skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The projections are at least partly or mostly based on the trends, which means that even if scientists are wrong about the cause, the projections are probably still right. So I think we're fucked either way. Some place more than others. Me, I'm planning on holing up in Oregon with the in-laws to prepare to defend the state's water resources from invading Californians.
Canonical is an interesting case. While all the others (except maybe Mozilla) do a lot of work on the systems programing, most of Canonical's system level stuff is done by many smaller, upstream, projects and Canonical is responsible for integrating them, and selecting ready for release versions. This allows them to much easier avoid to early to release problems, and direct their effort in a much more focused way on the end user experience.

Also, their duel release model (long term support and 6 month short term support) gives them a nice test bed where they can try out radical re-designs before forcing it onto the users, who can continue using the LTS release.
The dispute has not been about 'warming' in the abstract but about 'catastrophic warming'. So while the evidence for 'warming' may be getting stronger, the evidence for 'catastrophic warming' would seem to be getting weaker.

The longer we go without significant warming, the lower that growth rate will get and the weaker the argument for a catastrophic warming will be.
This thread won't devolve into a battle of contrarians.
what, really? I work either with kernel and system level code in C, or program analysis logics written in ocaml or c++. I've done that kind of programming for about ten years.

so I should seriously be able to look someone who has done web development for an equal amount of time and say "yeah, I'm a decent programmer, surely I can get to the bottom of your domain in a few months of learning as I go". really? if you had a choice between hiring someone who was an expert in a totally orthogonal domain or someone with experience in the domain you were working in, you would prioritize experience over familiarity? how is that working out for you?
"The ability to bomb specific other countries" sounds like the default go to defensive action to take in the event of external attack?

I know a supranational fanatical religious terrorist organisation that happens to agree with you.
In Soviet Russia ....
Yeah, damn those silly kids engaging in a little reductionist tribal idiocy. Those same silly kids whining against DRM in HTML; that's some serious attack against progress, those kids that are against the right of the government to see your emails; that's some serious attack against our beloved authorities, and those are the same kids that will stand against the government if they decide to force a required pre-approval of any message we post on the internet; but they would have some good reason for doing that so those silly kids are just going against the truly meaningful goals and ideals that will improve our society.
Active Directory is pervasive because Windows is pervasive, and Windows is pervasive because MS Office is pervasive. To my knowledge, there is no other effective central AAA (authentication/authorization/accounting) solution for Windows than Active Directory.

Cloud-based office productivity products are slowly chipping away at AD's necessity, but there's still a need out there for a cloud-based AAA solution that meets the needs of BigCos and SmallCos alike. Unfortunately it's going to be a while before we get there because it will have to emulate AD in the meantime.
I hate to be so negative, but... ugh... This reads like a rant written by someone with very little professional technical experience, and it's just such a poor analogy.

Yes, there are a few tools that are as interchangeable as various types of wood, and there are some weird dogmas out there analogous to using rocks as hammers. But these are exceptions, not the rule.

Languages aren't interchangeable. Sure, any half decent programmer can pick up any sane language and be hacking something together in a day or two. However, most languages have idioms and subtle usage patterns that take far more time to learn than you'd estimate. You've mastered first principles? Awesome. Ever heard of an "unknown unknown?" This kind of thinking will have you tripping over them constantly. The best part is it will always look like you're tripping over your own shadow.

And guess what? Tools do have meaningful impact on the way you perform your work, and even how you think about problems. Sometimes these tools are old and at first they look a bit like swinging a rock, but the people around you with more experience are probably using them for a reason. Go find out what it is.

Actually, that brings about a larger point. If you find yourself agreeing strongly with the OP, maybe you need to force yourself to work through a different set of languages/frameworks/platforms/tools/philosophies for a month or so and test the idea that it's "toe-may-toe/toe-mah-toe."
"backup mode"? That really seems to imply the main way to print is to send everything through your servers.
This is very true on both sides of any argument about anything that people attach tribal identity to. Which includes politics, religion, sports, choice of editor, one true indent style...

