skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Global warming Hockey Stick seen in perspective
Yes "trick" can have benign meanings.

Do you really want to argue that the "trick" in this case is benign?

Where's the skepticism among the AGW folks?

They were rewarded for finding "confirmation"....
The graphs in a grid layout need more whitespace below them. I frequently thought the labels were for the graph above, which made his interpretations make no sense.

> I suspect that the Perl result is due to the fact that it becomes harder and harder to contribute to a Perl codebase, the bigger it gets.

And a codebase in any other language retains its original complexity no matter how large it grows? A more reasonable explanation from the comments:

> My experience is that a lot of Perl projects are helper modules with focused scope, which get written as supporting units in the course of other work. They progress to a point where the author(s) consider(s) them satisfactory, then go into maintenance mode.
The post's big idea resonates with me and with HN's core values. While we think all the time, and we think we have big thoughts. But a thought that is unexpressed is equivalent to a business idea. "Hey, let's deliver packages overnight!"

The value is in working out the details, in logically organizing things. Writing an actual business plan is hard, in most part because it forces you to think things through, to stop hand-waving. That's the big leap, from "business idea" to "business plan." In writing? In presentation form? As a speech? Doesn't matter, the key is going from an idea to something that you share with someone else.

Sure, we can argue that speaking aloud for an audience has the same effect, as does writing a program or composing music. I'd argue that painting does as well. But the core idea here is that organizing thoughts such that they can be communicated to another human being is thinking on an entirely different scale of magnitude.
Some sort of warning system sounds nice, but since your program should be saving as often as it can anyway, a 5 minute warning wouldn't actually be useful because if there was a save point, you've saved, and if there wasn't, well, there wasn't and you couldn't have saved given a 5 minute warning anyway. Amazon also, of course, pushes all their other products to help deal w/ this problem.

They do also mention that it is 'by the hour', which I'd double check that it doesn't include fractional hours, but after the instance has been up for ~55 minutes, you have your 5 minute warning.

You do, however have a really good point with the up-sell off the 5-minute warning. I wonder if that could be too easily gamed. When that 5 minute warning comes the spot instances tell the normal-instance key node, which then requests a bunch of spot instances at 2x the current spot-instance price to be able to finish the current 'set'. (But then also request a bunch more spot instances at below the current spot price, in an attempt to drive down spot instance pricing.)

The other thing is that it is region specific; which means that you could target the EU region from the US west coast to get work done on spot-instances during the day.
Http://www.care2.com
What an ugly phone!
It's close though. Make the body out of metal and have a few more colors as options; that gold just do it for me. Drop the "trackball" at the bottom and make it a little bit shorter and you'd be there... HTC Legend, save for the chin, got even closer aesthetically (http://www.engadget.com/2009/12/13/htc-legend-still-looking-...)
Google's achilles heal is in the nexus (heh) between user interfaces and aesthetics. For a company that powerful to have such a large and reparable weakness indicates that it may be a culture problem, or a "from the top" problem.

Either way, it's likely to continue to be a problem, and a device like a modern mobile phone-PDA can't have that kind of problem.

I sincerely doubt this is going to impact iPhone sales.
Google's text to mp3 URL-based API
"the New Page tab can take up to a minute to load"

you are doing it wrong
Science 7-1
Twitter as a sysadmin tool?
I don't see why this "Could change film forever".

This is just an advert for a movie.
Thanks for the post.

I know the introduction is a bit long, sorry. I wrote it while I was hacking and I think I was even drinking some wine during that process, so... I'll write a shorter, clearer introduction soon, I promise.

The problems that occur when your JavaScript (jQuery) code starts piling up are nothing new. I've been finding ways to organize my code for ages.

The idea behind behaviors is simple really:

1. Encapsulate some type of functionality within a good old function.
2. "Attach" this function to some elements as their "behavior".
3. Methods and properties of all behaviors can be accessed from anywhere, which allows interaction.

