skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
How would you feel about the argument that, while I can't prove god exists, you should give %30 of your income to the church anyway. IF there is no god, you've still helped the world by funding the spread of his word. And if there is a god, you've saved your soul?

Ok, wait, that's not a correct analogy. It would be correct if I was advocating that men with guns go around and force you to give up %30 of your income to the church and saying that forcing you to do it was justified because its like insurance, right?

If the policies that the IPCC etc. are advocating are put into place, one estimate I've seen is that 100 million people will be killed as a direct result in the next 20-50 years due to increased starvation worldwide. (and that this is a "conservative" number where it likely would be 1 billion.)

"cutting fossil fuel subsidies" is dishonest, because fossil fuels are not subsidized, they are highly taxed, and increasing those taxes will hurt poor people the most by driving up food costs, increasing starvation... remember the IPCC et. al want to do this globally.

But there might be a god, right? So its worth it that they should die, right? (Just putting your argument in a different context so you can see the shape of it. I don't think you really want people to die, you probably think you're advocating for the less death alternative... but since your position is not grounded in science, you're ending up doing what the USSR did. They thought they were making a better society (or claimed they were) but they rejected science (specifically economics) and advocated policies that caused starvation.)
Am I the only one who can't read this graph? It looks like it's rotated 90 degrees and there's no time axis so I don't see what this is representing. I don't understand what the legend for the Y axis means.
In the comments for the "python for iOS" link yesterday I saw BB lets you write native python. Sounds kind of fun and easy to get started. I might give this a go (although buying a BB might set me back more than I would like).
cogs bad...
Here's a suggestion for your value proposition:
Collaborative notetaking made simple.

I actually started with a more complicated sentence [Real-time collaborative editing made simple] but then I saw Helen's comment below your blog post and think she has a more concise description.

I suggest you follow this up with a way (such as a story) of how a customer uses your product. This is where you can use the phrases: notetaking, realtime, and capturing ideas.

I understand why you're trying to steer people towards "notes" and "notebooks". You might not like the fact that people are going to assume your competition is [strike]Google[/strike] Apache Wave or Wikipedia (ok - I mean wiki software) or Evernote, but you need to come up with good answers to those questions and this is where you can focus on important features that you have. It doesn't matter who you think your competition is - it matters what your customers think your competition is. Keep in mind that people are familiar with Wikipedia, and understand the idea of editing a wiki. Use this to your advantage. You need to paint the picture of how this affects them by making it real to them i.e. zero in on their pain point - they may not even know that they have it.

Hope this helps
For further amusing reading, look at https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=91661.20

User pirateat40 is running a BTC investment scheme with super-high returns (BS&T: Bitcoin Savings & Trust, a name suggested by investors). So high, that the community is split between the believers who can't resist the ROI and the non-believers who are convinced that Pirate is running a Ponzi scheme.

But that's not the fun part. The fun part is that pirateat40 and another member have agreed to participate in a sort of bet to settle the issue, which involves certain payouts under certain conditions. Mostly it's a bet that pirateat40/BS&T will default within a couple of months. Both have put 5000 BTC, ie. roughly 30k USD on the line.
That is quite neat. Asking for a review after a few usages is definitely a good idea.

Does anyone know some similar tool for reviews in the Android (ehem, Play) market?
This post is the moment HN has jumped the shark for me.

I don't understand the deep amount of insight I'll gain from a rant by a man doing his best to berate his "friend" over failing at certain things in life and talking about how he deserved to get kicked out in a manner that seems to be oddly reminiscent of mean girls?

This isn't just limited to this post, but it is scattered through every thread I read these days. They tend to talk about stuff like harems and 4 out of 10 replies are just mean... There's no other word for it. It's almost as if most of the commenters these days don't have any insightful things to say, so they've turned commenting into a game of pulling other people down and proving them wrong instead of trying to add to a conversation and reaching an understanding. (that always used to happen to some extent, but now it's there in almost every thread I read and it's disturbing)

I miss the real HN. :-(
For anyone who wants to let this slide, how would you have reacted[1] if the headline had started "Bush gives himself..." and it had been published 6 years ago?

