skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
"a small group of influential scientists is doing poor science and going to any length to keep a lid on it"

No, a hoax is when people deliberately create a plan to deceive others, and know they are lying the whole time. It's different to when people fervently believe in something and get involved in groupthink, ignoring dissenting opinions and developing an 'us and them' mindset.

"You do have a competing, more plausible theory, right?"
No, I don't. But then I'm not asking anyone to give me their money, either. The Earths climate has always been changing, and the causes have never been fully understood. Why did the medieval warming period occur? Why the little ice age after that? It's not up to sceptics of a theory to provide a competing theory that's better. The burden of proof is on the proponent of a theory to prove it is true. Something many people believe has not yet been achieved with the AGW theory.
I take it you haven't been talking much with the instructor of this course? You might be pleasantly surprised that he thinks more highly of you than you do of yourself. Sometimes, curiosity and motivation impresses an instructor more than ability, especially from a beginner. This is especially true for good instructors, who probably experienced the same thing you are going through now. (If the instructor isn't impressed, then it won't hurt to think that he's a terrible instructor, and you can do better on your own.)
> I would argue (without data I admit) that the desire for privacy is actually caused by the desire to avoid punishment, ridicule and/or social exclusion. If these could be avoided then I don't believe there would be much of a 'need' for privacy.

I think you deconstruct things far too much. If you removed all those things from society right now people would still "need" privacy because we have been programmed by thousands or millions of years of evolution to need it. We don't need it on a rational basis (although there are plenty of rational arguments one can make for needing it), we need it because our brains evolved that way and we're stuck with it.

If you find a culture that has no privacy and no compensatory substitute for it then I'll readily grant that people in that society don't need privacy and we can qualify "basic human need" to something slightly more constrained. But it won't change the fact that we are stuck in a situation where the vast majority of human beings DO need privacy and it is wrong to take it away from them.
I do the same thing. It makes it easy to see, at a glance, what emails still need a response or some action on my part since I sort by date, not status.
A better analogy would be that huge pools of data are a temptation to break trust in the way that leaving a huge pile of money lying in the street is a temptation to steal it. That's what those people see in that data, huge piles of money.

The question is should we outlaw things that in and of themselves aren't wrong, but are so tempting that a large minority of people who wouldn't otherwise break the law fall for the temptation and decide to. DUI isn't inherently wrong, but the odds of it resulting in harm are so great that it makes sense to outlaw it. Most of the time DUI is a victim-less crime, that doesn't mean it should be legal unless you mess up and kill someone.
I really hope AT&T won't be short sighted with their networks. It will set the tone of how others might deal with their data traffic.
For goodness sakes get it over with already.
South Park Seasons 1-13 DVD
It's Doctor Schmidt, he's got a PhD in EECS. (this really doesn't contribute to the discussion, I just thought it was cool)
Right, cuz a failed rocket will stay in one spot spinning in a nice neat spiral...
I've implemented a Ruby version of WebSocket server (which is based on EventMachine and yet very experimental) - http://github.com/laktek/Web-Socket-Examples
That's an interesting alternative that may very well be true. I don't think it carries over to this discussion quite that well, as I'm not sure what the equivalent of urban sprawl, trains/group transit are in the context of internet infrastructure.

But still, an interesting take.
You'd bail from ATT because ATT did not lay in the network capacity for the devices which they were/are selling.
Technology First, Needs Last
It seems that there is more work associated with your option.
If A = all emails, P = number of pending and A>>P, then

his method: click "unread" P times

yours: click "archive" A-P times

A-P >> P

His method is less work.
wow -- finally a photo sharing app that makes sense and that's easy to use... jesus christ it was about time. i'd say it was worth the wait though because these these guys nailed it. i just shook pictures to a few friends in the office... worked perfectly but they should really offer a disclaimer about not being responsible for carpal tunnel (i'm feeling a little stiffness). regardless, job well done team divvyshot!
From New Scientist, the reason it was such a perfect spiral is because it was a three stage rocket, of which stages 1 & 2 probably went fine, putting it close to the edge of space:

http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn18262-strange-norway-s...
I'm interested in hearing what we use after the term "social media" burns out. A while back, people used to throw around "multimedia" to no end...
Static Page Search for Django Haystack
AT&T to Put 5gb Data Usage Cap on iPhone
Perhaps you meant this?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tarski's_undefinability_theorem

