skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I included a note at the top of the article. The graphs are from Google's API and were a pain to get in the state they are now. Not going to change them in this lifetime;-)
Yes. Reading these hyperventilating blog posts, you'd be excused for thinking that the climate research is based on one set of temperature measurements from twenty years ago.

I'm continually amazed by how many "skeptics" clearly haven't read (or even glanced at) the IPCC reports. It's hard to be skeptical of arguments that you don't understand.
While there are certainly a lot to look in to with this whole thing, could we get posts from a slightly more objective source? ESR is pretty obviously an extremely biased wingnut chomping at the bit to blow this up as much as possible.

I'd expect posts from a bit more level-headed source to make HN front page...
I can generally do interviews, but for quite a few years I had problems with burning out easily. I had to take a long vacation every year, etc.

I found the reason in the end. I wasn't extra stress sensitive. I just couldn't relax during stressed periods -- I was "on" 24/7.

Mediation solved that.

Edit: This was a bit personal, but I'll let it be. It might help someone. (AA, etc.)
A good tool built on R is rattle[1]. It's open source and is used at the Australian Taxation Office (Australian equivalent of the IRS?), so it must have something going for it. The version I used in a data-mining course last year was a bit buggy though...

[1] http://rattle.togaware.com/
I think this view is overly cynical. The reason why google is doing what it's doing also to protect it's buisness. One attack is that browser manufacturers and operating system manufactures will route traffic away from their site.

Advertisment for google is very sucessful, but it is what funds the service. Seems clear that Google is beginning to charge for services from those willing to pay.

What I like about Google is their funding of an environment where all can compete. There are things that they don't do well, but the competition is getting Microsoft to create their own opensource communities.

The only move that is bad for consumers is a deal with the media. But it would seem to be a ploy to me to bring Google to the table to play by another industry's rules.
My biggest nitpick about Georgia Tech was the lack of web-geared CS courses. The most "advanced" web-geared class was an 8-person class taught by a grad student about basic MySQL/PHP/Ajax. Of course I had the regular C, SmallTalk, Java, Matlab et cetera courses, but none of that interested me like LAMP, RoR and other stacks do.

Also not too many CS students early on have played with version control, and when they do it's CVS or something that was required by a class. SVN and Git should be more common in curriculum IMHO.

So I guess I'm suggesting you should address to these students where they can get started in web app development, because my university sure didn't help much when it came to that. Every semester I asked my academic advisor on their status of adding a Rails CS course and it was usually "same as last time.. looking for a professor that can teach it"
I'm reminded of the joke from Futurama - paraphrased, nobody drives in New York, too many cars!
Google seems to be the obvious example - anecdotally, anyway.
Newsweek on the cooling world
the problem is that these questions can devolve into a (you know) waving contest in which the interviewer is, instead of interviewing, satisfying his own ego by asking obscure questions that sever no purpose other than to inflate the interviewers perception of his own intelligence. This is particularly dangerous in technology professions where their is a high propensity of intellectual self-conceit.

I understand the low hanging fruit, I just witnessed and interview the other day for a Java web developer, and one of the questions was describe a singleton pattern to which the interviewee could not respond. Given that there has been a history of singleton / Java / Bad things web applications problem, not understanding the pattern is a significant issue and I did thing it was an appropriate question to use as a filter, but asking a web developer deep questions about class-loader nuances seems like overkill to me and I have seen that done as well.
That's about 4 photos per user. Doesn't seem like a lot. How many of your users have over 100 photos, 200, 300? Those are the ones you want to concentrate on. Ask them how to make the service better. They are your power users. Most everyone else is just a lurker.
This is a very interesting resource. Thanks for the link.
I used to be quite concerned that all my major programming projects were for my own business, and as a result I figured that I had to be missing some sort of 'process' step that would mean I was developing software the right way.

Being walked through a few different development lifecycle models would have helped to put my mind at ease.
ping works, but my browsers just say connecting or loading.... forever.

[edit] lol. forever must = 3 minutes in my world... loads afterwards.
Everything useful I learned about programming came either before college, after college, or when I got home from classes.

I'm obviously from the pro-dropout sector, but I can tell you that the one thing I've learned about learning is that for anyone successful (by pretty much any definition) I've met, most learning has taken place outside of a classroom setting.

Grab something hard, confusing, foreign, etc... Master it. Then move on. Learn things that are ostensibly completely useless to your job. You will do your job better than those who do not.

I still do take classes to help with things occasionally (there was a great arduino class at the hacker dojo recently), but even in that case, I've learned more about it on my own since the class than I did during it.

So here's my advice: Don't wait for other people to teach you things. Learn stuff on your own now. Maintain the expectation that you only know 10% of what you need to know.