Cause 6 years from now it might be someone you don't like in office, but the power will still be there.

Just as the PATRIOT ACT still is (expanded and extended by Obama), the TSA is (now with porno-scanners!), the domestic spying that happened under Bush is still going on (now retroactively "legal" and much more secret!), etc.

[1] In case my comment isn't obviously nonpartisan, I am equally offended at this in both situations, and believe that Bush wanted this power too.
Yes, there is a mix of taxis and probably the cars outnumber trucks (depends what you're doing, if it's long distance you wouldn't want to take a taxi because of cost, and I guess they have tuk tuks too). Neither are great because of the traffic and pollution caused by all the other road users. So Bangkok is a terrible example of a place which needs more taxis, as if you want to go any distance at rush hour they are terrible, and they cause all sorts of problems (pollution, noise, traffic) - it's one of the worst cities I've been to for traffic.

The public transport there is good (what there is of it), but the BTS and MRT are both expensive and therefore underused by anyone other than tourists and business people - most people don't use it and it's not as extensive as other cities. At least when I've been there the skytrain is remarkably quiet compared to the streets given how quick and easy it is. It's a shame they won't tax the cars more in town and use the money for improving public transport instead IMHO, and Bangkok is a terrible example of a place which needs less regulation - they need far more regulation on their taxis and traffic in general in order to manage it as at the moment it is bedlam at rush hour, partly because of all the taxis, motorbike taxis and trucks. It is a great example of the free-for-all which results from unregulated capitalism though.
While interesting, those benchmarks are only useful if you implement something remotely similar to the actual benchmarks. Just glazing over them, they seem to be "unfairly" targeted at low-level languages.

That said, they are fun to look at. I just had a wtf-moment looking at this:

http://shootout.alioth.debian.org/u32/performance.php?test=n...

~20 seconds vs ~20 minutes??
This is definitely the truth. Only recently in this country have people put the government on this kind of pedestal; it smells of nationalism. For years, we existed without any central government, and then for years with a relatively weak one. If the government were to go, it might not actually be the worst thing...
Slow/fast is a subjective metric, however in case of a language like Clojure you have to pay the price for convenience in the form of a performance tax when compared to Java or Scala.

This may be acceptable, depends on where you're coming from and what you're needs are. For instance if you are coming from Ruby or Python because you want much better performance and you think the JVM is awesome for that, then Clojure may not be a good choice. On the other hand if you want a modern Lisp that's also reasonably fast and that has access to the JVM, then Clojure is a really good choice.

Personally that's why I like Scala, but you know, the best language is whatever makes you happier and more productive.
Ouya: The $99, Android-Powered TV Game Console
If the bubble keeps repeating, it is still an opportunity for speculators who can do the timing right.

Personally I'm long on bitcoins, I do dollar-cost-averaging. Good way to do this is for example bitcoinbuilder.com, or 10-line python script will do the same thing.
This is a really good tool, I wouldn't be surprised to see some of the big analytics tool taking this idea. Signed up and looking forwards to getting any new reviews.

I'm also impressed that I can specific reviews per region, it might be nice to off an "all regions" option at some point.
It is a bit confusing, but here goes:

Ignore the green curve for a second. The gold curve is the 'bid' curve. It shows, at any given USD value (horizontal axis), how many Bitcoins people are willing to buy (vertical axis). So it says that, based on the orders currently in the market's books, at the $6.00/Bitcoin price point, you could sell up to 23,282 Bitcoins to get $549,907. This trade could happen immediately, because the matching buy orders already exist.

