skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
"that the data is basically fraudulent."

Where's the claim the data is fraudulent?

The claim is the data is missing. This is not the same. The presumption that it did exist is the reasonable conclusion, however, for it to be scientifically useful, people need to be able examine the data from the beginning. Correction techniques are routine applied to data across a wide variety of sciences, but are themselves something legitimately subject to scientific examination due to their intrinsic danger.

For all you know, the corrected data underestimates warming due to use of bad correction methods! How would you prove this, though? The data is missing.

Here's a very important point: This isn't about global warming or the skepticism thereof. This is a story about scientific malfeasance. Going to town defending people who can't produce their data, in accordance with the basic scientific principle of reproducibility, is an enormous flashing warning sign that you are deciding positions based on politics and not science. The scientific principle is clear: The data should be readily available for others to examine, full stop. That examiners may challenge it is a feature of the scientific process, not a bug!

There's really no room for debate on this, unless you are willing to admit up front that science is not a relevant consideration to your position, in which case, yeah, sure, go nuts defending the guys who won't produce their data. But you should be aware you've left science behind.

Am I personally a skeptic? Yes. But this isn't why, nor do I consider this evidence of my position. It is just plain scientific malfeasance of the kind that can pop up anywhere; since it's hardly the only piece of evidence in any direction, it's not really a story about this one piece of evidence. But it's critical to root this stuff out, call it out, and address it head on, for the same reasons it's important to call out the corruption of any other process. You can't tolerate this stuff, or it gets worse. I would by the first to criticize anyone who published one of the (many) scientific publications that bolster my personal beliefs if they refused to share data with "critics". This is basic science.
Sending email with Gmail using the CodeIgniter PHP Framework
It might be a good idea to make a break and restart the idea with just you.

That's not ethical. Whatever equity Greg had belongs to his estate.
I don't want to see environmental catastrophe any more than you do so why haven't you convinced me?

Because as ever I'm offered a litany of highly questionable statements supposedly adding up to something so obvious that only an idiot could fail to recognize it but when as here, I (proxy 'I' at least) ask to look at the data, I get Dr. Phil Jones from the UK Met Office saying

"We have 25 years or so invested in the work. Why should I make the data available to you, when your aim is to try and find something wrong with it?"

As a doctoral student impressed by Karl Popper's views on science I thought the idea was indeed to try to discover any flaws in theories and the data supposedly supporting them with the goal of making genuine progress in understanding the world.

And of course trillions of dollars are linked to the veracity of that and analogous data. This is indeed a scandal.
I always find stories like this frustrating. Users in general are led to believe that regardless of any other factors USB 3.0 is going to be faster than USB 2.0. The simple fact is that even with the fastest modern HDD you're not going to be able to saturate the bus with a single drive...

I realize that, as always, there is a difference between theory and practice. Protocol overhead is going to take up bandwidth and you're not necessarily going to get the full allowance, but still...
Sorry for your loss... I'm glad it sounds like you're trudging on

It's rumored that this was something Gates and Co nearly had to deal with:

http://www.pbs.org/cringely/pulpit/2006/pulpit_20060330_0008...

It would be great if there was a fair way for all living parties to deal with this issue.
And I'd argue the opposite. Messy, complex designs are hard to unit test. Writing unit tests encourages clean, well-defined, orthogonal interfaces.
Integrating Tarzan AWS PHP Toolkit as a CodeIgniter Library
Efficient Editing With vim
That is probably why the pages mention "unofficial" 5 times and "automatically generated by" 7 times. And contrary to GetSatisfaction, the associated logo isn't on the page.
Microsoft Research releases Barrelfish - OS optimized for multiple cores
Is the first sentence driving ANYONE else completely up the wall?

The Unix system, designed and constructed in the 70s by people living in a very different world from us, and it has stagnated.

The Unix system and it has stagnated.
i am a bit late to the game here. but i have used FDC for a year or two and have been very happy. Have one dedicated unmetered 100mbit box. it owns.

They also have GREAT support.
Multi-core CPUs: the end of Moore’s law
While Moore’s law may still be technically valid, for all intents and purposes it is no longer true.
That's actually a really good idea - I'll keep that in mind for the future!
Seriously. It's an invitation to a conversation with the minor stipulation that "their terms" include paying him $4800 a year...
Are you actually willing to be convinced?

Yes, if this Dr. Phil Jones said that, it's totally against everything science stands for.

But it says absolutely nothing about all the other sources of data that confirm the existence of global warming.
Your point about "embrac[ing] the Unix philosophy" is a good one. Probably not the biggest factor for mainstream adoption, but significant nonetheless. While there are some Lisps now that that do this well (particularly those that compile to C, such as Chicken Scheme), it has a big historical precedent.