Knowing this I try to apply increased scrutiny on arguments from people that I fundamentally agree with, because I know that if I don't do it consciously, then I'll just nod in blind stupidity. I won't claim that I do a good job at it. But I will say that the willingness to take the effort has resulted in my changing opinions on a number of topics over the years.

But, in this case, taking an article that says, "We found warming at 80% of previous average prediction, but well within previous predictions" and concluding that climate science is all bunk clearly indicates a lack of comprehension for what the article actually said.
15 Golden Rules of Moviemaking
Impossible For The Blind To Sign Petition Supporting © Treaty For The Blind
Ya, if anything we might be less fucked if it's human caused. Because that way we have some hope (however small) of reducing our carbon emissions. If it's something else out of our control then we could be well and truly fucked. Unless it just suddenly stops happening. Stay tuned!

Oregon does seem like a pretty good plan.
Trouble is, at the end of the day you can't sell it off to Yahoo.
No need to fork, it puts a copy of those libraries under ./src, so you always have a sealed (hermetic) referentially complete copy.

You don't bet your production software on things randomly downloaded from the internet at compile time. This is why go never auto-updates when you do "go get", you have to explicitly use "go get -u".

Always localize what you depend on, you never know when a github repo could be pulled, go offline, be renamed, a lawsuit could break out making the library vanish. There are TONS of reasons you should ALWAYS localize your dependencies for building software.

EDIT: This has the amazingly cool side-effect of meaning even on complex projects, you can just do a git clone and then go build FOO and it just works, no nonsense, no fuss, and it is EXACTLY in the state it was when it was checked in -- no surprises.
If by "text files" you mean source code, then yes, you're selling yourself totally wrong.

Don't sell what you do, sell what your work does. That is, sell the idea of the benefit of your work. Put it in terms of them, not you.
This is pretty old (I think it started circulating around 2004? [4]) and was first publicly posted at jasonbock.net[1], although his site seems to be having problems so here is a cached version [2].

The intro posted there is as follows:

The following joke was posted to an internal Magenic[3] list. I don't know who actually wrote it, and I'll give credit if someone points out the creator of the joke. It perfectly illustrates what I think developers (especially consultants) have to go through all the time when they're interviewing for the next gig.

[1] http://www.jasonbock.net/jb/Default.aspx?blog=entry.7c334037...

[2] http://web.archive.org/web/20130210235908/http://www.jasonbo...

[3] http://magenic.com/

[4] From the jasonbock.net post: Posted at 10.13.2004 11:38:07 AM
Sort of OT to the main topic, but, as they briefly mention in the story, quite a few actors from B5 have died:

Michael O'Hare

Richard Biggs

Andreas Katsulas

Jeff Conaway

Tim Choate

If it wasn't "great" television, what is? I'll take G'Kar sparring with Londo any day over the pablum on TV now.
I think the scope of it, really being one of the first truly serialized SF shows to succeed, more than makes up for its shortcomings in other areas. There's rarely been so cohesive of a whole series story as B5 on TV and that's laudable all on its own.
On the rare occasions when I drink soda these days I just think, I would have been happier with water. Also if I'm gonna consume 300 calories I'd rather have a taco or something.
That's how modern warfare between major powers works. You don't drive off a land invasion, you bomb each others' cities until someone cries uncle.
The two you mention (Haskell and Prolog) are great examples of languages where people can actually have negative impact for a while until they really get up to speed with the language. Pretty much any functional or declarative language fits that bill, and definitely any Lisp. Maybe not 6 months, but definitely at least a couple of months to start contributing a lot of additional value (in addition to getting set up with the team's environment and workflow).

