skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
What if it doesn't work? What if it kills all the salmon and worsens global warming? The reason there's so much negative press is that this was done pretty much unilaterally and it was done to make quick cash. This type of large-scale geoengineering project is almost certainly what will get us out of the current global warming mess, in my opinion, but it must be approached carefully and scientifically.

What science do we get out of this project? Virtually none. It doesn't appear there were any controls, or careful measurements, or whatever. Just a cash grab.
I had vagely heard of this before, but I didn't realize that tr goal is to have the carbon sink to the bottom of the ocean. I assumed that it would just introduce more active marine life.

Not sure how this guy is going to get paid for his co2 credits.
I've accidentally coded a clone.
Exactly. Algal blooms drastically change the composition of the water that they are in. Fresh water algal blooms from run-off are incredibly damaging for local ecosystems, producing chemicals toxic to local flora and fauna.

Done over a large enough area, it can change more than just the CO2 levels in the atmosphere.
The Supreme Court is considering a case now where a publishing company sued someone from Thailand for selling books they purchase in Thailand in the United States.

http://www.cornellsun.com/section/opinion/content/2012/09/07...

So the textbook publishing company sells a book for $400 in the United States but $10 in Thailand. Then sues anyone that buys it for $10 in Thailand and then sells it for $25 in the United States. This is the very definition of inflating the cost of living for the US Consumer.

It is also one of the major reasons why we have things like region-encoded DVDs.
Tech companies and their approach to labor is just sickening. They complain constantly that we don't let in enough H1B's. Are they offering to indemnify the government in case they need healthcare, unemployment; their children need public education, etc? They complain constantly that the publicly funded universities don't graduate enough STEM graduates to meet their needs. Think about that--they complain with no hint of irony that the public doesn't train enough workers for them at the public expense!

And let's not even start on collusion to keep down salaries, non-competes and other bullshit.
The whole article came off a bit sensationalist (do people really believe there won't be any 18+ games in the future on PC?). I agree that MS could close the platform, I felt the article assumed that it already has and built it up from there. I guess people disagree with me here and do feel that it's closed :/
Tumblr SEO is catastrophic. I had two tumblr blogs for a few weeks, they never got into Google before 3rd page. I created a wordpress blog in two days I was number One...
I was too scared to try. I wonder where they're scraping images from.
This team and robot rocks.
Meaningful Use of Personal and Quantified Self Data in Healthcare
Hi, I'm Jeff Casimir from Jumpstart Lab, director of the program. I'll do my best to answer questions here over the coming days if you have them, or ping me directly at contact at jumpstartlab.com
"People who do ground breaking research need to have a way of protecting their intellectual property"

Define "ground-breaking".

This is the myth of the patent system: the lone inventor doing dazzling unprecedented work that they can only recoup by being granted a patent. Those people don't exist. You may find one or two, but not enough to justify the overbearing patent system.
Regarding 5.3 and 5.7... doesn't Microsoft's own Office software facilitate these things, depending on the document created?
The reason people are up in arms is because there's significant concern in the scientific community that what he's done can be actively harmful. You simply don't dump 100 tons of crap in the ocean without having an idea of how it will react with the ecosystem.

I'm all for geoengineering experiments, but only if they're based on solid science and not a hunch.
Inducement and Goals for Publishers
Gawker are ridiculous. They've written a few paragraphs rewording the original article and then quoted 1/2 the article to wrap it up:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2012/oct/15/pacific-ir...

Edit: Yay someone fixed it.
Yes. The "do nothing" crowd IMHO makes things worse

"Nuclear is bad", "Wind will kill the birds", "Hydro is evil", etc, etc, guess what, countries will use coal then.

There's also the "not economically viable" crowd, that rejects anything if it "costs" more than oil (usually under fallacious arguments and/or ignoring some oil costs and/or inflating alternative energy costs.

