skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
From the email:

"The data are
attached to this e-mail. They go from 1402 to 1995, although we usually
stop the series in 1960 because of the recent non-temperature signal that
is superimposed on the tree-ring data that we use. "

So who of the discussing people is well versed enough in tree-ring data to have an informed opinion on this? It sounds as if in recent times tree-ring data has to be read differently (which seems possible, other factors could affect growth, don't know).
I never delete any emails. I find with several years of emails and a good search engine, it's like having a super memory.
It doesn't have to be fair. If they don't pay according to salary the woman will need to continue collecting money from her employer and discrimination is encouraged thus defeating the point
I have read this complaint before, and it is wrong. Most, probably nearly all, digital information will be translated into new formats as they become important, largely because it will be increasingly automated and increasingly inexpensive (both because of the automation and because newer hardware is cheaper).
Readability FTW, again.

http://lab.arc90.com/experiments/readability/
If someone with an honest intention asks about the methods or the data, I have no doubt it will be explained or given.

Apparently you should have had some doubt. As the hacked emails reveal, the people at CRU conspired to prevent people from accessing their data in spite of a legal obligation (under Britain's Freedom of Information Act) to provide it.
The quoted scientist is simply wrong. Openness with one's data is a good scientific approach, but it will not in any way reduce or minimize the faith-based attacks of the climate change deniers. (Rather, they'll be heartened because you took an action in response to their attacks.) Those attacks are not coming because Joe Redneck in the Bible Belt undertook a scientific inquiry into climate change and felt that the data wasn't open enough. You could hand-deliver 4000 pages of climate change datasets personally to the house of each and every person who said they don't believe in climate change; not one of them would change their mind.

If you don't understand the actual reasons that the deniers exist, which have absolutely nothing to do with your approach to the science, then you haven't got a hope of actually dealing with them.
Maybe someone should write a parse transform for dealing with them?
It's stuff like this that made me move to Slicehost, who I'm very happy with.
Unfortunately, OpenID is still broken on HN. Changing an existing account to use OpenID doesn't work. After the initial login at ClickPass, I get transferred to this page: http://news.ycombinator.com/openid_merge (which doesn't exist).
It's better than the U.S., but hardly a socialist utopia gouging out the soul of the hard-working noble capitalist, or whatever the linked article was trying to say.

What the article was trying to say is that placing burdensome restrictions on companies that have female employees will result in a completely predictable incentive to hire fewer women.

If female employees are, on average, effectively more expensive to the company than an equivalent male employee, what do you expect businesses to do?

And no, "it's illegal to discriminate against hiring women" doesn't help. Lots of things are illegal and people do them anyway.
Value as defined in? I think you're talking about economical value—at least that's what most talk about population shrinkage seems to be about. GP on the other hand was talking about ecological value. I don't think the units compare.

Did I interpret your comment correctly?
What are Google’s real motivations behind Chrome OS?
Of course it doesn't really help your case when you deliberately obfuscate and hide data - not to mention hide the fact that you can't even replicate your own models.

Let's acknowledge that there will always be some minority view that will always be in direct opposition to whatever science there is. You cannot possibly think that hiding, claiming monopoly and even deleting original data sets helps any cause. Since when did the science go from attempting to discern an objective truth to advocacy?

It seems like the defense of the leaked emails essentially comes down to this: the data would be manipulated by evildoers therefore the only people who can be trusted to interpret and even hold the data are some select group of scientists. Oh and by the way, if you disagree with any of our interpretations we'll label you a "denier" and try to destroy you whether you're a scientist or a scientific journal. Sounds like religion more than science.
Yes, but if it is based on former salary, I may want to negotiate a huge salary with my employer shortly before leaving, on the assumption that I pay back the money plus some more later (e.g. buy a bond of that company etc).
How would she collect salary from her employer? Also if she earns enough, she should be able to pay the maternity leave from her savings.

