skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Sigh. No, the emails don’t reveal any of what you just claimed.

Reading material: http://www.pewclimate.org/docUploads/east-anglia-cru-hacked-... [pdf]

Sorry to go all pdf on you, but I don’t have the time for anything else.
It is a know fact that very young babies can regrow the distal tips of fingers when cut off by accident. Human babies lose this ability after a few months into life.

Body parts regrow forever: the skin is redone every 30 days. The regrowth, though, is not a separate process from self-renewal from wear and tear. Bones, for instance, remake themselves to the last atom every 4 years, yet a broken bone won't regain its original shape in a human adult.

So the question is a matter of restoring a pattern. Why that doesn't happen is not understood. Some vertebrates can do it without much trouble--think salamanders being able to regrow part of their brain and eye, beyond the well-known limb and tail cases.

From an evolutionary perspective we can speculate that the formation of a scar is a big deal: it enhances short-term survival, which is a prerequisite for long-term survival (this is not something silly to say). Current medical research is showing (and already applying) that preventing scars allows some tissues to regrow normally, the nervous system included. Still a long way until medicine can regenerate a lost limb in a human, but there's supporting evidence towards its feasibility in the near future.
Entrepreneur's location floats his boat
Mainstream views in science. And Newtonian physics is a good example for that. It was an excellent first approximation of the real deal.
Your posts come across as overly defensive, which doesn't help your argument. I am not attacking you, yet you seem to believe I am.

The UEA Climate Research Unit is a small research organization, consisting of maybe 20-30 climatologists at most. (I can't check. They took their web site down.) Yet you claim that the international consensus of 2000-3000 scientists is rendered invalid by maybe 1% of them employing dubious methods.

I'm aware that the CRU dataset is an important one in climate research, but if this was truly a catastrophic problem with the conclusion, then I would expect to see hundreds of scientists withdrawing their opinions. Although some scientists have done this, there have not been many, and I understand this is more of a defensive move.
Javascript is also a good gateway drug to functional languages--it shares many of the facilities available in functional languages while retaining a C-like syntax.
Same here - almost exact reaction. I remember as a kid that Ritalin used to calm me down but, as an adult, these are definitely stimulants to me today.
Slowly Programming in R
Who cares if the NSA can decrypt my blog backups

Confidentiality is only one aspect of security. Authenticity is also important in some cases: You might care if the NSA edits your backups so that after restoring them it looks like you said something you didn't really say.
All I meant with that point is that it's hard to get to the meat of the argument with so many clearly false statements flying around.

I have yet to find any non-climatologists doing decent, unbiased, independent analysis of the climate change debate. As a scientist myself, this annoys me.
I definitely agree with those additions. Even designers should know Javascript for when they're building front-end user interfaces. It's so helpful when a designer already knows Javascript and doesn't need me to whip up a script in 30 seconds for some feature that they just designed.
Since when is HN new-world-order-conspiracy-central?

We live in an economy with a certain amount of economic activity and overall wealth, which tend to go up over time (barring recession). To facilitate trade, the central banks of nations issue currency, which acts as a "dual" of the economy (or more precisely, a piece of it - there aren't enough dollars circulating to buy every good and service in the US simultaneously), a pure trade good with fiat value. If the economy kept growing and the supply of currency stayed constant, deflation would result, as previously noted. However, by Keynesian theory (which is not absolutely proven be right, but has worked pretty well over the past 75 years), inflation (at reasonable levels) is more conductive to investment and consumption and overall economic vitality than deflation, due to people being more inclined to spend and invest money that would lose value just sitting there.

Thus, the government prints more money every year than would be necessary to match the growth in the economy. This is not some ridiculous plot by the Swiss and the Jews to enslave us all; it's simply a tax on everyone who holds dollars (or, in other countries, other currencies), since the government dilutes the overall pool of currency to grant itself spending money. This "inflation tax" is always a very small percentage of overall government revenues in the US, and even if Keynesian theory were totally wrong, the policy would not be particularly harmful. It would just be another tax, although somewhat regressive, since the poor tend to have more of their net-worth in cash than the rich.

And, it makes absolutely no difference who gets the money straight from the printing press, aside from the value of enjoying crisp, shiny new bills. The government spends money it got from printing in exactly the same places as it spends money procured from taxes.