It's a simple object-oriented philosophy and it's nothing new. I just think it would be nice to have a standard way of organizing huge piles of JavaScript without having to use some huge JS framework or moving too far away from the jQuery coding style.
It's both. I hear from some friends at mobile operators that the radio network code on the iPhone is pretty troublesome compared to other vendors. At the same time iPhone users use more bandwidth than certain operators planned for.

Operators need to boost capacity. Apple needs to improve their networking code.
How to Keep Your Facebook, Myspace Safe
Google Exploring Quantum Computing
Popover ads?! Nearly made me close the tab without reading a word of the article.

funpic.de is obviously an old-fashioned sort of hosting company.
I was curious, so I downloaded it and ran unzip -l.

It contains the contents of the .git directory and another copy of the .crx file, inside itself (who knows how many levels this goes down). Actual code (almost entirely jQuery and .psd "source" for the icons) looks to be ~100kb.

Authors, don't do this. git-archive is your friend.
Requirements Gathering Is Not Customer Development
Blogging Is Thinking More (beyond "writing is thinking")
Apple delays all iMac shipments due to faulty ATI graphics cards
How to Read/Calculate Statistical Significance (what are F,p,t?).
Awesome Dropbox hacks
Funding Clojure 2010
Been a while since I studied it, but I thought induction was the key ingredient.
In ev'ry job that must be done

There is an element of fun

you find the fun and snap!

The job's a game.

-

The wisdom of Mary Poppins.
Alternative: Set your "New page" as http://teuxdeux.com/
Actually you can remove it. For example:

$('.some-behavior').each(function () { this.behavior = null; });

I'll make sure to add a prettier way of doing this in the next release.

As for the multiple behaviors issue - it's a philosophical question: Should it be possible for one element to be an instance of more than one behavior or should we let the developer "mix" several behaviors into one, which is simple and not really that hard to do? I chose the latter.
This is an awesome rebuttal to what Monty posted over at: http://monty-says.blogspot.com/2009/12/help-saving-mysql.htm...

I'm surprised to see a company as big as Oracle willing to play ball like this, but I'm glad. MySQL is/was the gold standard for years.
Allison Randal, the chief architect of the Parrot virtual machine (that Perl 6 runs on) has one of the most under-rated views regarding this --

There's an odd misconception in the computing world that writing compilers is hard. This view is fueled by the fact that people don't write compilers very often. People used to think writing CGI code was hard. Well, it is hard, if you do it in C without any tools. I don't know anyone who writes CGI code in C anymore. If we wrote compilers as often as we write shopping carts, or web forums, or wikis, there would be just as many tools available to make the job easy. (And just like web tools, only 10% of them would be worth using. That's evolution in action.)

—Allison Randal, "Parrot Compiler Tools"

Source: http://www.lohutok.net/
Fundamentally disagree with you on exceptions. Exceptions as implemented in e.g. Delphi or .NET work very well. In C++ the complexity of exception handling is deeply exacerbated by things like copy constructors - the bias in the language towards (what I call) value-oriented programming, rather than object orientation - and in Java exceptions are hobbled by the misguided notion that exceptions should be handled nearer the point of the throw rather than far away, in the relevant main loop of the app; hence the requirement to trace through annotations throughout the call graph from low-level throwing code to high-level catching loops, or basically avoid the bad design with RuntimeException.
I'm not sure the negative comments about UNIX, C braces and C++ templates help.

They are unrelated to the case and make me feel the author isn't interested in being constructive.

The debate between terse and ugly is a non-sense. Had the author a more open mind, he'd realize that the comfort zone where we place things we call "beautiful" is flexible and what one may find ugly the other may find beautiful.
I think in most cases you can get away with using a single behavior for a single control that encapsulates all of the control's logic. I suppose if you only have one: removing a behavior is as simple as just re-creating the element. A bit clunky, so an API for this would be nice, but it works.
Let the hacking begin B&N's Nook has been 'rooted'
Fitness made simple. Push ups
Way to miss the point.

Another way of putting it would be that languages should be designed so that there aren't gaping holes waiting for people to fall in. They should rather tend towards a "pit of success" - the easiest way to do things should be the correct way.

