skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
There's also git ready, thought it hasn't seen an update in a while. http://www.gitready.com/
This is interesting too-

"I really wish I could be more positive about the Kyrgyzstan material,
but I swear I pulled every trick out of my sleeve trying to milk
something out of that. It was pretty funny though - I told Malcolm
what you said about my possibly being too Graybill-like in evaluating
the response functions - he laughed and said that's what he thought
at first also. The data's tempting but there's too much variation
even within stands. I don't think it'd be productive to try and juggle
the chronology statistics any more than I already have - they just
are what they are (that does sound Graybillian). I think I'll have
to look for an option where I can let this little story go as it is.

Not having seen the sites I can only speculate, but I'd be
optimistic if someone could get back there and spend more time
collecting samples, particularly at the upper elevations.

Yeah, I doubt I'll be over your way anytime soon. Too bad, I'd like
to get together with you and Ed for a beer or two. Probably
someday though.

Cheers, Gary
Gary Funkhouser
Lab. of Tree-Ring Research
The University of Arizona"

http://www.eastangliaemails.com/emails.php?eid=12&filena...

There really does need to be a full and detailed explanation of all this, immediately.
You Think The Google Interview Is Tough? Try Getting A Job At A PE Firm
Well, with URI.parse, you can send in a ftp uri, or just "something.com" (which is parsed as just a path). So not really what I need from URL validation. If there's something else I'm missing, I'm happy to know.

Edit: And btw, for an industrial-strength Ruby URI library (to replace the standard library), check out Addressable: http://addressable.rubyforge.org/
hmmm, perhaps conserving paper was also a reason for running words together, and cheaper paper (e.g. from improved trade routes/technology) enabled the reintroduction of spaces.
That is my point. Someone else (a normal person) breaks a major flooding news in her area via Internet/twitter before CNN or other MSM. In our area at least, it would be at least 10 minutes or more before our MSM gets any news on this.

Another recent example, tied to the flooding, we had brownouts but the MSM was reporting incorrect brownout schedules. We went to twitter and got the tweets directly from the utility company. This example is not breaking news per se but it affects our daily lives.

Sorry if that wasn't clear before.
I hope you like the book :)
Hopefully it doesn't cause you to follow spammers like your version 1.0 did. I had to unlink your app's twitter oauth account because I kept getting more and more spam from following the wrong people.
Aside from the fact that regex are implemented as a library, can you elaborate how support for them is not that good? I think that's wrong:

http://www.erlang.org/doc/man/re.html
If the tree-ring growth data doesn't match directly measured temperature at significant intervals of time (necessitating what amounts to arbitrarily changing data sources mid graph) why on earth would you trust it for periods where its the only data source.

I think the evidence for AGW extends beyond this particular incident, but I think its highly unethical and very poor science.
Setting Pricing for a Startup - The Rule of 80%
Right, but that sadly wasn't the point of the original post. Like most MG Seigler entries, it was logically incoherent and claimed that Twitter "wins" because CNN broke a story there before they broke it on their news. That's just dumb.
Tatsumaki a Perl port of Tornado
If only we could somehow bury coal...
reading that made me sleepy
I was always told by biology teachers and such, from junior highschool up to college professors that yawning is stimulated by a decrease in oxygen in the brain. A decrease in oxygen can be related to a number of things, one being exercise (which will reduce overall body oxygenation), another being concentration (certain areas of your brain can locally reduce its oxygen levels by working more than normal, likely when you shift from using one area of your brain to another), another is tiredness due to reduced respiration and heart rates, and finally by waking up as your body tries to increase its oxygenation levels to cope with rapidly increasing demands (this can be effected by what state of sleep you're in: light, deep or REM; typically deep sleep would cause the most yawning when being woken up from).

I'd certainly believe you could induce yawning from anaerobic exercise. If it was induced by aerobic exercise, I'd say you're not doing the exercise properly!
I am not well-versed in dendroclimatology, but I believe this issue is described here and is uncontroversial:

Briffa, K.R., Schweingruber, F.H., Jones, P.D., Osborn, T.J., Shiyatov, S.G. and Vaganov, E.A., 1998
"Reduced sensitivity of recent tree growth to temperature at high northern latitudes."
Nature 391, 678-682 (R)

