skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Not really. If the issue was thermometers getting more accurate, other proxy methods would show a similar divergence.

Trees are complex organisms whose growth relies on many factors in a complicated relationship. Just as a simple example, if you have a long, hot drought, do you expect tree growth to be more affected by the temperature or the lack of moisture? The scientists must control for these kinds of factors to isolate the temperature signal. But when you're dealing with the interactions of complex systems, new factors can emerge and the methods need to change to keep up.
The author of this piece sounds like he has sand in his vagina (to quote South Park).
Hulu and Justin.TV makes me ask, "Who needs Cable TV & why would I ever subscribe again!" Love watching marathons of my favorite shows!

Thanks Justin!
Agreed. While the market-share of Chrome is still pretty low, if you're going to publish work on the 'net you really should make sure that it display properly in the browsers of your target audience...
Ah, Chrome becomes the new Opera for people who love to whine around that they are an ignored minority even with using Windows while they are unable to install Linux to become a real minority. Drama queen reloaded. :)
As toll mounts, researchers peer into the H1N1 death spiral
Fun: Make an empty commit with just a message. Kind of like git-tweeting.
Oracle & Sun & the European Single Market
"But a study by Mr. Wadhwa and other academics found that 34 percent of repats found it difficult to return to India--compared to just 13 percent of Indian immigrants who found it difficult to settle in the United States."

Because Mr. Wadhwa is the one who usually writes articles about how more and more international students who study in the United States will return to their countries of birth, this finding is important. Two things are going on here:

1) The United States, because of its historical pattern of settlement by recent immigrants from a variety of countries, really is easier to blend into for a new immigrant than are many other countries that also have friendly natives, developed economies, and reasonably transparent governance.

2) REVERSE culture shock is usually rougher on a returning expatriate than the original culture shock of leaving the native country. I say this as an American who studied Chinese as an undergraduate, lived abroad in Taiwan (with visits to Hong Kong and China) in the 1980s for three years, and then returned to the United States. Then I went over to Taiwan once more for another three-year stay beginning in 1998. It has always been more unsettling to my established assumptions to return to my "home" country after a stay abroad than to go abroad in the first place. When a person goes abroad, sure there are problems with culture shock, wherever you go, but the psychological inner dialog takes the form of "Of course this is weird; I'm in a foreign country." But upon returning "home," after a long and locally connected stay abroad, the inner dialog becomes "Hey, I thought I was coming back home, but now everything feels weird here too." People aren't always sure where "home" is if they have sunk down enough roots in the foreign culture. As G. K. Chesterton wrote, "The whole object of travel is not to set foot on foreign land; it is at last to set foot on one's own country as a foreign land." A long enough foreign stay will do that to one's mind.
1. and 2. are spot-on. i treat many of my projects as collaborative open source projects before i even have collaborators. the weekend netflix api wars are total hacks, but anything complicated and persistent is so much better if i take the long view. it then becomes something i am proud of and want to continue working on, rather than something confusing and limited.

the last three points don't resonate with me strongly either way, though i will say that 5. is awesome to achieve, and is definitely helped via a persistent and open spirit rather than single-person hacking.
Justin TV's legit content consists of video game streams and young girls life casting.

A vast majority is pirated material. If you look at entertainment, every single one is pirated on the first page(by viewers). They are responsive to takedowns but what then happens is a new NFL stream of the game pops up or goes private. They are legal in following takedown requests but it highlights that the DMCA is not very effective on live streaming sites.

Viewer numbers of their 5 biggest sections front page:

Sports-17k pirate

Entertainment-10k pirate

Gaming-2k legal

Producers-3k legal(overlaps with gaming)

Social-1k legal(barely...)
I think the you're taking it a bit out of context, you should read the whole post and you should be able to comprehend what he is suggesting - though, I do agree it does not flow very well.

The gist of it; he says that it looks like not a lot is going on towards Py3000 migration, but after further investigations they have a long term strategy which is not first apparent. He then goes on to outline the migration strategy.
The Best Business iPhone apps
Find or post the best business iPhone apps.
Cute, except that it doesn't render correctly in Firefox either. And I'm using Chrome on Linux. ;)
Pictures and more info here: http://hackerhouse.bluwiki.com/
Since it doesn't render correctly on Firefox it's very likely that he didn't design for smaller screen sizes, which I find to be a common usability error made by people with print design backgrounds.
I am going to try to add it right now. :)
I like to think that the vermin preying on the gullible elderly today will one day themselves be old, gullible, and the victims of the next generation of scammers.

Looking at it from the other side, could it be that some of the current victims were themselves scammers in their youth, and are only receiving a little bit of karmic payback?
https://www.videoprofessor.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=shopping...

