skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Oh, I'm sure it's billions of people! I mean, why not, right? If you're going to pull numbers out of the air, it seems reasonable that they be large ones! I bet you're right and 1/3rd of the population of the earth will be displaced. (Or were there more billions than just 2 in your scenario?)

You should know that even the most computationally challenged "climate modelers" don't claim this will happen quickly. It would happen over a period of many, many, many, many years. The city would simply vacate what it had to, as it had to, and add levies where it made economic sense to do so. It won't be a tidal wave that just appears on the horizon.
I've taken similar actions, but the specifics are quite different. I don't have a phone - neither mobile nor landline. I have a Skype phone number, but I don't always have it open, and I don't always answer it even when it is. I don't watch TV, though I will occasionally download things that were shown on TV. I'm online a lot, but I don't use Myspace, Facebook or twitter. I don't even see the point of the latter.

I think it's becoming increasingly important to make careful decisions about time-consuming activities. Don't multitask too much. Make an extra effort to focus on depth over breadth.

Edit: it may be that the central theme here is control over how my time is used. TV ties the user to a specific time schedule. Phones are synchronous while email is asynchronous. The big social sites seem to be focused on wasting time more than anything else.
Not necessarily. You just need to put whatever libraries somewhere on your python path.
perl:

You do not need shell access to install modules locally. Anything you can do from the shell, you can do from Perl with system(), backticks, or piped open(), but really... no shell access?

You want hosting that is reliable, supports shell access, rails, and 100% uptime, but your not willing to pay more than $5/month ?
Windows 7 Release Candidate 1's Best Surprise New Features - Windows 7 RC1
Like John Lennon said, life is what happens to you while you are busy making other plans.
this is what I hear every time I visit my grandparents..
Why do "making a living" and "make a life" have to be 2 different things?

Better yet: What would you do for a living if $ didn't matter?

I love to program and can't imagine doing anything else. Sure, there are times where I'd rather be doing something else, but not very often.

I often think about one of my sports heroes, Jack Lambert of the Pittsburgh Steelers, who once said he'd play football for 50 bucks a game.

I'm not suggesting that anyone actually do that, but if you don't feel that way, you may be in the wrong profession.
1 Million Google Android Phones sold by T-Mobile
StumbleUpon Toolbar Storing 500 Cued Pages Now?
Google Founder Larry Page Has Impregnated Model-Ph.D. Wife
Radical Honesty 8 Day Workshop: "The Curse in Honesty"
i completely get your point. unfortunately i dont choose my webhosts. my clients does. but when i can, i tell them to take a linode slice.
I'm particularly interested in your reactions to the section describing the 8 Day Workshop.
He doesn't have any ads on his site, so it isn't like the traffic to the blog makes him money ...
The comment I was replying to didn't claim the article was reasonable because it was thoughtful and rational, it claimed the article was reasonable because it was middle-of-the-road.
The Recession's Infomercial Boom
Previously unknown Benjamin Franklin letters found in London
The illegal drugs are the ballast, so once they have been unloaded either the vessel with be radar visible or a substitute ballast would be needed. Since the ballast is basically in the crew quarters, you can't just use sea water. I'm sure they've run the cost/benefits here, and presumably judged the extra risks not worth the cost savings.
"What do you do when you can't stand PHP anymore?"

Reevaluate what's really important to you.

I love to program, but it's NEVER about the language. I know many of them, and AFAIC they all have their pros and cons. I suppose that if I was a "language-snob", I'd be "immensely bored" too, no matter which language I was using.

So if it's not about the language, then what is it about? You already answered your own question with the first 3 words of your post.

It's about your clients. Always. They have needs far beyond their ability to express them. And they need you.

Stop being a "language-snob" and start being a "solutions-snob". You'll never be bored again. Promise.
Just remember to always learn new things and don't get set in your ways

I Totally Agree. This is the other reason why i want to change the language in which i code for my day to day jobs. Learning new things.

I read a lot about functional programming and other cool stuff on HN but in my work i'm mostly stuck with PHP... This must change.
How the OAuth Security Battle Was Won, Open Web Style
My new startup took 30 seconds to build, already has hundreds of users
Telsaurus.com is a Custom Google Search Engine for the .tel namespace. It took me 30 seconds to build and launch yesterday and has already serviced thousands of queries.

In the future it will grow to become a fully fledged search engine in its own right, but for now it beats having a boring "coming soon" page :)
I believe the argument is supposed to counter the prevalent viewpoint that global warming is automatically a bad thing that will cause huge catastrophes without critically examining these claims. This doesn't automatically follow, and that it even may actually have some unexpected positive impacts. It's not a simplistic case of climate change solely being 'bad'.

