skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
This isn't the first time people have raised questiones about Philip Jones and the Climate Research Unit. HN discussion here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=843517

Obviously, an article in the National Review isn't worth much as evidence by itself. But it quotes reputable scientists who have gone on record as saying they believe he is stonewalling their requests to see his raw data.

The CRU has acknowledged that the files are genuine. In one of the emails, Phil Jones brags how he unethically manipulated the presentation of his results (Nate's words, not mine). And we might not be able to go back and check his results against his measurements.

It seems to me that this would be a good time for an audit of the climate change data. Our first priority should be maintaining the integrity of the scientific process, and in this case that means getting rid of the appearance of impropriety. It's wrong to hold back scientific criticism because of the way we feel about whichever group is currently using the scientific consensus to advantage in the infinite clown fight that is partisan politics.

EDIT: this post went through several versions, most of which were bad. Sorry to those who replied to something that's gone now.
I'd love to see what kind of emails tend to go back and forth among the climate change denial crew. If only we had some hackers around here - we might be able to find out!
No, YC isn't worth it at that valuation, especially when generating over $1m in profits. You do not need YC with those profits, if anything YC would need you. You can use your revenue to advertise the service on your own. Whatever you do, don't agree to those terms.
Ask HN: How to make an Amazon Web Service style billing ?
I have to admit that I like pay-per-use style billing, where you pay exactly for what you are using, providing it's cheap. So I would like to use that kind of pricing scheme for my startup (www.assemblive.com, currently in private beta, pretty soon public).

I was wondering if some of your startups are using that kind of billing, and, very pragmatically, how did you implement it ? Are there some providers (like Paypal, Amazon, etc.) that offer that kind of payment scheme, where you just bill for actual usage at the end of the month ? I might be a bit naive, but it would seem to me that's it's basically like a subscription, but with a different amount each month...

From the end user point of view, I'd like them to be able to allow the payments just once. And then they just use the service as much as they want and don't have to do anything anymore regarding payments.
I remember a program "ArtMoney" or some such from my early childhood. It would take snapshots of memory for a particular process, and allow you to search for a particular value. It supported a differential analyisis, such that you could enter the value of an easily controled variable (say HP), and then search for it, change the game state, search again, and narrow down the range of possible memory addresses.
Hell no, if you are really clearing 1m in profits a YEAR, why would you take 15k and give up 7% of your company? That is absolutely ludicrous. Either you are overstating your companies financials or PG is trying to ream you. I find it hard to believe that you run a company with 1m in profits a year and you have to ask this.
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"With the exception of Mr. Ptacek, a noticeable lack of openings in Chicago.

Ahh well, compared to the number of openings in Bangalore.India ... :-)
> But Ronald Reagan though freed something like 125 million people and he never received it.

No, he didn't. Gorbachev did.
Since inception? How old is it? Are you earning a million dollars doing what you're going to continue doing (i.e. is it three friends who were freelancing for a couple years and have a product they'd like to sell, or have you been selling a product to make that money)?

And why are you treating YC as just a cash investment? They've always claimed that the most valuable thing they give is advice, so you have to ask what that's worth, too. Consider it this way: you're giving up 7% of your company in exchange for the chance to pitch to far more investors, on far better terms -- if your numbers are as good as you say they are, you might find that the deal pays for itself on that basis.
My point was that you have a choice. If you're so wildly successful that you think you can be the next google, then you can go for VC money to finance even faster growth.

Or you can forego funding completely, but you're probably settling for a slower growth rate then.
I highly recommend Braintree. Variable monthly billing is very different from monthly billing from the card processor viewpoint. Most providers will let you schedule recurring payments, but only fixed ones. Braintree let you do variable billing, without needing to go through the PCI process, because the credit card information never touches your servers.
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When I want an ultra-portable / netbook, I generally am some place with limited access to the internet. I really can't have a device that doesn't work without connectivity. My home machine almost always is connected, so Google's strategy is the exact opposite usecase for me. I guess if you are in a bigger city all the time, Google's model might work for you.
Hey movix, just saw your question today (haven't figure out at the time how to track my post back).Could the answer to hyyypr help you? it's great you like the design. feel free to ask any specific question, if there's something not clear, I'll do my best to make it a bit clearer. In "one" word, it's an aggregator for sites and blogs as well as podcasts and the feeds are update in nearly realtime, add some social features to it and that's it. A User case could be for a google employee to keep in touch with his company news, it's very easy to do that by checking the google category with all the google blogs listed there, no need to fire up your desktop feedreader all the time, or login somewhere, just go get what you are looking for, and if you miss the news from several days before, click on the "more" option and you can catch up with that stuff and share it to twitter with one click.
I have one request: the little guy should roll like a paratrooper when he comes down from his jump while moving fast.
I wasn't implying that we should all start using hidden APIs. Personally, I have a hard enough time using the documented API. My point was that a tool to catch such uses is pretty pointless, as it can be defeated using other entirely "legitimate" API calls.

