skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
You have hit upon a key distinction, unfortunately the author is intentionally muddling these two issues of 1)scientific data is missing or being withheld and 2) global warming or the skepticism thereof.

"the data needed to verify the gloom-and-doom warming forecasts have disappeared"
"If there are no data, there’s no science."

There are plenty of mundane explainations for why scientists aren't providing data to people like Warwick Hughes. Perhaps Jones thought Hughes was a crank. Perhaps assembling the data was a lot of work and Jones didn't feel like going through all that work for someone he thought was just trying to raise trouble. Perhaps there were legal issues to providing the data publicly (as the article notes) that hadn't been resolved yet.

Of course Jones was wrong, all scientists should make every effort to provide data to anyone and everyone who wants it, even people they think are 'cranks'. In fact, Jones' reluctance to provide data to climate skeptics only fuels the fire of skepticism. But for the author to argue that this single act casts any serious doubt on the science of global warming is giving this incident far more importance than it deserves.
How to Measure a Website's Success
By advocating inaction, you are expressly taking the side of the denialists, even though you claim not to agree with them, technically

One thing that the world really needs to do is move beyond labels like "denialist". I'm sick of depiction that the only possible positions we can possibly take are "No way, global warming is absolutely a complete myth" and "zomg we're all going to die!"

The truth doesn't always sit somewhere between the two extremes on every controversial debate, but I'm pretty sure this is one of those cases where it does. One can think that anthropogenic global warming is probably a nonzero problem without buying into every extreme-level prediction or supporting every suggested policy prescription.
Chaos Theory vs Clojure
Amen. I'm surprised by how many developers think this is a totally reasonable debugging feature, and think that nobody is going to find it because it's in a hidden diagnostic support section of the application. Note to product developers: we always find these things.
"The whole "science has been wrong before" angle has been answered very well by lots of scientists. The answer basically boils down to, "Yes, but it's usually wrong in a continuous cycle of refinement, not wrong in a 180-degree direction kind of way"."

Well I'm talking about scientific revolutions, which are 180's

"If you -- or Michaels -- wants some credence in the scientific community, then you have to do some actual research, you have to have some actual data, and you have to get it peer-reviewed."

This happens all the time, but you don't hear about it, because they are against the scientific consensus.

Also, funding is 1000 times higher for pro-warming than against. If you want funding to study the blue-footed-boobie get in line, but if you want to study the effects of global warming on the blue-footed-boobie they throw money at you.

That's how it works.
Are there really trillions of dollars at stake?

I find absolutely no reason to believe any set of arm-waved statistics. And estimates of global growth decades into the future, from industry groups that can barely predict the fluctuations of their own business from one year to the next are at least as dubious as the most questionable of direct evidence for and against anthropogenic climate change.
9 out of 10 support requests for my app come from jailbroken users. About 1/3 are actual cracked copies; I can tell, because they register with our API server and the app sends along little bits of goodies. I ignore those, other than a "Buy a legitimate copy and I'll be more than happy to help you."

The other 2/3's are crashes from jailbroken devices. Directly caused by SBSettings. In fact, having the users go in and turn everything off in SBSettings usually fixes it.

So that's why jailbroken devices suck. It's not about "making it work the way they want", it's about having a stable environment for your applications to run in.
Computer security problems aren't that different from "real world" ones: it's a matter of trust. Either you believe that someone will do what you want, or they deceive you. While it's reasonable to have some systemic protections, at some point it is entirely up to the individual.

You might leave someone to watch over your house, and they could decide to trash it; that violates your trust, but it doesn't hurt your neighbor's house. You don't tie up every citizen to make it impossible for anyone to ever trash another house; you simply deal with that one trust violation, and learn from the experience. Also, you should tell others, to minimize how many suffer the same fate.
I agree, but it's hard not to get attached to something you dedicate a lot of time building, even when it's on a strictly for-pay basis. That's what happened here; it was bad when I left, but coming back and seeing what became of the system I spent so much time designing and looking after in the beginning was really difficult. They really did a lot of bad things to a good base.

People get emotionally involved in things by nature, and it's generally for the better. I just wish I could find an employer with some amount of comprehension on these things.
So does this constitute an indirect measurement of the size of the cache-savvy porn-consuming population?
How cell phones will change the world
That's a false dichotomy. There are not only "believers" and "non-believers" in any issue. It should always be the goal of all parties in the discussion to work from the best possible data/predictions.

Besides your argument is circular. The urgency you express with "THERE HAS TO BE A DECISION MADE" assumes that the data/predictions are correct.
Doesn't new money creation have the same effect as directly taking cash from the economy? After all, it does cheapen all available money. How, then, can he say that these costs are deferred?

Time-delay effect. In theory if everyone knows how much new money is being pumped into the economy (and exactly when it arrives, etc.) then the adjustment to reduced value of money happens instantly and you haven't accomplished much.