The sample videos show comprehensive tutorials. I think they deserve a more comprehensive look before jumping to a quick conclusion.

You and I may be computer literate, so to us it may seem like worthless crap to us, but the videos aren't too shabby quality. It's probably why it's drawing so many scam criticisms because to us it doesn't seem worth $300.
Facebook or MySpace? - Social Network Preference Survey
Great book idea, hope it gets funded
If we see lots of comments interspersed in a method, it is a good sign that the code cannot be easily understood. Break it down into lots of little functions with descriptive names, and all of a sudden our code reads like a very clear and concise recipe, and we find that the comments become redundant. Most comments that live inside functions are parasitic organisms, treat them with suspicion.

Seriously? I've seen this a lot in the Ruby world and it works in a lot of cases but using it as a rule sounds Wrong.
Yea I would imagine it'd be pretty hard to give directions without street names.
The Watchmakers' Time Bomb
What is the 'hacker house'?
There's six million jobs boards for different tech communities, but we don't really have a good housing board. Perhaps this post speaks to a need for one.

http://news.ycombinator.com/housing perhaps? :)

Meanwhile, I suppose submitting it as an article is inventive, if probably annoying for anyone not near Palo Alto.
When I am commenting (for someone else) I always stick at least one comment in (or above the function) per function, that way everything is clear, even if the comment is describing where the function will be used. That rule is awful imho.
I should note I canceled my cable subscription because of it.
Q: The most powerful and communicative shape in art and design is the:
A: triangle.

It's the triangle, huh? Just... the triangle. Really?

Much of this quiz has the attitude of the overconfident journeyman. I'd rather listen to a master. (I'm not knowledgeable enough to criticize, but if I do maybe I'll get a little education from those here who know better. So please set me straight on triangle theory.)
They're definitely different formats. That's why I toned down my questions for TC50. But it's interesting that both took about the same amount of time. That means we could have dug a lot deeper at TC50 if that had been the point of the event.
> "We punted on tons of key issues because we wanted to wait until we proved there was a market for our product. Once we realized there was much more of a market than we thought, we suddenly had to allocate a bunch of resources to customer support and bug fixes… things that we wouldn’t have needed at the same level if we had built a more robust and full featured product out of the gate."

flat out: you're doing something wrong. coding right is faster than hacking around. i guess that's what you are saying: at some point you have to redo all the previous buggy work you've done, and adding features is a nightmare, so all the "progress" you thought you were making was totally backwards.

i'm just surprised that "point" came to late in development. once you start having real customers, as opposed to testing an idea with gradually more tech-based mockups, how can you afford not to be doing things right? how you can make progress if every feature is introducing bugs? do you just ignore the bugs and keep pounding against the wall, brute force adding <crap> and trying to trick people into thinking everything is ok, keep the payments coming?

don't build your own grave. customers who expect to use your project for the long-view after you've built it require a REAL product. i sooooo wouldn't want to clean up after that mess.
I have two initial responses.

First of all, this is pretty cool. It really turns email into something more than it is in other areas, and seems like it would be a step forward for Turkey...

...on the other hand, I kind of like the anonymity of email. I'm not sure I'd like government issued email addresses, either.

So, really, I'm not sure how good or bad this is. Interesting, at the very least.
You can cross-check historical reconstructions to assess their accuracy for given periods. I don't know how often this has been done and if other significant, unexplained, and unaccounted for divergences have been found. I haven't heard of any, but I'm not an expert. For complete answers to your questions, I'm afraid you may have to review the literature.
This is a great observation. I watched my (then) 4 and 1 year-old kids the summer after my first year of med school. It took me about 2 days to decide it was time to install this operating system called Linux I'd heard about. I could read while they were awake, but could only dive deeper when they were asleep, which was not much time at all.

So I agree with you, and I'll up that to say that things don't really get easier as they get older, because they sleep less. You'd think the older they get, the more time you'd have, but, at least at 4 and 7, it really just means they can climb higher, fall further, hit harder, and break bigger things.
What are some of the extensions / add-ons you use for your web browser?
What are some of the extensions / add-ons you use for your web browser?
Getting over six hours of battery life with a GPS tracking iPhone app
> What I didn't expect was for people to down-mod me heavily simply for expressing an opinion that was different to theirs.

You either need more experience with people or to pay more attention to your experience. And no, hackers aren't different.

> I'll certainly be less open and more wary.

How does that follow?