Every activity causes an impact. Deal with it. The objective should be to minimize that impact.
The unique identifier was really just the technically simplest way to do it. I might eventually deduplicate the data and aggregate profiles with identical settings into a "canonical profile" if I can find the time.
So long as the end result of all these extra plankton is not worse than "climate change threatens human civilization", I think we'd have a net gain.
spqr, you look to be hellbanned on HN. You might want to email PG and find out why.
The rate at which these generators pop up is a testament to how awesome they are. I really think you're on to something with the built-in S3 deployment. Any plans for extending it with CloudFront caching?
New LinkedIn Profile Page Design
Our team build Jingle Boogie. It is app for making short jingles from youtube or vimeo movies.

http://visuality.r12.railsrumble.com/
http://railsrumble.com/entries/143-jingle-boogie
I like the idea of building out a specific vertical of the "hire people for stuff" space. I wonder what's next.
Actual Headline > World's biggest geoengineering experiment 'violates' UN rules

The word illegal in the HN headline is a bit of extra editorial, and should be removed. The inverted commas in this case are not trivial, as not all UN rules are Law, either per-se or in the (even then endlessly debated) eyes of 'International Law.'
You should be so lucky. Try quantum random numbers, biotch! Can control radioactive decay!

God says...

man to put away his wife? tempting him.

10:3 And he answered and said unto them, What did Moses command you?
10:4 And they said, Moses suffered to write a bill of divorcement, and
to put her away.

10:5 And Jesus answered and said unto them, For the hardness of your
heart he wrote you this precept.

10:6 But from the beginning of the creation God made them male and
female.

10:7 For this cause shall a man leave his father and mother, and
cleave to his wife; 10:8 And they twain shall be one flesh: so then
they are no more twain, but one flesh.

10:9 What therefore God hath joined together, let not man put asunder.

----

That'll learn them!
>hellbanned, and looking at your comment history yesterday, seems like an entirely inappropriate response from the mods)

Isn't that normally the case here? I've seen more people shadow banned for seemingly no reason than I've seen shadow banned for a legit reason. The whole point of shadow bans is supposed to be to waste the time of obvious trolls, here it is used randomly and seemingly as the only response to any perceived misbehaviour, so whatever wrong-doing is perceived never gets corrected, people just make a new account and continue as before. By far the most baffling and absurd aspect of HN.
Coral is a great CO3 absorber. CO2 can acidify the ocean water, which lowers calcification rates affecting the ability to grow carbonate skeletons. Combined with an increase of CO2 in the atmosphere contributing to a global increase in temperature, which coral is extremely sensitive to, and an increase of CO2 anywhere is bad news.

Source: http://people.uncw.edu/szmanta/BIO%20585%20CoralReef%20Field...
Scaling PostgreSQL at Braintree: Four Years of Evolution
Scrap metal is regularly, purposefully, and legally sunk. We call the results "artificial reefs", and nature seems to rather like it.
This what I thought too. Where is his comparison to patents in other areas?

I liked this title because it is restricted to software. A title like "Abolish patents, full stop" is, to be blunt, sheer idiocy and all too common.

I think there are some key differences between software "R&D" and chemical and biological R&D, and I can't see how any rational argument for reform could ignore those differences, but this "Noble Laureate" fails to mention any of them. Does he know something on the subject of patents that we don't?
Where are you seeing it's optional? Do you mean it's just not enforced?

https://vimeo.com/help/faq/pro

Vimeo Plus is intended for individuals who want more features than a Basic (free) account, however Vimeo Plus users may not upload videos that are commercial in nature, or that are intended to sell or promote a product or service.
I wonder if anybody has dared guestimate how much money SQLite has provided to the world in terms of time saved not hacking out buggy serialization and indexing code for software projects and just using this amazing tool instead.

I use SQLite frequently in small projects and it's absurdly invaluable. That it's free and PD almost beggars belief.
Clipper cards reveal travelers' whereabouts to police, lawyers, apps
The Open Source Cloud is Ready for Hadoop, Projects Say
Surface I thought was going to be a bit cheaper, but I think Microsoft occasionally makes good software.
Medicine is charged at significantly higher prices in the USA compared to even other developed nations, such as most of europe or Canada

Software and media is often charged at different discriminatory prices. DVD region codes point to this fact. You can buy identical gray market 'international edition' textbooks in English often at prices less than half of the US edition.