Why should a woman with a higher salary need more money during maternity leave than a poorer woman? If the poor woman can do with the free money the tax payer is willing to give, surely the rich woman should be able to do the same.
Most likely yes - I still think it would take a fairly sizeable contraction in openness in Silicon Valley to be as closed as Europe, though.
I'm interested in getting better at Git. What other tutorials are really good for getting to an intermediate level with Git?
Http://www.ispgeeks.com/wild/
Why limit it to maternity leave? Just make a general-purpose "valuable employee vanished without warning" insurance. Could apply equally to someone quitting, dying, enlisting in the army, running away to join the circus...

For a company large enough to diffuse the risk internally it wouldn't make much sense, and for small companies it might not be feasible (could a five-person software company afford a large enough insurance policy to mitigate the loss of the lead developer?), but it might make sense for mid-size firms...

If memory serves me, some companies actually do things like take life insurance policies on key employees for exactly this reason.
I like soft validation for emails. "This doesn't look like an email address, verify you typed everything correctly, and resubmit". That way you handle legit typos, without hassling people who have weird emails (gmail plus signs and such).
"so maternity benefits are essential if you don't want to cause harm to children at an age when they're especially vulnerable."

But why is that the problem of the company? It is a problem of society, and of the parents. Putting the burden on companies is just exploitation.
The main difference is the way it's displayed by default in the shell. Strings are handled with list operations, and Erlang is great for list operations.
I thought it was pretty clear when he added the part about letting the dog sleep on the sofa.
When you say 'not true', you mean you disagree, right?

Population shrinkage is certainly not a problem for the environment and it was not implied that it was not a problem in other respects.

The value of a human to society is a positive? Can you unequivocally state that a world with 3 billion people is worse off than one with 6 billion? It is an idealistic claim and only true in a personal sense, and even then may well be founded on an inconsistent set of values.
Depends on what hands are washed with. Semmelweis used what we call chlorine bleach, Lister carbolic acid (dangerous stuff). http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ignac_Semmelweis Semmelweis's strategy reduced childbed fever in his ward by 90%. (Then he got all pompous about it and was ignored ... unlike Lister.)

Since busy people can't wash all the time, a device like the one in the article would make antisepsis a lot harder to resist.
> I'm trying to figure out why this article is posted, as a UK anti-discrimination bill doesn't seem to matter much to mostly-US programmers.

`Mostly' is the word. There are also non-Americans on Hacker News.
Git for Computer Scientists: http://eagain.net/articles/git-for-computer-scientists/

Peepcode screencast: http://peepcode.com/products/git

GitHub guides: http://github.com/guides/home
This is a good point. If the goal is to get mothers returning to work, why not make it easier for mothers to work instead of worrying about whether they'll have a specific job that apparently many decide to abandon?
The Lunacy of Restricted Access
Rather than extending maternity leave, I would favour extending it as parental leave and making it exchangeable between both parents, however they like.

This is done in some fields already, like academia, where both parents can elect to take leave. Not even close to equal numbers of men and women use it. If you make it exchangeable, only women will take maternity leave, and the reasons are fairly obvious.

* Giving birth is physically very traumatic, and requires a certain amount of recovery time.

* Breastfeeding makes working from the office difficult, to say the least.

* It's very difficult for many women to spend long periods of time away from their infants. This may not be PC, but it's true. Men may love their newborns, but they don't spend every minute away from them obsessively imagining their mother-in-law dropping their kid on the head.
It's interesting to see the differences in comments between that article and this. The comments on this article seem to be "sceptic"-dominated, whereas the other one seems to be dominated by "believers". I wonder what's causing the difference.
Time-of-day
I think you are missing the point of the post. Tiger Woods getting into a car accident in a non-tournament day is for the most part "useless" breaking news. Some might argue that it's still useless even in a tournament day.

However, what if you received flooding information 45 minutes before it happens in your area. (I'm from the Philippines and we experienced heavy flooding recently and my house was nearly flooded b/c the "normal" news channels didn't know how bad it got before it got really bad). Of course, that's just one example.

