skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
>A lot of the CO2 emission control schemes being considered could seriously stress the economy.

A lot of the CO2 emission control schemes being considered are lame.

The key to reducing CO2 is to commit to a policy that will affect the energy market in a gradual, predictable way: A slow phase in of a carbon tax. Raise the carbon tax the equivalent of $0.25/gallon every year, forever. No increase in the year the tax passes.

That means no economic effect this year. No change at all -- except that everyone now expects gas to be $5/gallon in four years, so if you're buying a car now you better get something with an electric motor on it. If you're investing in energy you better invest in renewables rather than petroleum. And then by the time the gas tax is $1 higher than it is now, the installed base of cars has been replaced with higher efficiency ones, so the burden of the tax is already mitigated because a) you're now buying less gas, and b) so is everyone else, so demand goes down, so the pre-tax price of gas goes down and cancels out a significant portion of the tax.

Meanwhile the government collects a large pile of cash (largely at the expense of oil company profits -- what a shame) that can be used to subsidize the installation of renewable energy generating capacity, which creates jobs etc. etc.
NYC doesn't count as evidence for people wanting a car sharing culture/disregarding the car as a personal space if they lack the ability to do otherwise. The world would look the same whatever people wanted in that instance so it's no evidence either way.

#

If 90% of the car owners need a cars in overlapping time slots then carpooling isn't going to make a lot of sense - it's only going to benefit 10% of the people. It'd be like installing an apartment pool that everyone has to pay for for the woman in 3B. This is a case where the numbers matter. If people all tend to commute about the same time, then things aren't going to look much different - you might have people playing on their tablets before they get in to work, or a more efficient taxi service, but most people will still own cars.

#

As for getting your boss to stager your time so that you can car pool more effectively. Well, maybe. But at the moment that seems like grasping at straws to me. These are the same people who can't even manage telecommuting successfully and haven't caught up with management books from 40 years ago. Trying to get people to do things together is difficult and companies are by and large incompetent.

And that's before you start introducing all the cultural things like wanting lots of people in the office at the same time. I don't think most people's bosses are likely to put themselves out for this. You need to assume that this is already in wide circulation before any real advantage for them in terms of not having to have a carpark comes into play.
See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5795893
Thanks for the thoughtful words. I agree this is an overly simplistic view not taking into account age, lifestyle, or anything. Sleep is indeed a very complex topic, the intention with this was just to try to cleanly and simply visualize how sleep debt could play out :)
I'm not quite sure what point the article was trying to make. It simply read like an unnecessarily rude and polarizing circle jerk. One one had, the author vaguely hints towards some sort of conspiracy only to offer one of his own (Frank Luntz and his back-room terminology redefining). Pure crap.
World's Largest Bitcoin Exchange Stops Some Anonymous Operations
The correct key wasn't put on full display, and the kids didn't really get much time to look over each key to pick the right one. He may have been able to determine the head shape in that time, but not much else.
Thanks for this explanation. I understood most of it but could you explain why you should normalize using 1/sqrt(n) and why doing so makes the result converge in distribution?
Ask HN: Understanding Object Oriented Programming...
Hi guys... I'm in a course that teaches Ruby and Rails and I am simply not picking it up as quickly as others in my class. I understand rotating through arrays, what a hash is, classes, but I am having a hard time putting it all together in a way that I can understand. My goal is to be a competent Ruby programmer as quickly as possible. I come from no programming experience, though I am a natural at "technology" in general.. Would love your best analogy or tips... Thank you.
This is the world's new Coolest, sleekest laptop - Suck it Macbook Pro
Consensus is not science. 97% of "biologists" in the 17th century might have said that acquired traits are heritable, or perhaps that there is no common ancestry among species, but that is scientifically false now and was scientifically false then (barring for the moment epigenetics and neo-Lamarckism). Of course, without the luxury of hindsight, you can't really be sure yourself unless you are more confident in your scientific abilities than the so-called experts at the time or are able to personally recreate experiments and observe contradictory results (which is unlikely for things like speciation and climate change).

Note that I'm not saying I believe any specific theories are correct or incorrect. I'm just trying to make a general statement that appeals to consensus are themselves not that useful and are certainly not "science." Also note that I am well aware that opposing political groups might purposefully publicize articles disagreeing with the consensus in order to make it seem like there is less of a consensus than there actually is.
Yeah the problem there is that isn't not conclusively proven either way.

The crux of the argument is that the error bands on the last 10-15 years of temperature data show that the trend isn't cooling, and that in fact it's just a slow decade and about to be followed by a warm one. And we all know that can happen.

Problem is, the error bands are significant relative to any cherry picked "things are warming up" 8-15 years OR any "things are cooling down" 8-15 years and as such, no rigorous conclusion can be drawn.