Amazingly, even if someone does learn Java, Python, and C, he or she is not necessarily able to generalize that knowledge to other languages, or even to larger-scale projects in those languages. For example, I wouldn't want to take someone with a lot of Python experience and a semester's worth of C, and put them on a large-scale firmware project or Linux-kernel-hacking project. There are a lot of ways somebody who thinks they know C could mess up a project like that.

In general I agree with you: a truly smart engineer can pick things up as they go, especially on a longer time frame. However, this isn't always the case. Though my perception is admittedly warped a bit working in startups, where you need people to hit the ground running immediately.
> Languages aren't interchangeable

I disagree.

If we're talking about building websites, there's a dozen of languages that you can pick from and they are all fine for making a website of almost any complexity.

Yes, you personally will (likely) prefer one language over every other. That doesn't mean anything.

There are really really profitable websites out there written in PHP, Java, C++, Ruby, C++, C#, Pascal, Python, Go, LISP, Javascript, etc.
Hey, no fair you actually read the article. The rest of us are just hypothesizing and adding our opinions based on the title.
"Medium isn't a big thing because it's special in any way, it's a big thing because it was made by "web celebrities"."

This is dumb to the point of annoying. Did you read the article at all? Lots of great design thinking went into Medium. I'm constantly finding new features on Medium that are very well thought out.

Yes they have a huge problem of not letting the authors own their own work, which is why I will never use Medium as-is, but let's not say nothing is special about it either.

Even if the only thing you want to give them is credit for their beautiful typography, you have to at least them give them.
Big Nerd Ranch for Ruby on Rails worth it?
I'm thinking of dropping $3700 of my own money on this investment. Does anyone have any knowledge about this course? I have a lot of programming experience but little experience in writing web services. Thank you.
http://www.bignerdranch.com/classes/ruby_on_rails_i
Well that marks one more end of an era. With Camino folding up and Opera going with WebKit - Camino too was on the way to this with Gecko being out of the question - the browser field is getting to be a one-horse race (since all the cool kids are going with Chrome these days).
> No need to fork, it puts a copy of those libraries under ./src, so you always have a sealed (hermetic) referentially complete copy.

While that is true, it doesn't solve the problem with distributed teams. The library path MUST be pointing to a 'localized' repository to solve the problem the Haunt guys are having.
bitcoin laundering / zerocoin solve that.
Please regale us with tales of the software projects you've successfully shepherded to on-time, on-budget releases.
I want to like Firefox, I really do, but the experience on OS X is awful. It doesn't fit well with the aesthetic of a native Mac app, and certainty doesn't' function like one. Multi-gestures in Safari are so much smoother. About a month or so back when the Firefox team was soliciting feedback for something here on HN, one of the designers or developers at Mozilla had screenshots of a version of Firefox that looked really good. I went to go download the latest version and realized that the screenshots most have just been Photoshop comps or something.
Story wise I think it blew Star Trek out of the water, I really do. I much prefer the dark, gritty and realistic locales of B5 over the white polished Apple spaceships of Star Trek.
Most reviews I have heard agreed with you. I have heard nothing but praise for the show. But after watching the first 2 or 3 episodes several years ago the best word I can think of to describe it is "unwatchable."
Camino was my preferred browser on my old Macbook because it was the simplest and most easy to use browser available. All other browsers were irritatingly complex by comparison.
Actually I'd dispute that; modern warfare between major powers can only waged by proxy wars between lesser powers who do not have recourse to nuclear options. In the future as the destructive potential of smaller and smaller actors increases over time, humanity will have to get used to the idea that it can't go around just acting like a pack of spoiled murdering bastards with an entitlement complex, or it will end up destroying itself as the power threshold of the disenfranchised actors approaches mutually assured destruction scenarios.