If instead the new money is injected stealthily into the economy (or at least: knowledge about it doesn't spread everywhere instantaneously) then the cost (in inflation) will be deferred (until "everyone figures it out" / prices re-adjust).

Thus in the short-term private sector spending would be mostly unaffected (b/c people have about the same nominal amounts of money as before and prices are still at about their previous nominal amounts) and over the longer term the inflationary effect kicks in and you pay for it.

In Keynes's time it would be pretty likely you could stealthily inject money and also it would be pretty likely that readjustment to the increased money supply would happen slowly; no internet, for one, and generally nowhere near as tightly integrated an economy as we have today.

That's not as clear today (information moves faster), but on the other hand information still takes time to work its way through the economy.
"Successful" and "not sucking" are two very different things.
You could have saved yourself a load of typing just by looking up the definition of "traitor" in the dictionary. By the way, while you are at it, look up "strawman" also.

To Stallman he is a traitor to the ideals and helping the enemy (see my other post on this page). This does not mean it's a conspiracy.

"i just wonder how much hollywood movies has affected our brains". Indeed.
Heh, puts the "Chronic Low-Level Radiation Good for Us? Taiwan Housing Accident Suggests So" ( http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=833662 ) story from a few days ago in a new light.
No, not a "motion sensor" in the traditional sense, at any rate.

After all, people sitting and reading or watching television or listening to music might not be moving enough to adequately indicate room occupancy. It is a room occupancy sensor, but without some NDAs, I am not saying any more than that.

Tom

Thanks for your response.
For groups of students it's basic tribal identity.

If our tribe decides that, say, downloading mp3s is alright, then we're more likely to download mp3s. If we decide that 'only those clowns from public universities do that' then we are less likely.

What would be interesting, is to see what would happen if the actor had merely proclaimed 'we don't cheat here' while wearing a white shirt. i.e. does the reiteration of a value alter behavior more or less than a specimen of the other tribe?
No, I do not have a web page as yet. Nothing to put on a web page at this point.

As I noted in my original posting, I lack the fgunds to develop a meaningful demonstration of this system. Short of laying out the PCBs, and writing the firmware, I have it all worked out. I am just stuck by that damnable nuisance, lack of money.

Tom
37signals Valuation Tops $100 Billion
Tag jumping is also cool: Ctrl-] will jump to the tag under the cursor and pushes the current location on the tag. Ctrl-T pops the tag stack and moves you back to your previous location. Good for checking the definition of a function and jumping back.
What VC's want from Entrepreneurs: a company that makes lots of money.
Sorry, I meant to expand what you were saying, not push back on it.
Of course it doesn't say anything about the system. I am not going to give away enough information to allow any decent electronics/embedded systems engineer to recreate it from my description.

Ifg you or anyone else is interested enough, and serious enough, to sign an NDA< I will be glad to reveal the ideas behind the design.

Tom
No. The agreements cover only Novell and their users.
He mentioned Devel::*, and showed screenshots of NYTProf, but didn't mention it by name. Thanks for pointing it out.
That is what makes it even worse. Those benefiting from that would be those who get to spend the extra money first and those affected are those that save. That would defeat the whole point of money as a store of value, since it would be losing its value.
I'm not sure it's good to admire ideological extremists. In fact, I think the opposite, what is admirable is empathy, the ability to see something from someone else's perspective. RMS seems incapable of this.
Believe it or not, but Miguel is probably one of the most pro - Free Software that I have read and write to, even if OSX or Windows were so awesome in year 2000, he would still work on GNOME and the Linux desktop. That's just something he truly believes.

And I don't think Miguel or RMS should engage in a flame war, we owe too much to this two guys, literately they have written millions of lines of code, that run on almost every desktop computer today.
Lifehack idea: not getting influenced by personality
I don't think we've really heard much about Microsoft needing more developers though. Certainly not in the sense that open source needs more developers.
Anyone else here remember how politics articles became ever more popular on reddit a while back?
Obligatory perl example, pretty messy:

U="onelinebot:one.onelinebot";curl -d 'track=obama' http://stream.twitter.com/track.json -u$U|perl -ne'/\"screen_name\":\"([^"]+)\"/&&`curl -d "" http://twitter.com/friendships/create/$1.json?follow=true -u$U`'
Tangent: you think Spolsky overdoes it with the marketing stuff, gruseom?
All I can say, after several years of Mobile development, is: Thank God.

We've been relegated to the dusty corners of the consumer market for so long. It's amazing to see the mainstream web services community catching on. Now we mobile guys just have to keep up...
He's talking about "facing bricks" being $2 billion unless it's a poor choice of phrasing.