We'll know more in a decade. Sadly that's how it works when you're measuring stochastic processes.
Just added that, let me know what you think!
Someone in my public speaking class several years ago, during a persuasion speech, actually tried to dismiss CO2, CFCs, et al as a cause of global warming in favor of methane from cow farts (bovinepogenic global warming?)
Is PHP the choice for application development
It could be made, but it wasn't in this case, which was my point.
What term would you use? I can't think of one that's less loaded than "denier", which is at least fairly correct.
Pretty good execution, I was entertained. I didn't mind the puzzle difficulty, though the answers felt arbitrary. It was confusing going back from @left and @right to @door, which seemed puzzling for sure but guessing's no fun.

If the language were clearly built up on the screen (syntax, literals) it'd be easier to work with the EEM. Showing the bound functions would help, too, but would demystify the puzzle aspect. Sexps are more natural to me than this super sugary syntax that leaves you guessing, more or less. Guessing language syntax is no more fun than guessing random numbers. :( I would definitely play an Episode 2.
'Kickstarted' Documentary Will Focus on Crowdfunding
I know it's kind of defeating the purpose, but it would be nice to be able to skip and see the answer to the question. Most of these step through games usually let you do that, although those are made for weaklings.
Wow, that was an awesome explanation. Thanks.
Given our government's not very excellent management of Social Security I wouldn't bet on them wisely spending on renewables when there are all kinds of other things the money could be spent on. As such I'm a bit skeptical of your proposal.

EDIT: sarcasm removed
Same with me on OS X 10.8. However, works on my iPad.
I think this is preaching to the wrong audience. Anyone getting 8 hours of sleep a night while working on a startup is sleeping too much.
They were for a while, but seem fine again.
When was it the "consensus" that the Earth was flat? As far as I understand it, the Earth has been known to be round for approximately as long as people both thought to ask the question and attempt to figure out an answer.

"Consensus" may not give us proof, but in the absence of compelling evidence against it, it's fairly strong.

Yep, they could be wrong. But it's not the way to bet.
Wargaming to fund open-source development groups like Linux and Wikimedia
He's not debating the cause of obesity. The linked article is about the economics of sweeteners in the US. It's about money not health.
Seattle Mayor McGinn Calls for Leadership with Mention to Bitcoin
Here's some anecdata from my experience.

When I drink a soda made with cane sugar, I am satisfied: I've had a nice little sugar rush, I'm happy, now I want to get on with whatever else I want to do.

When I drink a soda made with HFCS, I am teased: my body has been reminded how tasty something made with cane sugar is, and I'd really like to have something. Oh hey here's that half-drunk 2-litre of Coke, guess I'll have some more of that. Repeat.

Now that I've realized this difference, I buy and drink a hell of a less soda. And am much more happier when I drink what I do.

(This is of course in the middle of various other changes - it's after switching to diet soda for a while, and completely kicking the habit for a few years.)
You forget that the line between "government" and "oil companies" in many countries is a fuzzy one. Most people will either blame this on the oil companies (stereotypical liberal viewpoint) or the government (stereotypical conservative viewpoint), but I prefer to just point out that there's not a big difference between the two.
Aging Windows XP a cost for local schools
You answered your own question :)

Lots of people cheated their way through without admitting to it. But the government sees everything...
The only wy I could ever consider using this would be selfhosted..
Nested if statements? I'd be interested to see how that looks.

You only need one if statement, and you only have to involve a single guard.
Also, I think the append method for the @log is getting exposed. I tried to do something (who knows now) and it said append was not a method which I assume is coming from one of the @log.append
Because these days, everything is political even if it shouldn't be. And people need to feel good about themselves for picking the "correct" party, whichever party that is. Think for yourself? Why bother! Jump on our bandwagon instead.
The best startup analogy is that of a band. Everybody is in one, or if not, they want to be. A lot of work and sweat is invested, often after hours. If you get kicked out, or the band breaks up, you start another. Everyone dreams of making it big, but few do, and a lot end up making a lot less money than they think they will due to the record labels (VCs). But the dream lives on.
Best Linux Software: Our favorites for any desktop environment
I agree, civil suit seems like the way to go here. If I can ever kick in a couple bucks to help you make this happen, let me know!
You're playing Episode 2 from within Episode 1. What are you doing playing the game you should fork it already.
That is really suspicious. It seems the paper was published by Elsevier's Physics Reports in 2009 and now republished by South Korea's International Journal of Modern Physics B.
Fedora cooks up new Linux for Raspberry Pi
I think you all miss the point. It is not about how he spend the money (in this case an education perceived to be not worth its money by a majority of you) but what he did to save this money. You could spend it on your next start-up or get inspiration to pay off your own debt by changing your living standards.
wasn't there a yale study that tied fructose to appetite regulation recently? I never actually found and read the main study, but i think there have been prior studies suggesting similar things

http://news.yale.edu/2013/01/04/study-suggests-effect-fructo...

http://ajcn.nutrition.org/content/88/6/1738S.full
Sky's Android apps, Twitter account hacked
Thanks for the feedback!