Clothing is often charged at many multiples of the real price it cost to produce, design and market. A market in Asia will show you how different it really is.

Etc
"Does a lot of Good" is a subjective term, and even if it weren't, the ends typically do not justify the means.
I'm not sure it's fair to say that every bike sold on Craigslist is stolen, which is pretty much what their "stolen bike finder" tool suggests.

To then offer a classifieds tool seems a bit off... especially since there's nothing to say that stolen bikes are not being sold their either other than their word. But then, Craigslist would surely say that they don't support selling stolen goods either.

Mostly, as someone who runs one of the largest bike forums in the world, I'm unimpressed.

But as I don't like commenting negatively without at least thinking how I'd possibly do it better.

Provenance.

I would love to see something like http://velospace.org/node that provides profiles of bikes, but with the capability of registering the components too.

Such that it becomes a database of bikes over time, you'd see what bits you changed when, etc.

If your bike gets stolen then you have a record that it was yours, and you mark it as stolen and it auto-alerts the police as well as auto-searching classifieds sites. And you'd have a record of anything you changed that helps identify it.

If you sell your bike, you assign the bike to the new owner, and the bike now shows who currently owns it as well as who used to own it... the bike gets provenance. A nice history of what it looked like when, and how owns it now.

With a bicycle provenance database you combine the best of buying a bike, owning a bike and selling a bike... whilst at the same time making it very easy for people to find the bike online if it gets stolen, and very easy to find it if it gets sold online. You have the ability to prove it was yours.

So what I'd like to see are sites like velospace expand into managing the provenance of bikes and for that to be used as a major deterrent to bike theft.
Yes, I agree. That too, mindshare is very important. Almost as important as marketshare! I meant to lump this in to my statement but didn't elaborate on it.
The interface of payment
GSchool
I wouldn't be surprised if Octave (open source version of Matlab) doen't become very popular because a lot of Coursera classes use it for homework assignments.

I thought that Octave was an ugly little language at first, now I really like it - a great tool for doing linear algebra, data visualization, machine learning, neural networks, etc.
Responsive Images Community Group
I can integrate continuously by doing this:

git commit (in my_branch)
git checkout master
git pull
git checkout my_branch
git merge master
(possibly resolve conflicts)

Ta! Da!!

Continuous integration AND branching.
Zendesk Open Sources Real Time Push Notification Framework
And we are hiring our 6th, 7th, etc. engineers! http://careers.thinknear.com/
given a reason will be very helpful, thank you :)
Ouch. ;-) For the text, you are right, I am an french from Quebec but I didn't think it was so bad. Thanks for the input spleeder. I am going to work on that.
Public Sharing vs Private Sharing
Show HN: Skype calling sucks, so we made this to talk with our offshore team
What language are you using? If it's Java I found 'Test Driven Development' by Kent Beck a great book if you want to 'get' unit testing and TDD.

There's a gap before when the point of TDD 'clicks' and you see the 'why'; before that it can seem a huge bore. After that it can seem a bore too in some situations but you can see the benefits of it.
A challenge to break a simple Python sandbox [2009]
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ada_Lovelace#Controversy_over_e...
I'm really happy to see that Aarron's post highlights how important copy is to your success. It's super dull and tedious to get it right, but amazingly effective when done well. The post also confirms my suspicion that the highly secure "username and/or password is invalid" is a costly tradeoff.

Glad to see Persona mentioned in this thread. Full disclosure, I'm the UX Designer for Persona.

A couple of questions I have for MailChimp

* Why use usernames at all? They're a necessary evil for things like forums where users don't want to expose their real names. They are a major contributor to login failures. Email as the unique identifier is much easier to remember.

* How much pain did Mailchimp have to endure to migrate the user account that had been created via Facebook and Twitter? What copy did you use to explain? How many users did you lose?