These are non-load-bearing purely-decorative bricks. What does your intuition tell you is a good ballpark for the ratio of "load-bearing" bricks to "decorative" bricks?
I agree that it is difficult and I have been there myself. The thing is - if it's a typical work relationship, it's theirs to do with as they wish, even if you built it. That is the difficulty of doing creative work for hire. I think it is a tight rope walk, balancing sufficient investment to do a good job without becoming overly invested. It helps me to think of everything in terms of a means to an end. I still feel the same emotional attachment, but I run all my actions through a filter of whether that particular action is beneficial. Writing such an email and sending or publishing it simply cannot ever do you any good.
I think they were making fun of sites like TC a little bit as well.
Several years ago, a close friend of our family died in a bicycle accident.

He had troubles throughout his life - he was a recovering alcoholic of several years at that point, had been through a difficult divorce, was struggling to pay his bills. (He was an excellent carpenter; we still have many improvements on our family's house that he built through the years.) But he was very well read, and had much life experience, and I can remember staying up late into the night when I was in my very late teens; talking with him, and broadening my perspective on life and everything else.

I wasn't so close with him that it had near the same effect, but I can recall the feeling of loss I had when it finally sunk in that there would be no more conversations late into the night in our living room, and imagining that feeling multiplied by interacting with someone as closely as such a co-founder is almost unbearable.

My condolences for your loss.
Twitter Gets More Funding… For What?
Probably so; he was asking how money-printing defers costs and I explained it.
Sorry if my question upset you. I was being serious. You mentioned Turtles all the way down so I figured that you were using a Lisp OS.

What did you mean by Turtles all the way down if you actually aren't using a Lisp OS?

What is "Chew it"?
> But that's the point: THERE HAS TO BE A DECISION MADE.

No, not really. That's an argument that's often heard from the confirmalists(1), injecting it into the discussion as a premise. It's not the language of people who are confident truth is on their side.

The action-now argument assumes that no significant technological advances will be made. If e.g. desalination on a massive scale becomes viable, most of the drought-problem can be solved. If the nuclear power waste problem can be solved (e.g. by raising the efficiency), we can slash a huge percentage of current emissions with little to no downside. If artificial photosynthesis becomes viable, we can even wash out already emitted CO2.

Deciding against globally orchestrated emissions programs -- which will have very real costs in terms of economic growth, which fuels increases in living standards, especially in countries where it isn't so high -- isn't denying climate changes. It's arguing that we're already hard at work slashing our dependencies on fossil fuels, and that we probably know a lot more in 20 years than we do today.

If I'm wrong, and we don't take the decision, then we're much better equipped, both technologically and financially, to handle the situation in 20 years than we are today. If I'm right, and we do it, then we're severely limiting the ability of the worlds poorest regions in increasing their own well-being. 400 mio. Chinese entering the middle class, and accepting that a western standard of living (car, air condition, heating, hot baths, flying on vacation) is going to be denied to them because of changes in the climate lying decades ahead? Not gonna happen, no matter what Hu Jintao said at the UN.

(1) It's a stupid word, but so is deniers and denialists.
This article has spent an hour or two on the front page with no discussion. I've always wondered what that means; perhaps in this situation, it means that YC's active commenters aren't active PHP developers?

Regardless, I think this is a pretty cool idea. It seems like a lot of effort to emulate what's (arguably) a missing language feature, but for those of us who are stuck in PHP for one reason or another, it's an interesting development.
This is a fairly old article from the beginnings of Ximian (hint at it's age that it was still called Helix Code). And most of his points are valid - Linux had a LONG WAY TO GO at the point he wrote this. Ximian did a lot to change that. Before Novell bought them, Ximian pushed their own more polished build of Gnome, and produced products like Evolution and the Exchange connector (then a paid, licensed product which was worth every penny for those of us stuck in companies using Exchange) which really changed the game for Linux on the desktop.

The reality is, as a few other people have said - not everything Microsoft does is bad. I'm of the opinion that their Apps (e.g. Office) and OS (e.g. "Vista") groups are the issue most people think of. Ancient, bloated code with no real vision, and stomping on the competition. Yet, if you look at what the .Net team does lately, they have fulltime Python and Ruby developers, they've made huge efforts to contribute code outward to the community and standardise things. There is cooperation happening, partly because people inside and outside Microsoft are making an effort to change things.

If you stand around beating the "Microsoft is evil" drum you at the least ignore the fact that Windows has ~80-90% Market share (roughly ad libbing #s from Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows) for desktop computers. The reality is this: NOT EVERYTHING MICROSOFT DOES IS WRONG. They clearly are doing some things right, and the early Gnome efforts (from my observation and opinion at least) seemed to echo that fact in how they improved the UI and usability.

No, I'm not saying we should make Unix windows, and certainly I'm remembering this is an almost 10 year old article. I still recall the first install I did of a Linux with Gnome (early version, IIRC it was the first Red Hat that shipped Gnome). It was an incredible change, and wildly impressive.