Basically, since tree-ring density is influenced by temperature, you can use it to reconstruct temperatures. I believe the data set in question uses maximum latewood density (MXD), which accorded well with instrumental temperature readings until 1960, at which point they begin to show a decline in temperature while thermometers show an increase. The proposed solution is simply: Don't use the reconstructed temperatures after 1960, since they're wrong.
I speculate that the dementia is caused by poor circulation of oxygen to the brain. This would be due to arterial plaque and inflammation caused by the sympathetic stress response and LDL build-up which follow excess consumption of carbohydrates. The carbs account also for metabolic syndrome and the accumulation of body fat. (Fructose is principally responsible for the fatty liver.) Excess consumption of carbs is an addiction. All addictions are caused by identification with the thinking (verbal) mind, which is centred in the dominant hemisphere; they represent a misguided attempt to escape from that personality. Carbs are the most common addiction partly because avoiding them is difficult both socially and financially, and, obviously, avoiding food completely is difficult biologically.

It may well sound arrogant and/or downright wacky to state all this speculation but, hey, it represents an attempt to explain the world which is really what those scientists ought to be doing before they design an experiment!
This free online book: http://progit.org/book/
I don't think that news needs to be defined as 'important' against an objective standard. Of course "Tiger Wood hurts finger" isn't objectively time sensitive. If it is important to you, you could read about it in a monthly with no consequences. It appears & is read in dailies regardless.

It is news if it interests people. If it is news, speed is probably an issue. People like to be in the loop for (possibly) irrational reasons.

You are trying to make the time sensitivity of a news item objective by attaching actionability to it. Most news is not actionable. People want it fast regardless.

I don't think it is even controversial that "you heard it here first" is important to most news outlets.
Uh, I still do? The person writing the article seems to think that if you can approximate how many piano tuners there are in New York, you automagically get that Google dream job. They're both tough, but very different, processes. I can only hope the author doesn't work in the business side of software, as they clearly suffer from Shit's Easy Syndrome.
For CNN to break something on cable it has to be really important. There is a very serious filter there. It must be important.

Twitter requires no such filter. This allows much more breaking news through.
Facebook and Death
Your own screed doesn't do you much credit, either. Like it or not, most people who argue about climate change, evolutionary theory and other accepted-by-the-huge-majority-of-scientists-but-still-"debated" issues will never, ever consider actually sitting down and going through the evidence. And most of those people are, like it or not, rural and/or southern white Republicans with strong religious beliefs.

So, much as you'd apparently like to get your dander up, you've presented yourself as nothing more than an anecdote, and tried to imply that we should generalize from your case to the general case, a generalization not supported by the actual facts.
What is the best way to deal with skeptics of generally accepted ideas?

As a thought experiment, I'm going to throw out the worst possible analogy I can think of: How should historians deal with holocaust revisionism?

Is it better to censor, criminalize, and ignore the deniers, or should their claims be refuted with discussion and evidence (if available)? Ken McVay and the Nizkor Project has been doing this with holocaust revisionism since the USENET heyday of the 1990s. Refutation of claims from revisionist texts is openly presented by Nizkor.

Open dialague hasn't proven to be horribly effective, but marginalization and not responding openly to skeptical claims is certainly less effective. Humans are social animals. We need to interact and talk, even if it sometimes seems the guys on the other side of the fence are the bad ones.
"... I'm trying to figure out why this article is posted, as a UK anti-discrimination bill doesn't seem to matter much to mostly-US programmers. ..."

Because it's worth thinking about "why there are so few women in Startups?" Is it really how good a person is as a hacker or entrepreneur that stops someone succeeding? Is the Startup playground as open and equal as you think?
Since when did the science go from attempting to discern an objective truth to advocacy?

Advocacy of what? Shouldn't it be the duty of a scientist to be an advocate for better understanding of objective truth? Do you really think researchers should allow misuse of science to go unopposed?

What the researchers in this case are guilty of is not advocacy of a position, they're guilty of reckless disregard for scientific integrity. This is the case even if their position is correct.

the data would be manipulated by evildoers therefore the only people who can be trusted to interpret and even hold the data are some select group of scientists.

Well, it would be manipulated by "evildoers". There's no shortage of unscrupulous individuals seeking political gain on both sides of the climate debate. And chances are, the number of people outside their field of study who could correctly interpret the data is vanishingly small.

But it's still not an acceptable excuse.

The practical endeavor of science relies heavily on researchers acting in good faith, and on deferring to authorities in other fields, as no one has time to go back and personally recheck everyone else's conclusions. "Because the experts say so" is, generally speaking, a perfectly valid reason to accept a scientific conclusion--which is why even the appearance of impropriety is grossly damaging. It undermines the foundation of trust that the whole system is built on.
Was it the only data source in other time periods? or was it collaborated by other data?
Crowdfunding for entrepreneurs
This actually sounds like a pretty good strategy for fighting cancer... let's hope this research survives peer review.
I don't find camel case interesting in itself, but the evolution and adoption of the technology of written language is intellectually stimulating to me.