To your second point, even apps that stick to using only documented API methods have known to fail after iPhone OS upgrades. So, let's not delude ourselves (or the users) into thinking we're writing robust (or worse, future proof) software simply by adhering to Apple's guidelines. All I would ask from Apple is that they get out of my way of getting an update to my users as quickly as I can.
I don't get it. Why are people excited about an OS that does less?

I travel a lot, and I do a lot of programming when I travel. So, I bought an Acer Aspire A150, I got a spare 9 cell battery and I increased the RAM to 2 GB. And, it runs Windows 7 Ultimate like a charm. I have enough battery life to last me a 14 hours of coding movie watching and non-stop music listening. The whole thing is the size of a hard-cover book.

I use Rhapsody for music, which keeps my music libraries synced and Bitbucket for my code. I use Windows mesh to keep other files synced to the "cloud". I can switch seamlessly from my 3 monitor dev box at home to my netbook by doing an "hg pull, hg update"

How does using a "cloud centric" OS help me? Is it cheaper? I got Win 7 Ultimate for free through Bizspark and I have $350 invested in hardware. I don't really see the advantage of hamstringing my OS. Hardware is cheap.

I understand the theoretical advantage to the third world of using less hardware, but when I was in Mexico this spring, netbooks were everywhere. They weren't running Ubuntu, either, they were running pirated copies of Windows.

I'm not trying to troll, but aside from trying to compete with MSFT, how is a cloud centric OS any better than a typical OS?
Don't forget distributed social graph (in Scala and Java):
http://www.linkedin.com/jobs?viewJob=&jobId=785025

Another 'Inner chiming in :-)
Tarsnap works with a prepaid usage-based billing model; every day at 00:00 UTC a cron job looks at how much storage people are using and processes the server logs to figure out how much bandwidth people used over the past 24 hours, and throws the numbers into Amazon SDB. Some time later, users' current account balances are updated.

When people connect to the Tarsnap server, it queries SDB to get the user's current balance and any payments they've made since the balance was last updated; if the balance is below zero, it sends back a "send more money" error message.

I considered taking the AWS approach of adding up usage and charging credit cards at the end of each month, but this wouldn't work for two reasons: 1. Half of the people using Tarsnap spend less than $0.30/month, so I'd lose most or all of the money in credit card processing fees; and 2. Dealing with bogus/expired/cancelled/etc. credit cards is not something I want to worry about.
To be fair, Google has been making strong progress towards offline data storage for Gmail and other apps, and the Chrome OS will presumably incorporate this feature (which is actually part of the HTML 5 specification). This way, you could still access old email and create/edit documents, and the changes would eventually be synced up once you have an internet connection.
I don't understand why conservatives are so happy about this. If an entire branch in the tree of human knowledge is unsound, that's an unambiguously bad thing. It means, at the least, that we have a lot of work to do over again.

Maybe those people are happy because they have been saying for a while that an entire branch of human knowledge is unsound and that there is a lot of work to do over again?
CRU's work hardly constitutes an "entire branch" of climate science or meteorology, must less the whole tree (!) of human knowledge.

What happened here is that some players in a controversy were revealed (gasp) to have strong opinions, and even an agenda. And other players, themselves no less possessed of agenda, are using it to attack the subject via guilt by association. Meh. Lots for Fox News to spit about. Not much really interesting here.
I would give YC the same amount of stock for $0. That is to say I'd give them advisor shares just to be involved. That's pretty common.