If you're doing things for praise from other people ....
One point which I rarely see addressed in various internet fora is the striking similarity of form between orthodox Marxism and orthodox Objectivism. I realize this may be a repugnant idea to fans of either philosophy, but consider the following nutshell summary:

There are two classes of people in society. One class, which we call the ____, is productive and labors to bring forth all manner of useful things. The other class, which we call the ____, is not productive and, in fact, consists entirely of parasites who suck the life's blood out of their fellow men. These parasites accomplish their goal via exploitation and alienation: unjustly separating others from the fruits of their labor, though they wrap themselves in a philosophy by which they seek to justify their theft. One day, the revolution will come and the productive class will rise up and throw off the yoke of the parasites.

Broadly speaking, one can insert "poor" into the first blank and "rich" into the second and obtain the works of Marx. Or one can insert "rich" into the first blank and "poor" into the second and obtain the works of Rand.
You mean the actual "interview", right? As a judge were you also expected to review and filter applications?
Self-Taught Inventer Creates Homemade Electric Wheelchair
gandi.net offers all you need. I use that for all my domains.
Already discussed here:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=925996
Two other financial blogs I follow:

http://www.calculatedriskblog.com/

http://www.ritholtz.com/blog/
Ray Kurzweil also likes to point this out. It's his explanation for why we don't appreciate how fast things are actually changing.
Fast internet and a large freezer.
"Most Japanese streets do not have names" from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japanese_addressing_system
Ask HN: How do you choose your projects?
Hey!

So, I recently finished a few small projects of mine that I've been meaning to finish - recently meaning 'within the past month'. I haven't really been programming much in the past two or so weeks, and feel like I should get back into the groove and start hacking away at something new.

But I don't seem to have any ideas that really catch my eye!

Do you guys have any suggestions? Anything you wish existed but doesn't? Or just any notes about how you come up with projects for yourself to work on (if you do hack in your spare time)?

Thanks!
You could do a lot worse than _Trading and Exchanges_ by Larry Harris. The first couple chapters in particular do a fantastic job at giving a laypersons tour of the operations side of trading and finance.

The problem with things like _A Random Walk..._ is that they're geared towards helping independent investors; that's great, but it's not super relevant to a tech career in finance. On the other hand, knowing how shopping a block works: pretty handy.
i submit that painting and music are also goverened by rules. they are clearly art forms. the cutting of film for dramatic effect is governed by rules, and the cinema is an art form. and in at man cases, art is useful. its best exemplars serve cultural identity. they educate and broaden experience (the best artworks are not just objects, but experiences). i could go on...
I really wish this existed. As a person hunting for a good place to live in SF, such a resource would be really handy.

I've considered posting an 'Ask HN' looking for potential housemates, but didn't want to pollute the stream.
FWIW, he didn't seem to link to my django-dev post despite mentioning it; you can find it here:

http://groups.google.com/group/django-developers/msg/0888b1c...
Want Good Tools? Break Your Problems Down
I find design sites like this more readable in Opera's "User Mode".
Why I am an Optimist
Under Firefox, I consider Adblock and Noscript to be essential. I also use Tab Mix Plus (so that I can change tabs by hovering the mouse over them, without needing to click, and also for the changing of tab color when I haven't look at one), Tab History (useful from a usability standpoint, and because I often forget which tab I was originally in), and Autopager (so that I don't have to load pages as often/wait for them to load, if it's linear stuff - like articles).

Under Chrome, I'm only using one, Adsweep, which doesn't work nearly as well as Adblock, but is better than nothing.
The reason maternity leave is so long, and results in so many women never coming back, is because of breastfeeding and bonding. The physical trauma of childbirth doesn't last that long, and some women won't want to breastfeed, but pretty much all women will be bonding with their infants.

So what? Both men and women bond with their infants. One, the other, or both will inevitably sacrifice bonding for income. Women with full time jobs who want their kids breastfed, pump.

Why do women need special arrangements to rejoin the workforce? Doesn't that simply perpetuate the gender discrimination we already have in the industry?

It is unlawful to discriminate against female candidates because they might take maternity leave. It's also stupid: whether they take formal leave or not, the performance of a new father is going to plummet as well. Let's leave it at that.
Thanks for your kind words!

I follow a similar pattern at work these days. Having amassed a large amount of technical knowledge, I can spend time I can't spend innovating in teaching, documenting, cleaning up code, running test cases, doing research, doing arcane analysis. And while one or two brilliant ideas a week isn't what I'm used to, it's not nothin' either.

But oh, for those two-day coding runs of yore, during which it seemed I could move the earth . . .
Firebug. Without it, I would be working blind. Developer tools when I have to got to IE.
When I was in the Film Club at St. Andrew's College in 1977... (yeah, yeah, walked to school barefeet in a blizzard, only Aurora, Ontario really did have winter blizzards!) Anyhow, Dr. Rupert Ray, the "Master" running the club gave us a piece of advice: When reviewing a film, review the film you saw and not the film you would wish you saw.