The article suggests that written language used to be read aloud - it was a recording of spoken language rather than directly interpretable in itself: monks had to read it aloud to understand it. A bit like an LP (remember Hofstadter's tortoise character who enjoyed LPs by looking at the groove patterns?) And then, it was found that the eye could recognise words directly, without needing to read aloud (or subvocalize), and that this technology became widely adopted over centuries.

The article discusses europe - I wonder if it was a localized cultural change; whether the greeks and romans already had this technology or if they needed to "read aloud" (I believe they favoured memorizing epic poetry); and of course whether other areas (especially china) had a similar change at a similar time.

There's a tantalizing possibility that it may have been accompanied by biological change, perhaps similar to the bizarre and fascinating concept of "The Bicameral Mind".

Or perhaps my intellectually curiosity is reading too much into the article? If so, the article stimulated it.

EDIT I was sure the guidelines used to say "intellectually stimulating", but you're right, it's "gratifies one's intellectual curiosity" http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html I found the article more intellectually provocative than gratifying, so maybe you're right.

BTW: I've found my upvotes/downvotes on comments aren't working anymore (I need to refresh to see it). Is HN secretly experimenting with vote privileges (karma threshold over 2183? average over 2.68? membership over 304 days?). Is it a bug? Or have I somehow irritated someone powerful?
My concern about the tree-ring data is that, on face, it seems like tautological reasoning. Please correct me if I'm misrepresenting what's going on.

The tree ring data, after a certain point in history, is no longer a reliable indicator of local temperature changes. There is no explanation for why trees no longer reflect local temperature changes. We know that they no longer reflect local temperatures, presumably, because we have other more reliable measurements available now (measurements that are not available further back in history).

This leaves us with a conundrum: is there any period in which alternative measurements and tree-ring measurements correspond with one another? Is the divergence between our measurements and the tree-rings something we can trace? Is it sudden or gradual? If there is no period in which there is a correspondence between our measurements and the tree-rings, what does this say about our assumption that tree-rings have ever accurately captured local temperatures?

It seems that the implication is that changes in the environment have rendered tree-rings unreliable. But if we're arguing that tree-rings are unreliable because of environmental change (i.e. the chemical changes to the composition of the atmosphere and water cycle that contribute to global warming), and we're seeking to explain environmental change, we're begging the question (assuming the explanandum in the premise of our argument).

Until a causal mechanism for the divergence between tree-rings and other measured temperatures can be specified, how can they legitimately be discarded as evidence, without invoking tautological reasoning?
But that tells us nothing about the quality of Erlang's Unicode support. Is it easy in Erlang to encode a string to its UTF-8 or Latin-1 representation and vice-versa? Are there utilities in Erlang to check whether a character is a punctuation symbol, a letter or a digit? Are there utilities to normalize Unicode strings? This one is important if you need to compare two strings.

Sorry if I sound a bit pedantic, but there is a lot more to good Unicode support than using wide characters.
Congratulations, your rank bigotry obliterated what little point you had.
feeling somewhat bruised and punished

Let go of that like you drop a filthy sock! Think of it this way: If you never disagree with what others put on the front page, how often are you going to be truly surprised? How often are you going to read something that you didn't know you liked until you clicked on it?

I like to think that a certain number of articles I detest is a necessary complement to enjoying a certain number of "Wow, I'd never thought of that" moments on HN.

I hope that perspective helps you shrug off the odd time you get downmobbed for calling out an article that doesn't "gratify your intellectual curiosity."
I'm not sure whether you're aware of this, but many older scripts, including all of the Semitic scripts, actually write letters entirely differently when they appear at the end of a word. Given that the monks who began employing majuscule and minuscule would surely have been familiar with Hebrew script, I'm hardly surprised they initially went to making the last letter significant instead of the first.
Ability to process 1 million orders/second
If you don't have accurate data for a certain time period, it's preferable to have approximate data than none, as long as you take that lower accuracy into consideration.
Frankly, I think "native regexps" has proved a mistake, not a virtue. If you're using so many regexps in your code that you actually care whether the syntax is optimized for it, the odds of you Doing It Wrong (TM) are very, very high. (And it has to be direct use, too... if you want something like a regexp-based dispatch map like Django uses, Perl doesn't even have a significant character advantage over Python; r"" vs qr//.) Making it easy to do the wrong thing and harder to do the right thing (than the wrong thing) has certainly wrecked up a lot of Perl code I've had to deal with.

