skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
But between the raw data and the set of data is a correction. Without being able to show what that correction is, all the models based off the second set of values is not valid science.

So you have to go back and recollect the info from all these sources (not an insignificant undertaking, though mostly do-able), actually give a reason for the "corrections", and then create models that fit that data, and then issue new predictions.

Without starting over from raw data and following all the way to the conclusions reached about man made global warming there is no scientific proof that man causes global warming. None of it is valid until you can show how that "correction" was made. And the loss of this data means they will never 100% be able to show that.
You've got to love the economy of words that the introduction displays. It's only one sentence: "The introduction."

(That's a good way to do things. Write some meat first, then you'll know exactly what you've got to introduce.)
If that were the case, there would be no need to delete it; the lawyers could decide whether the FOI request or the license won.

Of course, if it turns out that it was illegal for them to accept the data under that license in the first place, then it might be more understandable.
Serializing a good novel would be difficult for anyone who hasn't plotted the whole thing in advance, isn't incredibly lucky, or doesn't approach writing the same way as Tom Robbins.

My first drafts are decent, but the first stage of editing is vital to add coherence and fix plot holes. (Imagine if the season 3.5 of BSG had some sort of planning; it would have been much, much better.)
So it literally takes 15 seconds to do?
Try mingw and msys. You can compile static, stand-alone C or C++ code for distribution.
What I don't get: "As I listen to the manifest nonsense that has been promulgated by the likes of right-wing fanatic radio hosts and moronic ex-governors in response to the effort to bring the U.S. into alignment with other industrial countries in providing reasonable and affordable health care for all its citizens, it seems that things have only gotten worse in the years since I first wrote those words."

First, this idea that "right-wing fanatic radio hosts and moronic ex-governors" have a monopoly on bad science is at best arrogant and at worst remarkably deceptive. Second, what is the Scientific American doing writing about advocacy for public healthcare in the first place? Nevermind the vast array of policy alternatives that this space entails, or that the bills presented before congress now do little to nothing to meet the original objectives even President Obama set.

This piece is breathtaking on so many levels.
I listened to the audio version of Outliers a while back. One lengthy section was about how Chinese children have an advantage in learning math over English speaking children due to the regularity and brevity of the number words.

Gladwell gave examples in which he absolutely murdered the pronunciation of the number 7. I'm not talking about tone problems. He pronounced it as "kwee". It was clear that he hadn't even bothered to listen to the number words that he devoted a section of his book to.

Of course I don't expect someone who isn't a student of a language to speak it well, but he could have at least gone to wikipedia or chinesepod and listened to the numbers once or twice!
The standard deviation is simply a measure of the spread of a distribution. There's nothing wrong or right about high standard deviations. In fact, the high standard deviation means that you should expect highly variant performance.

Look at the figures. The performance of Slicehost follows a sawtooth like pattern. The quantity standard deviation is useful because it quantifies what to expect. Plus or minus one standard deviation means that ~ 2/3 of the time you will fall in that range.

If you think about the problem a little bit, you might be more worried about the standard deviation of the standard deviation. This, in fact, would be a useful quantity, but hard to measure.

EDIT below this line -------
Several comments below have commented that SD is somehow less useful if it's "large" (or large relative to the mean, or whatever). The reason people think large SDs are indicative of a poor experiment is that in school lab classes one calculates the SD and call it the "error".

The standard deviation is a measure of spread, if it's large then the spread is large. Knowing the spread has value. In this case, under the parent's experimental conditions EC2's performance is more constant than that of slicehost's.