EDIT: Turns out HN is stripping out the apostrophe in the URL.
I was talking specifically about Eric Schmidt, not "people". I think he's pretty smart, and smart in the kind of way that would make him notice things like this. Google certainly wouldn't have hired Dubya for CEO.
>If you disagree then [citation needed].

I think you are confused about where the burden of proof lies here. You are asserting the worthlessness of the entire cannon of Western philosophy (and quite possibly other branches of philosophy too). This is an incredible assertion.

By the way, why do you "exclude logic"? Logic has always been a central element of philosophy, at least since Aristotle.

>To be clear Philosophy does not encompass math and it does not require testing of those theories.

Philosophy certainly includes some areas of math (for example, mathematical logic derives partly from work by philosophers). As for whether or not philosophical ideas "need to be tested", that is such a vague locution that it's difficult to respond. But certainly philosophical ideas are supposed to be subject to scrutiny (e.g. compared to alternative points of view, shown to be consistent, etc. etc.)

PS. Thanks for telling me what skepticism is. By the way, if you are interested in testability, you might want to read the ample literature on this notion in the philosophy of science.
Submit one article a week next year
The scientists aren't asking for anyone's money, either. They're simply giving their best forecast.

Here's the thing, (and mind you 95% of the people who've studied this for longer than 5 minutes on cable news commercial breaks agree on it), the carbon theory makes sense and there's a lot of correlation. If they're wrong, then all we'll have done is get off of fossil fuels, which we have to do anyways, and leave cleaner air for our children.

If you're wrong? I mean, do you buy homeowner's insurance or flood insurance? Why not earth insurance?

Lastly, to revisit the original point, regarding groupthink and dissenting opinions -- if you don't have an alternative model that makes more sense, you don't have a dissenting opinion. You're just getting sucked into the politics of the situation.

The earth is definitely warming, ice is definitely melting, and atmospheric CO2 definitely causes at least ocean acidification which is massively disruptive itself. That's just basic chemistry. It also seems to be the most likely candidate for the cause of global warming, based on what we know.

So why are you so invested in making sure we don't act on it?

If we already had clean energy, hypothetically.. would you be willing to take on all of the risks of global warming in order to be 2% richer? Honest answer.
I may be missing the meta-joke (an undefined result page for an undefinability theorem) and possibly there's a URL mangler at work, but here's a link including the apostrophe (%27) between Tarski and s:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tarski%27s_undefinability_theor...
When and how to micromanage
That's what I've done at YC for the last year or two. It's very efficient. I set aside a block of time, and founders book slots within it. I doubt we could fund 26 startups at once the way we used to do things, where each appointment had to be made individually.
Related Post: When The World Gives You Lemons, Sell Lemonade
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=987138
"carbon trading was invented by Ken Lay"

I've looked into it and you're correct on this (both accuracy and logical fallacy usage). You won't hear this from me ever again.

Also on the 'evil' statement - poor choice of words. I was referring to the EPA declaration of Co2.
And brc, seriously, knock off the downrates for political disagreement. I'm being polite here, and whoever is doing this is pretty much proving that they're not interested in the truth, they're interested in politics.
"modern automobiles are at least an order of magnitude more complex than something from, say, the 60s". I could believe a car today is even two or three orders of magnitude more complex than a car of the sixties (100 times or a 1000 times more complex).

But that's compared to Moore's law that a computer becomes an order of magnitude more complex roughly each eighteen months for twenty or more orders of magnitude increase from the sixties.