Many people have complained about @door vs @left/@right - the reason for that obviously was poor decision-making during crunch time.

Making the game accessible to non-coders (it is - they just take more time - but are usually better at riddles) was hard, and caused some hard decisions to be made.

I'll try to make Episode 2 more polished. All this feedback is very valuable, though.

As someone once said: "If you're not ashamed of it, you haven't released it soon enough".
Why would this be illegal? Lots of people work on products that make it harder for governments to snoop on citizens.
It actually seems like the Lu paper being debunked in that RealClimate link is the same paper that for some reason has been republished in another journal now.

http://www.worldscientific.com/doi/abs/10.1142/S021797921350...

http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0370157309...
Unlike the rest of their products, the Xbox wasn't a massive design by committee project. It was created by 4 guys from the DirectX team, effectively their own little startup within the Microsoft world.

The Xbox was also able to leverage the past ~5 years of DirectX development and PC gaming knowledge and built a OS that was very similar to Win32 minus the HAL.
It's very much a bad thing if the bomber-making country starts using them, and nobody can fight back effectively.
As we move from coal based to natural gas based electricity generation around the world, the amount of CO2 emissions as a percentage of energy produced will naturally decrease. There are fewer carbon atoms attached to natural gas than coal, and as a result, less are launched into the atmosphere as a by product of burning it for power. Even if we do nothing other than let the natural gas revolution take root, the amount of CO2 in the air, and hence the amount of global warming will be reduced significantly.

tl;dr if CO2 does cause global warming, it will be fixed on its own
SoftBank Capital Raises $50M To Invest Exclusively In New York Startups
>When was it the "consensus" that the Earth was flat?

I don't know man I just threw that down as a hypothetical. Look at the sibling comment next to mine for a more well-thought-out refutation :)
D11 - Apple's iTV Coming Soon, but Tim Cook's Silence is Deafening
Well reading your post rather bothers me because you automatically assume murder. Attempting to maintain the 'status quo' via military sounds like a default defensive action to me, fending off the attacks of others.
"The government screws everything up" is not an argument, unless the point of the argument is that we shouldn't have a government. We know the government is capable of doing bad things, but unless we intend for them to do nothing whatsoever, the idea is to do what we can to have them do something good rather than something bad.

For example, the problem here is "how can we subsidize renewable energy efficiently." Obviously there are plenty of stupid ways to do that. See: Solyndra. Let me suggest a better alternative: Forget about which companies should get money or qualifications or anything of that nature. Just take the money from the tax and give it to the people generating electricity from non-fossil sources in proportion to the number of kilowatt hours they push into the power grid. No complicated rules, no governments speculating about which companies are going to succeed or fail, just this: you produce a KWh from solar/wind/hydro/whatever, you get a check. The end.
ES6 will introduce Maps and WeakMaps, at least, which addresses two and four; similarly, proxies will enable three.
> Naming and shaming who?

Again, stop playing dumb.

Type his Firstname Lastname into the search bar at the bottom - your "name and shame" post is the only result.

> Unlike you, Sherwin has never been anonymous.

News flash: Moxie Marlinspike isn't Moxie's real name either.
Free UX help for your startup website, app, or whatever
The first article concerns fructose in general, not HFCS in particular. Cane sugar contains comparable amounts of fructose.

The second article says, in its abstract, "However, when HFCS is compared with sucrose, the more commonly consumed sweetener, such differences are not apparent, and appetite and energy intake do not differ in the short-term. Longer-term studies on connections between HFCS, potential mechanisms, and body weight have not been conducted".
Rutgers computer scientists to develop Google personalized data search system
#2 wasn't always that. When I started at MSFT, many moons ago, there were also testers who solely provided end-user style testing and feedback on the product. While their loss was less traumatic to my own division (DevDiv), during and after that transition it seemed that replacing those STEs with people who wrote automation (SDETs) caused some of my peer product units to lose out on the only people with real customer empathy.

I guess in one way there are still STEs, but now they're called "customers."
To keep ML fast and cheap, you want to keep compute as close to data as possible.

I don't think a web service would be broadly applicable. Perhaps in certain domains it would make sense, but bandwidth costs and duration would be a huge factor in most solutions.
Constellation.js
Demo: http://demo.danielmclaren.com/2013/constellation.js/release/...
However, the half-life of atmospheric CO2 is about 100 years.
That is a plausible explanation for why it hasn't been done. Do you have any argument for why we shouldn't do it?
I was under the impression that, since there hasn't been any recent evidence of warming, everybody had just substituted the more general term "climate change"...