A fair critique of the blog posting is that the error on the standard deviation may be large, depending on the experimental conditions. It is _not_ a fair critique to say that the SD is too high to make a prediction, you just have larger performance spread. Note that the performance spread described is not necessarily "error". The spread is inherit to either the server (as implied by the article) or the method (in which case it is an error).
It would be harder for the scientists to justify making it up to themselves. I assume none of them set out to do bad science when they started investigating climate.
they had system-wide (cross data center) downtime (as low as 1 hour, others several hours) on October 7th.
The author only sees one of two potential values: they're concerned about the future value of domestic manufacturing capability, but they seem to miss that the savings in manufacturing costs can be spent elsewhere in the economy, which may lead to a vastly better overall result.
Food stamps help feed 1 in 8 Americans and 1 in 4 children
I guess this would encourage pubs and public businesses in general to keep their customers offline. I can't imagine that being good for the UK in the long run.
>So you're suggesting that despite years of education and learning from mistakes, investors never learn from their past mistakes

Investors learn that the best bets are betting on being too big to fail, or being risky as possible to get a massive short term profit and then retiring. (Or alternatively, being hired to clean up the mess you made ala Geithner)

These are human beings working for corporations. They have limited liability. They get no benefit by being safe, but have all the incentive in the world to do stupid things that will make several million in bonuses today.
You'd be surprised how easily 40% of the supply of a crop could disappear. P.E.I. produces 1/3 of all potatoes consumed in Canada (this includes virtually all potatoes used by McDonalds, Wendy's and most fast food companies). If a severe problem ever hit P.E.I. it would be devastating, and it's an island a whole factor smaller than the next smallest province and has less than .1% of Canadian land.

As the island only has 1 bridge connecting it to the mainland, and the ferry service is largely only a novelty service any more it would present a serious problem for the country for its food production.
I understand the performance variance characteristics, what concerns me about these tests is that the graphs of them are not continuous, they seem to be immediate dips instead of gradual curves. This indicates to me that the sample size wasn't large enough, or at least the graph needs a higher resolution if data exists to support it. Also, at the bottom, the article gives the numerical data, with the mean and standard deviation. However, the mean for the hosts with high standard deviations are essentially useless, because the standard deviation is so high. If we are going to compare average performance between cloud hosts, lets at least have useful averages to base our opinion on.
Ask HN: How to consistently generate traffic and new customers for Ramamia?
Hi HN, over the past few months,Mark Bao and I have been trying to figure out how to exactly launch Ramamia, our family sharing app.

Link here: http://staging.ramamia.com

We've been in beta for a number of months and this is our kind of final product. At first, we were going to go for a premium model, as in: the only plan we have is a $40 a year or $5 a month plan, with a 21-day free trial.

We're not sure how we will generate steady incoming traffic. So I thought--why not use free as a marketing tool? So thus--freemium.

We're just not sure about how we are going to generate a stream of incoming traffic for our app, which is a big problem. Should we go freemium or stick with premium?

Keep in mind... with a freemium model, we'd restrict a number of things like # of photos per month, remove video functionality, etc. but there will be still a lower conversion rate to prem... though we might get more leads from 'free' valprop.
As a lover of science and a longtime skeptic throughout a series of changes of political viewpoint, I've learned to hate when anyone tries to wrap his/her political viewpoint in the mantle of "science" or "skepticism" (as opposed to proper understanding of a scientific issue). I've yet to see anyone do this without the upshot being, "Yes, the political beliefs I already had [whatever they were] are shown to be objectively correct - thanks to Science!"
It's not that easy to switch email providers when you have 10+ years of history. I have Yahooo and Gmail accounts, but all my old friends keep sending emails to Yahoo.
Moving the goalpost. God damn, this place just became reddit. Cheers. Enjoy the cesspool you created.
As a matter of fact I ran the benchmarks on one instance in EU and one in US before I started a week long run on one US instance. I simply could not believe the numbers I was getting from what should be a larger share of physical CPUs compared to the other providers and many times more RAM.
It's also worth noting that it can actually hurt your image if you try to bolt on virality when you don't know what you're doing. You can become a laughing stock. I'm reminded of recent failures by two of the largest engineering companies in the world.

Microsoft: http://www.istartedsomething.com/20090917/windows-7-now-with...