Error code results make it really easy to ignore errors. That's not a good thing.
Linux Security Kernel Clean-Up
The Question of Quantum Chaos
I agree with the person you are disagreeing with, in this case. Go is being touted as a systems programming language.

My experience of very low level programming is that you want to know exactly what's happening, and especially when things go wrong. And you want to know what's gone wrong right at the point of it going wrong.

Exceptions are the wrong technique for this form of programming. When doing systems work you are spending a lot of time dealing with error situations and hence the handle the error and pass up an error code form is appropriate.
One of the reasons why exceptions are difficult to use well is because of the guarantee you offer when you raise one.

What happens when your function raises an exception?

Rollback?
Undefined?

That's the real difficulty.

More information here: http://blogs.msdn.com/oldnewthing/archive/2004/04/22/118161....
Completely true. In fact nothing is hard in the computing world. Everything is doable. And if someone says it's not doable, they are not trying hard enough.
I recently worked with a recruiter near Boston. I told her I liked one start-up position she sent me but I wanted to work on the Linux development not the Windows. She setup the interview then 1 hour before she called to tell me to focus on my Windows experience and not my Linux in the interview. That is when I realized she didn't care about what I wanted, all she wanted was for me to get the job so she could get her fee.
Looks like this 3-D camera he developed has been used in films before. Why didn't they change film forever? Do we expect to enter a new era where everyone uses James Cameron's insane attention to detail in order to make a headdress look realistic, or develop a new language and teach it to actors? The article smells of hype and seems to justify this long-delayed epic "to out-Lucas Lucas."

I'm no film buff, but the cinematography of certain parts of the trailer reminds me of the same second-rate "Lets get a really wide shot of this big computer-generated battle scene" effects-for-the-sake-of-effects schlock that's been shoved down our throats for the past 10 years. The Na'vi look really cool. But every time I see a perfectly framed complete shot of a monster leaping out of some shrubs in slow-motion I want to throw a shoe. We get it. It looks cool and somewhat life-like. Now can you please show us something that's designed to evoke a response other than cooing in delight of your wonderful technical achievements?
Functional style binary tree in Javascript
Just for kicks..
You make some fair points.

I believe jQuery's strength is that it allows you to accomplish things neatly without needing to know the sins and virtues of Javascript....

The point is that there are plenty of both.
Great Findings From Social Sciences Applied To Online Communities
Some fascinating thoughts about sustainable open-source development. For me, Clojure was/is easily one of the most exciting developing events in programming languages in 2009.

I started following the language around October 2008 and I've seen the mailing list go from 500 to close to 3K. Amid this growth both the mailing list and the IRC channel have remained helpful and friendly. Useful tools are popping up everywhere, and more and more people are using it as the secret sauce in their projects.

And even if you don't like the language (being a Lisp), it's hard to deny that Clojure's ubiquitous use of persistent data structures and rich variety of concurrency primitives have made what previously seemed academic and esoteric concepts practical and everyday.

If you're a Clojure fan or even an open source advocate, think about chipping in!

I have a feeling 2010 will be yet another great year for Clojure ;)
This looks to be a part of their translation service, not explicitly a public TTS API and may be subject to use restrictions.
In the second sentence I meant: Few years before.
Maybe it's just me, but these blue dudes are not quite out of the uncanny valley.
Speaking as a guy who just punted his iPhone for a Droid a few weeks ago, there was definitely part of me who has been saying "Why did I put up with that for so long?" 'It' being the awful call performance (data and apps were great).

I'm sure I'm not the only one... So why DID I put up with it? Part of it might be a love-affair with Apple due to their exceptional marketing and the near mythical status of Steve Jobs.

Consumers aren't stupid-- but I can't imagine how you could think that all of your decisions are rational... Or even most of them. Ever done any A/B testing? Why would an orange button perform 20% better than a blue one?

What about priming studies?

(more thoughts in an old blog post: http://www.tonywright.com/2007/the-fuss-about-macs-priming-a... )

Here's the interesting bit:

Bargh and several colleagues chose a group of undergraduates as subjects and gave them two scrambled-sentence tests. The first test was sprinkled with rude words like “disturb,” “bother,” and “intrude.” The second test was sprinkled with polite words like “respect,” “considerate,” and “yield.”