Quite simply ,all other issues aside... Shouting down critics who suggest something you just don't want to hear rather than listening to their arguments is a rather poor approach to life; especially as a developer. I'm not making any claims of being a saint in that regard, but I've found most of the times I do it that I regret it.

Finally... read the article again. I can state from experience that most of what he claims was an issue at the time. And that most of it has been fixed in a lot of ways since. Linux today is what it is because people like Miguel worked hard to improve things, and listen to what other companies, open source or not, had to say.

Here's a thought: Spend the time to find everything that Miguel, Ximian, Gnome or anything else related projects have touched. Go ahead and uninstall them and see just how much you lose from Linux functionality.

I still have a set of Slackware 3.2 floppies in storage somewhere... that's a nice taste of the days before we started thinking "Maybe unix needs some improvement after all."
Awesome quote:

"If you’re on Windows it’s basically the same approach, you just have to start by installing Linux, but afterwards you’ll also get this result in all its animated splendor:"

(Emphasis mine)
Companies also have the ability to identify potential customers by researching what someone says on a social network. If a Zappos employee read someone's tweet about having sore feet and was able to recommend a pair of shoes that you would be interested in buying, would that be as big of turn off to you as well?
For those looking for an alternative to dropbox I can recommend SpiderOak (https://spideroak.com)

- Unlimited number of devices (computers) in one account
- Slightly cheaper
- Windows, Mac and Linux client
- 100% Zero-knowledge security and client side encryption key creation.

My 5 cent
Bullshit. As if no one else could have created a linux desktop? There were already plenty of window managers at the time. The distance between a window manager and a "linux desktop" is pretty slim.

There were plenty of Linux WMs but they didn't aspire to do anything more than what (fv)wm was doing and it was considered fancy to support ICCCM. X was big and bulky and it had to be accepted for what it was. Actually, most Linux users were happy with FWVM2 and other stuff, OpenLook and CDE were frowned upon as a corporate kludge, perhaps in sour grapes.

The genius of GNOME was not just the delivery of a full Free desktop, first, but also the ballsy withdrawal from everything X. GNOME said we're gonna bring our own libraries and we're gonna supplant and supersede X. They brought in a display manager, session manager, input translator, etc. They didn't stop there but they also brought unorthodox, at least to unix, computing models: they brought a component object model with CORBA/Orbit. GNOME kept pushing the boundaries and for once defining what Linux should look like, not a poor man's SysV-clone, but a new desktop OS to be judged on its own. So much so that an early port to Solaris was the hottest thing on Sunfreeware.
I think you missed my point. It's not a dichotomy at all, it's a spectrum. There is some (incomplete) evidence, and some choices of action available, and some (uncertain) costs to be borne because of those choices.

Your point seems to be that we should do nothing, because we don't know that the "data/predictions are correct".

That's not a middle ground, it's a choice. You are making an AFFIRMATIVE decision that the costs (amortized over probabilities) of regulation are greater than those of inaction. I don't think you realize this. You think you're just delaying a decision, but because the cost models aren't constant, you're actually making one. And obviously I think you're making it based on some very flawed logic.
Better that one vendor incompetently write a driver than have Microsoft open the floodgates with a shockingly insecure API 'feature' (again).

It's much easier to replace third parties than the OS.
He probably doesn't understand your emotional reaction to that dollar amount, because in his world $5k is a token amount, not a real cost.
I think the separators between posts need to be more pronounced. At first glance, it looks like it's all one big article and it's very visually jarring to look at it all at once.
I don't believe I asked you to buy into "every" prediction or support "every" prescription.

But it's a fair point: which regulation choices do you support? My experience is that the seemingly-moderate "science is incomplete" skeptics, when pressed, generally argue for no action at all. That would put them much farther on the "denialist" (I don't know what other label to use, and you didn't offer a suggestion) end of the spectrum, no?
It may not have been in the original article, but someone here on HN stated it best–this is basically a protection racket

From Wikipedia: "A protection racket is an extortion scheme whereby a powerful entity or individual coerces other less powerful entities or individuals to pay protection money which allegedly serves to purchase protection services against various external threats, usually violence or property damage."

Powerful entity: Brands in Public with their authority domain and SEO ranking

Purchase protection services: if you pay BIP, you can edit your page, thereby protecting your reputation.

External threats: in this case, not violence but the PR damage your company might suffer if negative/false information appears on the front of your BIP page.
Twitter confirms new round of funding
Is Twitter Worth a $1 Billion? Can They Generate $300M in Revenue in 5 Years?
yes! .dropboxignore please!
In a recession, there's sometimes a bit of deflation, or at least much-slowed inflation, so you have some more leeway to just start pumping money into the economy (by actually printing money, or by lowering interest rates).