skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Shameless linkbait.

Summarizing the article: no, because Linus and the Apache foundation are sponsored.

My opinion: if you need a tool, but can't get paid for it, then releasing it open source is a good way to get free code reviews and bug fixes. It's not ideal, but for code you can't monetize, open sourcing it is a fine idea.
The data in question dates from the 1980s. You couldn't "walk down to the local store and buy an external hard drive", and if you could a gigabyte of storage would cost you tens of thousands of pounds. Google didn't exist.
Couldn't they just keep HDDs and give the rest back? Or would that be too logical.
If you've done a unique and time consuming experiment, and gathered important data, then that raw data has a real tradable value. It can be traded and bartered for with other scientists to gain access to grants, co-author status, experiments, different data and a host of other favours. Simply giving it away can put you in a real financial or academic disadvantage.
This is the best way science should respond to skeptics: make all the data open and easily accessible for anyone to have a look through and critique.

Well done RC.
I'm sorry, but every time I have checked out a G Phone or the Droid and tried to scroll through their menus, I am both thoroughly disappointed at how jerky it is and a bit shocked that for some reason, no other company has been able to pull off the smooth touch screen scrolling like the iPhone has. It gets me every time and is a big reason why I wouldn't purchase a Droid, as pathetic as that reason may be.
Sorry, but there's a difference between programmers and computer scientists. He's talking about the latter.
I think source control should be taught starting the first day of CS101.

I agree with the general sentiment but I think that instead this should be taught during the first time students need to work in large groups (more than 2 people). Without suffering from not having version control, no one will care. Now, I'm not saying that we should only focus on what people think they need as students, but if there is a way to force them to understand the value of something, all the better.
yes possibly - though in my experience explaining that to a police office (with no disrespect meant - most are tech illiterate) could be difficult.

Then you have the huge issue of explaining that to the jury; the defence would probably still have a field day.

And finally, certainly here in the UK so this might not apply elsewhere, there is quite a strict mandate for handling evidence. Returning the computer and keeping the HDD's would almost certainly break those guidelines.

It's really illogical all round; the main problem being computer evidence is still treated with suspicion by Juries (probably due to technical misunderstanding) and greeted with delight by defense teams (who will take joy in asking obscure, mundane and irrelevant questions :D just to derail things)

Finally: complex investigations might really take months to complete (as in 8 or 10). And then going to trial can take upwards of 2 years.

EDIT: with all of that said I strongly disagree with the police actions in this case.

Not giving a list of seizures, even within a few hours, is definite grounds for massive legal action here. It would be unheard of, frankly.

Not giving computers back after, say, 5 months where the case was unproven or the computers irrelevant would also be wrong. In the case where information was found but no trial forthcoming stuff should be returned within 2 years.

I wont comment on the legality of the raid though; we are only getting one side of the story and it could be there is evidence to have raided them. We also haven't seen or heard about the warrant used; so we cant really speculate on the legality of the seizures.
Five things you should know about climate change
You may be wrong. I was at the Intelligence Squared debate on Atheism [ http://events.intelligencesquared.com/past-events.php?event=... ] yesterday in which Dawkins debated. The vote was overwhelmingly in support of Dawkins' position (which is not fundamentalist atheism but one of calling a spade a spade). More people voted in favor of Dawkins' stand after the debate than before. Things are more nuanced, of course. I personally favor the position advocated by E O Wilson (co-opt religion).
It's like saying that Star Track is one of your favorite shows. In the scheme of things, it doesn't matter but goddamn is it annoying to people who care.
Unfortunately, this link does not include the raw CRU data which is at the heart of the debate. It is a repost of old data, which you can figure out by reading the comments section of this post (http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2009/11/wheres...).

This is disappointing. The University of East Anglia keeps talking about needing "permission" from national metrological service partners before releasing the data, but that should have been obtained before the first publication appeared. You couldn't pull this secret data thing in genomics, for example.

Overall this appears to be an attempt at damage control, to get the issue out of the news. Yet those other "5%" of stations are critical for establishing the global trend. They should not have published without them.

http://www.edie.net/news/news_story.asp?id=17333&channel...

Quote:

The university has confirmed it will make all the data accessible as soon as it us released from a range of non-publication agreements, publication will be carried out in collaboration with the Met Office Hadley Centre.

"We are grateful for the necessary support of the Met Office in requesting the permissions for releasing the information but understand that responses may take several months and that some countries may refuse permission due to the economic value of the data," continued Professor Davies.