So for example I think criticism like The conspicuous absence of macros cannot be obscured by the presence of preprocessors is witty, but it is really reviewing a language that is a dialect of Lisp with a glaring defect rather than reviewing a language that may or may not provide a different solution to the problems that macros solve.
Bad diet, physical injury, family crises, financial problems, selling a home, divorce, and burnout also cause developers to work below their "potential". We make minimal concessions to those problems.

A good manager is going to cut a late-term-pregnant developer a lot of slack, because "below potential" is not the same as "net negative value", and because proven developer talent is very hard to acquire and even more expensive to ramp up.

You worry about performance changes that are long term, systemic, and corrosive to the project. You worry less about easily explainable short term problems that you have 2-3 fiscal quarters to plan for and that run on a set time frame.
The problem I have with this is it still seems to require a decoder to actually function properly. So, it becomes simple to just look for the decoder, you don't even care about the "payload"
Sounds crazy. Very hacker-like.
The one main problem with men is when children are young fathers are much more likely to be tired or worn out running on little sleep and probably have less time/will to work on complicated problems.

Or at least, that's been the case with me, and with every new father I've ever worked with or known.

In a two-career household, you are expected to figure out how to allow both parents their careers. If the mom is the only one awake at night, you're doing it wrong.
Get a nanny.
You've got a good speaking voice! Did you work on it?
Sorry, this is what I get for posting while tired :(
Hulu will be moving to a subscription model soon.
VC's make poor company operations advisors, and even poorer family planners. Women delay having kids because men expect priority treatment for their careers, and so make inadequate concessions to child care (or standard of living).

Here's a news flash: if you're an entrepreneur, your life will be no more or less accomodating to children when you're 35 than it is now.
You shouldn't believe everything you read on the internet.

1/ if you're a newbie at F#, it is not completely unlikely that all the F# you have ever written was valid OCaml. The languages are that close to each other.

2/ the author's criticism is that OCaml is not LISP, not that OCaml is not F#, so all the complaints he has against OCaml very likely apply just the same (note that I am not saying they are valid complaints) to F#.
"Overconfident journeyman" sums up a lot of the web design bloggers. There is a nice quote about the difference between "men who understand everything and appreciate nothing", which seems relevant here in the sense the author appears to understand 'art' but not fully appreciate it's nuances, shown by his very rote-style.
Not surprisingly, after more digging, the jury is still out on fMRI evidence for dopamine, addiction, food, and cravings.

http://www.jci.org/articles/view/18533/version/1

http://www.ohsu.edu/nod/2007-04-25.shtml

http://www.sciencedirect.com/science?_ob=ArticleURL&_udi...
I second that reference!
Old-school Platformer in JavaScript for the iPhone
I'm not sure at all. You should have said it was the subject GRE in the original post! I was talking about the section on the regular GRE.

I took the biology subject GRE, and tanked it. So I can't be much help here.
Cheap rent. Great location. If I had any job prospects in Palo Alto, I'd be there in a second. Hell, moving there on speculation wouldn't be a terrible idea.
The wikipedia definition is a bit abstruce. One of the links in the external links section has a much better definition, and is more relevant to usability rather than being the more general definition:
http://www.usabilityfirst.com/glossary/term_66.txl
Quite simply, the purpose a work of art is to exist as art--self-expression that evokes an emotional response from it's audience. The purpose of a design is to to perform a specific practical function. That's not to say that design can't be artistic. A Jasper Morrison chair might be incredibly beautiful and expressive, but it's designed to be sat in.
The Billion-Year Technology Gap: Could One Exist?
Considering a show called "New Moon - Looping" already has 33,000+ views... I'm not sure.
Taking the original post at face value, that would be like showing up in New York and saying, "Blocks definitely have names. See, right there it says, Madison Square."
Refactoring large methods into a collection of small aptly named ones has its drawbacks too. When reading the code the reader has to keep a mental stack going maintaining what each sub function means/does. Sometimes this is worse than keeping it inline. There is definitely a good balance to be had between the two approaches.
Lots of evidence of Bauhaus quasi-mystic ideas in this test, talking about the 'energy' of a composition, 'visual influence'. All ideas rooted in early 20th century abstract expression, which I suppose are now widely accepted but are by no means the universal truths they were presented as.

Some mid-century rational design thrown in for good measure, swiss grid systems etc. which are under going something of a renaissance through their recent discovery by web designers, but they also aren't a universal panacea for design ills. You need only look as far as Jan Tschichold's (a prominent exponent of modern typography) return to traditional typographic forms in his later career for evidence of this.

I don't doubt his assertation that there are a lot of incompetent charlatans in graphic and web design, but I do think his view that modern design educators are failing their students is probably due to many of them having moved on from the Bauhaus/Swiss modernism touch points he seems so firmly attached to.