Similarly, the blue curve is the 'ask' curve. It shows how many Bitcoins people are currently willing to sell at any given price. So right now, at the $8.00/Bitcoin price point, you could buy 19,242 Bitcoins at a cost of $144,682.

Obviously, you'd be stupid to do either of those trades because they're far from the market rate. The action happens where those curves meet, currently at $7.10362-7.18242. This means that, currently, someone could buy at least one Bitcoin at $7.18242, or sell one at $7.10362. If someone were to put either a buy or sell order in between those numbers, then it would sit there until a match came in.

Which brings us to the green curve. This is the trade history. Like the other curves, the horizontal axis is the price, but here the vertical axis is time. It shows, trade by trade, what prices Bitcoins have actually traded at. Right now, the most recent is $7.10110; this is what people quote as the market price.
Ask HN: What is the problem you face everyday and can't find a solutions 4 yet?
As A User - not developer - What is the problem that you face everyday and you couldn't find a solutions for yet?<p>Example: Information Overload, there is a lot of news and feeds that you don't have time to read every day
16GB may be recommended, but I have built it before on a machine with 6GB. The initial build ran overnight, and subsequent builds seldom require a rebuild of the entire tree. I think it's certainly possible to manage a small change without 16GB available.
For the sake of argument, let's just say the Mann, et al, 2008 models. [1] They include an updated version of the hockey stick graph. [2]

But I'm not actually arguing that this specific model is correct or even that the IPCC's review of the state of the science is correct; I'm arguing that the article on the Register smells like a hit job.

Let's just look at the differences between the Register's graph and the original article's graph. [3]

First, they've bizarrely omitted the scale from the left-hand side of the graph. Maybe they were trying to save space, since the ticks are each one, but when your story is your graph you shouldn't skimp. The "Reconstruction" has been relabeled "Summer temperature". The "Trend" has been helpfully relabeled the "Cooling trend". The hundred year filtered reconstruction has been left completely unlabeled, despite its prominence in the graph, and as mentioned previously, the error bars have been left off entirely.

This looks like an interesting line of evidence, and it may even point towards what the authors of the original article claim (some orbital forcing of climate). But this is only a single line of evidence, so far: Scandinavian tree rings collected and studied by a group of Scandinavian researchers. I would like to see followup studies, by other researchers looking at tree rings in other parts of the world -- and non-tree ring based temperature records! -- before people start jumping up and down declaring the IPCC to be lying liars who lie. A single line of evidence can be wrong; a single line of evidence can mean something different from what you think it means. Only many corroborative lines of evidence can build a scientific consensus.

[1] http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2527990/?tool=pm...
[2] http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2527990/figure/F...
[3] http://www.nature.com/nclimate/journal/vaop/ncurrent/fig_tab...
I was simply using it on the iPad, but generally I can't imagine the iPad is great for mock up design (unless you do some really cool multi-touch things).

Generally, the use case for mock ups at least where I work (we use Balsamiq) is that everyone at least has a laptop.

I'd work on getting parity with Balsamiq, and focus on doing other things better. We use Balsamiq at work, and generally we have a lot of assets already in it (I know you are working on importing), but you'll need to unentrench their current user base.

Going on the freemium model will disrupt a lot of their income too. Right now balsamiq requires that you pay to use it even if you are not collaborating, but I'm sure you already knew that.
> What would be wrong with OCR plus a marker or two
> to indicate a scannable area

Simple:

* There is no OCR that is currently sufficiently reliable

* It has no error correction ability, so is not robust against damage

* There are currently no apps I know that can perform this function

So go to it, create an app that works on all known phones and is robust against up to 30% damage, and you may have something with which to penetrate the market.

> My biggest issue with QR codes is there is no indication
> of what they are before scanning.

My phone tells me what it is and asks permission to open it, and the context usually tells me what it should be. I don't bother with context-less QR codes. Beside, this is not a problem with the code, it's a problem with the brain-dead manner in which some people use them.

> That, and I dislike most forms of advertising.

