skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I'm more in the skeptic camp, but I don't find the comments cited in this article very suspect, especially without further context. The comments may just be warning users not to use the function past 1960.

The most damning excepts from the leaked email are the following:

http://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2009/11/024996.php
In this one, they delete emails rather than respond to a FOIA request

http://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2009/11/024995.php
In which they lie to the NYTimes in response to a question of data cherry picking. They tell the NYTimes that they looked into the criticisms and that the criticisms were completely unfounded. But behind the scenes they were emailing each other that they could not explain the results, and in fact, other scientists had found the criticisms to be quite valid.
Ah, looks like you're right. "New with points."
Agreed. Which is why open access to code and data would make this text publication ready.

When I ship code to a client you can bet the ambiguities have been removed. Thorny parts have defensible explanations.
Yes, that's pretty much the standard lifestyle business. It puts you in a similar situation to someone owning a local store or restaurant. You will be able to live a solid middle class life (or a little better), but you aren't going to retire to a tropical island any time soon.

If you were instead doing $100k a year in revenue at (say) a 20% margin, that would mean you take home $20k a year (assuming you revinvest nothing in the business), which would be more of a "hobby" than a "lifestyle".
"If you ask parents why kids shouldn't [violate social norm X], the less educated ones usually reply with some question-begging answer like 'it's inappropriate', while the more educated ones come up with elaborate rationalizations."

I see no loss of meaning, but that's probably because there's so little meaning in the dismissive little excerpt you've chosen to deploy here.

My kids aren't allowed to swear either, for exactly the same reason that this commenter gave. People who think words can't be dangerous, especially for a 10 year old, seem likely to me to be leading sheltered and confined lives.
Node is single threaded, so you shouldn't need to implement any locks yourself.
Well, the ad is via Google Adsense. Blame them. :)
I came to the comments because I thought the author forgot to actually include the new logo in his or her writeup. I thought that was just him or her making fun of the new logo.
Exactly. I think all the people replying with their stories of missing braces or semicolons or typos are missing the point. This wasn't an issue that could've been solved by careful (character by character) reading. It was one that required a ton of research. Tracking down a missing brace doesn't teach you anything. Tracking down an issue like this does.
10 eBay Secrets for Planet Wide Scaling (HPTS Talk Summary)
FarmVille’s Parent Company Valued at $1 Billion?
Discount Codes For Your Shopping Convenience
Discount codes are one of many enticing stuffs particularly for Web buyers to keep doing with their thing irrespective of what it takes. This is the reason why more folk try to have one of this codes.
The author seems to be suffering from a lot of insecurity and anger issues - and I mean that in the most non-judgmental way possible. I think it's pretty clear that most of HN works on web technologies, and personally I haven't really seen this condescending divide between 'web programming' and 'real programming' - which at the end of the day seems to be about the same thing really.

I do however object to his calling the entire iPhone developer community out as stupid and arrogant. How arrogant is it to presume that everyone of the many iPhone developers who have complaints about the current approval system is, in his words, stupid? If anything the author is the arrogant, misinformed, and dare I say, stupid one here.

I'm torn about whether or not to flag this. While this has generated some good discussion on HN, I don't think we should really cater to troll material like this. If you cannot communicate your opinions in an intelligent, civil way, and cannot deal with your fellow developers with some decorum, then please don't say anything at all.
Fair enough. I'm certainly willing to believe there are some hack scientists in the field. And even if they were all unimpeachable, there's the simple truth that we are very far from understanding the intricacies of the weather. So sure, it's possible that we're wrong about global warming. And it's definitely possible that we're wrong about certain weather patterns being related to global warming, even if we're right about the long-term effects. I'm just sick of people using their ignorance as a weapon.
That excerpt reads to me as written by a frustrated programmer who was given a dataset that was poorly designed and lacks sufficient documentation.

I've been in that situation before, as has anyone who's had to work with real-world data.

This hack episode seems really scary to me. Getting angry at the computer, your suppliers, et cetra is all part of the development process --- as is writing angry comments and internal emails. It's a much less disruptive way to vent the frustration that comes with the job than punching your monitor.[1]

I've not seen anything anybody's posted that doesn't happen at every development organization in the world. I really feel for those guys and the firestorm they must be in now. And to be frank. I hope the criminals who broke into their computers are captured and prosecuted.

[1] The nicest thing about the old CRTs is that they could take a good smack or two.
That is a gross oversimplification.