Also, modern cars do have lots of bugs in sense of suboptimal behaviors. They just cannot fail utterly without people being pissed.
Where do you people get this idea that politicians secretly want to implement socialism ("controlling the means of production and distribution")? What evidence do you have for this? If financial firms and "unproductive countries" have so much of a comparable vested interest, why don't they do as the oil companies do and actually invest in political advocacy on "their side"?
Ask HN: Letters of rec for grad school apps
I'm a few years out of college and still at my first job, but am thinking of changing it up. I've thought about applying to grad school in computer science many times in the past, but each time I'm deterred by the letters of recommendation. I didn't really establish any connections with professors during my undergrad years.

What are my options for getting letters of recommendation?

I've thought about trying to contact some professors at a nearby university to see if I can help with research projects in my free time, but haven't investigated very much. I have several industry sources to get recommendations from, but it seems that industry recommendations aren't weighed nearly as much as academic/research recommendations.

Any ideas?
OK. It's been well documented how the oil companies have their hands in the game. Show me the money trail from the solar and wind industry.
yes. i meant that.

the link opens for me. either wat u said is true or my opera has acquired intelligence or quantum mechanics is causing a havoc.
Firewatching Media is hiring in Tokyo
Ask HN: Extracting text from cross-platforms
Is there a way to automatically extract text from any application in focus?

For example, can I extract text from a website when my browser is in focus. Then, when I switch my focus to Microsoft Word it would extract text from there automatically.

Help please!
:)
both the link i posted and and the link you posted open for me. the title was frack Godel where frack was spelled with multiplication operator. didnt know HN had blasphemy laws !
First, wrong link, should be: http://www.zdnet.com.au/blogs/null-pointer/soa/Carelessness-...

Second:

rm -f /*.*

I mean, seriously? Is this amateurs' hour in the trojan department? They don't even know how to use rm?
I also use the unread status for stuff I could go back and respond to, I then archive stuff older than 90 days in my inbox. Having 3 months of email I can search on my BlackBerry is handy when I'm away from a computer.
From that entry...

The indefinability theorem is conventionally attributed to Alfred Tarski. Gödel also discovered the indefinability theorem in 1930, while proving his incompleteness theorems published in 1931, and well before the 1936 publication of Tarski's work (Murawski 1998). While Gödel never published anything bearing on his independent discovery of indefinability, he did describe it in a 1931 letter to John von Neumann.
That's why you can have more than one email in the 'To' field:

To: You want to read this.

CC: You may want to refer to this.
Imagine if we had multiple companies building separate highways alongside each other, competing for traffic.
Or stop using your inbox as a todo list. You wouldn't give people the ability to insert Viagra jokes into your normal todo list; why would you let them send whatever they wanted to a todo list for your most pressing issues?
Fine, let's test that hypothesis: climate scientists overstate their findings. If climate scientists overstate their findings, we would expect them to, among other things, overestimate the rate of glacial melting. But in fact, most of the findings (the IPCC findings in particular) underestimate the rate of glacial melting. Hmm....
They just have to block access to porn sites. Done, network congestion solved.
I'm really enjoying this series. Definitely getting down and gritty with what Clojure is really capable of (and all the other languages he's tried). Of all the articles I've read on concurrent programming and the languages that promise new ways to handle it, I find the Wide Finder series the most pragmatic and concrete.
So why are you so invested in making sure we don't act on it?

This is why I downvoted you.

I grew up in a religious environment, although I am not religious now. Your statement reminded me almost exactly of the way I watched religious conversion being pitched to new prospects when I was a child. On one hand, there's a chance of total damnation. On the other, if you make these simple commitments, all will be good. And the commitments you make are good for you in either case. You have been doing wrong. Now is the chance to repent and change your ways. How long will you stay childishly in your selfish ways?

The similarity was almost spooky.