Point is the power of Internet/twitter allows for breaking news that might be relevant to you and might give you enough time to avoid disaster, etc.
Conservation is (in America at least) definitely at the top of what most people can do. And they will, given time and good arguments. Water heaters used to be the #1 energy sink appliance in the average US home (early 1970s).

But drafts, single-glazing and inadequate wall/ceiling insulation continue to waste enormous energies every winter. And car engines, like light bulbs, continue to be about 15-20% efficient.
That's right. But here you are saver with older women than older men.
Some people show off vacation photos all over their houses. Even then, though, you don't usually get a good sampling of that person's travels by the few pictures they chose, and had space, to present. I opted instead for having one poster-sized digital pictureframe (well, okay, it's a screen inset in the wall with a hidden PC, but the interface is the same), which shuffles through all the photos—a much better sampling, and you eventually see everything if you watch long enough, without having to hunt down the scapbooks in the attic. Having said this, I wouldn't be surprised if there were an analogous device for ebooks—perhaps a touchscreen marqueeing a steady stream of your favorite quotes from each book, each of which displays the appropriate cover and either pushes the book itself via Bluetooth, or begins dictation from the audiobook version.
Quebec has subsidized daycare. You can apply and pay as little as 9$/day or you can get a tax break corresponding to that. Although the program is costly for tax payers, it will pay itself pretty soon. Quebec now has a positive birth rate for the first time in a long time.
Eric Raymond on "Hiding the Decline, Part 1"
Encoding data in the last two digits of a check -- flags or a checksum
+1 for lamson. Closest I've seen to what an email-app framework must represent
Playgrub: Music Playlists for the Playdar Content Resolver
Erlang doesn't make any assumptions about what it is.

To Erlang, it is a list of 32 bit integers. There is no difference between a list of integers and a list of characters.

The shell will transform this list of 32 bit integers with ASCII equivalents into text for your convenience, but it doesn't do any sort of conversion or typing.
Erlang now has a full-featured standard regex module called re that handles utf8 strings and binaries. It now has a standard module for handling unicode.

Yes, regexes aren't part of the language syntax, but then that's not true for, say, python, either. Having to use a library to do regex is not going to be the difference maker in productivity for your app.

Besides, while I love regex, I still use them as a last resort. You're going to want to use a real parser for reliable structured text processing.

Generally, erlang programmers keep strings in binaries, which are compact. Most modules for handling string type tasks allow you to do this, e.g., the re module understands a unicode_binary type.

In 6 months of programming erlang professionally, in a domain dominated by scripting languages like python and ruby, I've certainly never been tempted to bolt over string handling issues. Erlang's flexible distribution, concurrency, and reliability model is just too compelling.

To get competitive performance in a reasonable amount of programmer time for concurrent applications in other languages you're limited to the subset of tasks that, say, twisted or tornado makes easy. The program I'm writing now couldn't have been done with either of them.

Frankly, if it's the choice between built-in support for regex and built-in primitives for distribution, concurrency, and fault tolerance, there's no question in my mind which is more important.
If you don't like to deal with the public, don't have business experience, and would rather focus on your discipline than on people/money/marketing problems, a PhD can be a cozy way to go ... if you pick the right one, and are crazy talented or know the right people. Some PhD's spend a few years driving taxi.
AT&T Offering Refurbished 16GB iPhone 3GS For $49
Interesting. Can you describe what kinds of AI techniques you're leveraging beyond keyword search?
Lisp doesn't have native regexps, but of the two main Lisp regexp libraries, one, cl-irregsexp, is 3 times faster than Perl, 6 times faster than Python, 7 times than C, and 8 times faster than Ruby.

Scroll to the bottom of the page http://common-lisp.net/project/cl-irregsexp/

If you have been following some recent papers on regexp performance, there is consensus that things could be a lot faster with better algorithms. I expect the game to change dramatically soon.
You're missing the point of the parent. If CNN breaks it on Twitter, they COULD break it on cable immediately. They've done it many times when real news occurred. They COULD break the flooding in your area (and probably would) as soon as they learned of it. I'm guessing the actual lead time, if it's something as important as a major flood, is a matter of at most a minute or two.

