skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I don't get it, though - surely if you are capable of installing a plugin, you are capable of updating your browser, too?
That depends on what browser you're using!
provide a REST api, make the whole thing a web app, provide python dev framework to get people going.
Apologies for the lack of formatting. Guess I need to reread this message a few more times for my own good. ;)

Formatted HTML: http://dl.dropbox.com/u/506504/solving_problems_by_yongfook....
This reminds me of a problem I've been wanting to solve for a long time.

A lot of web apps use email to deliver notifications and other data like reports. I want to take these emails and process them whenever a new email arrives.
A few qualifications:
The email server and the processing server are separate.
Need to access any attached files as well as the message body and other headers.
*Ideally, I don't want to deal with any email related libraries at all i.e. want to use something like a Rest API or even FTP (like in the libgmail library linked to in this post). This would make it usable from any language without needing a special email library.

Example Use Case:
Your web analytics software sends you a daily report with an attached CSV file. You want to grab the data from the CSV and put it in a database so you can create a nice dashboard for your site.

Would love to hear from anyone that has had experience with a system like this and could point me in the right direction.
He could put the passwords on a piece of paper in his wallet.

If paranoid, or worried about “shoulder-surfing”, the passwords could be obfuscated in some simple way. Examples: swap the first pair of digits, or swap case, or add a constant to all numbers. This would buy time if the wallet were stolen.

There are those that say passwords should never be written down, but I'm not alone on keeping them in a wallet:

http://software.silicon.com/security/0,39024655,39130618,00....
http://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2004/12/safe_personal_...
CRU Admits to Dumping Raw Climate Data
A good data point but very limited.

Indian Government bureaucracy is not the same as private enterprises. The inefficiency and feudalism of Government bureaucracy is very well known and does not bear repeating.

Private enterprises,( not the outsourced variety ), do not work this way. There are other cultural issues but such blatantly incompetent and bureaucratic behavior you will not find.
In the German city Mannheim streets also don’t have names, blocks do. Well, only in the old city center, but still.

Mannheim’s old city center has these regular, almost quadratic blocks (called „Quadrate“) which are very unusual to find in any European city. If those regular shaped blocks made Mannheim name its blocks, not streets, why didn’t the same thing happen in the US (where those kinds of blocks are much more common) at least once? I think that’s a intriguing question.

http://de.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Datei:Mannheim_Inn... (Photo)

http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quadratestadt (sadly, only in German)
Dwelling on the point
As a front-end developer and designer, I agree. HTML 5 allows you to imagine the web as a platform rather than as a bunch of webpages.
See also: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=843517

Which is a strange read. "Looks like the National Review was way out front on this one," is not something I expected to say to myself today.
why is this being voted down? simplistic models of complex systems are obviously a bad idea when the results involve spending billions of dollars that could otherwise directly save lives today.
Wonder how well this could succeed with modern technology.
Why Do My Comments Disappear?
I've noticed that any comment I submit is visible for a short while, but after several moments, disappears unless I am logged in.

Why is this happening? Is this some kind of moderation?
Summary: I as an author sure do like money. This makes me cute. Megacorporations like money too. This makes them evil.
New Website Publicizes iPhone App Rejections
Very timely article: I'm in the midst of writing my first book, which will be published by a major business imprint in late 2010.

I thought long and hard before signing my trade print contract: my next-best alternative was self-publishing via Lightning Source, which would give me full distribution at Amazon and all Ingram-affiliated bookstores (without shelving, probably), no inventory requirements on my part, ~75% margins for each book sold, and full control over the process. I have enough technical and design skill to pull it off well, and my publishers know it.

I also have a list of ~14k people to sell to, which I established via my blog. Most of the early sales of the book will come from this list, trade contract or no, and most of the ongoing marketing for the book will be my responsibility.

I signed the print contract because my publisher made it worthwhile: six-figure+ advance for worldwide rights, and I retain multimedia rights so I can freely adapt the content for online courses and other programs. That was a good deal for me. If I want to write book #2, they'll have right of first refusal, and if they don't want it for some reason, I have other options I can pursue.

Book contract negotiation is like any other business negotiation: always have options, ensure you're holding the valuable cards before you decide to play, and be willing to walk away from a bad deal.
For a hacker, what is the compelling reason to even use gmail? The web interface? Isn't there a way to run your own email server with a web interface?
The site referenced seems to be down, but here's another page with some more links (including some bondi source):
http://www-staff.it.uts.edu.au/~cbj/patterns/
Let me just note in passing that her first book advance was for $150,000.