I've been wondering how Lisp would look if it were redesigned from the ground up to include Unix's philosophy, and I'm beginning to think that Erlang would be a good candidate. (With a healthy dose of Prolog as well.)
I have a bad feeling that this Spolsky post --- which I liked, for what it's worth --- is going to spark a very long, very boring testing vs. shipping controversy, in which both sides, by taking sides, are going to come off grating and sanctimonius.
The sad thing is that absurd arguments work. All that's needed for denialism to win is doubt. Just one goof, or bad actor, or wrong result can be spun like this into a "collapse" of the case it is making.

The fact that this is an argument of risk, where the argument for carbon legislation needs to be weighed not against the certainty of the science but on the best-guess risks of inaction is completely lost on the public and the media.
Infrastructure 2.0 Requires Collaboration
I'm surprised and a little bothered by the responses here, especially yours.

Assuming that the subject here was, say, evolution, would you respond the same? Would you be saying, "Well, we should consider it exciting, interesting, and daring when someone says that there's not actually any factual basis for evolution"?

The other commenters are correct in their critique of this. Michaels isn't offering evidence contrary to most scientists' understanding of climatology. That would be exciting, daring, and interesting. Merely attempting to discredit climate research by saying that they're missing data that they once had is ... well, it's thin at the least, and it doesn't further the debate at all.

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".

It is extremely wasteful to have to keep answering the same questions over and over in scientific contexts, especially when those are brought by people who aren't familiar with the field, and especially when their questions basically amount to, "You haven't answered all my questions the way I wanted you to, and you might be wrong."

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.

That's how it works.
A nice article on two points.

1. A good explanation of something I had wondered about.

2. A technical level above "History Channel popularization" but below PhD dissertation. Is it just me or does it seem like articles at this level are very rare?
1,000 year-old math problem solved
I had no idea that there were famous "TDD-ers" or "Agile-ers" that were infamous for not being able to code at all. I just don't keep track of this stuff that closely. Thanks!
Sorry for your loss. I lost a close co-worker once and it was extremely painful. Do not hesitate to cry if you want to. Laugh at some of your good moments, jokes. Say something to him out loud if you want to "Hey Gregg, how would you solve this problem?". I hope you continue with your project, I am sure Gregg will support you along the way.
Well, what that really means is "the only way to build this feature is by writing code that gets signed, either by you or by some trustworthy guy." The trust is supposed to come from the code signing, not from the fact that it's a driver and not a user-mode app.
FTA: However, there do exist other types of devices commonly used on wings that create a similar effect to the dimples used on golf balls. Though these wing devices also create turbulence in order to delay flow separation, the purpose is not to decrease drag but to increase lift. One of the most popular of these devices is the vortex generator.

Upvoted for informing me that a device called a "vortex generator" actually exists.

SWEET.
I didn't see it in the slides but it maybe Tim being a bit modest because he didn't mention NYTProf:

* http://search.cpan.org/dist/Devel-NYTProf/

* http://blog.timbunce.org/2008/07/15/nytprof-v2-a-major-advan...

For more testing stuff checkout the Perl5 wiki: http://www.perlfoundation.org/perl5/index.cgi?testing
This is a long post, mostly filled with things that are either irrelevant to what I said or obviously wrong. But the basic place where it disagrees with Keynes is that it adopts the old-time monetarist view that printing money always "debases" the currency. This seems intuitive, but it's been proven just wrong. During the period I mention when we kept interest rates low, the economy grew steadily. When monetarist targeting was tried (under Volcker), we got a huge recession. The recent problem wasn't caused by low interest rates but a housing bubble. If Greenspan had simply given a speech pointing out the bubble instead of repeatedly denying it, it could have been averted.
Experts awed by Anglo-Saxon treasure found by a bloke with a metal detector
As always, it has been an intellectual feast to read through the comments on both sides of this debate. I would just like to throw this out there to see what YC thinks. Is this possibly an explanation to the warming we are seeing?
Mars Warming Points to Solar, not Human, Causes for Global Warming
http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2007/02/070228-mars-...

Also, I'm curious if anybody knows what other alternative theories are out there?
Downvoted.

This post is completely ad hominem. It's also easily shown wrong by a quick perusal of Cato's web site. The statement "They exist to serve the interests of the energy industry" is obviously false, because they clearly publish about all sorts of regulation, foreign policy, etc. One couldn't even say they're Conservative shills (not that this post did), because they also seem to favor gay rights and decriminalization of marijuana.