In my view, the global warming "debate" ultimately comes down to three core questions:

1. How large is the effect of global warming?

2. What effect will this have on the planet and its inhabitants?

3. What is the correct, proportional, response?

As you get further down the question becomes broader, more complex and more difficult to answer as it's reliant on the answers to the ones above.

One extreme is that the effect will be huge, it will have a devastating effect and threaten the human race, and so the proportional response is to focus and invest an almost infinite amount of resource on global warming as a threat. The other extreme is that the effect is marginal, it will do little to change the planet, therefore few-to-no resources should be dedicated to it.

But there's actually a huge, largely forgotten, middle ground. What if the effect is quite large, but the effect is largely changing worldwide weather cycles, so the best investment is to attempt to limit against further climate change and divert resources towards the humanitarian aspect and industrial projects to mitigate the problems instead, while watching and re-evaluating how these things progress to get a better picture of the true scale of the problem? This seems the pragmatic 'solution' that the real word politicians are trying to take, but you don't hear much about it compared to the more extreme viewpoints, not least because it doesn't make for as good headlines as 'the destruction of the world'.
Sure, if you equate "making a living" to "working for some guy who's going to get rich off your work", it's never a good idea to work so hard you forget to live. Only a fool would work hard for someone else.

If, however, you're making a company and not a living, this nice little rule doesn't apply anymore.
Java! I may be in the distinct minority here and particularly prejudiced since I started with Java in 98.... Java has the best IDE (eclipse), a slew of open source libraries, Groovy if you have it up for dynamic language syntax and with JIT etc. innovations it's pretty much as fast as C++. I think Java is the perfect OOP trapped inside some slightly ugly, easy to compensate for syntax. Also, easy to deploy dynamic apps with Tomcat, great user community, stable API...
To defend humanities, call on scientists and engineers too
GvR has better English proficiency?
What is the motivation for locking yourself into the micro$oft stack? Why not use Java with a javascript (jquery/yui/ext etc) front end or even (shudder) JSPs? Spring framework? Anything but .net lock in...
That's pretty awesome, simple but does the job well! :-)
I've hooked a Python Bayesian classifier into procmail and deliver things into folders. In essence it follows the GTD input process flow and delivers emails into project, answer required (AR), archive and delete folders. The AR emails I scan and reply to every day, refiling those that have been misclassified. My weekly GTD pass checks the other folders, allowing me to reclassify when they're wrong, and deal with appropriately otherwise.

For archiving I just put it all in either a project specific repository or a single folder called "other". I can then search for keywords, but I usually pop out to a command line and grep for things if I need them.

I'm sure there's more available in existing systems, but the Bayesian classifiers also work as spam filters. I wrote them years ago and they are a great tool to have to hand.
If you're comfortable with Linux, an option for you is running a Linode or Slicehost ($20/month) and hosting your clients on it. This will give you total control of the hosting environment, and a residual income. You'll have plenty of horsepower for Rails or whatever else you want to use, and as you grow, you can buy more nodes.

Beware, though: when you put on a system administration hat you're taking on a lot of new responsibilities, including backups and security. It's also a good idea to bring your friends in on it, so if something goes wrong they can look into it for your client if you're away.

So, it really depends on your level of comfort with sys admin stuff, and the kind of relationship you have with your clients. Good luck!
Copenhagen Consensus: http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/bjorn_lomborg_sets_global...
Another not so well thought out Slate article:  I'm Human, Computer, I Swear
Do you also get the impression that Slate articles try to be sophisticated/insightful but often fail in that regard?
It is an interesting sensation to reread this 7 years later ( 3 of those spent in the SF Bay area). The intro describing Murray's day to day life and circumstances are disturbingly familiar to me.
If you reread the article from the beginning, you will see that it is intellectually dishonest. Here is the thesis:

"Global warming doesn't matter except to the extent that it will affect life -- ours and that of all living things on Earth. And contrary to the latest news, the evidence that global warming will have serious effects on life is thin. Most evidence suggests the contrary."

As you go through each of his paragraphs, do you really feel like he has taken the best conceptual arguments for the seriousness of the consequences of global warming and shown that the evidence for these scenarios is thin? He hasn't. Rather, his thesis is supported with straw men about the particulars of mockingbirds and vikings.
for what it's worth, climate change does seems quite pronounced in some countries (india, china), but that may be more due to local environmental damage than global trends per se.

harbin, china, for example, used to experience 4~5 foot snow storms every winter. you'd open the door and there'd be a wall of snow. these days you're lucky to see a foot. some locals will say it's global warming--which it may be--but northern china has also undergone extensive deforestation in the last 60 years. you'd expect changes in precipitation if you cut down 75% of the tree cover.
It was fun reading this on my MacBook with an EV card while sitting on the grass by the Charles River.
Become a real solutions provider and lease a colocated server and move your clients to it by offering them competitive pricing. You might even make a profit.
Yes, this is something i thought about also. It can be good when they dont already have their own server already set up with their email, etc. I have tried both slicehost and linode. Its nice to have such control when its possible.
Define "end of the world". The problem indeed is that we don't have computer models accurate enough to predict what will happen. A change of half a degree over the next hundred years isn't too worrying. But a change of 2.5 degrees shifts the wheat belt into Canada.