That's not midlist; that's indicative of a publisher taking serious aim on the New York Times bestseller list.

Average first novel advances in SF/F fiction are on the order of US $7500. Average n'th book advances for agented authors are around $17,500.

Of course, there's a power law at work here; about 1% of the authors get 50% of the advances. But Jane Austen Doe was handed an opportunity with her first novel that most professionals will never see -- and blew it.
I don't know about this, I mean if an application's only API is email, is that something we really want to encourage?

Google analytics has a API now.
I only have some familiarity with Erlang, Does anyone know the rational behind not being able to change a variable's value? Is it simply historical?

It seems you have to call f() to 'forget' a variable before assigning a new value to it - what a maddening name for a built-in function ;-)
I guess that's one way to deal with outliers.
They have incentive, but not the means.

To search for mistakes, I skim a paper, think "yeah, that graph looks about right", [1] and give an opinion.

To search for fraud, I would need the entire source tree for the paper: data, programs, etc. I'll need to verify that the source code does what the paper says, and that the output of the program is really the source of the graphs. (This ignores the issue of fraudulent data, but that's really tricky to find.)

Since the data was destroyed (oops, I mean lost), this simply can't be done.

[1] I also check the proofs for mistakes, but that's irrelevant for this discussion.
Alternatives to Objective C for iPhone Application Development
Google-Microsoft battle hurts consumers
It doesn't matter whether I can use XML. What matters is that some people will use a new syntax and all the integration hassles and incompatibilities will start once again.

Why is it a good idea to invent yet another syntax that is almost the same but not quite compatible?

Looking at the ridiculous guru culture that has formed around minor obscure CSS features is very telling. When that happens to a technology I call it a massive failure.
I'm curious. Do you know any hiring method which scales well while maintaining high standards? I have yet to encounter any company where the quality of hires didn't decrease as the company grew.
I know it's probably an exaggeration, but IQs of 160 are the 99.997th percentile so there should be something like 10,000 people in the united states of all ages with 160+ IQ's. Suggesting those are the type of people you want to recruit is mostly a waste of time because there are just not that many people let alone people with that IQ let alone people with that IQ who are looking for programming jobs.
Weight Loss Diets
Spammers Taking Advantage of Holiday Season | TechJaws.com
This is turning into the biggest science story of the year, and for weeks most of the MSM refused to cover it.

I'm not trying to allege bias, just making the observation that stories that don't fit into pre-existing media narratives take a lot of push to get out there. Usually it's the fringe media that keeps kicking and kicking until somebody finally picks it up. If I remember correctly, the National Enquirer was running stories of John Edwards' love child for months before anybody else would pick it up. (And love or hate Edwards, it was a real story that deserved national attention)

I wonder if blogging has changed any of this? Sure would be great to read a study on how this type of anti-narrative story breaks today versus 20 years ago.
Furious investors warn troubled Dubai it will 'never raise a penny again'
i didn't get the feeling that the author has a problem with publishers making money. more like she is sad that publishers are no longer willing to allow an author to build a reputation over a number of years, like they used to. and even there, she seems to acknowledge that it's due to economic realities more than anything else.
I think people think I didn't answer the question which pertained narrowly to learning how financial firms operated.

The thing is - Charlie Munger, Warren Buffett, Philip Carret, and a few others DON'T operate like normal financial firms and have done spectacularly better. To understand financial firms you need to know what works better - and Berkshire Hathaway works a whole lot better. And Charlie Munger is Warren Buffett's sounding board.

Read Charlie Munger's advice and compare it to what you read elsewhere about financial firms knowing that Charlie is right.

In fact, the OP reasons in much the way of Buffett (I read several of his eariler articles), except that his noodling around with shorts is a departure from what I take to be Buffett's strategy of buying good management and good companies at good prices, and waiting as long as it takes to get good prices.
WordPress has become the first Greenscroll  friendly blogging system.
The big question is what happens if we do nothing about
climate change. Do we end up spending hundreds of billions
of dollars coping with the changes or do we end up spending
tens of trillions of dollars coping with the changes? Since
we are contemplating spending trillions of dollars to
prevent climate change we can act on the answer to that
question and a reliable answer is worth trillions of
dollars.

It is natural to expect that the Climate Research Unit would
have been performing its major work within a framework of
internal controls designed to permit the appointment of a
third party to audit the quality of the work. If the auditor
was of the opinion that the work was of sufficient quality
it could go forward as input to intergovernment treaty
making. If not, then governments could look elsewhere for
advice or commission further research work from other hands.