And if anyone ever hears me say that I know everything worth knowing, someone please shoot me.
Free Souls captured and released by Joi Ito
Flagged, because there is no new information in this article. This was already reported on the front page: http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/environment/article693...

I'm ok with GW articles being on Hacker News, because it is a very important issue. But let's at least keep it to articles that have something new or interesting to say.
Please contact jobs@codedusk.com
50$ and you are getting only Atom servers??

Checkout http://www.hetzner.de/en/hosting/produktmatrix/rootserver-pr...

I'm a happy customer
I honestly don't understand what you mean. But if you think these discussions are games in which the aim is to score points (as your analogy would suggest) please do sod off back to reddit.
Two points.

First, this is not that much data (~180GB). Is there a particular reason not to just throw it on a hard disk on some machine that doesn't do too much during the night and write a trivial Perl script?

Secondly, (g)zip may not the best solution here. A quick unscientific test on ~3MB of Apache log data (in the default Common Logfile format): gzip or zip produce ~240KB of data, xz (formerly lzma) gets it down to ~80KB (using -9e) or ~96KB (using the default option).

In my quick unscientific test, xz can decompress data about half as quickly as gzip and about ten times faster than bzip2. It's very likely able to keep up with your disk.
Flagged, because there is no new information in the article, its purely political.
Source control, continuous integration, automatic testing. All of those things you might learn on a software engineering course but for some reason were conspicuously absent on my CS course.
I went through a "Information Science and Technology" program rather than a "Computer Science" program but the one thing I really felt like I missed out on was gaining experience using svn/git/etc in teams.
Huh, I just watched the video of the talk referred to before coming here.
It's from the recent PDC09 conference http://microsoftpdc.com/

and the actual talk is here http://microsoftpdc.com/Sessions/FT52

I didn't find the talk that gripping, I think computerworld got most of the high points, but added one glaring error: Managed code has been around for a while, see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Managed_code
I let the rest build up in my inbox and try to get to it on the weekends.

seems to directly conflict with

4) I like to have conversations via email.

this would be like trying to converse with someone over postal mail, except it might even be faster to mail this guy a letter than wait for him to reply next weekend to your email.
What did 'Life of Brian' ever do for us?
Well, to be fair, they do note that one can upload via duplicity, which apparently does encrypt backups: http://rsync.net/products/encrypted.html.

Of course, there's a distinction between "we accept encrypted backups" and Tarsnap's "encrypt everything, trust no man/program".
Yeah coming up with names is wicked hard in the age of domain squatters. You'll find one I'm sure.

Even if you go the freemium route, check out AdWords. Getting the right combo of keywords can be a lot of work, but you may just find you can acquire paying users for much less than you make off of them. Especially since you're presumably using subscription billing here. And it's highly scalable, once you find the right audience you can probably buy them by the truckload.
This is awesome feedback. Sorry for delay, was driving.

Name- Very good chance we'll change it. Just haven't found anything we love yet.

Viral loops- Some of that basic stuff is there. A lot more need to be added. Since we didn't know if we wanted to go premium only, we wanted to hold off on implementing them.

Freemium- I think we're going to go this route after playing around with time limited trials over the past month.
Most decisions at that level aren't made based on data and facts. They are made based on the emotional appeal of the acquisition of power both through increased control and financial benefit.

Politicians ignore the facts all the time. They invent facts all the time. Politics has little to do with science.
You can say the same thing another way. If your code is littered with V2 = V1 + 1 "idioms", then you are coding in a way not well supported by Erlang.

Or, rebinding variables is generally not the clearest way to express the intent of your calculation. Abstractions like fold are more pure descriptions of the desired calculation.

I do agree with the consensus that the clojure recur, expresses something about intent that is missing from Erlang.

I enjoy functional depictions of algorithms, but there are many programmers who are currently more comfortable with imperative code.
In boston, parking tickets are a form of tax.

It's quite normal to see delivery trucks (FedEx, UPS) with 20 tickets on their windshield. It's just a cost of doing business.

And it's not like the violations are rational. The restrictions are designed to seem reasonable, but really just to snag as many people as possible.

For example there is no overnight parking on the street - at all - in brookline (suburb of boston). And of course the fees are at least 3 times as much as any normal city charges.

I'm so glad I don't live there anymore.