The author is right on that it isn't the end of the world, per se, but he dodges the question of what small changes will do to our civilizations, by framing the problem on a geological scale.
Thank you for the links. Watched two Whiteboard Friday videos on SEOmox.org and they where amazingly informative.
Hgtasks: Git like local branches for hg
I never claimed there couldn't be benefits of global warming. Certainly there will be benefits as well as drawbacks.

But the thesis of the article is that the evidence of the serious consequences of global warming is quite thin. Saying that there will be benefits of global warming doesn't support that thesis; when people say the consequences of global warming will be severe, they are already taking into account the benefits.
Dude, if it took you 30 seconds, its not a startup
Autonomous, buoyancy-powered subs: http://spray.ucsd.edu/

A fleet of them - the future of drug trafficking?
Letting go of CoFounders
To give a background, I am working on startup for the past 6 months full time. Within the last 4 months, we I have assembled a team of 4 more people as co-founders except all of them are working part-time. We had divided up the founders pie in the order of 40-15-15-15.

One of the team members were working a lot at the beginning, but lately have been performing extremely poorly and outputting very bad quality, and this is becoming a big problem for the rest of the team.

How can we let go of a team member, and how would compensation work (since letting him leave with 15% ownership is not fair for the current team, and letting him leave with 0% is not fair for his contributions).

How does this work? Any experience with such situations? This is a really nasty situation, please help.
Remember that the "flat and lifeless" digital experience that Fremer was talking about was a long time ago.. Yeah, he's a bit of a nut, and I'm sure that some of what he hears is as much psychological as physical (especially as it regards such things as power cords _sans_ isolating filters and so forth), but the man has a point where digital is concerned. Or rather, as far as digital _was_ concerned.

Remember the old days? When the digital recording involved brick-wall filtering of the analog source at 20KHz before digital sampling? I sure do. Sure, the clicks and pops were gone, but the filter introduced such distortion as to make the music nearly unlistenable for anyone who could hear anything over about 16KHz. High harmonics were so far out of phase with the fundamental that anything that has a percussive component (piano, xylophone, cymbals, etc.) would hurt my teeth. We've gotten past that problem with higher sampling rates during the recording phase, and digital processing can reduce the bitrate without inducing those phase errors.

Redbook CD still has one major problem, though. Nyquist says that a 2F+k (where k is some small value) sampling rate is sufficient to encode an analog waveform unambiguously. For audio, that means that the 22.1KHz rate that CDs use for each channel ought to be enough. And it would be, but for the fact that there is a hidden encoding in stereo audio, and that encoding is the temporal difference between the signal's arrival at each of our two ears (or our two microphones, as the case may be). While no component of the audio signal may exceed 20KHz, proper spatial encoding may require a temporal resolution that requires the sampling rate capable of resolving a difference in arrival times of less than 50us. And yes, I understand that that's getting really finicky, and that the phase errors in most output transducers (speakers) will be greater than that, but the best equipment can _just_ make the difference perceptible. And for smaller ensembles (chamber music, acoustic jazz, folk, and that sort of thing), that spatial accuracy can take the listening experience to a level most people are completely incapable of imagining.

SACD and DVD-A solve the fundamental problems of Redbook, but they came to the game just a little too late. People had already decided to settle for cassettes again. Not literally, mind you -- today's cassette is the MP3 file. Even at the highest bitrates (256 or 320Kbps), MP3s are audibly inferior even to Redbook, but damn they're handy, eh? They are Good Enough(TM) for most people, and you can carry a half a billion of the things on something smaller than the crappy pocket transistor radios we had when I was a kid.

The upshot is that now that we can readily and cheaply produce recordings that are light years beyond anything anybody dreamed of in the '60s, the mass market that would have supported it has become irrevokably attached to yet another great leap backwards. That's really a pity.
I still think your missing the point. Sure you might like to program and design a product, and it might not be work to you.. but where does a significant other fit into this picture? What about having children? If you're spending all your time working on a company than you won't have time for these finer things in life.
Even when things are released there is often duplication.

The biggest "problem" is code reuse. Everyone's problem/skills(i.e. ability to understand & trust particular solution)/infrastructure(e.g. needs to run on cell phone vs we gots Big Table) are slightly or massively different. We as a profession still struggle to abstract things correctly so they can be reused.

It's best to not to have a solution or have a partial solution and convince your industry to work on it together thus distributing the costs and benefits. This is commonly practiced as standards and open source.