So perhaps in light of this it might be a good idea being practical to get used to that fact and stop acting like endless bullying war is a realistic long term foreign policy?
Many doctors are as behind the times as the rest of us, as the 'ick' anecdotes here demonstrate
We Think We Know What Elon Musk's Hyperloop Is
We really want people who are serious entrepreneurs. That usually means you have some kind of prototype, but really, we're looking for quality people who we think can use this kind of knowledge.
Maybe I should've qualified that better. Languages can be interchangeable in purpose, but not in process. By that I mean that sure, I can write a web backend in pretty much any language I choose, but the quality of that backend code and the rapidity with which I can deliver it will heavily correlate with the amount of experience I have with the language in question.
I'm accustomed to seeing this kind of butthurt on 4chan, not-- oh wait. lol
I'm looking forward to using the new rackspace automation included in ansible. Especially for spin-up and tear-down of staging sites.
How Instant Messaging Rules The Internet
The problem is that evidence has come out, been confirmed, etc multiple times. Evidence is clear that if we want to avoid the consequences we need to act. However we can't act, in significant part because a large portion of the population is unwilling to believe that the consequences exist.
The post was not really referring to a gap like that between systems programming and web development. It was referring to a gap like that between developing web applications in Ruby or Python. Drop a Django guy into a Rails project or vice versa and they will hit productivity parity within a very short span of time.

The problem that the post laments is that while there absolutely are separate domains within the programming field, HR people rarely have any idea what those domains actually are. Because of this, they tend to operate under the assumption that every single entity (language, framework, etc) is a different domain, and if you haven't worked with the right entity then you don't have enough experience.

Edit: To expand on this a bit further, your example of systems programming vs. web development is actually a perfect example of what the right question would be for the interviewer to ask. Has the carpenter built a lot of houses, or have they built a lot of tables and chairs? What wood they used to build them doesn't matter much, but what they built with it is very important and is where the real domain gaps actually lie. This distinction crosses over to programming very well.
Well, you have to remember that very few places uses lisp for that very reason (the benefits don't outweigh the training cost), and the few production bits of lisp code I have seen work like java (albeit less object-oriented) with macros.

Second, I only mentioned C because of its use in understanding computers. Memory management is definitely a skill that people should (but often don't) learn in college, at least to understand what's happening when your GC hits some GC-unfriendly code. So I agree that memory management (via C) is a niche skill, so the analogy outlined in the original post doesn't apply... but quite honestly, how many people on this site write C regularly enough that lack of knowledge of C is going to seriously impede them? The vast majority of jobs I see are for PHP, Python, Java, and C#, at which point the largest impediment is the time it takes to get the O'Reilly book.
I do have to say, keep going.

Season 1 is...an inkling of something good coming.

Season 2, B5 starts to get interesting

Season 3, they hit their stride and then hit you upside the head mid-season (no spoilers!)

Season 4...holy shit

Season 5, things wrap up. Not.
If nerds experience a dissidence between their own judgements and reality, we tend to distort reality to conform to our worldview rather than the other way around.
That's why we tend to get hard when we are presented with studies that are cherry picked to cater to our demographics values.
Email Receipts
How would you have answered differently?
Good luck to your project. I wanted to verify similar ideas and built http://www.ex-prj.com/. Unfortunately the project itself will become to an ex-prj.
Metacontrarianism!
> the only way to test his work was by creating and dropping test tables, on the production db.

Really? He couldn't restore a backup locally and test against that? You guys couldn't roll back via transaction log? Mistakes ALWAYS happen, and it's just unfortunate that the Jr Dev was the first person to get screwed by one.
I agree, but men... a joke is a joke, and I found this one funny.
Tips for space travel
aka Top-13 list of key things to know before joining Elon on Mars, all from the Rocket Man Nasa guy.
Actually, nobody interviews carpenters. You either:

A. Call the carpenters' union and take whoever they send over.

B. Ask some carpenters you trust if they know any decent carpenters who are looking for work, and when they show up at the job site sober with appropriate tools, you put them to work.

