skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The important ones, basically. It's not 1990 anymore. There have now been many predictions made for times now in the past based on the same climate models being used to predict disaster, and they are now almost uniformly wrong.

The Met Office in Britain is one of the clearest. Are they predicting a wet summer for Britain? Brits should buy suntan lotion. Are they predicting a hot, dry summer? Brits should plant something that likes wet, dark conditions. They are the source of one of the models in the IPCC report, and they're predictions for a year or two out are wrong, consistently.

And I find the idea that a climate model can't predict a year in advance, consistently, but can be used for 10 or 100 years in advance to be absolutely ludicrous. Utter mathematical illiteracy is required to think that is true of a chaotic system. It remains unclear to me whether climate researchers actually understand that "a chaotic system" is actually a mathematically meaningful statement and not "an excuse for why we were wrong, again". (No sarcasm, it truly remains unclear to me. Chaos theory is a real thing, and I'd really like to think that climate researchers would know a lot about it, but I've only seen faint traces of it, where I expect the terminology to dominate the discourse.)

Given the utter failure of these predictions on a year and a decade scale (as I've said before, had the climate scientists said "hey, there's going to be a 15-year plateau because of this and this which will mask the problem but then this is going to happen", I'd be fine with that), I see no reason to believe they'll work on a century scale.

At the moment, the most reasonable explanation is that the models used by the IPCC up to this point have been grossly wrong about their positive heating feedback claims, which if you dig, were never really that well substantiated by actual evidence, they have always been modeling choices. In the real science world, those claims are being walked back quite rapidly with a variety of peer reviewed studies providing both evidence of this and potential models for explanations; this has not penetrated to the political portion of the AGW crowd yet. This is probably because the science, to my eyes, is rapidly converging on "global warming is unlikely to be a problem in this century, and may even be a net benefit to humanity". I wouldn't be surprised this is the dominant science consensus in ten years.
Can't wait to see what comes out of KC next!
The only Mac version that ever shipped used a commercial Wine wrapper. None of the open-source client forks have completely removed all the windows-specific dependencies, so there are not any native ports yet. The biggest sticking points are Direct3D and an older version of PhysX.
Perfect for using your offline cached copy of Wikipedia to recreate civilization after the apocalypse?
You specifically said that climate scientists had made predictions that hadn't come true. Now you repeat again that we don't have a good track record. Which predictions in particular are you talking about? How good do our predictions have to be for you to accept them as good enough?

What is your evidence for the current course not being catastrophic? How are you defining catastrophic? To the human species? Or to the daily lives of a couple of billion people? Those are quite different, and the first at least isn't seriously being suggested by scientists that I'm aware of.
More than $800 billion has been requested by the president and appropriated by Congress for the war in Iraq over the last 10 years.

It is impressive that for just over 1% of that budget we've measured the age of the universe and its rate of expansion. I'm happy for my tax dollars to go to any type of scientific advancement rather than killing other humans.
A loan that you couldn't have gotten otherwise is still a subsidy, just as student loans are a subsidy for education.
The monthly service payment discounts (subsidizes) the phone purchase.
As soon as you understand that git is just a DAG then it becomes simpler to understand and reason about than any other VCS I have used.
True. Though if they ever marketed it as what it actually contains they would get considerably more heat.

Hacker instinct took over :)
Call me maybe: Cassandra
Ember Guide Spanish Translation
I opened this repo in order to translate the Ember Guides into Spanish if anyone is interested. I should have the first part out in an hour or so.
Cubehero launches OpenSCAD previews
The same criticisms are leveled at the standard model of physics. You're right that it's hard for a theory to be falsified if it can be molded to fit any data. But it still does need to be consistent with past measurements and future measurements and what we know of the physical principles that drive the climate.

It also isn't that difficult to demonstrate the underlying principles that are in action. The greenhouse gas effect is fairly easy to measure experimentally (it was first experimentally measured in 1859).

Modelling the climate accurately is a very hard problem but we don't have an untouched completely controllable alternate climate on which to perform experiments. It's still better than throwing up our hands and declaring understanding impossible.
See it in action:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gkHoV6XJGsk
Google - Our History in Depth
Previous discussion:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6445657
With how many countries did the US engage in pre-emptive wars with false premise and without much if any support from rest of the world in the last few decades, which resulted in 100s of thousands of death? Lets not forget the US financed dictators that killed many more and the topplings of democratically elected governments that resulted in civil wars and more deaths...

And now compare that with Chinese record, or does it not fall under "human rights" category?

American exceptionalism is the most disgusting theory if there ever was one.
Joking about Breaking Bad spoilers: the surefire way to ruin your mailing list.
Faith does not mean belief without evidence, it is more belief in something not seen. That does not imply a lack of evidence.