What can I say? I didn't like the style of the comment. Your downvote had nothing to do with the any sort of politics that I'm aware of. While I don't agree with you, carry on the conversation. I'm sure my little downvote will easily be compensated by dozens of other votes from people who didn't have my response to your particular turn of phrase.

No worries, mate.
USDA Innovations for Healthy Kids Challenge
Who's not reading this on an iPhone? I just see a big white area where the article should be.
nice thought.

wrench: the median club owner has more money than the median guitar player.
Guide to Low-cost Usability Tools
I don't recall ever downrating a comment or a story in HN. If someone is downrating your comments, it's not me.

"If we already had clean energy, hypothetically.. would you be willing to take on all of the risks of global warming in order to be 2% richer? Honest answer."
No, of course not. None of my posts indicate a dislike for clean renewable energy. I am an enthusiast of electric cars, passionate about ocean pollution, believer in locally based sustainability. It would be my ideal to have a self sufficient home with no fossil fuels providing energy. Hopefully I'll see that in my lifetime.

However, I stop at correlation=causation, I distrust any non-testable computer models intensely (be they of the economic or climatic type) I'm also dubious about the 2% - it's also based on computer modelling and government forecasts, none of which I place the slightest faith in.

The scientists are asking for peoples money - that's the whole point. Directly through more research grants and funding. Indirectly by asking for wealth transfers from people.

"if you don't have an alternative model that makes more sense, you don't have a dissenting opinion. You're just getting sucked into the politics of the situation."

I completely reject that statement. I don't have to have an alternative view on any theory. Any theory on anything is completely rejectable without coming up with an alternative. It's perfectly logical to say "I don't have a better explanation, but you've failed to convince me".
[Note: This is the perspective of a Product Manager & Technology guy, not a lawyer]

NDAs are not for "hey we have an idea we'd like you to hear about" and they are frequently misused for that. This just sets everyone up for legal issues and hurt feelings later -- when you tell somebody an idea they may have already been working on it -- you then end up in a prior art mess.

NDAs are not something you should ever put into the CRM workflow for your sales people as a measured objective, i.e. I've seen quotas of, "Get 20 leads to sign an NDA, get 10 POCs, get 5 sales." If you can't tell me about the features of your product without an NDA I'm not going to understand the product after I sign it.

NDAs make sense if you have an established relationship and you're working on something pre-patent or trade secret work together. NDAs also make sense if you're hiring a consultant to come in and help with marketing, business planning, etc.
In Canada, it could now be illegal to talk to children online
This is a bad analogy because if you are the club owner you already own a freaking club. Of course I'd want to be the club owner, making big bucks as a guitar player is a crap-shoot. You'll most likely fail as a musician and end up a computer programmer. If i sell the club that's money in my pocket.

This analogy isn't a paradox.
It has nothing to do with deep concentration.
It is a choice between a sure thing and most likely nothing.
Well, there's multiple people doing it, and frankly, attempting to silence opinions you disagree with seems much more religiously invested to me than simple hedging against the worst case.

Anyways, I hope you're right but I fear that you aren't.
Not to be too pedantic but gb != GB. The g is unambiguous(though wrong) but the b could be bit or byte depending on the capitalization. 1Gb networking is much slower than 1GB. (.125GB vs. 1Gb)

It's one of my pet peeves so sorry about the digression.
Or at least one example.
Why can't this just link to the original article?

Which is an ok article, and might be better summed up that when you are dealing with an unknown quantity, you should treat them as an unknown quantity and /not/ trust them to do their job properly. Which is fine and reasonable and possibly common sense.

I just don't understand why this article required two levels of indirection.
Mind Matters: In Defense of Downtime
Then couldn't Google offer some sort of non-personalized version where such data was discarded that privacy conscious users could choose to use? This would bring me back to believing that Google isn't "evil"
Well, clearly several people are doing it, and I'd wager that they're also Republican voters, if we're going to play the statistics. That sort of rating seems to be abusive to me, and against the HN ethos, particularly if you can't be bothered to form a cogent response.