Siemens: http://www.lc-d-825.com/
That's what they say here: https://www.uea.ac.uk/mac/comm/media/press/2009/nov/homepage...
Sorry I don't think this makes sense. Personally I'll just wait to see how the story unfolds.

This makes me glad again that there is some kind of legal system in most civilized countries. So many people seem to be ready to form a lynch mob at short notice.
If you think Patrick's startup is actually about bingo cards, you need to re-read pretty much everything he's written here. His technical challenges aren't about putting random words on a page.

You in particular would benefit a lot from what he's writing about.
Facts to fit the theory? Actually, no facts at all
Google and News Corp. Do Need Each Other
I know. I feel for you. I actually purchased the paid Yahoo account for my wife, so we could pop3 her yahoo over to gmail. (they only allow the pop3 access for paid accounts).
None of these things require HTML 5, and all of the worthwhile things had workable implementations before HTML 5.

Formal specifications for things that had de facto cross-browser support for multiple browser generations are nice, but not amazing.

"This is the first time our core platform has seen any serious evolution since HTML4.01 was published in 1999!"

And that's just simply untrue, but oh, well.

"I'm amazed to see so many web developers unexcited by HTML 5. This is the first time our core platform has seen any serious evolution since HTML4.01 was published in 1999!"

And I'm boggled to see such giddy fanboyism modded up so high.
Perhaps instead of spouting articles without understanding you should read a bit about falsation and Karl Popper's contributions to the philosophy of science.

Falsifiability is the cornerstone of the scientific method.
do you guys really have 3,000 users? Or is that a marketing number? If yes, then you guys should just focus on building a viral loop
This was a performance comparison (with a price undertone). If you need elasticity I would just stick with EC2.
I think he's a Linode user... He used "slice" which is SliceHost's trademark but I see that term used for a lot of different companies.
I'm not sure how you can discern cloudy thinking from malice.

Here's how I do it: I look for someone who seems to be trying to score rhetorical points, and then I ask what the chances are that happened by accident.

When people are earnestly but confusedly trying to work something out for themselves, they don't sound like this:

DARPA birthed the Internet. YC birthed reddit.
I guess the jury is still out.
There are lots of places like this, but they don't work specifically on the venture capital model. (But they should!)

http://www.channel101.com/ is an example where it's a kind of co-operative incubator for comedians, directors and actors. Andy Samberg and his two partners (who are major players on SNL now) were incubated there. Too bad you can't invest in a comedy team the same way you can invest in a corporation - because if you could Dan Harmon (the guy who runs C101) would be rich.
This suggests a possible improvement to HN: do a WGET on the URL and make sure you get a status code of 200 before allowing the link to be posted.
Yeah, what they do for the RailsRumble competition is awesome. They set aside hundreds of instances for competitors during the competition (which is a wonder on its own), and they give out several large instances as one of the prizes for the winners.
They also only charge you for what you use. (When you delete a VPS, they'll credit your account a prorated amount.)
ESR finally noticed the missing data; http://esr.ibiblio.org/?p=1487 , which I linked on HN http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=966888 . I don't know what took him so long, I heard about the missing base data before this last media wrangle; I hadn't brought it up in any of my comments anywhere because I had assumed everyone else had also heard about it; until ESR's post today.
I'm not a big fan of trivia, but there are basic details you will necessarily learn over time just by working with any technology, and not knowing these is damning. E.g., asking how arguments are passed is a quick shibboleth to catch the guy who thinks clicking "print to file" entitles him to put PostScript on his résumé (a colleague has actually witnessed this).
Right. And personally, I think those decisions should be up to employers. Similarly, I'm completely against the minimum wage. Give employers the freedom to hire who they want, for whatever wage they want to offer.
Admin stats page screenshot: http://i50.tinypic.com/2dwcg1s.png
I love this.