For example, you have faith in the efficacy of a pharmaceutical product based on the fact that you trust the peer reviewers of the reports of its clinical trials, and the reputation of the journals those reports are published in.

Without faith you could not accept any scientific conclusion unless you had directly observed the experiments they were based on. Neither could you believe anything on the news or any historical event you hadn't observed.
Yeah, Neil Postman wrote about this same basic issue in his book Amusing Ourselves to Death (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amusing_Ourselves_to_Death), and that came out nearly 30 years ago.
Mailbox iPhone app vulnerability executes any Javascript from HTML mail body
I'm Alexis Ohanian + I'd like to be your mentor (+ fund all BK STEM classrooms)
Wow. This should be illegal or at least require labeling. Intentionally crippling a product in an obviously unexpected way should at least require disclosure.
Qualcomm being at the bottom is counter to my experience in writing GL ES 2.0 apps on Android (since the Motorola Droid!). Adreno generally performs very well, and doesn't have weird performance characteristics like Mali and SGX. I also like Tegra because it has solid predictable performance. A big part of why Qualcomm have been cleaning house in the Android world is because they have a more solid BSP, so compared to the other ARM guys they have a pretty good software group.

I don't use most of the extensions that the Dolphin guys are using, though, and I wouldn't expect anything but the most basic ES 3.0 stuff to work. But maybe spending so many years on mobile has taught me to have low expectations! :).
You are correct. Yikes, I got that one wrong.
Getting things done with Google Tasks
It's the difference between must have features like the ability to communicate with people you want to talk to and features like desktop/status/etc that are nice to have but not essential. The tech community demands perfection and obsesses over anything/everything while normal people just use what works.
Having "only a handful of employees" is hardly creating jobs. And Apple is a notorious example of a company that doesn't actually reinvest most of the money they avoid paying in taxes, they just sit on enormous cash reserves (reinvestment is often used as an excuse for tax breaks and tax holidays here in the US).
First time: about two months salary. I'd just been laid off for the second time in two years, and rather than find another job in the same industry, I decided to try doing my own thing for a while. It was a great learning experience and I eventually came out ahead, but I basically lived month to month for several years.

Second time: about a year's salary in savings, and I had enough revenue to live on by the time I quit my day job. I was probably overly cautious, but my wife was pregnant and I didn't want to blow it.
I'm sorry, I always feel that if they are distracted by their tech and not socializing, they really don't want to socialize with you. I often use the book/phone/tech as an excuse to not socialize. I tell people to email me what they want (or reminders of what they said), family knows that IMing me is the best way to get a response from me. I'll add that I have social anxiety and I don't process verbal information well.
This strawberry picker was in the news last couple of days:

http://www.japantimes.co.jp/news/2013/09/26/business/latest-...
Do you really need a co-founder? I think co-founders are over-rated.

> You need to have someone in the team that can fix a crashed server at 3am, or burn the midnight oil to hit a new feature deadline.

Almost every contractor I've worked with on elance has been willing to work whatever hours were required. For $5 an hour. Why give up precious equity for something you could hire out for a few dollars an hour?

> To date I have been using a contractor to build Satago, and whilst he is very good (one of the best developers I’ve worked with to be honest, but sadly based very far away from me in Russia) the fear is that without the large chunk of equity that a co-founder would be working towards, he could just down tools, and then Satago would grind to a halt.

If I were you I would find a few other good developers to work with. Elance has them in abundance and they'll be more than happy to work for you at $5-$10/hr. (I prefer fixed-budget projects, personally.)

Here's how I get projects done: I take a few INDEPENDENT features from the product roadmap, set clear expectations with the developers, hand off the code, iterate, finalize, then pay my main developer to integrate their code into the main code-base. In my case I'm the lead developer so I do the code integration, in your case maybe it would be your contractor from Russia.

If the developers I've hired write good code and deliver as promised I keep them. If they don't I move on to someone else. In one year I've gone through 6 developers and kept 2 of them. 2 competent, hard working, reliable developers.

When I said "set clear expectations", some expectations I've found useful to establish with a contractor are: clearly define the project specifications (you need to be able to tell them exactly what needs to be done), clearly define the project deadlines (first iteration due in 2 weeks), clearly define the budget ($300 for features X, Y, and Z), and clearly define the communication requirements (respond to emails within 24 hours, provide constant work status updates). It's also a good idea to let them know that you're looking for developers with whom you can establish a long-term relationship and that this small project they're about to work on is a test. If they meet your expectations you will keep working with them, if they don't you won't be repeating business.

I also make sure to tell them that the code needs to be thoroughly documented. It helps the other developers who have to work with their code and it could help you get an idea of what's going on under the hood.