Which means that all Twitter in this case did is bombard people with stupidity 30 minutes before cable TV did the same. That's not a value add. If anything, it's an extra 30 minutes before this stupid fact pushes something useful out of my brain. Because I avoid Twitter, I knew who won the Battle of Trafalgar for an extra half hour before cable ruined that.

If you wanted to give an example of Twitter being useful, you'd give one where some normal person (not a cable news network) broke a story that got big before the MSM even found out.
Are you putting the journal on its own disk?
opening paragraph comments on a code fragment:

From the CRU code file osborn-tree6/briffa_sep98_d.pro , used to prepare a graph purported to be of Northern Hemisphere temperatures and reconstructions.

;
; Apply a VERY ARTIFICAL correction for decline!!
;
yrloc=[1400,findgen(19)*5.+1904]
valadj= [0.,0.,0.,0.,0.,-0.1,-0.25,-0.3,0.,-0.1,0.3,0.8,1.2,1.7,$
2.5,2.6,2.6,2.6,2.6,2.6]*0.75 ; fudge factor
if n_elements(yrloc) ne n_elements(valadj) then message,’Oooops!’
;
yearlyadj=interpol(valadj,yrloc,timey)

This, people, is blatant data-cooking, with no pretense otherwise. It flattens a period of warm temperatures in the 1930s--see those negative coefficients? Then, later on, it applies a positive multiplier so you get a nice dramatic hockey stick at the end of the century.
Your screed is a tad repulsive, and does little to advance your argument.

I wasn't aware that because I don't buy into the AGW religion that I was a Joe Redneck from the Bible Belt.

I guess I will have to go to the local Philly area DMV to get the address on my driver's license change, will have to choose a state that is south of the Mason-Dixon line ... is South Carolina OK with you, or should I choose Georgia?

And on Monday I will stop in at the local Ford dealership and trade in my Toyota for an F150.
A publication generally has a page limit

I'm sorry, but this statement doesn't make any sense in the digital era. I can download closing prices for nearly every traded US stock over its entire existence in spreadsheet format from Yahoo for free. I downloaded binaries for an entire operating system to run the computer that I'm typing this reply on for free. "Page limit" is not a reasonable excuse for a scientist whose work is funded by the public. I have no doubt that a researcher who was willing to make data available in a digital format that is compatible with commonly used tools such as R would be able to find an outlet willing to host this data for public consumption. In fact, I would almost see this step as a requirement in today's technological environment. How many extra pages would be needed to cite a URL from which further details could be retrieved?

If someone with an honest intention asks about the methods or the data

This statement makes even less sense than the last one. The scientific soundness of data or method is unrelated to the intention of the analyzer. Publishing full details of the analysis can only strengthen confidence in the conclusion that has been reached. Only someone with reservations about the conclusion would seek to obscure the steps in the process by which it was reached.
That might be possible. Primitive recursion is much less powerful than Turing machines.
So what... He has looked at how "believing in God affects our brains" - his idea that yawning could be a good thing is still valid and interesting.

He is a neuroscience professor (but then we'll fall into "Appeal To Authority"). Anyhow, I think we should stick for what he is saying now, and not what he has said or researched in the past.
Donald Keiller a plant physiologist at the University of Anglia wrote Briffa this October:

"1) The appropriateness of the statistical analyses employed
2) The reliance on the same small datasets in these multiple studies
3) The concept of "teleconnection" by which certain trees respond to the "Global Temperature Field", rather than local climate
4) The assumption that tree ring width and density are related to temperature in a linear manner.

Whilst I would not describe myself as an expert statistician, I do use inferential statistics routinely for both research and teaching and find difficulty in understanding the statistical rationale in these papers. As a plant physiologist I can say without hesitation that points 3 and 4 do not agree with the accepted science."