The majority of my professional programming is in Perl with many other programmers, and the number of times I see people do something like $settings =~ /read/ over a string containing settings, often complete with more than one setting that has the substring "read" even though they're only looking for one particular one... oi. Makes me sick.
Even better, I could have them installed in my pockets so I could clean my hands all the time.

I have a (usually sticky) 2-year-old. This would be awesome.
I really like where it's heading and what it does already. I wouldn't spend $700, but for $500 you MIGHT have me buying it for my mom. Odds are, this is just the first version and costs will go down over time. It's good to see others building tight software+hardware integration for purpose specific computing.
I agree, as much as you need to be paranoid about spam, there is also the flip side: when people(twitter users) need something and your tool helps them connect with a vendor it can be magic. Not all unsolicited communication is spam. It's all about targeting and I believe that is what Zack's tool is after.
Hmm... I also wrote a concurrent webcrawler in Erlang, and at no point was I tempted to use regular expressions.
Thanks!

All advice appreciated!
What you say is perfectly reasonable regarding popular content like movies and novels. Even computer games. However, of personal data like photos and writings, much will be lost. People (or their children or their grandchildren, etc) won't bother to convert everything to new formats and they won't bother to copy all files when they upgrade hardware. Alternatively, they could upload their data to a third party who, for an annual fee, would store and continually upgrade the files to newer formats. However, companies go bust. Conversion software is buggy. Passwords get lost or not handed on. Descendants go through financial bad patches. A single break in the chain is enough to destroy information.

Thus to preserve data you really do have mingle it with hardware and mass reproduce the whole thing. In the biological analogy, genes are the data, DNA is the medium and the rest of the seed is the 'reader'. Making hundreds or thousands of copies ensures against total loss.
How Geeks Measure the World
Good point. It seems obvious that it does, in fact.
Innovation Exchange tunes the crowdsourcing model for the Fortune 5000 crowd
In that case, more articles about Lisp please :)
As a Christian that accepts climate change as fact, I will add that much of the resistance from the Bible belt comes from the misconception that climate change is necessarily a doomsday, end of the world event.

Christians obviously have their own distinct end times view. So if climate changers couch their arguments as "Pay attention or the human species will go extinct!" it's really a non-starter. If you really care to start a discussion, try instead: "Pay attention or the entire Eastern seaboard will be flooded in 2020!", or, better yet, what I say (as a Christian myself), "We are commanded to be good stewards of God's creation, which means not polluting/raping/short-term-thinking."

To be very specific, I think one major obstacle is that many Christians consider God's promise to never flood the Earth again (Genesis flood, Noah) as a guarantee that God will not allow a sea-level rise to wipe out a "significant" percentage of humankind. That's a misconception that's significant to the debate but rarely addressed by either side.
Please quote your source for your assertion stated as fact that "most people who argue about climate change ... are rural and/or southern white Republicans with strong religious beliefs" .
Ah, really? That's a Google question?

I'd love to hear what a good answer to that question is. Anyone up for it?
I've never deleted a genuine email in my entire life. I've deleted thousands of emails, sometimes in one go, but I've never mentioned 'deleting loads of emails' it's "I deleted a shit load of spam today, it was a fucking boat load, you could feed a third world country!"

Perhaps yes he deleted a lot of spam, but no one on the planet considers them emails. Why would he be any different?
While I'm glad people are digging through the leaked source code, I doubt they find anything so blatant as outright fraud.
A decade ago, many journalistic outlets didn't humor brand-motivated capitalizations. They didn't accept the company's own marketing staff as authoritative about what was "correct" and what was "mangling". It was Ebay, not eBay; Next, not NeXT; Nationsbank not NationsBank; etc.

This article is a lamentation that the journalistic style guardians didn't hold the line.

Here's William Safire's 1997 take on the issue, alluded to by Crain but not linked:

http://www.nytimes.com/1997/07/20/magazine/jammedtogether-na...

I'm for camel case as a necessary evolution: there are so many similar names, and name collisions, that anything that lets someone try to be distinguishable, and anything that might make two words fit together more distinctively than if paired any otherway, deserves a chance.
It's a bit extreme to put them in jail. I too think their actions are deplorable, but jail? We didn't even put the criminals behind the financial collapse in jail, why put morally reprehensible scientists in jail? I'd say the financial criminals caused more problems than the climate team.
Sorry for asking, but what's "Shit's Easy Syndrome"?