Another situation were it is good to release solution you paid to build is if there are high maintenance costs associated with that solution. Others will be incentivized to use (and thus share maintenance costs) your solution. You will have "lost" the initial development cost but save on maintenance and there are multiple fringe benefits (publicity, good will, control/influence).

It sounds like the ICD things have low maintenance costs, creates a barrier to entry for competitors and is fundamental to medical billing and thus seen as a core competitive advantage. All factors that discourage openness.

Should sell directly or spin off company to sell libs/software/translation service of the ICD. When you recoup costs and/or sales decline open source it.
I appreciate your concession that 0.5 deg isn't worrying. I wonder about your 2.5 degree "wheat belt" statement, though.

As somebody who has personally worked on wheat farms in Texas and in Alberta, (these two places, as you may know, have a wide temperature variation between them) I have to say the science behind this statement seems already empirically refuted.

I would submit to you that any extra wheat production you may see in the central US is due to topographical (it's flat), nutritional (good soil), and cultural (daddy was a wheat farmer) influences, more than any propensity of wheat for that exact temperature, as evidenced by the successful wheat farming americans and canadians from Texas to central Alberta)
You should read this short story: http://www.businessballs.com/stories.htm#businessman_fisherm...
simple solution: microsoft releases as scan utility that counts the number of unique deprecated calls. The higher the count, the more costly the software maintenance, and the less preferable it is. so, all companies can independently evaluate a piece of software and developers can't hide their shoddiness.
I don't understand how people can get away with just copying an entire blog post from some other blog.
You're just trying to slow us down! ;)
Ubuntu is more widely supported, and I have 8 GB of RAM. I don't know if using less memory is worth the effort to learn something new. For instance, I rebuilt my dad's PC with an Atom CPU and 1GB of memory and installed Ubunutu on it. It works great. I might give puppy linux a go on my netbook though.
World health chief says it may be too late to contain swine flu
When Words Aren’t Enough To Describe Web 2.0
Headphones are really bad at resolving space for anything that should appear near the centre of the "soundstage". Even the good folks at HeadRoom will admit that. (I'd like to mention here that those guys are the most honest folks I've run across in the audio world -- they'll tell you when the cheaper model is the better buy, and they'll point you to outside sources for things they really like but can't sell, like custom-fitted in-the-ear monitors.) Cross-feeding helps, but the "inside the head" effect for centred sound is unavoidable unless the original recording is binaural. I love 'phones, but if you want the experience of musicians in front of you, cans can't.
John Resig - New Processing.js and Sizzle.js Sites
http://heroku.com isn't that expensive and it's easy to scale as needed.
If you have the inclination, I'm sure many people (myself included) would be interested to see your code, even if it's raw and unsupported. Cool solution.
Judging from the statements in the article, it's the future of the drug war as well. That's an interesting vision of the future -- increasingly sophisticated autonomous smugglers and coast guards battling it out. It's better than putting human lives at risk, I suppose. Most of the people on these boats are probably low-level flunkies anyway.
http://railsplayground.com/

Developer hosting from $5/month. Much better uptime than others in this price range. Have had some small sites with them for several years.
shiznit is a technical term in analytic philosophy meaning "this philosopher holds the predominance of public acclaim on a relatively obscure and completely misunderstood idea of his"
First of all, I'm assuming that you've already discussed the issue with him? found out why he isn't pulling his weight, etc. You may be able to fix the issue without letting him go.

This is the reason for vesting ownership shares, so that the people earn their shares over time, rather than all being divided up at the beginning.

I had a similar issue with a friend I brought on as co-founder. Thankfully he was 'stolen' away by another company, so that resolved the issue of his involvement, and I very candidly brought up the issue of ownership ,as he was around for such a short period of time, and we hadn't reached enough milestones to match the value of the amount he would have owned via the vested ownership.
We worked out a smaller percentage which we both thought was more fair based on what he had accomplished in his short time.

If this guys head/heart were and are in the right place, he'll want to work with you on what is best for the company. If not, then you may have to get some legal advise.

But I would first talk to him about the issues, and see if the team can resolve it.
What do you mean by being "solution-snob"? Looking for the appropriate tool(language) for the given task? Thanks in advance.
Handicapping is an exercise in self-delusion
Why do professional paths to the top vary so much?
What about Mozy?
You need to add in failures, like the flooding of the new york subway system, and Katrina etc. Over time we don't keep things 99.9% safe over 100 years so it's not actually several orders of magnitude cheaper. Which is part of why I suggest you read a real analysis of the costs of sea level rise in 1 foot increments.
I somewhat disagree with mronge (which reads as ummmm-wrong), i don't care how long it took you to build it.
However, what is it for? What is the .tel space? Why does the .tel space need a search engine?

I could build a search engine that only returned results with .net or .biz, but what purpose would that serve.
So unless you have a market, you don't have a start-up.