That makes this whole debate irrelevant. It is worth it.
UPDATE: It was flagged to death by users, not moderators. Them's the breaks.
Profit, or revenue? It takes an awful lot of revenue to come up with $1m in gross profits.
Well, hard to say. He uses FAST pointer detector for point tracking which may not be this accurate for other "smoothing" surface object e.g. your mobile phone or "sharp-vertices" object e.g. the doll. It seems only can get impressive result for objects with simple 3d structure and detailed texture surface (has good point cloud prediction).
How did you score the Amazon internship? I once dropped my resume into their jobs application black hole never to hear from them again.
These postings get sadder and sadder every day. It's like this developer is dating a girl who's just not that into him and he doesn't get that yet: You left her 10 messages but she didn't call you back tonight. I'm sure she'll call you tomorrow. She was just busy.
I agree that it would be nice to have a CS nobel (or engineering, etc.), but that thought is unrelated to the peace prize question. A CS prize would be handed out with respect to technical merit, just like the other scientific ones.

However, the peace prize would be awarded based on promoting peace. For example, if Twitter one day actually enabled a revolution to take place, it could arguably be eligible for the nobel peace prize, but probably not the CS prize. Similarly, solving a very hard algorithmic problem would get you the CS prize but not the peace prize.

I think the question of whether Linus deserves the award is a very interesting one indeed, because it leads to a much more fundamental question:

"If I cure world hunger, I deserve the prize. But what if I write a script that runs in the background and five years later cures world hunger, do I still deserve the prize?"

Its just automation right?

I think Linux is itself prize-worthy, and thus since we can not hand the award to Linux itself, I think it would be a wonderful statement to give it to its original creator. I believe Linux really has changed/helped the world that much, and I think it would also make the important statement that politics isn't the only way of improving the world.
That's actually exactly what I don't want to have to deal with: bogus/expired/cancelled/etc. credit cards. Hence I'm looking for some kind of middle man.

But that's actually a solution I'm looking at: prepaid usage-based.
It seems interesting, but US only, and my startup is in France...
Sometimes, one data point is all that people have the patience to know about you.

There's a joke this reminds me of. Something about an old man at a bar ruminating, "a man can spend his life building bridges. Do they call him John the Bridge Builder? No. A man can spend his life raising crops. Do they call him John the Farmer? No. But you fuck one goat . . ."

On second thought, I'm not sure exactly how well that joke supports my point, but it's worth a thought.
PG is low-balling you. A 200k valuation for a startup that has already earned $1m in profits (I'd assume over several years) is absolutely ridiculous. He's trying to capitalize on his name.

Remember, you only heard one side of the story, and there are plenty of question marks around the $1MM figure in profits.
Two other things.. You would assume the individual would already have a hacker news account by this stage in this process, not one created 3 hours ago.

Also, why not provide more details such as a name or url if you're going to drop the "7%" figure. Your identity is already blown.

Perhaps someone is questioning the value/integrity of the YC concept rather than the monetary values.
Actually, AFAIK, climate change is supposed to cause greater variability in temperatures, not just uniformly higher temperatures. This is what I've heard from scientists like James Hansen.

Therefore, one would expect more episodes of lower temperature (cold snaps), but also more periods of higher temps (heatwaves).
It seemed from all the coverage that no app would work without a connection.
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Seriously (though I do think many developers raise valid criticisms and that the gatekeeper model of app development is unsustainable). "Open letter to Apple" yields >25,000 results in Google...I'm tempted to collect a bunch of them into a book, I figure they'd all buy a copy to see if theirs was included.
Yep, no one who has built a company that turns up $1M in profits, revenue, or event debt shows the same business mistakes as those in the post. Really, unless you have made a very specialized scientific or engineering product and sold it to one mega research lab for that much, you should have had enough business sense by now to know NOT to discuss deal terms in this manner. This is strictly something between you and your advisors/mentors.

Unless, of course, the posted already decided to reject the offer but wanted to capitalize on it with a publicity stunt.
Well, as long as we see ALL the emails, they can't be taken out of context, eh? (What? Communications methods other than emails? Preposterous.)
I tried to create something like this a long time ago, but I really wanted it to work by using pictures from only three equidistant angles. Probably why I never finished it....
This blog post describes why Winer does not like PubSubHubBub: http://brad.livejournal.com/2405147.html
Sorry. Having checked out reddit yesterday, I can see what you want to avoid. The pressure was strong, however :)
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How can the Earth have been cooling since 1980 if most of the 10 hottest years in recorded history were in the 2000s?
We have 2 offices. Our main office is here in Portland, but we have another in Lahore, Pakistan. The dev team here is a really solid group of 6 people. We wear many hats and likewise have many responsibilities.
It amuses me that people's imaginations always run towards retail discrimination when the technology clearly would be so much more cost effective for wholesale discrimination.