I scan codes for shows, films, and shops. I know what I'm getting, and it's simple, clear, and my choice. I don't like advertising either, but sometimes I see notices of things I want to use, see, or get involved with.
Ask HN: Help me find a name
We have a contest in my company to find a name for a new product.
The product is a report module for a security feature in the cloud.

Can you help me and suggest such a name?
"If a user has Chrome installed, chances are they wish that it would be their default browser."

Horrible assumption. I am all for Apple stealing Android's intents. Assuming that because the user has an app installed they want it to be the default is wrong.

I think the better approach would be each app could ask the user once if they want Google Chrome to be their default browser and then store which one they should open. Sure it is more code but it will be a better user experience than forcing them to uninstall Google Chrome if they don't want it.
Because there are no other good cheap options - both issues are examples of the tragedy of the commons and without regulation/restrictions neither will go away. The trains are fast/expensive, and the buses/taxis are cheap/slow because of all the traffic.
Readability for iOS Version 1.1 Released
Microsoft's Ballmer Throws Down Gauntlet Against Apple
I am still searching for the additional insight I am supposed to gleam from your blog post, relative to the comment thread attached to the original.

Despite my best efforts, all I see is a deliberate attempt to be malicious for the purpose of increasing your HN cred.

You've asked 7 rhetorical questions. Assuming your post (and this is a generous assumption) was to ask these questions in earnest, here is my best attempt at answering them:

1. What are you solving?

>> We are trying to create a "better than email" environment for ideas and insights, shared within teams. Email is great at task management, but orders content by recency, which means that important thoughts (that aren't time-sensitive) get lost in archives.

2. What are the tools that are currently being used?

>> Email. Google Docs. And sometimes teams use the writeboard within their project management application.

3. Why are they so horrible?

>> I've explained email above. Google Docs doesn't give you attribution and ownership over your ideas. It's also very poor at allowing you to organize your docs. Finally, it's also incredibly hard to add to a doc quickly from a mobile device.

4. Do people wake agonize over these treacherous solutions, ripping their hair out and wishing there was something better?

>> This doesn't need an answer. You're mostly just interested in hearing yourself speak here.

5. So who actually needs what you’re building?

>> Creative teams (web design/dev shops, agencies, startups), Freelancers (part of many teams), Students & Educators (project groups and classrooms), Networked organizations (like YC who manage a portfolio of companies).

6. Have you talked to potential customers?

>> We're approaching 300 user interviews.

7. Have you reached out and gathered honest opinions?

>> Again. No answer required here.

The interesting thing about this experience (aside from the tremendously helpful feedback provided by some HN users), is that there seems to be this widely held assumption that branding and positioning a product are the "easy" parts.

People look at the fact that we've been at this for a year and a bit, and judge our progress, yet there is an endless amount of literature that's been created about how to do it well. If it was such a simple task, would you expect there to be such a large body of work around it?
Plantable Beer Coaster
Sighs.

So you must necessarily not accept anything without having obtained the raw data, formed a hypothesis, processed the data, and formed a conclusion, by yourself.

Or are you just selective in the facts you choose to accept without personal research and verification and the ones you don't.

Ludicrous hypocrisy.
I think it's interesting that minimum wage has to be raised like clock-work. It's like inflation is out-pacing wages -- which seems like another failed implementation of price control (interest rates).
This seems a bit straw man. "Distributed systems suck because Developer B has to wait for Developer A to add stuff to System A so System B can have a new feature". What you have there is a totally different problem that is unrelated to being distributed or not. Replace the word System with Module and imagine they are in the same codebase, still have the same problem. This post smacks, distributed system are hard and gave us a new set of problems that seem hard, runaway!
Well that's kind of the reply I expected. You're reacting as per my comment here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4223478 (see note on red vs blue).

I am neither a Republican voter nor a US citizen. In fact I'm sitting here at home in London in the UK staring at the Thames out of my front window.