See link for full email thread:
http://www.eastangliaemails.com/emails.php?eid=1064&file...
It could be that your heart rate increases (exertion, nerves) and this is your body's way of increasing oxygen in the system. That'd be my guess, anyway.
String processing is just one of those things you can't offload to a second process. Having Perl in the same box doesn't mean you have the luxury to open some IPC channel and pass your texts to Perl. String processing is one of those types of problems that just benefit from a little thought and 10 seconds of planning.

C itself is bogged down by its own horrible string representation, the nul termination, where most operations need to traverse the string up to the terminator before they know where it ends. This causes all sorts of horrible buffering tricks, conditional tests on every character, and other unpleasant things. Pascal had length-prefixed strings from day one, and DJB created Netstrings to make network programming easier on people. See http://c2.com/cgi/wiki?LeasedString
Why are my posts in this thread being downmodded for asking questions about OpenID usability?
Please do not link to random papers on semantics, you don't know whose weekend you might ruin.

Horrible nerd-snipping there; I grok half of the paper, and have no choice but to study the formal semantics of the other half :-(
Actually, here's what MG gets wrong.

The Twitter story was this: "BULLETIN — REPORT: FAMED GOLFER TIGER WOODS SERIOUSLY INJURED AFTER CRASH NEAR FLORIDA HOME."

And the CNN story (30-45 min later), was this: "(CNN) — Golfer Tiger Woods was injured in a car accident near his home, Florida officials say."

When all was said and done, which was more correct? The answer is CNN's. Woods was not "seriously injured," he was treated for facial lacerations and was, quote "fine," according to his agent (http://twitter.com/darrenrovell1/status/6121135958).

Twitter might win on speed, but CNN ultimately won (this time) on accuracy. They knew about the Woods incident as soon as everyone else did -- to think they don't watch Twitter like everyone else would be silly -- but they likely spent that extra half hour doing what no one on Twitter does: actual journalism (as in, checking sources).

(Note: I'm personally not a fan of process journalism, something that MG's boss avidly promotes... report first get the facts later is a sad future if it is indeed the future of how the news is disseminated, imho.)
As The Economist points out:

"The 'hiding' concerned the decision to leave out a set of tree-ring-growth data that had stopped reflecting local temperature changes. That alteration in growth pattern is strange, and unexplained, but eliminating it is not sinister."

and:

" 'I’ve just completed Mike’s Nature trick of adding in the real temps to each series for the last 20 years (ie from 1981 onwards) and from 1961 for Keith’s to hide the decline.' Trickery associated with Dr Mann was catnip to the sceptics. But Dr Jones has clarified that 'The word trick was used here colloquially as in a clever thing to do. It is ludicrous to suggest that it refers to anything untoward.' "

http://www.economist.com/opinion/displaystory.cfm?story_id=1...
He compares Erlang's string handling with C... And C sucks at string handling. He should compare Erlang to all the modern languages where strings are a first class citizen. Comparing Erlang's string handling to Java, Python or Ruby might change his mind.
Especially since "believing in God affects our brains" seems entirely plausible.
If you don't understand the actual reasons that the deniers exist, which have absolutely nothing to do with your approach to the science, then you haven't got a hope of actually dealing with them.

So what is the correct way of dealing with them? Insult them until they agree with you?

Merely being correct may be good enough in science and technology fields, but it's not going to get you very far with the public; at that point it's a problem of marketing and PR. Would you say that "appearing secretive and refusing to disclose data" is a good PR move?
You could hand-deliver 4000 pages of climate change datasets personally to the house of each and every person who said they don't believe in climate change; not one of them would change their mind.

Such rigidity and blindness to reason is not limited to skeptics, as even George Monbiot noted this week: http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/georgemonbiot/2009/nov...

Stephen McIntyre, and those like him who consider it their duty to science to check whether the data and modelling really does support the story we're being told, can hardly be dismissed so blithely.