I understand what psychological processes drive people to conspiracy theory, but it still frustrates me to no end that so many people believe in the laws of cigar-munching cabals instead of those of economics.
Wow, yes it's a shame. Possibly a very beautiful machine but there is no way I would give them my money.
Well the reason jQuery rose to popularity had nothing to do with its speed. jQuery is a bit of a pseudo-dsl for dealing with dom manipulation. Sure it's a ton faster if you just did it with pure dom, but I think if you considered the development time required as part of your benchmark, you might see jQuery come out on top.
Didn't know hacker news was into speculation.
The only payment option seems to be PayPal. Does anyone know what kind of buyer protection PayPal provides in case the payers never receive the device?
Hmm, surprisingly a nice final product for such a messy inception. I'm definitely not going to be an early adopter of this, though. I still have more questions than answers about the product.
As an illustration of the character and motivations of those who are advocating loudest that we do something about climate change I cite today's Drudgereport which has the following stories featured:

Stanford climate change professor, Stephen Schneider, uses UN security to force a non-sympathetic film maker, Phelim McAleer, to stop filming and stop asking questions at his conference. http://biggovernment.com/2009/12/11/un-security-stops-journa...

The IRS is hiring hundreds of people to go after wealthy tax-evaders (people who are trying to keep their own money): http://www.reuters.com/article/idUSTRE5BA45320091211.

Greece admits it's riddled with corruption: http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/54f4983e-e637-11de-bcbe-00144feab4...

China says that population control is key to climate change deal: http://www.chinadaily.com.cn/china/2009-12/10/content_915112...

Canadian national newspaper calls for global one-child policy and cites China as "the world's leader in terms of fashioning policy to combat environmental degradation, thanks to its one-child-only edict." http://www.financialpost.com/story.html?id=2314438

SC First Lady files for divorce from Gov Sanford. http://www.breitbart.com/article.php?id=D9CH8FAO0&show_a...

I think it's just naive to accept the climate change argument as if it's motivated by a pure search for truth. Better to see it as an attempt by government to grab more power and limit freedom.
His C program is actually a C++ one. C does not allow declaration of variables in the for loop (i.e. 'int i;' line has to precede the for statement). Better not to take any programming advices from someone who can't tell C from C++.
I've never seen $606 billion US dollars being referred to as 'paltry' before.
I have crossed these borders frequently (except Croatia).

Yes it can happen.
One thing it will definitely change is the attitude to Google from all the device manufacturers now making Android phones. This is a stab in the back, nothing else. Everyone who fears Android will be fragmented should be concerned.
Full purchase price protection: https://www.paypal.com/cgi-bin/webscr?cmd=xpt/Marketing/secu...
A prediction has been made that, if we limit our total CO2 emissions to (from memory) 650GT between now and 2050, the anthropogenic portion of global warming will be limited to 2 degrees. This is falsifiable.

Great. It only takes 40 years! And what kind of model do you use to determine the anthropogenic portion of global warming, given that the whole argument boils down to how you, uh, determine it. ("If we ban vaccines, I can assure you that the number of autistic children born due to vaccines will drop.")
One of the best programmers I know (my tutor in a sense) is 57 and started programming in his late 30's after buying out of the Air force.

So: no :)
I'm not so sure: http://www.google.de/trends?q=perl%2Cphp%2Cjavascript

Anyway, php is still very useful if you want to put something on the web and have no money. So is javascript although the need to write JS yourself will decrease due to automatic generation of JS etc. I also don't think you necessarily have to learn (ba)sh since you could easily write more complex scripts in any other programming language (i.e. ruby is quite good at that and it's also a very suitable perl-replacement).
As i recall about http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pentium_FDIV_bug, the error came about when transferring a mask where one segment was dropped. The implication was that it was not so much a design bug as it was a production step. They had tests for the FP, but did not run it at every step.

As an aside, what was amusing to me were the estimates of the probability of errors that various voices were making: Byte made one, I remember IBM making one. All of the estimates presumed that the floating point calculations made were somehow randomly distributed, which is very clearly not the case.
Why should all developers use/know a system programming language? And the title of the article implies the list to be valid for "every developer".
This was a great reply - very factual, polite, and informative - thank you.

Here's my issues:

1. This has been done, in several ways. A prediction has been made that, if we limit our total CO2 emissions to (from memory) 650GT between now and 2050, the anthropogenic portion of global warming will be limited to 2 degrees. This is falsifiable.

I am always skeptical, in any field, over a claim made over a 50 year timespan. Actually, any predictions made over specifically a 30 to 60 year timespan set off alarms for me. It's the longest timespan that will occur within your own life, so it gains some credibility, but you're not really going to be held accountable to it. Similar claims are made when recommending finance policies, for instance. It's far enough out that you can't test and falsify before taking the recommended course of action.

2. Predictions of sea-level rise over the shorter term have also been made. These are falsifiable.

This would be fantastic, this is exactly the kind of thing I've been looking for and haven't seen. Do you have links?