But none of this says anything, one way or the other, about the veracity of the OP, or the utility of its thesis.
> If it wasn't for Miguel and his work there wouldn't be Redhat, Suse, Caldera, Mandarake, or any of the major corporate linux distros.

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.

> In 2001, Ximian was the hottest thing to run on a PC. If they put a price tag on it they could have sold it in custom boxes at $5k and would have had buyers, but it was free...

And then Ximian died. Perhaps they should have sold it for $5k a box instead, hm?
So how do you weigh your decision? Are you waiting for unassailable evidence? What is your best guess at the cost of regulation needed to fix the problem you are not unconvinced exists? How does that cost change over time as we do nothing? Or do you care about any of that?

This isn't (just) an internet flame war. The goal isn't (or shouldn't be) to "win" by poking holes in the oppositions argument. It should be to make the best/safest decision possible given the evidence at hand.

But that's the point: there has to be a decision made. By advocating inaction, you are expressly taking the side of the denialists, even though you claim not to agree with them, technically.
"But for a confidence-building public-works program to be effective in arresting an economic collapse, the government must be able to finance its increased spending by means that do not reduce private spending commensurately. If it finances the program by taxation, it will be draining cash from the economy at the same time that it is injecting cash into it. But if it borrows to finance the program (deficit spending), or finances it with new money created by the Federal Reserve, the costs may be deferred until the economy is well on the way to recovery and can afford to pay them without endangering economic stability."

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?
this is a nice rhetorical trick used to avoid thinking about the issue at hand.
It's not anecdotical evidence, it was in question of this: "Until then I doubt anyone in their right mind would trust the creator of Internet Explorer and IIS with anything web related."

So, from what I can gather, Spolsky and Attwood are:

A) Out of their minds (possible?)

B) Are limited and going to have issues since it's built on the Microsoft stack.

Edit: Also, I didn't know if you knew SO was built on the Microsoft stack, I was asking a legitimate question.
This is why we don't see more open source developers developers migrating to develop on Windows. They are curious but then they hear how open source is a terrible abomination according to Microsoft. (Admittedly, not the exactly the same, in one case rms is attacking your new choice, and in the other Microsoft is attacking your old choice, but it doesn't make either side attractive to the other).
Not so well known Google sites
This extends to other areas as well. I was shocked the first time I found an "enterprise" app with an interface for executing arbitrary SQL with full permissions. The shock wears off when you see it over and over. It's nuts.
You really think 37signals couldn't decide tomorrow to play the VC valuation game?

They've published enough hints about their customer base to make an order-of-magnitude guess about their topline numbers. They have something like 15 people in the whole company, including support. They are absolute complete geniuses at software marketing --- tens of thousands of people hang on their every word, half of which consist of blog posts that do nothing but talk about moving text boxes around in their existing products.

I don't think they're jealous.

I do think they're arrogant. I think they believe zealously that many of the barriers to getting a software business off the ground are artificial. I get the impression --- colored by my own biases, of course --- that they see VCs and analysts and the trade press and the convention wisdom as gatekeepers that add no value, distort the market, and restrain entrepreneurship.

I have never, ever gotten the sense from anything they've written that they'd look down on me from launching a product --- any kind of product. I've never gotten the sense that I'd have to "qualify" in their eyes to break into the business. Despite extraordinary success and "mindshare", everything they write seems welcoming and encouraging to me, and that's not something I think is easy to pull off.

I'm always a bit confused by why people here are so put off by them. It's always looked to me like these guys are in our corner. The VC startup culture, not so much.

(ps: I can also imagine some straightforward business plans that would justify the insane valuations that Twitter is getting. I can hold these thoughts in my head at the same time.)
As a rule of thumb, if you are going to accuse someone of being unethical you should have to name the rule of ethics that the person is violating.

The criticisms of the original project, at least the ones I read, didn't actually do this. Instead people were complaining because it reminded them of something unethical that someone else had done, or they didn't think it fit Seth's personal brand, or they were afraid he would do something unethical in the future, or they never liked him to begin with.

Now if people are saying, "you violated X rule of ethics" then it's really easy to apologize for doing that. But in this case that's not what people were saying, so how exactly do you apologize to those people? Especially since in the end the reason Seth backed down was probably at least in part because his personal brand is worth more than the money he could make from the project anyway, regardless of whether he was right or wrong.
I wonder if he would choose different terms today. UNIX does not suck as a desktop operating system. OSX proves you can build a fantastic OS on top of UNIX. It took Apple only a few years to do it right. What we're talking about is really a Linux/GPL/GTK/QT/etc problem isn't it? It's also a culture problem. There's basically no market for consumer Linux software because most Linux users prefer free OSS alternatives. It's irrelevant anyway -- the battle for desktop operating systems was over 25 years ago. Apple & Microsoft won. The future for Linux is mobiles & set tops. It's time to stop living in the past and focus resources on the future. Let's stop trying to fight lost wars.
The article comes across spectacularly lazy which bodes ill for the veracity of its contents.