In Pittsburg the law is you can get give someone a parking ticket for street cleaning, unless the street was actually cleaned, AND the car was in the way (so move it before or after and you are OK). Not so in boston - they watch the clock and as soon as the time starts (to the second) they give everyone a ticket. But of course there is no budget for an actual street cleaning truck.
Always worth mentioning: "The Inverse Power of Praise" http://nymag.com/news/features/27840/
I'd hardly call Scientific American a political magazine.
I could just as well have replied to any of the other comments below this talking about IQ, but I wanted to make sure people know that 1) IQ is not a perfect measure of one's intelligence, nor even necessarily the type of intelligence needing for programming, and 2) IQ tests are far from perfect in even measuring IQ. I don't know my IQ because I've scored anywhere from 120 to 200 on IQ tests.
innovation

in - nova - tion

nova = new in latin language
Richard Dawkins: Viruses of the Mind
Less than 5 per day. I discourage email at all costs.
> Some commentators, including the former chancellor Nigel Lawson and the environmental campaigner and Guardian writer George Monbiot, have called on Jones to resign but Pachauri [chairman of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change] said he did not agree. He said an independent inquiry into the emails would achieve little, but there should be a criminal investigation into how the emails came to light.

The chairman of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, Pachauri, does not inspire trust in the scientific results. Rather than focusing on the misdeeds of the scientists, he's pushing for those who exposed the misdeeds to be punished. Mr. Pachauri's reactions are more consistent with a fake who is afraid of being found out than with an honest scientist who is just interested in exposing truth.
I average about 50 messsages daily; this covers several OpenBSD lists.

It's a bit much, and not all of them are proper e-mail messages (one-line commit messages...)
We did a quick run with AdWords and it turned out to be total crap. The volume of searches for stuff like "family website" was abysmal and the CPCs for stuff like "family photos" was out of the water. So, yeah. We're definitely looking to do it, but not without some conversion % estimates.
That's all Gladwell does -- he spins yarns around widely accepted knowledge in a subfield into stories for "everyone".
The new Reia: now without rainbow-farting Domo-kuns
"You're being a bit kind to yourself, don't you think? You're skeptical, as are those you agree with, but those you don't agree with are 'skeptical'."

No, not really. There's a difference between being skeptical and using fallacies and rhetoric to cause confusion. I disagree with people who do the latter in the guise of "skepticism".

"See, this revisionist stuff drives me crazy. 30 years ago, it was called "global cooling". Now, sophisticated punters call it "climate change", instead of the less sophisticated and more embarrassing flip-flop of 'global warming'."

What part of "the climate change debate was a controversial new idea" don't you understand? When presented the theory, scientists didn't believe it. They debated many different theories -- global cooling, global warming, temperature cycles, etc. -- and eventually, the data led them to a theory. It's not "revisionist" when new data leads you to change your hypothesis. It's science.
To any of you that are looking for an adviser, I can offer some assistance the only caveat is that I have to find the technology you are working on compelling. If you shot me a high level via email (in my profile), I will shoot back an I'm interested or a good luck.

Full disclosure, I do work with a venture group from time to time and an incubator, but any advise I give will be no string attached until said time that I tell you that strings would be attached to continue the relationship.
When Information Overwhelms Facts
Which is not really that different from how much I pay in taxes now on my phone/DSL line.
I seem to remember reading, maybe about a year ago, of some movement trying to promote the practice of supplementing scientific papers with reproducible experiments and derivations - ie source code and data. Perhaps it was just in the field of computer science? To a non-academic like me it sounded like a completely obvious thing to do, but yet you hardly ever seem to see it. Surely given the tools the internet offers these days (look at the wonders of github it its ilk for sharing and modifying code), we should be moving academic publishing forward to take advantage of such tools?
No, there's general agreement that the quality of hiring at Google has gone down. They just started from a higher baseline than most.
I put 26-50, but I get about 14 unique-sender emails a day, the rest is read-respond-read-respond.
I think the key part is to not worry too much about the actual number. Seek out the right job, and the right people to work with. From experience I can say if you find yourself around smart people you'll learn more in the first 3 weeks of your job than in 3 years of study.
Your email is not in your profile.
How to distribute elements horizontally using CSS
Meh. Google doesn't care about Microsoft nearly as much as this article states it does. It's not like Google is "out to get Microsoft". It's not. It just does the things it wants to do without following any directives from Microsoft or being afraid of what Microsoft might do. Go ahead and use Windows, that's fine. Google supports it with their products -- and sometimes, supports it first, and exclusively. Look at the Chrome browser. If lowering the cost of a laptop by $50 means more people can have one, then that's good for Google -- more (potential) users. It's not about hurting Microsoft at all. Similarly, if very capable, open-platform phones are the norm, there's more "mobile internet users". Android isn't about Microsoft, it's about raising the bar for what a smartphone is and enabling more mobile internet usage.

The idea that everything revolves around Microsoft is a stupid one. Google doesn't make decisions that way, regardless of what Fake Steve says.
Despite a trend for some colleges to teach computer science as software engineering (my college included..), they should be considered two different things. However, they're not. So we usually wind up with a mix that is some CS, some SE and satisfies very few people.
On the other hand. Microsoft is all about killing its enemies. It sees the world in those terms. So sad.
I'm in my final year of CS undergrad, and I've learned a couple of things outside of class that help me, all stuff I wish they would teach (well) in class:

* Learn how to write a Makefile, your builds should be one button/command away

* Learn how to test your code using assert.h, JUnit, whatever, just test all the fucking time.