It's a slightly different process than programming.
nitpick: Opera is going with Blink. Admittedly, Blink is very similar to WebKit at the moment.
Scroll down to the comments and follow the Google Maps link to the crazy Belgium/Netherlands border. How does stuff like this even happen?
The irony of this comment does not escape you, I hope
Not directly applicable but if you are using Salt to manage your servers you set it up to restart a service when certain files change with the watch requisite [1].

[1] - http://docs.saltstack.com/ref/states/requisites.html#require...
I agree that most tools that are similar are fairly easy to switch between: PHP/Python/Ruby/Groovy, and Java/C#/C++, all imperative, OO, etc. Also, from a tools standpoint, Rails guys can use Django and vice versa, pretty much the same, for sure.

It also sounds like you agree that that's not so easily done with (quoting myself from above), "some programming languages/tools/methodologies." So sometimes, sometimes not.

So... we agree? :P
or we've been lucky so far with the predictions, or been able to fit our predictions to match the data. This is just PREDICTIONS. it's not settled science - meteorologists have been able to stretch their predictions out to a couple of days, but the system is too chaotic for long-term predictions. It's not all bunk, but it's not a perfectly accurate 'science', either, and concluding that it's not indicates a lack of comprehension of the difference between theory and settled fact.

Now, I'm not saying we should foul our nest, just that we don't know exactly what is going to happen, given our current understanding of long-term climate change.
The first couple episodes aren't the best, but it really picks up and gets better in later episodes.
> Some people just seem determined to denigrate even the idea that hard work, blood, sweat, tears and sheer force of will can lead someone to success.

I think the bigger issue is that there are a lot more people that invest hard work, blood, sweat, etc. and fail than people who do all those things and succeed. It's still silly to say it's all luck, but I think it's fair to say that luck (by which I just mean circumstances that cannot be predicted or controlled by the founders/workers) plays a large part in success.
Node.js is actually an interesting idea. Instead of threads they force you to write non-blocking code based on callbacks.

JavaScript made sense because web devs already knew it. Also, and more importantly, there was no blocking io library.

So the developer is forced to write code in a way that makes Node perform well.
Define catastrophic.

At current rates of change we are looking in near decades at changing rainfall patterns that will result in regions and countries suffering permanent drought, and others suffering regular flooding and other forms of extreme weather. Among the areas predicted to have severe and permanent drought is the southeastern USA.

Furthermore we are learning about new risks. For instance ocean acidification has put us on a possibly irreversible path towards world-wide mass extinctions of organisms that use calcium carbonate for protection. This includes coral and shellfish. Nobody knows what resulting ecosystem changes will happen, or what the consequences for commercial fisheries which are a critical food supply for populations around the world.

The only way in which these things do not qualify as "catastrophic" is in comparison to worse catastrophes that were within the realm of theoretical possibility, but which now seem less likely. For the planet as a whole, and for people on the planet, the current course bears a series of inevitable catastrophes in our future.
Yeah, for a new watcher, I'd really only recommend a handful of episodes from season 1 (And the Sky Full of Stars, Signs and Portents, A Voice in the Wilderness, Babylon Squared, Chrysalis). Then maybe about half of season 2, then all of seasons 3 and 4.

I swear there used to be a page on the Lurker's Guide[1] that had arc-plot-heavy episodes in bold or something, but I can't find it at the moment.

[1] http://www.midwinter.com/lurk/countries/us/eplist.html
As amazing as Season 4 was, I can only begin to imagine the levels of awesome it would've reached if they hadn't had to wrap up all the open storylines out of concern that they wouldn't get renewed for the fifth season.

If they'd gotten renewed in time, the Season 4 finale would have been Intersections in Real Time.
I really like the idea here, the quality of information has been so badly degraded by spam and status updates that it would be valuable to have a place for meaningful discussions on abstract ideas.
You're right. They should be discussing the brand of the hammer.
Samsung expects Galaxy S4 sales more than 80 million in 2013
Such a great browser back in the day. It was absolutely my preferred browser of choice until Chromium came to the Mac.