Just look @ how our "researcher" (ahem) "researches" the only known-to-him example of raw data being given out:

- supposedly "Peter Webster" has (a subset of) the "raw data"

- no other "researchers" aside from the data originators have the "raw data" (at least insofar as is known to Michaels as revealed in this article)

- supposedly Michaels is interested in obtaining the "raw data"

Is there any evidence in the article that, you know, Michaels tried calling Webster up and asking for the "raw data"? The kind of thing you'd do if you were, you know, seriously interested in getting your hands on this data?

Not really:

- there's no explicit mention of (attempting to) get in touch with Webster

- there's a half-hearted attempt to strew fear and doubt based on the fact that Webster's findings (about hurricane and warming correlation) are apparently at variance with what others have found, but it's half-hearted b/c:

-- it doesn't examine whether the different findings are due to methodological differences or due to "raw data" differences (only the latter of which implicates the "raw data" as perhaps suspect)

-- as per usual it's not like Michaels tried calling Webster and being like: "do you think your results are different b/c the data has been mangled?"

So just with respect to Michael's actions with Webster there's a rather transparent pattern of some mix of incuriousness or laziness.

Which (quite apart from any think-tank connections) is why he ought to come across as not all that credible: he's lazy or incompetent or both.

I mean really: say you were to read an article wherein the author:

- is supposedly searching for some holy grail

- identifies a source that has it

- makes no mention of trying to get it from that source

...would that not raise a red flag as to the author's sincerity and/or general competence? Would you be more or less likely to take his other claims at face value after seeing that?
I read that to my girlfriend, who works in the architecture and building industry, and she said "Apparently, fly ash is the hemp fiber of the brick industry".
No, that's just faffing around. The difference is that networking isn't about making friends, it's about making mutually beneficial business relationships. What I'm saying is that it's possible to be genuinely interested in someone's business ideas and abilities, and genuinely want them to succeed, and genuinely be willing to put in the effort to help them do that.
You've submitted the third page of the article.

The first page: http://www.itwire.com/content/view/27980/1090/1/0/
Code signing is rubber chicken security. It sure sounds good. But the threat with code like this is incompetence, not malice, and nobody --- nobody --- has the resources to audit every Windows driver, or even every OSX driver for that matter.

The problem here is that the interface the MSDN blogger is talking about is brittle. "You can't have those instructions unless you write a driver". Well, they're going to get the instructions, genius. They have a business driver, and business trumps principles every time. So they're going to go through whatever dance MSFT requires this year to ship as a driver, and the kernel's going to get one more piece of incompetent driver code.

Maybe I'm missing some backstory here, but that's my read.
Google Sidewiki: Brands under attack
Condolences, thats just horrible.
RMS: De Icaza Traitor to Free Software Community

http://www.osnews.com/story/22225/RMS_De_Icaza_Traitor_to_Fr...
I've tried, but the lowest I could get is around the 230-240 mark for something that tweets hi $n (where $n is the name of the person tweeting something you're interested in) for bash. It seems the URLs are the killer. URL Shorteners would help but bleh security. Any ideas for different languages?
Cool feature I discovered today, for multi-file project navigation:

:tag yourMethodNameHere

Tab-completion works, so typing ":tag yourM", and pressing tab repeatedly cycles through all the tags with that prefix (you need to have created the tags file with ctags first).
I don't think any intelligent reasonable person objects to the fact that the global temperature is rising. As for Human activity being the cause that is far from settled.

Don't get me wrong I'm all for reducing emissions and generally doing anything we can to reduce our impact as much as is possible because it's just good sense. But stating that the industrial age caused the rise when we really have so little understanding of how all this works rankles me just a bit. I especially object to the attempts to assign blame as a scare tactic for political gain. Especially when there are equally valid reasons to reduce emissions and lessen our impact local air quality and increased efficiency in manufacturing being just a few of the reasons.

The plain fact is that while there "might" be a correlation with Human activity that does not imply a cause and effect relationship out of hand. I don't think we really have enough data or understanding yet to make an assumption regarding the cause.

[Edit: I had a misplaced sentence which totally made that read wrong. Just fixed it]
"to join in to the conversation that's already happening all around us"

If that was so important to him, why doesn't he open up his blog's comments?