3. There was no event of "destroying data in response to an FOI request," - or if there was, there's no direct evidence of it in the leaked emails.

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/environment/article693...

"SCIENTISTS at the University of East Anglia (UEA) have admitted throwing away much of the raw temperature data on which their predictions of global warming are based."

"The UEA’s Climatic Research Unit (CRU) was forced to reveal the loss following requests for the data under Freedom of Information legislation."

"In a statement on its website, the CRU said: “We do not hold the original raw data but only the value-added (quality controlled and homogenised) data.”"

4. No, the burden of proof is on those who want to show that the null hypothesis, that human-produced CO2 has the potential to cause direct harm through accelerated warming, is incorrect. The reason this is the null hypothesis isn't because the scientists say so, it's because it's the best physical model we have.

This was actually quite an insightful point, which I'll think about. The models right now come across incomplete at best, so spending trillions on that risks destroying a lot of health, wealth, happiness that those resources could be deployed to instead. If there's global warming, what's the extent of it? How much is caused by humans? What are the pros and cons of climate change? And so on. These questions aren't answered, and there's recommendations for trillions of dollars of resources and great amounts of social and economic controls to be put in place. I tend to think the burden of proof on that should be extremely high, but your point about our CO2 models is interesting and I'll think it over.

Thanks for the reply.
ARM based SoC created by Qualcomm, in phone assembled by HTC, which is running Android and marketed by Google itself. Where is the miracle?
/. was the first technology aggregation site I started visiting on the web.

I don't go back very much. I think the thing that did it for me was the site's redesign. It's much too clever by half. The signal-to-noise ratio dropped over the years as well.

Having said that, I thought the categorization system was awesome -- much better than up/down voting. And on good days I really enjoyed the mix of funny and interesting. It was a nice combination of amused peanut gallery and topic expertise. Sort of a joyful love of learning.
the benchmark is just a proof o point, nothing else. and certainly I know why jQuery is popular.

But as for the second part, I don't see any difference in coding efforts between jQuery and RightJS, if you really read the tests on github, you will see the size of code is about the same, RightJS is even compacter in many places.
There is, to me, no difference between Python and Ruby. It’s basically the same language.

Ha!! I agree, and I'm a Ruby developer.
Careful - it looks like no protection. Italics mine:

> 13.2 What are the eligibility requirements for PayPal Buyer Protection? You must meet all of these requirements:
Use PayPal to purchase an eligible item
Pay for the full amount of the item with one payment. Items purchased with multiple payments – like a deposit followed by a final payment – are not eligible
Open a dispute within 45 days of the date you sent the payment – then follow the online dispute resolution process described below under Dispute Resolution
Keep your PayPal account in good standing

That's from https://www.paypal.com/cgi-bin/webscr?cmd=xpt/Marketing/popu...

From https://thejoojoo.com/store/order/new

> We are only accepting pre-orders in the U.S at the moment. Pre-orders will ship in 8 to 10 weeks.

So not within 45 days of paying seems like no protection.
Ask HN: Where can I get/buy stock market data?
Basically, to get started I need only U.S. stock market data. It'd better to have real-time streaming, but 15m delayed feed is alright as well. Thanks.
I began to learn programming when I was 11, now I'm almost 22. As for the answer, in my opinion, it's never late to learn anything. Like Nike's motto goes, Just do it.
IPhone users suffering 'Stockholm Syndrome', analyst firm reckons
C99 allows this.
Don't even get started with Austism and vaccines... it has been shown over and over again that there is no link between vaccines and autism. (Plus, the claim was that the children were born normally and then became autistic when given the vaccine)

How about this one: If we ban vaccines, I can assure you that the number of children that die each year from diseases you've forgotten about (measles, mumps, whooping cough, polio) will be so high that everyone who clamored for the ban in the first place will say "Who thought this was a good idea? Certainly not me!"
Breast Cancer Treatment Options
Regarding 3. There was no event of "destroying data in response to an FOI request," - or if there was, there's no direct evidence of it in the leaked emails.

Your response doesn't show that the data was destroyed in response to the FOI request, only that the FOI request got the response that it had been destroyed.

Other than that you made some very good points with a cool head, and I appreciated them.
btw, very good self-promotion. I admire your effort, self-esteem and courage! There are lots of programmers who were afraid to attract such attention to their products.
Absolutely not, and 24 is young.

When you're 22, it's intimidating to compete with the people who have been on a career path since high school (e.g. the kid who knew he wanted to be an investment banker when he was 13, and has been reading the WSJ since 1997). It creates the illusion that the only way to succeed is to have been planning for it since you were in grade school. What you learn later on is that pretty much everyone interesting will change career tracks at least once in his or her life, and have to start over. It's not so bad, because a lot of the skills you've learned previously transfer over.