I do not choose a team. I have no political allegiance. I do not vote as I do not wish to be responsible for the person I voted in. I try to be a rational independent human and do not align to a stereotype well. A close stereotype is secular humanist.

I suggest you do some research on "accepted norms" and how it applies to climatology plus how conflicting views with theories and data are thrown out without being considered.
>If someone's got an example of a holistic study of glaciers

I'm not so sure how holistic this is: http://nsidc.org/glims/glaciermelt/index.html
Excerpts from the MONEY SPIDERS
There's somebody at the CIC in Kendall Square looking for COBOL programmers if you know any...
The implementation of higher-order functions in PHP has saved me hundreds if not thousands of lines of code, and that's only in the last six months.

It's not perfect, but it's better than what we had before.
Deutsche Post DHL Buys IntelliAd To Ramp Up Its Adtech Business
Compiling Clojure to JavaScript
What's the most ancient thing you can tweet from?
It's an implementation problem of Java.

I never understood why the JVM folks didn't get along to develop a JIT cache. That means the first time I start a Java program it would run normally slow. But from the second run on it would use the native cache and run immediately fast with native performance. That would eliminate many performance problems of Java.

I know that there already is a solution which uses a Java server to serve the application as client which reduces the startup time but this is not very convenient to use.

The slowness of Clojure is a typical problem of all languages which are based on JVM. Racket Scheme, for instance, which is a Lisp like language but NOT based on JVM, needs just 0.062s to print "Hello World" (compiled) on my system.
Seems like a poor choice for a font for the default page though, given how much comic sans ms is hated within the design community (end everyone else).

PS: Love the product, will be using it from now on!
Speaking of controlling communications-- this entire thread, which was #2 on HN when I first saw it-- has been buried because it is not sufficiently pro-obama.

Meanwhile the latest uneducated screed about how the banks caused the housing crisis (false) and are EVIL!, will always stay way up on the first page of HN for hours if not a day or so.

I can't stand this censorship on HN. Well, it wouldn't bother me if the HN core audience weren't constantly saying "We're objective and open minded!"
An Encyclopædia of JPEGs, GIFs and PNGs
If a picture says more than a thousand words – and current internet dynamics tend to agree – what would a visual guide to the English contemporary and vocabulary, look like? Ben West and Felix Heyes two artists and designers from London found out. They replaced the 21,000 words found in your everyday dictionary with whatever shows up first for each word in Google’s image search. Behold Google – a 1240 page behemoth of JPGs, GIFs and PNGs in alphabetical order. A modern contemporary witness.
Great job with the posting. Very creative!
Unfortunately, "exciting", "yuppie", and "vibrant" aren't economic terms.

It sounds like you're justifying rent control on the basis of aesthetics.
I think your article would have been stronger if you'd provided some clear elevator statements that fit your mold for other companies, or even your own.

Seconded. We could all benefit from honing our short pitches.
Building All-Star Teams
This is what I need to. For when I'm sitting on the train, would be really useful to read through the commits from the day & mark ones for further review.
Thought that might be confusing, you'll get reviews from all regions. The country on the search is just to specify what store to search. That was added because someone had an app only in Australia and it was searching the US store and hence not finding it.

Will try and clear it up.
It's occasionally said that we aren't importing manufactured goods to China, we're exporting pollution.
Those benchmarks are fairly useless, because it doesn't compare idiomatic usage of those languages, but rather the capability of those languages to drop to low-level primitives and libraries.

I did an experiment once, testing out a simple web-service on the JVM and Scala (with Scalatra) yields the same performance as Java (with Jax-RS), while Clojure (with Noir) is only 2x to 3x as slow and JRuby (Sinatra) is only 4x-5x as slow as Java.
bit harsh. but, upvoting you coz of the nice song.

P.S: words do matter ;)
First Impressions of Lille's EuraTechnologies: Home to 100+ startups