In both cases, the tests were indiscreet. None of the subjects picked up on the word trend consciously. But it primed them subconsciously.

After taking the five-minute test, students were asked to walk down the hall and talk to the person running the experiment about their next assignment. An actor was strategically engaged in conversation with the experimenter when the students would arrive. And the goal was to see how long it would take students to interrupt.

"Bargh wanted to know if the subjects who were primed with polite words would take longer to interrupt the conversation than those primed with rude words. They thought the subconscious priming would have a slight affect. But the affect was pretty profound in quantitative terms.

The people primed with rude words interrupted, on average, after only five minutes. But 82% of the people primed with polite words never interrupted at all. Who knows how long they would have patiently and politely waited if the researchers hadn’t give the test a ten-minute time limit. [Note by Tony: Those damn ethics committees... Milgram would never be able to get away with his experiment today!]"
rel="noreferrer" should be used in the link.
So yes, refresh.
Stopped reading when I got to the first use of "UNIX virus" (actually I didn't but I should have). Unnecessary for the article, which itself is fairly lack-luster.
Sci-Fi author beaten and detained by US border guards
There's a bit of a 'highest common denominator' effect in play here. From the little detail on the reasoning, I'm guessing his phone sucks as email client, but is good with text messages, so twitter is being used as a high-level interface to text messages, as well as anything else that will use Twitter.

I call it 'highest common denominator' as he could setup the system to send text messages directly to him, but then he'd lose all the other features like logging w/ timestamping, and, uh, being able to friend other twittersyslog system accounts. Since Twitter is the system to plug into, I call it highest; the common part is there exist numerous tools to take things out of Twitter to a format he's comfortable with. In this case, text messaging happens to be built in.
GHC 6.12 released Dramatic parallel performance tuning, dynamic linking...
Obligatory: http://www.gnu.org/fun/jokes/ed.msg
403's with wget user-agent.

pwillis@bobdobbs ~/ :) wget "http://translate.google.com/translate_tts?q=hello+hackers"
--10:11:36-- http://translate.google.com/translate_tts?q=hello+hackers
=> `translate_tts?q=hello+hackers.1'
Resolving translate.google.com... 74.125.91.100, 74.125.91.101, 74.125.91.102, ...
Connecting to translate.google.com|74.125.91.100|:80... connected.
HTTP request sent, awaiting response... 403 Forbidden
10:11:37 ERROR 403: Forbidden.

pwillis@bobdobbs ~/ :( wget -U "Lynx 1.2.3.4" "http://translate.google.com/translate_tts?q=hello+hackers"
--10:11:41-- http://translate.google.com/translate_tts?q=hello+hackers
=> `translate_tts?q=hello+hackers.1'
Resolving translate.google.com... 74.125.91.138, 74.125.91.139, 74.125.91.100, ...
Connecting to translate.google.com|74.125.91.138|:80... connected.
HTTP request sent, awaiting response... 200 OK
Length: 6,192 (6.0K) [audio/mpeg]

100%[====================================>] 6,192 --.--K/s

10:11:41 (103.07 KB/s) - `translate_tts?q=hello+hackers.1' saved [6192/6192]
The Startup Pivot: How Moo Got It Right & Became Profitable
This technology has been around for so long that I hope Google or someone will push it to the point of sounding much more human like instead of so robotic-like.
Have to say the first page of the article was quite inspirational.
We get it. It looks cool and somewhat life-like. Now can you please show us something that's designed to evoke a response other than cooing in delight of your wonderful technical achievements?

We live in a world where people know nothing about cinema except what they see on commercials during the Simpsons. When you make a trailer, you're convincing the masses. You expect cinephiles to ignore trailers anyway.