Addresses a couple of your impressions rather directly:

http://thinkprogress.org/climate/2013/04/23/1909881/debunkin...
Hmm, you could avoid some downloads by basically populating the browser cache by default with some common libraries, like jQuery, and maybe a Lua VM if that catches on, yeah. But this would be totally different from shipping a nonstandard VM, since there is no violation of the standards process if you are basically just optimizing away first downloads of common JS libraries. It does have the cost of increasing the initial browser download though, which is perhaps why this isn't already done (also things like jQuery have many versions which makes things harder).

Note however that Google has not actually shipped NaCl or Dart. (NaCl technically ships in Chrome, but is disabled on the web by default, it is only usable in the Chrome Store.) So currently no browser is shipping a new nonstandard VM - which is good, because if a major browser did that it could fragment the web.
>>>Does the average person buying a laptop from Bestbuy really care that much about screen resolution?

I said desktop. People sit further away from laptop screens and at a totally different angle. Win 8 emphasizes touch, and all the AIO touchscreen desktop screens I've seen are too grainy to look at compared to tablet screens. Even if the pixel count is the same as a laptop, the pixels, obviously, are a hell of a lot larger.
Definitely had seen issues, but now that I'm commenting on this one, seems fixed.
Surely you're joking about 2/3 of those being remotely close to good ideas. And you made an account just to post this??
They work for me OSX 10.8.3 on Chrome 27.0.1453.93.

I can also access them from the HN2 app for Android on my Incredible.

(ironically though, anyone who can't use them can't comment here to inform us of that fact)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pax_Americana
I actually agree with you on this - but the Xbox came from a department that is segmented off from the rest of the company and uninfluenced by the rest of the corporate culture. The company made a breakthrough there, but in recent years they haven't been able to repeat that.
What's peculiar is the way certain words are used by the authors, like "systems" programming, or "programming at scale", etc.

I don't see how Go is more "systems-ey" than say, Java; other than allowing you to pack struct members together by separating pointer and value types in a certain way. C# already allows you to do something similar.

Furthermore, the main arguments I've seen for "programming at scale", are that unused vars get treated as errors, interfaces, and the way dependencies are managed (mainly to speed up compile times).

The latter has been solved by probably any modern language post-C++. Warnings as errors is a preference. Interface types aren't that special when looking at languages like Scala and Rust, which provide very nice and powerful type and trait systems that go really well together; while maintaining the ability to extend types by other traits, not that much unlike Go to begin with.

I am not a language designer, but I can't help but feel that the language was somehow designed into a corner, with the way interfaces and composition work together. All this is making adding generics much harder.
Ask HN: What does the EFF actually do with all their fundraiser money?
If you look at their site, eff.org, it looks a lot more like a news outlet than anything else. News articles are 99% of the content.

Across the top nav, they have "Take Action" and "Our Work" buttons. The former, IMO, oversells on its promise by a wide margin. All they do is re-route your message to some congressman who never looks at it anyway...

The latter at least includes a section advertising their "legal victories," but if you click on that, you find the list is only 9 items long, most of those items are from the 1990s, and none of them actually involve the EFF.

What do they need all this money for? They have these fundraisers all the freaking time.
And I wouldn't mind too much if what you're suggesting happened. But I've seen too much politics to bring myself to believe that it could get passed just like that, with no loopholes, pork, or other corruption.

You could structure it as a 95% of payments in go out to renewables producers. But the problem there is it doesn't provide any kind of stable payment structure for the renewables folks to structure their 10-50 year financing on.

If you set $x/kWh that's fine at first blush, but we could easily run into a situation with a big surplus (which goes into general coffers and is probably spent on wars) or a big deficit (which we definitely can't afford).

I like the idea but I can't see any way to implement it that doesn't end in tears in some way or another.
Am I missing something here, why is this "news"?

This "can't get right on first try" happens to virtually EVERY company. We don't even have to look too far back to find examples. Just one example would be Apple releasing Maps, which was oh-so-perfect out the gate.
WeakMaps don't quite give you everything that weak references do in other languages. Sometimes weak refs can be used to check if the object referred to has gone away (the weak ref becomes null in that case), that is not possible with WeakMaps. You also cannot create a list of weak references and iterate over them with a WeakMap.

There has been some discussion about adding more powerful weak refs to JavaScript, but I'm not sure where that discussion stands.
Where is your VPS hosted?
Well yes, and unfortunately for Microsoft they are never first to market. In my opinion, the iteration model only works if you're dominating the market. Otherwise, you need to create something that blows your competitors' products out of the water.
If I use my home internet, yes. If I use my lab's internet through a tunnel, no. I have checked that a forced-reload-all does not fix it, that switching back to home internet breaks comments again, and that this is true across multiple browsers. I should be able to provide network diagnostics if that would help.