Regarding not being convinced -- fine. But what's your incentive to go so far out of your way to discredit them? Correlation doesn't equal causation but when we have a plausible theory, correlation, and no other theories that come even close as far as the smell test, well, you've gotta do better than crossing your arms and proclaiming yourself unconvinced to be credible.

Given that you agree that we should move to clean and renewable energy, what's your investment in tarring the scientific community? You try to bring it to grants.. what's that, a few dozen million worldwide for the whole climatology community? I'd think anyone who labels themselves intellectual would be proud to sponsor pure research.

Basically, where's your beef come from, if it's not politics? Why aren't you trying to poke holes in the theory of evolution? You don't need an alternative to be unconvinced, right? That'd be easier than the warming one, frankly.
How to make VOIP Calls?
Do you want to make cheap calls to India and to other destinations? Many of us hesitate to make long distance calls for the fear of blowing a huge hole in our pockets. Today we have one of the cheapest ways of making international calls to India (make free international calls) and to the other international destinations. You will be able to make phone calls from your PC at the cheapest prices possible and these phone calls are called VOIP calls. VOIP stands for Voice Over Internet Protocol.
That's the same argument for marijuana legalization.
Just have her use Access and keep your evangelism to yourself, cripes!

Are you seriously thinking a CRUD RoR app might be a better solution for her?
What about the blue "beam" or "tube" or whatever you want to call it? You have to admit, it looks pretty symmetrical for a malfunction.
Sorting dir listings by ASCII (or how this is called) big Names befor lowercas names; that would be a useful feature for me at least. I don't know how much I would trust an app to essentially taking over my system though.
It wasn't a press release was it? I thought it was an interview.
Won't Chrome Frame fix the IE problem?
To make sure we upvote it because its from Joel.
Do they have the ability in the contract, to arbitrarily cap you? Assume I have an iPhone and for the last 6 months have been using 5.7GB per month; now I use it and get either capped or charged more... I would not be happy.

And FWIW, 5GB/month of data transfer, were you to buy it at any major datacenter, is about 10-30 cents' worth of bandwidth.
I can answer my own question... another source says they want to move to a straight usage based billing model. They'd have to charge less than 1 cent per MB to match $30/month pricing on a 5GB cap which obviously isn't going to happen. This is a stealth price hike for everyone light or high usage.
"No, you are not a designer. You are someone that can piece together some stuff in Photoshop or add the right pieces of code in XHTML/CSS. You aren’t the person that creates experiences. You aren’t the translator of ideas that people never thought could be produced visually. You aren’t the person that can toss their own style to the curb and come up with something even greater because of it."

I am not a computer programmer, i am just someone who throws together some characters in emacs which compile on a computer for the most part but sometimes crash. I am not a person who creates codes that have not previously been thought to be creatable. I am not making the world an unimaginably better place of incredible grandiousity. I totally lack the condescention and hubris required to be the ONE TRUE PROGRAMMER.
There's an opportunity in mobile because many photos are taken on the phone and (arguably) it's easier to transfer photos from your computer to your phone than your computer to Facebook because USB is faster than broadband.

People want to share photos w/ their friends. Facebook is the easiest way; that doesn't mean it always will be.
Yeah, but for what price?
just shake it!
I like the "sensor data processing" one. Measuring,
grouping and manipulating traffic whether on the web or
on the street will give search much more dynamics.
I'd really like to see a Common Lisp solution to the wide finder sometime (in case any lisper is really bored and feels like cranking one out :D )
> It seems likely to me that the superposition in the formalism actually just represents our ignorance of the system's state, not the state itself.

Again, nobody argues that. It's possible to experimentally distinguish between the two situations (Bell's theorem). This is a bit of a strawman.

Besides the wave function is a complex vector. It can't represent ignorance. You have to take |ψ|2 to get a real value.