In summary, I think technical co-founders are over-rated. I see no reason to give up equity for something that can be easily contracted out. Ok, finding good contractors isn't "easy". It takes a lot of time -- it's taken me 9 months to find 2 solid ones. But the ones I've found can reliably get the job done, on time, within budget, guaranteed. I own 100% of my company.
MIT Skycall uses drones to guide users around campus
There are certainly some good points covered here, and it looks like it would be better than the current status quo of extorting payments as "settlements" when one party can't afford the legal fees.

I do wonder if all these new measures will head us into a situation of patent entrenchment though, whereby patents already granted to (or subsequently acquired by) the biggest players actually increase substantially in real values due to the greater difficulty in getting new patents granted.

What I'm sure a lot of us would like to see is a better means by which to invalidate existing patents that have become standards-essential. Of course, the problem then is that you're seen as effectively punishing the most successful of ideas (in reality a lot of those patents should never have been granted in the first place).

This has become a longer response than I intended. Hopefully someone eminently more knowledgable on this will be along to solve the problem shortly!
Shopariffic - Buy in 60 seconds or less
Which fingers do you use? For me it's left index and ring and right middle.
See my other reply.

And to be honest, as far as I'm concerned one must seek out predictions that have come true, quite selectively. If you randomly sample the ones that have completion dates in the past, they are almost uniformly false. You speak as if you feel yourself in a position of moral authority, but I do not accept the moral authority of people who choose words over the plain science.

And there's always the big one... those big curves drawn where temperatures go up, up, up over this entire century, where instead they've stayed flat, flat, flat, and we've fallen out of most of the confidence intervals (and very nearly out of the rest). The spinning on how this really is what we predicted all along is getting quite mind boggling. No, the temperature trend of the last 15 years is never what was predicted. It is merely what actually happened.

Goodness help us all if those who think the solar activity level actually sets our temperature on a several-year delay are correct, and the global temperature starts going down. How will that be spun, I wonder? (Though that is merely one possibly theory. At this point I consider the late-1990s catastrophic model that still dominates the discourse plainly false, but it remains rather unclear what is true. I'd still put quite a bit of probability on "the chaotic system is fundamentally unpredictable past a few years" myself. It's been the smart money for the past 20 years and I don't see a lot of reason to move it.)
I encourage you to read past the headlines. Assuming your personal scientific methodology permits it.
Features =/= Crapware

Apple was not paid by a third party to include it's own software features.

Game Center is like S Voice, a first part developed software that is billed as a "Feature".

Apple has no equivalent to "Pizza Hut" bookmarks that can't be deleted, because they control their carrier relationships better than Samsung who is willing to give their partners the freedom to install and screw up what they want.

Fortunately, Samsung is generally pretty good about letting us users have custom roms, which IMO trumps the Apple advantage for us power users. A custom rom > non-bloated default iOS, to me.
For the record, it's 6 (today)
There is a difference between default apps and apps for which the manufacturer was paid to put on the phone in order to advertise to the purchaser.

Apple does not get paid by another company to load its default apps onto the phone.
That's correct. Should be within a few hrs :)
I hope you inform them you were joking. I think it's pretty irresponsible to misrepresent a problem this potentially serious.
Although it is true that the consumers in the town are paying less for the goods, their salaries are also smaller on average. Meanwhile, in some other town that happened to be more aligned with increasing demands for human labor (Silicon Valley) people are getting richer. When those peopl visit the small town, their income dwarfs the town's inhabitants' income.

All this is mitigated somewhat when a town can issue its own currency. But if they are forced to use the country's fiat currency, they may start defaulting on their loans. This can explain what happened with the PIGS countries' economies after they joined the EU for example.

In any event, the income disparity pushes some people around (making them move) . There is an ever greater amount of people unable to earn enough to leave their small town to a "booming center" without significant risk. Those who do are willing to put up with worse conditions in order to get a chance at the big bucks. This happened for 10 years in the Great Depression as farmers migrated to the cities and our country transitioned to be dominated by industrial sector. A sector which has been disrupted in the last 30-40 years much as the agricultural sector was before.

However, even with all that, a growing "underclass" of people becomes less economically significant. For example why develop vaccines for them? The overall pictureis that automation increasingly favors the capitalists over the wage laborers. One of the best ways that has worksd to mitigate this is to decentralize the capital, eg have wordpress and linux instead of facebook and windows. Patents work against this, though.
None.

I don't know if it matters but this was in 2000 (and not in SV/SF). I was doing IT/help desk for a UPS call center with a few servers and 75 workstations (on a token ring network!).

We had been doing educational software in our spare time. We landed a couple decent contracts and I decided to quit and go for it (I was also a senior at Cal Poly and quit). At the time, my rent was $400/month and I wasn't married. We found an office for $250/month.