The recent leaks have confirmed that the CRU never attempted
to institute apropriate internal controls, attempts to
replicate past results internally have failed, and there is
nothing to audit. You find the sarcasm you encounter to be
confusing because it is misdirected.
Interesting, didn't know that.

However, from your link:

"no-one has yet demonstrated uranium-extraction from seawater on an industrial scale."
Let's not continue this here. If you are really interested, go talk to any local sports scientist involved in professional or olympic level sport and ask them their expert opinion.

Or, put your email on your profile and I'll fill you in privately.
It's you who is confused.

Scientists are normally obligated to release all data. It's the standard in most other fields (e.g., biology, econometrics).

Running the same data analysis on existing data doesn't count as reproducing the experiment. Running a different analysis on the same data is, however, doing new science.

In contrast, failing to release the data does count as "violating the scientific method".
Intuition, Peformance, and Scale
Amount of time saved using an existing, established service like Gmail versus running your own and fighting the never-ending fight with spam.

You can take that free time to hack something up ;-)
This doesn't really explain why these chains succeed in America, though.

My current theory about this has to do with the relative mobility of the populations. Speaking personally, when I'm at home I never go to Starbucks. There's a dozen other coffeeshops within walking distance and most make better coffee, and I know which are which. When I'm traveling to another city, though, I'm fairly likely to go to Starbucks simply because I know what I'll get there (a slightly overpriced, slightly over-bitter, but adequate, latte), while experience has shown that picking an unknown local coffeeshop leads to, on average, a worse cup of coffee, with high variation.
Methinks the serious issues the author raises would have benefited from a better written article.

Even though it's a subject that interests me greatly, I found this nearly impossible to get through on account of the fragmentation.
Another solution for firefox:

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/2351
The rationale behind immutable (a.k.a. unchangeable) variables is rooted in Erlang being designed as a concurrent functional programming language from the bottom up. Whenever you have multiple operations manipulating a single value, you're immediately responsible for synchronizing access to that value and ensuring it always exists in a consistent state.

Rather than deal with the complexities of synchronization, some languages opt to make all their data immutable and encourage the programmer to write code in a functional style. The fact that the f() function seems unintuitive is because that's not how code is written in Erlang. f() is merely a convenience function for unbinding a value from the Erlang shell, and it is not used in the real world. Rather, you setup initial bindings and then use recursive functions to yield new values as needed.

This requires a shift in your thinking about programming, but it offers huge advantages when working within a concurrent model. For more info on the dangers of mutable state in concurrent systems, I suggest the following article:

http://www.artima.com/articles/hickey_on_time.html
As a web designer, are you leaving money on the table?
Why, oh why, would she write this anonymously? Does she not realise that an article like this, getting passed around the Internet, finding its way to HN and personal blogs, is a great way to get immense publicity? Publicity == sales.
I thought MVP already supplanted MVC. I haven't wrapped my head around DCI yet, but my first question is whether this resembles MVP in any way.
Hacker News | New Comments
I've been using KeePass for several months and love it. The only thing lacking at this point is a suitable version for iPhone. While there is an app, it has a long way to go. I heard that the Blackberry version is great. I use the same database across OS X and Windows machines.

http://keepass.info/download.html
So to put it another way, these 'scientists' purposely made their data unverifiable and thus non-scientific. IMO any adjusted or modified data is unscientific without the original data set and how and why the data was modified the way it was.

If you adjust data to normalise it due to the differing global climatic effects of El Nino or La Nina then that's perfectly reasonable, if someone can corroborate what you did and if you did it right. However with no original data set, and apparently no mention of how or why the data was modified the way it was leaves it completely unverifiable and might as well be entirely fabricated.
There are several reasons why the media is reluctant to cover it.

1) The emails were acquired through an illegal hack, which makes them a highly tainted source for journalists who aren't pushing an agenda. Naturally journalists who are pushing the opposite agenda will ignore it, as those who who are skeptics will readily jump on them.

2) This leak was initially trumpeted as a the end of AGW theory, and has since turned out to be nothing more than scientists being douchey and unprofessional wrt their critics. Smoke, but no fire. There's an important lesson in marketing here: Make sure you set appropriate consumer expectations.

3) (US only) It's technically foreign news, and the American media generally doesn't do foreign news unless it pertains to our various wars or some 3rd world dictator says something bad about America.