* Learn GDB, stop using printf to debug.

* Use source control for everything, but especially group work. The groups in your classes emailing code around are doing it wrong, and by the time they'll find out, it will be to late.

* Spend some time in a functional language, and apply what you've learned to your Java/C/C++ class work. Minimizing side effects will minimize errors

Most of all though, get involved with your faculty or department, and try to affect some positive change. The connections you will make with other students and faculty could change your programming career more than anything else you do in school.
Refreshingly balanced perspective on climate change
Er, Google isn't "turning into a Microsoft killer". Google simply doesn't make decisions that way -- unlike Ballmer, who wants to "kill" other companies, and "cut off their oxygen".

It's fallacious to equate Microsoft's business practices with those of Google.
Ed, once again many thanks. This is a gold mine. It's hard to seem thankful enough via a text box, but I hope it shows :-).

I think our biggest problem is that we're giving it mediocre effort. We're on that cusp of doing something great, but we keep treating it like this side project. That means the really small details like the ones you mentioned get overlooked or the smart viral loops get left out. I've always wanted to take Ramamia to a higher level, but I think I get worried about the what-ifs/am i passionate enough/ can it make money/etc aspect.
"... English novelist George Orwell was remarkably prescient about many things, and one of the most disturbing aspects of his masterpiece 1984 involved the blatant perversion of objective reality, using constant repetition of propaganda by a militaristic government in control of all the media. ..."

I added this article to highlight a new phase in science that is occurring - advocacy. Why advocacy and not just science? Because it's getting to the point where mere "facts" isn't good enough to bring about the changes necessary.

It's not the science where the problems lie. Science can be refuted by bad evidence. Scientific theory becomes fact when the evidence gathered by observation or experiments be supports the theory. The problem we have now is a "people" problem where people who don't see or want changes made to our carbon economy.

The change from pure science and scientific reporting to scientific activism is a feature of more active scientists in recent history and include Richard Dawkins (evolution,religion), Tim Flannery (land use,disruption of ecosystems, carbon emissions). In the past dissent, contrary arguments would not have been tolerated. In Galileo's ~ http://www-history.mcs.st-and.ac.uk/Mathematicians/Galileo.h... day scientists with ideas like Dawkins and Flannery would have been quietly silenced like Galileos advocacy ~ http://www.hps.cam.ac.uk/starry/galileo.html of the Copernican principle ~ http://www.hps.cam.ac.uk/starry/copercosmol.html

Why?

Because it didn't fit with the plans of those in power at the time, Pope Urban VIII. Charles Darwin ~ http://www.bbc.co.uk/history/historic_figures/darwin_charles... withheld releasing "The Origin of the species" for 20 years even with the amount of evidence because of the potential for persecution ~ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/On_the_Origin_of_Species#Time_t...

Presenting the science is not enough to create change in the way leaders make decisions. Decisions based on some "rational" basis instead of "belief" or "influence".
I wish I took a software engineering class earlier than my junior year. I started programming my freshman year, and didn't realize how badly I was doing it till that class.

I also wish I didn't learn a compiled language first. I almost think there should be two beginner classes: lisp or python and then a unix tools class where you learn scripting.

Operational things like getting a box setup, code deployed, etc. would also have been nice.

I guess I'm saying I learned enough theory and math, and wanted more practical knowledge.
The chairman is not very concerned that his scientists are behaving badly, but is very concerned that they were caught.

I really think people should be discreet … in this day and age anything you write, even privately, could become public and to put anything down in writing is, to say the least, indiscreet … It is another matter to talk about this to your friends on the telephone or person to person but to put it down in writing was indiscreet. If someone was to say something like this in an IPCC authors' meeting then there are others who would chew him up."

That last sentence almost makes me want to ask the obvious follow-up: do you keep records of what people say in IPCC meetings? Where are they?
You're the one that keeps saying it's a side project. Asshole.

;)
I think we'd be better off giving families an option for a "public page". Focusing on SEO over SEM would be a better long term goal. The CAC and conversion numbers didn't make sense with the small test we did for SEM. then again, that might be a bad way of looking at it since we used such a small sample.
Scientists spend loads of time worrying about what data to release and how to present it because it's necessary in communicating your findings effectively to the rest of the scientific community. The problem with the "release everything" approach is that there is so much data generated every day that it would be impossible for anyone to make sense of it. When journalists or other non-technical people try to analyze raw data or scientists' communications on their own they are very likely to mis-interpret or emphasize the wrong things.