/Regular/Promo_Balance_Tra...
Why do you think Al Gore started using the term "climate change"?
Yahoo Goes Offline | TechJaws
AMEX is one of the best cards for floating monthly expenses. Customer service is top notch, and you often get an extra year warranty on anything you buy. If you're irresponsible, prepared to get slaughtered by high interest rates that pay for these services... That said, I would not use an AMEX to bootstrap a company. You can find a better interest rate through VISA/Mastercard.

I currently use an AMEX Blue (cash back) for my personal stuff, balance is paid IN FULL every month. And we have a business checking account for the iPhone company. $5/month through Wells Fargo.

While I keep a few accounts at Wells Fargo, I bank through ING Direct. Love everything about ING, and they have great leadership. One complaint: for an online bank their web interface is freaking terrible.
Ask HN: Is our universe constantly expanding or constantly shrinking?
Just read the book Zero, does their final conclusion still hold up? They say our universe is gradually expanding, which will inevitably leave to a freeze of everything? Did anyone else read this? What did you think?
DHH, the 37signals and the Rails community at large has aspirations of actually being a community. DHH played an active role in developing the community.

Once you do that, and engage people in helping with a community project, it's not his anymore. It's a community project.

That is the fundamental difference between "building your project, for you." If DHH had just put up a repo and said, "sure you can pull from this if you want, have fun!" that's different.

Once you start holding classes and publishing books, and advocating for your framework, one's responsibility to one's users changes.

So, IMO, that is a massive dick move. Even if DHH is an extraordinarily nice guy in person. That is a move that says "i honestly don't care about the community i have helped to build, unless they accept everything i do."

Second, i think that

------------------------

Linus is a huge cock. Although on his count, i've never seen him wish anyone ill will, regardless of how many times he tells people that they're stupid and to STFU. He's mean, but he's not malevolent. Not that i think i'd ever like to have a conversation with the man :P
Amex business. As an anecdote, I heard Jeff Barr say that Smugmug was charging all of their monthly Amazon S3 expenses on Amex Business Platinum (generating multiple first-class air tickets)
excellent article, especially in the current economic situation where everyone could use a consulting gig to supplement their income
I just make sure that when my wife has time off, that I take time off to spend time with her. I close the computer and don't try to multi-task. Makes work and life more productive.
The author is completely wrong about "client v. customer". Your "customers" should be "clients", because it instills confidence. The difference is the country doctor versus the highly payed surgeon. A country doctor pokes around and asks "where does it hurt". The highly payed surgeon goes in to the situation and says, OK, this is your problem, I have performed this procedure 100 times, this is what we need to do. So if your client's pain is not having a good website, you go in there and say, OK, this is what we need to do, wether that be the look and feel, optimizing it for search, adding video, whatever. Don't say "what do you want me to do", say, "this is my recommendation based on my knowledge of the problem you are having and my experience in that problem's solution".

The principle underlying this, is you want your revenue curve to be linear as you add more customers, but you want your cost curve to be logarithmic, that is, you want to do LESS work for the next customer than you did for your last customer, and still get the same payment. What I mean by less work, is basically provide the same solution for the same problem, but since you have done it before, it is easier the next time. Have a basic approach for the problems your clients have, so, for example, if they need their website optimized for search, have a basic strategy for doing this, and apply that for each new customer with this same problem.

Kissing the customer's behind and re-inventing the wheel for each new customer doesn't do anybody any good. It reduces the consultant's profit by requiring more time, and it reduces the efficiency with which the customer gets their solution, because the consultant is being a short-order cook with them and re-inventing solutions for every new problem, which takes a lot longer.

So if you want to slave away re-doing the same thing over and over again for each new customer, by all means, treat the client as a "customer", but if you want to provide timely solutions for the client, and not have to re-invent the wheel all of the time, then take the "surgeon" based approach and not the "country doctor" based approach.

The client pays you to know the solution to their problem. So don't ask them what solution would they like, rather, tell them the recommended solution that you know works. Kind of like you don't want your doctor asking you which treatment for your brain tumor you most prefer. Rather, you want your doctor telling you which treatment for your brain tumor is going to the most effective, based on how that treatment has worked for others. Sure be nice and respectful to the client, but inspire confidence in having a good grasp on what will work for them and what will not.