It's the ultimate amateur mistake to assume a movie trailer is worth anything. It's marketing, and what's more, it's dumb marketing for dumb people.
Any other query string options?
I hope that this story has a good ending, and that the community (especially businesses) step up to make sure development can go on.
No, it doesn't in this case. The multiple return values make it impossible to accidentally ignore an error.
While I generally agree, the dude (Cameron w/Sony) did 'invent' a new camera that has already changed film making. As far a Wired fluff pieces go, this one was bearable.
Dupe: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=994211
When I am visiting my parents I have to use their 56k dial-up connection; so being able to ssh makes it possible to admin my servers.
Like the first Mac, the iPhone is the first phone good enough to criticize.

Sure, plenty of limitations, but overall, the iPhone completely redefined how well a phone could work, and has massively expanded what people expect from their phones.

To the benefit of users of the iPhone and competing devices alike.
Does the vim mode count? :)
Is Clojure used for any particularly interesting tasks in which it results in a massive improvement in performance, efficiency, or TCO? Is there any specific community of users who are doing commercially-applicable stuff with Clojure?

I don't know a lot about Clojure, but if it is gaining a following for some sort of commercial application, it would make sense to start "The Clojure Company" and sell support contracts, training, etc.; if this is the case there's no reason this guy should be asking for handouts (he should be raising funding!). But again, hoping people from the Clojure community can enlighten me.

I am sure some large Silicon Valley company could hire him to add to their pet collection, but that'd be totally boring, especially if Clojure has real commercial applications...

Edit: I should note -- if there aren't any specific domains in which Clojure is either necessary or an improvement, it may just be a nice curiosity (like most programming languages), and the author is making a wise decision; again, I know very little.
What Is It Like Working At Facebook?
On Coin Tossing Games and Unexpected Probabilities
Even simple games show the fact that human beings faced with propability challenges often act completely irrational and, furthermore, this irrational behavior is predictable.
What's even more hilarious is the code in his "My Library".

I'm far too much of a generalist to consider myself a JavaScript expert. However, even I can pick out a number of items in his lib that shouldn't have been handled the way they are:

- He declares $ in a global context without first checking for its existence;

- He uses RegExp objects constantly -- in 50 different places in his full "mylib.js" -- including in cases where a simple indexOf would be better, and, best yet, he doesn't bother to cache them in any of the dozen or so cases that I examined. Wasn't that one of his criticisms of someone else's code?

- His treatment of camelCase is truly embarrassing, relying on an ugly RegExp every time it's called. Try something like this instead:

_camelCases = {width:'width', height:'height'};
_camelCaser = function (p) {
return typeof _camelCases[p] != 'undefined' ? _camelCases[p] : _camelCases[p] = p.replace(/\-(.)/g, function(x, y){return y.toUpperCase()});
}

There, now you only need to camelCase the property for anything once. JavaScript's object handling makes caching this kind of stuff soooo easy. And, if you do have to have a camelCasing function, try to do it with as little overhead as possible -- use the tools that JavaScript gives you, instead of capturing the string parts in a match and then .join()ing them and all that other nonsense.

His library doesn't demonstrate any of the kind of specialized language knowledge that he accuses other library developers of lacking, and it has at least some of the same weaknesses that he criticizes others' works for.
He gets a lot of bad press, but I find Cameron genuinely inspiring. His attention to detail and fanatical focus on storytelling is impressive. He bends the world to his will. Also the way he gets obsessed with things and pours himself into them with apparent little regard for what others think.

I could care less about whether actors find him difficult to work with, or what percentage of his work involves revolutionary technology. I am glad he is out there making his films. Even the bad ones are interesting.
Out-Lucas Lucas is easy, just throw a decent story in there, and don't get high on the effects.

Given Hollywoods history in recent years, I'm not to confident that Avatar will be such a good movie.
Blue Website Designs
The first in a series of inspirational showcases of colored websites. Today we look at the color blue.
How IBM WebSphere got REST Religion but forgot to tell anyone
Command line: here is an alphabet, grammar and dictionary. With these, you can utter any command, submit any query, and make automatic decisions based on the results of any command or query. You can also create your own grammar and dictionary; recurse as desired.

GUI: here are the sentences you're allowed to utter. Which one would you like?
Business ecology and the four customer currencies
Another Privacy Misstep from Facebook