"The remaining data, to be published when permissions are given, generally cover areas of the world where there are fewer data collection stations."
Do you believe everything you read on the internet? I'm not saying the figures are out but before you jump ship you should really try things out for yourself. Many other posters have said Linode has a 7 day trial period; maybe try that with one of your sites before switching completely (I probably will).

edit: Sorry, someone below has said similar thing.. should of read the entire thread first!
Before Germany invaded France in 1939, they were major trading partners. War is less likely now; see Stephen G Brooks, "Producing Security: Multinational Corporations, Globalization, & the Changing Calculus of Conflict", which claims the fact that no one country produces anything at all complicated any longer makes it almost impossible. In this view, it is the fact that manufacturing is transnational that prevents it, not trade in the traditional sense.
Can anybody tell me what, if any, published work this data has made it into?
Just a case of http://xkcd.com/386/ , Mr Holmes

I don't know any of the people involved, but I really despise lynch mobs. Still, I know I shouldn't bother with this.
I think your formula is nice but maybe could value could be subtracted at the end for loss of time through getting educated (loss of youth). I presume it took a lot of graft to become an eye surgeon, maybe more so than a merger lawyer (during the uni/qualifying phase).
This is an ugly post. really. For the people who are working on things right now, those who care about execution, you can help them by not shouting it in order to appear as a smart gut.
Does anybody know what, if any, published work this data has made it into?
Of course there is a reason. You don't want to waste time having to explain your unpublished research.
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Very usefull for me ... work on that right now.
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Sweden does not have any such protections.

All evidence is admissible in court no matter how it was obtained, legally or illegally.

Of course if you can prove that the evidence was obtained illegally you can file charges for that, but the evidence will still be used.
Interesting and opinionated - good summary.

But there are plenty of owner-operators in the service industry. One person can run a small cafe single-handed. 2 founders (a head cook, and a head waiter) can run a mid-sized restaurant. They still need a few kitchen hands and waiters, but they don't need to hire any managers.

Once the whole management structure can be manned by founders the wage system has been undermined.

The point isn't that everyone will be an owner-operator or contractor. The point is that all the good jobs will be. If you want to scrub floors, that's OK, but everyone else will be a manager or a hired gun.
You Built a Metaclass for *what*?
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Depends on the idea. The average startup idea is indeed junk.
Last I heard they'd abandoned the raw data at some point in the '80s during an office move. Which is obviously less than ideal with hindsight but doesn't strike me as suspicious, as some seem to be suggesting.

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/environment/article693...
According to the hackerspace page, the police had IT-techs with them from the start. Why would they bring techs with them if they where just going to bust an illegal bar.
Stamford CT has plenty.
APart from the money what makes you a good investor?
I didn't read the article and really don't care to, but I want to know: which of the following languages would HN suggest - OCaml, F# or Scala?

I took a brief look at OCaml a few years ago and have been meaning to try and learn it properly for a long time now, but never got around to actually doing it. From my very very brief look at F#, it looked really nice. Finally, I don't know much about Scala, but since I'm mostly using Clojure for my own coding (and Java + C++ + JNI in work), maybe staying with a JVM language would ultimately more beneficial?

Thoughts?
> the lawyers could decide whether the FOI request or the license won.

...and if the FOI won you wouldn't be able to get data anymore.

I don't understand what you're getting at with your second paragraph.
While I generally agree with you, I don't think all ideas are created equal. Some ideas are obviously bad (going into an established industry with razor thin margins without a clear plan for innovation; fundamentally unscalable businesses; etc.) Some ideas are obviously good (planes that fly twice as fast at half the cost without compromising safety). Some ideas are really good but look really bad, others are really bad but look really good. Some ideas aren't iterable (if you spend three years and half a billion dollars on building a plant that brings cars to the masses and find out that the masses are perfectly happy with horses you don't have much space left to iterate).

It's hard. Really really hard. I don't think any given formula can capture the complexity of it all. The current model (fast iteration) has obvious flaws - there are plenty of businesses that turned out to be massively successful that were fundamentally not iterable.
--Second, many cell phone users have imperfect voice calling anyways, due to coverage issues or network glitches.