* Would you consider implementing Persona? ;)

I do want to add a +1 to the concerns other folks have expressed about mixing the context of a personal Facebook account with a professional service like MailChimp. I see in my research one of the main concerns users have about using Sign in with Facebook is that they're unsure what will show up on their wall. Social sign in isn't right for either professional services or on the opposite side, anything that is socially questionable, like a gambling site.
3x the screen resolution...a little less than 1x the usable screen real estate. Comparing to a high pixel density display isn't really fair. The Surface Pro is 1920x1080, but that is all usable space, no pixel doubling for non-"retina"-ready apps.
It sounds like Priceonomics is pivoting... into a bike classified site.
It also doesn't "cost" anywhere near MATLAB. (I couldn't check the price of MATLAB as you have to have/create an account).
Ask HN: Are you going to Startup School and have a +1 to the after party?
Apparently I missed the after party invite email by an hour and half, and it was already waitlisted. Blast.

If you have a +1 available and would like some company, I'd love to buy you dinner and talk shop before hand. I'm flying in from the east coast and would like to meet as many new people as possible, so I'd love to chat about what you're working on, exchange tech/business ideas, etc.

If you're interested just send me a message at @timcheadle on Twitter, thanks!
Many use Matlab because of its amazing IDE, a great collection of toolboxes and remarkable speed, not so much because of its language features. Last I checked Octave was still missing all of that. If you can afford it, Matlab is usually well worth paying for. If not, other alternatives (Python, R) are much better in my opinion.
How much is expensive?
The MS-DOS to Windows transition was more technical than business. It is not an apt analogy because Windows Next being completely closed down would be a purely business decision. If we're using 'what-if' arguments, then what if Microsoft does remove desktop in favour of Metro and then open up Metro to everyone?
That's very well possible, but to some extent only. It's at least doubtfull that desktop apps like CAD/IDE software will ever ceise to exist.
World Record freefall jump from stratosphere breaks sound barrier (video)
Not likely. This was a self-contained project to scratch our own itch.
Thanks.
I appreciate the difference and understand the need for taking other things into consideration for allowing immigration.

But most of the arguments made in this thread and other similar debates - the main point is about the economics associated with it. By not allowing companies to pay lower wages to foreign workers the wages of the local market is being protected.

In the short term bringing down the wages would be unfair to the employees in the local market - as they have probably paid a higher price to acquire education, healthcare, housing etc. But in the longer term those inefficiencies would also get addressed.

The same argument applies to opening up the markets for goods and services. In the short term the local producers of goods are subjected to competition which will result in many of them going out of business which indirectly effects the people employed by them.
Presumably Steam will either start developing to the Metro interface, or continue targeting the old desktop interface. They are hardly about to throw up their hands and say, "well we had a good run but we're done now".
The crypto dream
"6 upvotes in 27 minutes gets you on the front page?"

From what I have observed, yes. It however does not mean it will be the top post on front page but it definitely gets you in the top 30 i.e. front page.
One thing that isn't mentioned which we are currently facing problems with is the change of timeline once a failover occurs. The code isn't yet merged to use the stream to push the timeline update so all slaves must read from the shared archive.

Maybe I've implemented things incorrectly, but this is a frustrating issue for the moment.
I looked at Jekyll for my recent blog rewrite[1] but I ended up writing my own[2] and hosting it on Heroku, for many of the same reason. Even without CloudFlare it's been able to handle HN homepage and subreddit hits with no perceptible performance issues.

[1]: http://bugsplat.info/2011-12-14-yet-another-not-very-static-...
[2]: https://github.com/peterkeen/bugsplat.rb
JavaScript is Assembly Language for the Web: Part 2 - Madness or just Insanity?
Yes, I thought it funny that given the synonyms that article title is "marketers take over startup marketing" :-)

Young tech talent does not give enough credit for great marketing. That turns out to be a double negative since the marketing folks don't want to call themselves product marketing because it makes them sound 'uncool' and folks who are ignorant of what marketing does give them no respect.
I must say, SendHub and co have done a pretty remarkable job. Their product is superb, I highly recommend just trying it to see how to do onboarding on a fairly complex service (considering multiple people & phones are involved).
> while a programmer who is not concerned with design is little more than a line cook following instructions.