Advice: pick up a language (I'd choose Clojure, but HN would have some good advice here) and start writing code. It doesn't matter if it's useful; just become comfortable with the process. Find a job where you'll be able to learn from a mentor more experienced than you are.
Saying "Google is making hardware" is like saying "Vizio is making their own TVs".
If you think you might enjoy it then do it. I started at 33 and it was one of the best decisions of my life. As for how long, think in terms of hours. If you want to get up to speed quickly, then put in a lot of hours to it. When I started I worked 120 hours a week to get up to speed. I enjoyed it enough that it didn't feel like I was killing myself. YMMV.
New PHP development may not be as popular now-a-days (according to that graph, just the other day someone posted a link saying there were gonna be 5.2 million PHP programmers in 2010), but there's certainly a ton of legacy software to support written in it.
I stopped reading when I got to the bit about programmers being glorified translators.
Also check out http://raphaeljs.com and http://g.raphaeljs.com
There's no way you can turn a sinking boat into a 3 hour movie! #twitter1997
Ask HN: Are marketing problems like technical/design problems?
I'm a programmer. My co-founder is a designer. Through the course of developing our product we expect to encounter many technical and design problems. I'm quite confident in our ability to solve those. While I don't know any of the specifics of the technical problems we will yet encounter, I know the gamut of what I've done in the past, and feel most of these are just a matter of time and effort (lots of effort some times) to solve. My greatest fear, is developing/designing a good/great product having no one show up. I have no idea how to solve a marketing problem. I have a hunch that it's also just a matter of time and effort. Are there people out there that view marketing problems from a similar perspective as I view technical problems: for a good/great product it's just time and effort to acquire customers through marketing, or do some good products seem to fail for unknown reasons despite good marketing?

As a sub-note, our product is a game with an advertising/in-game purchase revenue model.
The Pirate Bay Will Not Appeal Order to Remove Torrents
I started to be serious about learning to program at 26. Then, I was in an entry-level position where I learned how to write spreadsheet macros on my own, with just the spreadsheet documentation as my guide. I also had a problem I needed to solve so my self-training was directed by what I needed to accomplish. That's often the best way to learn how to program: take a problem you want to solve and develop a solution with whatever tools you have available. When you have completed your first programming task, you will find that you have built foundation for you to tackle your next task, which may be even more complex than the first one you solved. Today there is an overwhelming amount of tools and information available for learning how to program on the Web.

Now I am 46 and have been building applications for almost 20 years and the learning doesn't stop. Even experienced programmers continually learn how to program as they pick up on new techniques, new programming languages, and new best practices. Good luck with your efforts.
It's all gonna hinge on who provides the data plan and what the monthly cost is. If they can convince Verizon or TMO to offer a $40/mo LTE or 3G plan, I'll camp out for one. And I don't camp for devices.

One wonders if the 1/1/2010 countdown on "Feeling Lucky" is related to this launch.
Drezner: China's soft power hits the brick wall of economics
The article mentions GSM.
Is Technology Dumbing Down the Japanese Language?
The programming profession is young enough that not a great many of them have made it in to their sixties yet, but those that I know about and that did are going strong. Maybe a bit more cautious, maybe not quite as fast as before, but the quality is definitely still there.

I'm 45 and I find that I can't quite remember everything as easily as I used to, but I guess that is expected. I plan to keep on coding until my body fails me in a way that makes it impossible.

Just like I would assume a musician would always want to make music, even when older.
If you want to be a good programmer, you probably need to reformulate your question. You never "learn to program" and then just kick back and rest on your laurels. If you do, technology will soon overtake you. Good programmers are always learning.

So a better question is: am I interested enough in technology to continuously spend some quality time of my life keeping up with how people are making computers do stuff?

I think if you're interested (and able to find some way to consume technical material that works for you) that age doesn't matter in the least. But you've got to have enough passion to plow through boring stuff at times so that you can do cool stuff later on. And to really be good, you have to be able to rinse and repeat.
All of the product shots look like Photoshop mockups. Note the shadows and highlights and the pixelated edges around the simulated pictures on the device. When "real" vendors do this, there is always a disclaimer that says that the images are simulated.
look again, https://thejoojoo.com/sites/accessories this side profile makes it look thick and it seems it has cheap looking plastic on the back
Reduce Your (team's) Bug Tax
"Best of Hacker News"
Best Blogs of Boston-area Internet Entrepreneurs