I do not remember ever having a network issue when using a phone. However I do not use a phone in the US. I own a smartphone and primarily use it for its multimedia abilities and not the web.Most of the times I would use the web is to play a song/clip from youtube. Maybe my usage patterns explain why I am a Nokia fanboy.
No two historical events are ever identical. But these crises do have things in common. For one thing, they're all crises. For another, the people who benefit the most on the way up (bankers, brokers) are not the people who suffer the most on the way down (taxpayers, working poor, newly unemployed). That asymmetry, I think, has a lot to do with it. Investors have learned, yeah, learned how to game the cycle by externalising the losses.
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Google about to get a Makeover
“Whosoever desires constant success must change constantly” and it is becoming more and more evident that Google subscribes to this school of thought. The Online Marketing Blog is reporting an All New Google Design.
Perhaps it's the color. Blue buttons like that spell "microsoft" to me. I hate them.
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No idea why you were downmodded. I agree. Perhaps an opportunity for a new startup to be the new 'simple search engine that just gives you uncluttered results'.
According to the mimetic theory by http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ren%C3%A9_Girard there is a social benefit of religion - it is a much more direct explanation of religion and thus more convincing than this virus theory. It is not less condemning, at least for all 'sacrificial' religions - but in a nuanced way - it says that we could not have a civilisation without it even if they are rather problematic for our contemporary morality.
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Except they're not making all the data open...
Calling Arduino open-source when the very core of the hardware is still proprietary is bit strange imho. A fair comparison would be if someone threw cygwin on Windows and said it to be open-source as a whole.
Ok, so it's the 1980s, climate change isn't a particularly politically hot issue, you have several cupboards full of paper and magnetic tape which nobody has touched for a couple of years because you have better, corrected data. That that data doesn't survive an office move strikes me as unfortunate, but not particularly an indication of gross malpractice as some are suggesting.
I skimmed through the comments again. I find it funny how people jump to conclusions, focusing on providers, and thinking about switching.

In my humble opinion, at least some of these benchmarks (the CPU ones) do not represent anything, as they depend on the load of neighbor instances on the same physical host. Once you see that, how can you possibly make business decisions based on these benchmarks?

Color me surprised.
They have their use, they ensure that only sophisticated thief get away with your loot. Makes for more impressive local news coverage than this http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wQqk-x7dD0Abest quote is at 1:40. Skilled practice a throwing bricks.
It's not working for me at all. Am on google.co.in (India) and I also tried switching the domain in the javascript path.. didn't work. I think it's just working in the US... annoying when the posts always fail to tell you about that.
My first thought when I saw this was Bing.

My second thought was that it looks more like Facebook's search with the filter labels on the left:
http://www.insidefacebook.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/08/fac...

My third thought is that I should stop making comparisons. They're just trying to organize the types of search in a way that's usable, and my first assumption shouldn't be that they just ripped it off of another site.
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I have seen those and I thought they were like "College Painters/Haulers" (i.e. hire a student who needs the money) meaning the "Hubbie" here implies a working family man, as opposed to a "lousy bachelor who might squander your money on booze".
Islamic banks and finance institutes (like most finance institutes) are really good at coming up with various creative ways of working around annoying legislation. Basically they use various financial engineering tricks to create products that look they pay interest, while technically not paying interest. Google for 'sukuk' if you want a simple example.
It seems that it's not only linkbait, the article is slightly wrong with the answer. Sure, there's RedHat and loads of other OS projects, but I can't agree with "there is no end of suckers willing to maintain it for free"... and not because of "suckers" and "for free". MySql is a very specific project and not that many people from outside of the Monty's or Sun's team can do anything about it really. There's not much of community development, because it's not really a community project. (a bit like the official openoffice) It was always hard to get your own code inside, there was no "typical" dev community around the project - just look how dead is the "internals" mailing list.

Now that Mysql has an "official" dev group outside of Sun, of course they're going to pick up the project. But these are the people who left Sun. Noone else is rushing in to "maintain it for free".
Hey alec, I just wanted to say thanks for the weekly updates. I've been reading it since issue 1. Keep up the good work!
Is everyone forgetting how many people are complaining about iPhone dropped calls? Might be AT&T or something else, I'm not seeing as many complaints with their other phones.

I have an HTC magic, never had issues with the dialer. Rogers in canada is pretty good, no dropped calls after 4 months of use. Only app that seems to hang my phone is twidgit. Great app, horrible performance.
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Funny, I wrote an blog post about this last week.

http://blogs.auckland.ac.nz/z00m/2009/11/24/signal-to-noise/
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Today CCP raided a datacenter in Shanghai and over 10k sites were offline.

http://www.otaku.net.cn/viewthread.php?tid=7339
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Agreed. However, I'd use a different example to emphasize the point considering that Twitter's fail whale stories are legendary. I'd stick with NYSE.
By the way, also note that if permissions are truly being refused because of the "economic value of the data", then the fact that this data is unavailable is quite significant. No one would put up a fight over releasing insignificant data, so there must be some unique and critical information there. Hence this is not a fuss over nothing.