I disagree with this and am inclined to take offence. Programming is not at all like following a simple recipe. Perhaps if the chef specifies that the line cooks must raise special chickens to be slaughtered for the main dish, keeps a herb garden that the line cooks have to maintain, puts the line cooks in charge of estimating and purchasing ingredients, and gets them to experiment with genetically engineering food to taste good in the dish, maybe then there is hope for a comparison.
This sort of thing is also harmful for native IT development for an outsourcing destination such as India. Since the motive of work channeled to India is simply cheaper costs, good software engineers have a limited run. One of the direct fallout is time-based promotions instead of merit-based. Some salient points:
a) Average entry salary(0 years exp.) for an IT worker is about $6k. After applying PPP(purchasing power parity) of 2.9(source:http://www.thehindubusinessline.com/opinion/columns/harish-d... amounts to $18k. In the US the average is about $60-65k (http://www.whatsalary.com/us/salary/SOFTWARE-ENGINEER-T6812....). TLDR:Entry level, India($18k after PPP) vs USA($60-65k).

b) Why is the above data relevant to this discussion?

H1B is a red herring basically saying, "Look we tried looking for locals alright. They are just not qualified. Look at the Indians we got, they work all the time." I don't think the 800-900 workers IBM imports translate to a huge savings compared to 100,000+ workers it employs in India. While in India, the H1B is a carrot for workers to continue slogging on.

c) How is it bad for India?

It's bad for India for exactly the same reasons. There is no desperation for innovation as a software job is easily available. This is also the reason India has not produced even a single Google or a Nokia.

Recently I was offered a contract job. I quoted the global market rate(after applying PPP). The response I got back was shocking and humiliating.

"India's GDP is $3700. Why is your quotation so high?"

I apologized for earning more than India's GDP and refused.
How many patentable steps are there in useful chemical production paths?

I expect that any trivial software application has many (many) orders of magnitude more patent-vulnerable elements than the most complex commercially produced chemicals.

Software is much more free to include complexity because of the low cost of each element - there's no need to create a physical plant that implements the software.

This makes progress in software much more vulnerable to impedance by patents, because patents cause a greater increase in the relative cost of each element and because there are more elements involved.

And I think if we only allowed patents on "ground breaking" inventions, there would be many fewer patents and much less basis for anti-patent opinions.
What if it does work?

I do agree with you and I'm not trying to defend the way this guy has gone about this.

However, the path we're on now is basically, "we know we're fucked, but let's do nothing."

The UN is not going to be able to agree on anything more active than Kyoto. In the US, Romney is using Obama's previous comments on climate change as a laugh line. The EU has plenty of luddites themselves; they would never agree to fertilizing parts of the ocean for fear of negative side effects. For the scientific community to come to a consensus would take decades.

So I agree that we need to be cautious. But right now it seems we're just rearranging the deckchairs on the titanic.
Study Finds Digital Pirates are Nearly a Third More Likely to Purchase Music
We made a simple little ethics game about this very possibility for an exhibit on anthropogenic change:
http://sciencebuzz.org/earth/scenario
> (in fact it's not clear that she ever really understood the difference engine/analytical engine at all).

I don't believe that.
Atravessar o Vale do Cobre em Chihuahua - México
Microsoft Surface Preorder
x86 Windows 8 tablets coming out that run all your windows programs ever

They'll run all of your Windows 8 programs, not all of your Windows programs, since Windows 8 apparently drops some functionality like IFilter.[1] I'm somewhat surprised I haven't seen articles detailing stuff that doesn't work under Windows 8, but maybe I just haven't been paying enough attention.

[1] http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms691105(v=VS.85).as...
"Indexing Service is no longer supported as of Windows XP and is unavailable for use as of Windows 8."