Of course 18 months later things got real tight. After the .com crash, a lot of california colleges got their budgets cut. But we survived long enough to sell the company at the same time a new one started and took off.

I'm sure there's lots of sound advice here and my story shouldn't be a model.

I haven't had a real job since and I'm still a senior ;)
I quit my day job this September, with €14,000 ($19,000) in savings. But I already have cybranding.com making some money - and very good reasons to think things will move fast now. Otherwise, having a family to support, I would never have done so before raising some money!
Why do Recruiters want us, where's the catch? (Share your Experience)
Hi,

I'm regularly getting mails from people calling themselves Recruiter, Business Developer and in some cases Headhunter. I've not responded to many of them, except a few recent ones that I politely answered "no". But they keep mailing me.

Why do these people send us these requests and why do some want our resumes, or a description of what type of work we want to do? How should we react to it? Is there a catch, or do you recommend to take the opportunity?

A friend of mine once got cold called by someone who knew all of his past history and he never actually send his resume to that company who wanted to acquire him (he was employed at that time anyway). They refused to tell where they got his info from, but eventually it came out that a previous company he applied to, sold his resume to other companies.
You say this is an example of an application that does not depend on a service.

It seems to me this is an application that should depend on a service or two.

For example, you have your data in a big global variable. This is not a good practice.

I think Angular is one of those things where it pays to learn all its parts as soon as possible (services, compiles, etc..). I say this as someone who is going through the learning curve as well.
Very cool. It would be awesome to automate as much as possible of permaculture and everything you need to create small communities that can survive entirely off the grid in a way that affords people plenty of free time.

People who did this might want to also check out the Global Village Construction Set:

http://opensourceecology.org/wiki/Global_Village_Constructio...
Ellipsis Programming Language
Google has stopped innovating, at least as far as features I appreciate is concerned.

I agree. But, as always, we're not the customer, we're the product. Google continues to innovate on things that make money. Why would you expect a profit-seeking company to do otherwise?
It's pretty rare, so probably not worth fretting over, but IIRC sometimes multiple people will request the same document, and different words or sections will be redacted in one and preserved in the other.

This is a benefit for people who want to know what different reviewers disagree on treating as sensitive, as those could be interesting topics to research further.
At least now you can bury them in a folder.
I have that book and really like it. I have been trying to apply it to my embedded work. It's a great start but we need a lot more development in that area, including more active support from the big embedded tool vendors.
About $100k. It lasted me 4 years. Frankly, I sort of wish I'd had a lot less. I never felt any sort of urgency like "This must succeed."

No regrets though. The last 4 years have been a lot of fun. :)
Show HN: gif-roulette, bookmarklet to replace all images with random imgur pics
I'd love to have the number of choices that Americans have in the wireless market, compared to the rather protected cartel we have in Canada. Verizon dropped some hints about coming here, recently, and the Big 3 wireless companies here launched a huge campaign to try to stop it.
ooo shittttt... this is going to be awesome and its for a great cause. we need more of these peps in the world.
Also, you can't put Newsstand into a folder
I'm curious if PayPal will begin to shift to make accepting PayPal requests as simple as credit card. I suppose the problem with that is the need to supply a password, but they could change things in PayPal to use something like Google Authenticator to use a 6-digit pin, or perhaps a separate purchase-only password that cannot log into the account.

It would be great to be able to use the same API to accept credit card and PayPal payments. I currently use Braintree for CC payments but I have to have a completely separate workflow for PayPal payments.
If You Can't Analyze, Test
I really did not expect that. That's one of the best unexpected funny things I've experienced this week. I don't think I would have found it as funny if I had stumbled on it randomly; the discussions here provided the perfect context for this link.
Great. Thanks a ton! :)
Sleep-learning
I was really hoping that this was about an actual dolphin emulator.
Hindsight is 20/20 Bill :)
Well, more or less exactly what you said. An active attack is detectable, a passive one is not. There is no risk to me if I walk around with a wifi adapter in promiscuous mode just recording traffic. Actually doing a mitm exceeds my admittedly low risk tolerance.
The website scours the internet for popular URLs and then ranks them according to how popular they are on facebook!
I would love to get input from HN on my new project!
Thank you very much in advance.
Samsung doesn't own OS like Apple does. Despite Samsung selling more phones than Apple, they don't have the clout like apple does.
Not sure how it works in the US but last time I bought a new phone in the UK I calculated the total cost of ownership over 24 months of various options, including buying the phone unlocked plus a SIM-only airtime deal, and getting the phone-plus-airtime on a contract.

The contract worked out cheaper. That's a subsidy isn't it?