Scanning resolution is probably higher now but you most likely still have to break it into multiple scans due to the platter diameter of an LP and the fact that most scanners are designed to scan paper documents. Duh, I guess.
Not counting the irony of you linking to the Wikipedia article named "Argument from Ignorance," I absolutely despise the method of simply linking to an article of logical fallacies as a proof that the author had no legitimate point.

I hereby christen the "Argument from Latin Wikipedia Page." This is categorized as an idiot grappling to a very specific point in the article and attempting to refute it by naming a Latin logical fallacy, usually erroneously and with no explanation. Punishment for "Argument from Latin Wikipedia Page" may involve being bodily thrown from a moving vehicle.
Poll: How many legitimate emails do you receive daily?
Just out of pure curiosity, and prompted by the recent submission on sorting through 500 emails, I've made a poll to find out how much legitimate email HN readers are receiving daily.

I'll make an arbitrary definition of legitimate email as anything that you don't mark as spam or delete without reading.

Just make a guess.
0 - 10
26 - 50
51 - 100
really? did we at least get you a refund? we do sometimes drop stuff, but we try to at least refund everyone who we don't get going.

(the vast majority of or problems are provisioning-related, as well... we're working on that. But still. If you didn't get the refund email me and I'll see to it.)
If you really believe your offering value, then my vote is for premium right away. Freemium isn't really a marketing tool, its more of a business model.

A 30-60 day free trials or 30% off for a year might help grab early adopters. Of course it will always come down to trial and error. I'd launch it asap and see what works for your market.

For pricing your users know better then us!

Regarding traffic, I'd try SEM with some nice landing pages to find the right marketing message.

Besides that, the top of this chart shows the other online marketing approaches.
http://www.flickr.com/photos/500hats/577630547/sizes/o/
Monetizing Episodic Content
I put the word skeptic in quotes to denote the difference between scientists (who are already quite skeptical), and the people who employ fallacious "skeptical" arguments to advance a political agenda. I don't know to which group you belong (but then, I wasn't referring to you in my comment).

Anyone who has spent any time around scientists knows them to be a conservative and naturally skeptical group of people. The "scientific establishment" -- if there is such a thing -- is powerfully opposed to new ideas. The climate change debate was a controversial new idea thirty years ago, but after three decades of research and debate, it's been as close to universally accepted as anything ever is in the world of science. The people who would have you believe that climate change is a conspiracy amongst rogue scientists either do not understand how science works, or are purposefully dissembling to advance their cause.
Not responding in time is the worst thing such a company can do. My first slicehost instance didn't start as well. It took 31 minutes from sending an email to getting a "problem solved" response. Stuff always happens, it's how they react that makes the difference.
I think you might want to go back and run a web application benchmark like you did last time; the benchmarks you used this time apparently do not benefit from having more ram, and this is, uh, rather different from most (but not all) real-world loads.
"No, this is the set of raw data beneath the corrected data all the papers are based on."

No, it's not. First, no reputable journal allows re-publication of the same data set -- after thousands of publications, it's just silly to suggest that it's all based on the same data. Second, even if you don't believe that other scientists would prevent the re-publication of the same data, one only has to peruse the IPCC report to see that there's a lot more than just the "hockey stick" graph and computer models.
True, and often that consortium isn't just a bunch of SME-sized companies. Even the bigger players, like universities need to form multinational consortia to compete successfully.

Long processing times might effectively require you to have the amount you are seeking in your own bankroll (money comes often late, not before). Thus you can't actually compete without stable finances.

I'm not sure that the scheme produces innovations efficiently, but at least the investment in networking (might prove valuable) and bureaucratic efforts is huge.

More info:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seventh_Framework_Programme

Luckily there are plenty of funding instruments at the national level.
I think part of the problem is MS encouraged people to write a bunch of ie6 specific sites. Thus, since ie doesn't AFAIK do side-by-side installs, the need to stay on ie6 for line of business apps.
Javascript fanboyism.
There is already an overabundance of ads on the internet. I block ads and when I go to someone else's computer and browse around, I'm absolutely amazed at how many ads there are. Flash ads that show stuff outside the flash container. Blinking banner ads, flash movies that play sound...