(by the by, the thing that pisses me off so much about this as a scientist is that data hiding is a direct assault on reproducibility. I can understand a company keeping some secret sauce to themselves -- no one expects Google to open source GFS. But the whole point of putting out a paper is so that the community of scholars can build on it.)
yup. Same prescription: fuck the gatekeepers. But right now, the consumer culture is such that people are simply not in the mood to pay direct dollars for any of the art/entertainment they consume. Yet I still pay > $100 a month for crap-ass cable with fake HD and shows I hate.

Something has to change.
Functional Programming For The Rest of Us -- http://www.defmacro.org/ramblings/fp.html

What works for me is thinking of fp as describing mathematical relationships instead of changing state
Besides the legal issues, you get what you pay for. Really, if I was doing work (especially if I can see it making someone else a pile of money) and I wasn't being paid for it, I wouldn't be motivated to put any effort into it and you'd probably find it cheaper to just pay someone instead.
Exactly what I was thinking the whole way through. If she can move 10 or 20,000 books, she can build a list by regularly publishing a blog. Then she can market directly to that list and self-publish, and keep most of the bones for herself. 70% margin to 1,000 readers is the same as 7% margin to 10,000 readers. As she says, when a book bombs, she's the only one who loses a job.

I suspect much of the problem, though, is counting on advances to write the book instead of just writing the thing in your spare time after something like a part-time job. Kind of like a startup wannabe who won't lift a finger until they've got funding.

It reminds me of a boyfriend of an old roommate of mine. He would introduce himself as an author, or aspiring author, something like that. Mostly he just sat around reading and smoking. I always thought 'if you're an author, just friggen write something - anything'.
I used to work for EMI and I'd never heard of that before. I think that just goes to show part of the problem with the big record companies now, they don't seem to like getting their name out there attached to good things anymore.
I love this -- 25-years olds giving advice. Hilarious. Every programmer also thinks he's a guru. How about the ones giving advice on hiring or getting hired?
I knew this story looked familiar; it's because TechCrunch covered it over a year ago.

http://www.techcrunch.com/2008/08/23/3-reasons-why-the-inter...

Unfortunately, it's a mis-leading non-story. Yahoo! controls 33% of Yahoo! Japan allowing a Japanese company to hold a larger share. The result is that Yahoo ultimately worse off than Google (who gets 100% control/revenue from the market share they control).

The worst part is that Yahoo's strategy is actually failing them. The story from a year ago cited a larger market share for Yahoo (and it still wasn't a good deal back then, compared to what Google had). The article fails to report than Google's changes (many sound like terrible ideas to me personally) are working in Google's favor.
I did some similar benchmarks a while ago:

http://journal.dedasys.com/2008/11/24/slicehost-vs-linode

Looking more at memory and price, and Linode is a winner there, too.

It's a pity that Slicehost doesn't offer a 32bit system, as that would negate most of the difference, and they are good people with a good product. But I don't want to pay extra money for fat pointers.
DropBox was an age old idea....The execution is what made its glory
Even the Geocities version for Japan is still online.

But google need not be too worried, the mother ship is in serious problems and when Yahoo! will bite the dust Yahoo japan will either go with it or their minority stake will be sold to the highest bidder.

Googles rise in Japan has been slow but steady, and in 2009 to date they've outperformed yahoo.co.jp with a factor of 3 in growth.

A similar thing is happening in the Netherlands with Hyves.nl and Facebook.com. Facebook is still behind but growing steadily, hyves is still top in the segment but it is only a matter of time. (unfortunately, I think that it is great to have some diversity).
Does this include statements made under duress?
I am pretty sure that this article did make it to the front page as I remember reading it a long time ago. It is a relatively old article so you may have forgotten it or it may have come up at a time you were not following Salon that seriously.
Recently some startups started selling customized sweets. You could mix your own flavor in a web interface and then order the gums, build on demand. (I only know startups for chocolate, cereals and coffee doing this atm).
'Science' versus skeptics' is it? Really? Evidently you haven't been paying attention over the past couple of weeks.
well, I guess I don't need to try to do anything similar to have the results, I'm considering a switch to Linode now.
I wonder why this is even necessary - I understand on the iPhone this is an immediate kill -9, no user intervention required. This seems like the correct way to do this - to expect your average phone user to operate this like a PC power user is absurd. "Force quit" should not be in the vernacular for operating a phone.
For a bit of context, this was the product of an brainstorming exercise set by seth godin to his students during his "six month mba program". You probably should read anymore into these ideas than that.
If you are running a site that is used by others and you don't have a system to automatically rebuild your server on another host, I'd say you have bigger problems than the relative performance of your provider's architecture.