Think "credit scores". Except based off of much, much deeper data sets, and applicable to more fields than credit/insurance/employment.

I mean, I can tell with 80% accuracy what gender somebody is with 400 words they've written. Think of what could hypothetically be done with tying as much of their online persona I could possibly get to and then judging them on it.

Of course, you could get a new free email account and start fresh -- but then, that tells me something too, right? It will be just like a credit score: an absence of a credit score makes you look incredibly risky. Similarly, a few years from now, only reason someone in their early thirties won't have an online history is if they have something to hide. At the very least, that will be a good enough approximation to work with, given how stupidly effective the technology will be.

I mean, say I'm pricing car insurance for you. (Not for you, really. For a pool of a million people. But in the instant case, for you.) If I can make a determination of your risk algorithmically, even if I botch it some of the time, all I have to do is shave a fraction of a percent of accidents off my total and I save the company millions of dollars. How could I do that? Well, lets see whose Facebook accounts suggest that they routinely enjoy hard partying and alcohol. That might be worth a percent or two. And I won't be firing blind -- I'll have a hundred years of insurance claims, scores for people involved in 80% of the accidents last year, and a Hadoop cluster at my disposal to torture the data until it gives up its secrets.
This is awesome stuff. This type of stuff makes me regret not applying to stanford :(

On another note, does stanford not record the lectures? I would really love to see the videos.
It should be noted that CSS gradients are not yet supported in Firefox (3.5). As such, this demo uses transparent PNGs instead of of CSS3 properties. It works fine in this case, but of course images aren't as flexible as CSS properties would be.

However, Firefox 3.6, which should be released within a few weeks, will support custom gradients, so things are looking up.
Is it the right time to give banks trillions of dollars that they are just going to gamble away again?
Do you think paralysis, the flu, and depression are equally easy to fake?
Yeah, it sure would be terrible if poor people could get education...
Ning is hiring

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Napster was truly incredible, and the content on the network was so clean and well organized.

Funny how long ago that was now....
Clearly the solution is to get a time machine and do things your way. But we don't have those yet, so this is the result.
I am not disagreeing, but if you had some numbers, I would be interested in taking a look.
I am not fresh out of high school, but I still think the state should give them more free government services. I have a lot more use for educated fellow citizens than I have for, say, roads. (It's not socialism when the government builds roads that are free for everyone to use, but it is when we talk about educating people or helping them not die from some disease. I think that is pretty funny...)
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Wal-mart is a joint stock corporation. The chain of decision making goes: line employees < middle management < executives < board < shareholders. So on the big decisions, executives, the board, and for really big decisions, the shareholders must vote.

The United States is essentially a giant property management company, run as a consumer co-op. The chain of decision making is: civil service (including NSF funded climate researchers) < Congress < voters.

So as voters we actually do need to research and understand the big issues, just as a shareholder needs to research the companies they invest in.

Of course, perhaps the U.S. should not be run as a consumer co-op (aka democracy). I am sympathetic with that view, but that is really a whole other discussion. But for now it is, so people do have to take an interest in the issues.

It would be nice if we could just delegate these issues to a class of experts. But how we do know if these experts are on the right track? At some point we must do at least some verification ourselves. There is no other option.

I am not an expert in climate science. But I do know quite a bit about politics and government. In college I began to major in political science. But I found that the researchers in political science were incredibly off base. Their research was wrong, irrelevant, and used models that couldn't properly work.

Thus I do not have a strong, baseline trust in academia. My experience in political science shows me that systematic error can flourish among "scientists". These leaked emails illustrate the climate "scientists" are not scientists seeking truth wherever it may lead, but are advocates with an institutional agenda.

So we have climate scientists who are smart, but who should be treated with the same amount as trust as the prosecutor lawyer in a criminal case. We have the hoi polloi who are ignorant. That leaves us, smart, thoughtful people, who have to make the best judgments we can.
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