Their browsing experience is horribly slow. The browser is slowed down by flash. The blinking is totally distracting. The ad based internet is a travesty.
Gift Ideas for Gadget Lovers
I did not use EBS for the database for the same reason I did not configure the database according to the amount of RAM on each node.
you might find http://www.startups.com useful for these types of questions.
The guy sounds unnecessarily harsh. He could just have said "Congrats on the article. How's the company doing?" I don't think I'd want him as an investor.
It's one of the hardest things to wrap your mind around going into business - people buy what they want. If you deliver what they want, they'll buy from you. If you don't, they won't.

They don't buy what you'd like them to buy, or what you think they should buy, or what you yourself would buy. They buy what they want to buy. If you can line that up with them, you can sell to people.
to be fair to linode, this is what nearly all providers do, if you complain, they refund you for the time you were down. To my knowledge, nobody in this price bracket has a real SLA. (at one point I had a pretty tough one myself, but I've weakened it to the point where it's not much better than normal.)
The Slicehost slice was located at one of the St. Louis data centers.
Now, 4 hours in I have 3 Linode referrals. If these stay customers for 3 months I'd get one month of free hosting for http://wasitup.com (which I provide free for all).
unestablished company? uh, Linode has been around longer than I have. (And I've been around longer than slicehost.) If any of us VPS providers are established, Linode is. (johncompanies has also been around a while.)
On a newly provisioned slice in the Texas datacenter, it would be interesting to see how the numbers look.
In a bunch of mostly uninteresting detail, he basically says that although hindsight can pick out missed facts, at the time they are lost in a sea of data with no reason to favor them over other, useless facts. This has been know to intelligence agencies for many decades, there is nothing new here that makes it worth the time to read.
Definitely not a ringing endorsement..

I do like his idea at the end but I think it would make more sense for Gmail to be integrated into Wave instead of vice-versa.. Integrating back into Gmail seems awkward at best..
Knowingly investing in a bubble is almost as bad as propagating a Ponzi scheme. It may be legal, but it's quite unethical.
I didn't suggest that it would eliminate the flamewars (if only!) However, I do think it would cut down on the incentive to start them.

Flamewars on Usenet were hard to ignore, and easy to propagate. How would people start flamewars on HN if they can't comment?
Dave's Automated Webster
Yep, the reason Slicehost and Linode is mentioned at the bottom is since they are the only providers which had a referral program (as far as I could gather).
What does cat /proc/cpuinfo give you?
I'm using a small EC2 instance to run a service that used to run in a very small real computer. This instance is unbelievable slow. I'll switch ASAP. Benchmarks are benchmarks but EC2 is slow and overpriced.
I've always liked the idea of a freemium system.

I think one way that could really help it spread is to incorporate some kind of affiliate program. For every paying user that the person brings in, they get X% off for a premium account that month. Referrals are likely to be huge in your market.
> Google takes existing ideas and improves upon them, they rarely invent new ideas.

That's the definition of innovation.
Thanks! We have this implemented already. If a user refers another family that becomes a paying family, then they get 25% off their yearly price—for life.
Emails that I read? Somewhere around 25. Emails that I keep? Over 100.

I'm on several mailing lists (most notably FreeBSD commitmail) where I don't read everything, but still keep emails for future reference.

Oh, and the above doesn't count ~40 cron emails per day, which I usually "read" to the extent of scrolling through them quickly just in case there's something unusual in them.
my cpu is probably worse 'cause I only give you 1 VCPU. I don't know for sure this is the right decision, but the idea is that the fewer VCPUs each instance has, the less often you have context switches, and the better your system performs when there is a lot of contention for CPUs.