Long story short, this would be covered in the MSM if: 1) The emails were acquired through a whistleblower with legal protection 2) it wasn't over-sold in the blogosphere the moment it broke 3) US Media actually gave a crap about what happens outside of America's borders that doesn't involve a military escapade.
I'm rather surprised that none of those are considered "tech" any more.
The 1918 flu went around once, and wasn't a big deal. Then it went around a 2nd time and killed lots of young people with the same "cytokine storm" pneumonia from an excessive immune response.

http://www.ted.com/talks/laurie_garrett_on_lessons_from_the_...
TED Talk: Lessons from the 1918 flu
The really striking thing about this talk: How the 1918 pandemic went around the world once and was no big deal, but then it came around again. There are copies of US Army memos bascially saying this. Then it went around the world again and killed tens of millions.

The takeaway: the flu is unpredictable. There's no way we can know what will happen!

I'm surprised no one has developed drugs to tackle the "cytokine storm." Perhaps some biotech startup could make a killing with this.
Corporate users would still need their administrators to install the plugin. But Chrome Frame could let change-fearing companies keep their users on IE6 (no retraining users or retesting existing sites), and use the Chrome engine only for sites that opt in to it.
Outside of software.
Some Thoughts On Email After Dealing With 500 Emails
* IQs of 160...what they've been thinking about..."will I get laid tonight"*

This is also a good test of common sense: if they answer "will I get laid" rather than "monads", you know they don't have any.
I actually have a blog post about this general subject: http://jasonmbaker.com/the-devils-in-the-details

In extracting code into a method, you're intentionally obscuring what it does. Most of the time this is a good thing because you want to only focus on the details of the routine you're in. Thus, if you follow the "make your method do one thing" rule, you should be ok.

If your methods have no cohesion to them, then you will have problems breaking them down. But then again, I would argue that that's the least of your problems.
Linux Mint 8 has been released - Linux Critic
I haven't read MacKay in some time, but I think he mentions other possible technologies. Breeder reactors are already in use for power generation and in the fuel cycle in France, and China and India are both working aggressively on Thorium reactors.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Breeder_reactor

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thorium_fuel_cycle
It's only good publicity if you can get published. Outing the corporate nature of the friendly looking book publishers is a sure way to get every editor in an exceptionally small market to blacklist you, you're then fucked and have to start selling primarily to a foreign market where the editors have no clue who you are.
Let's just add in a little virality
It is. I think people may have modded you down because they thought you were being ironic.
Really? How can you read a legal document that quickly?

If I was signing something that could get me sued in the future, I'd make darn sure that I read it thoroughly before signing!

That's just common sense:)
That's sage advice. I value all business relations like a poker game; you have to manipulate your way to a win, because that's what everyone is doing to you and if you just don't have the cards for the stake on the table then you fold.
I've done some programming in Erlang and I found the immutable variables to be a total pain in the ass that gave no benefit. Your code ends up littered with var=1 var2=var+1 type idioms.

Also, the immutable variable have nothing to do with concurrency. Since threads cant touch each others data, and they can only talk to each other through messages, immutability only applies to a local scope, where its really no big deal.

Last time I checked somebody was making a scripting language built on top of the erlang runtime and he says that immutable variables are nonsense.
Parking (Tickets) in Boston
Thanks, now I at least sort of know what the hell is going on.
It includes shipping. From Australia.

Also, weird shape => custom made in small batches => expensive. I'm surprised he managed to get them as cheap as they are.
At first, I was expecting something Moebius themed.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Airtight_Garage
I didn't enjoy his book. Woz is someone who did something great, made a lot of money, and then stopped.

To each his own I suppose, it's just really disappointed to read about someone who was, in all regards, brilliant and probably a genius. And then... For him to simply stop after a few years. Very sad.

One thing that particularly bothered me was why he went back to try and make a calculator after the personal computer?
I'm surprised nobody has talked about pairing interviews in the comments yet. I spent years clumsily hiring developers crapshoot-style. I shared the misconceptions that people get so nervous during technical interviews that it obviates their usefulness and that it doesn't really matter if a candidate writes code or not during their interview. My current employer, Pivotal Labs, hired me after a first interview that consists of interview-y conversation and a short pairing exercise followed by a second full day of pairing with the team on an actual project.

I know pairing is sometimes controversial around these parts, but for interview purposes its benefits are pretty evident.
IMHO their work should be re-validated, if it fails to meet the standard, and if even a minor portion of their work appears to show purposeful tampering or deceit, then all of their work should be black-listed as well as these scientists themselves.

Politics and game-playing is only an ethical violation. Tampering with ANY data is a violation of the very nature of being a scientist, and any 'scientist' willing to violate the core principles of the art cannot and should not be recognized as a scientist in any way, shape or form and neither should anything they produced be recognized in anyway as being scientific without complete validation from an impartial independent party.
You'll never get what you want