It also seems you've backed off your claim that 50% of your trades are profitable (if you actually trade).
The stuff about going after patents isn't true in my experience: I can't think of a single prominent CS academic researcher in systems/PL who spends a lot of time going after patents (... unless they do a startup company, of course).

But otherwise, sure -- academics aren't incentivized to produce usable, non-prototype software. Sometimes they do anyway, but they aren't really rewarded for it professionally (with a few exceptions: e.g. Chord). That is especially true of something like Cyclone, which would require pretty considerable effort to support.

The hope is that by writing papers that clearly describe a new idea, practitioners can make use of ideas developed by researchers (e.g. Cassandra is heavily influenced by the Dynamo paper). That's not always true, but forcing academics to write production-quality software and then provide support for it probably wouldn't make a lot of sense either.
Supercomputing for the Masses
> Telling expert humans what you're trying to achieve is far more useful.

Tiny little problem. You may not be able to.

Having worked in commercial, academic and government contexts, I can tell you that real life projects will always, always have some kind of hurdle to prevent you from divulging "what you're trying to do."

You might be working from a spec that only tells you what your superiors what you to know, there might be some legal or "market positioning" reason that requires you to preserve secrecy, or there might be department politics that will cause fur to fly if somebody outside your team finds out what you are really doing...

I sure hope my current stab at self-employment works out; I'd really had to go back...
The Openfund, Round I: Start-ups Selected
Besides which, it sounds like they're only using it in-house for processing, not distributing anything based on it. So even if they're not compiling it in LGPL mode, they're probably perfectly OK.
Of course not. Neither would "Things You Can't Say".
Socialism is an ambiguous word, but roads aren't a good example of any of them.

-Does socialism mean the workers own the company? Lots of perfectly capitalistic companies are actually socialist by that standard. I even know a company where the original founder has no equity anymore and everyone else has equity based upon seniority. What socialist would do better?

-Does socialism mean that the government owns the company? Amtrak, Fannie Mae, GM, AIG.... Hasn't been an amazing success so far.

-Does socialism mean that the government provides welfare? By that standard, Bismarck was a socialist. (But in reality, he was an old fashioned aristocrat who figured out you can snip socialism in the bud by using welfare to buy off its supporters.)

-Does socialism mean that the socialist party holds a monopoly on all commerce and politics? We, ah...tried that a few times and it didn't seem to work.

Roads? Most governments build roads, if only for their armies. You think Caesar was a socialist?
Capitalism also bears little resemblance to its utopian vision. Perhaps the problem is following these as ideology instead of simply seeing these "models" as tools. National Parks and vast stores of natural resource leverage a communist model, Health insurance (really any insurance) leverage a social model, Growth, speculative enterprise leverage capital models. I see no reason why we cannot choose the right tools for each job.
Stripes: A Conceptual Operating System User Interface
In fact, it's probably one of their core company values.
I'll recommend New Zealand to fit your criteria.
what the author of this quote doesn't seem to understand is that the primary output of academic research in CS is not an industrial-strength implementation of an actual product, but rather is a prototype whose ideas can be transferred into future products. it's unreasonable to expect a group of graduate students and professors to build software on par with well-tested, well-QAed open-source or commercial products ...

i agree that researchers often don't have an incentive to make robust, industrial-strength implementations of their work, but some systems hackers are actually quite good at making real software that people actually use. examples:

- Unison file synchronizer (UPenn research project) http://www.cis.upenn.edu/~bcpierce/unison/

- gprof program profiler (http://portal.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=989401)

- the Scala language (http://www.scala-lang.org/)

most of the time, though, the way that CS systems research impacts the world is by:

a.) the researchers founding their own company from their research - e.g., VMWare, and more recently KSplice (http://www.ksplice.com/)

b.) a big company implementing features in their own products based on research findings - e.g., machine learning at Google, OS security in Google Chrome, and even gasp OS security in Microsoft Windows OS
Both of them are actually animated in Korea, incidentally.

It's funny... There was a minor controversy a few years ago when someone discovered that several Naruto fight sequences were actually traced off of other sources, including the Cowboy Bebop movie. I wonder whose idea that was -- the main studio or the outsourced one?
Sparkfun giving away $100 per person in free electronics+S/H on 1/7/10
How to Remove the iPhone Worm | TechJaws.com
'"People in our field should see this submission. People in his field should, as well."'

This doesn't strike me as a good defense; in fact it seems to me to concede the point you think you're fighting. The editors think that people should see sheer nonsense? What are they doing, again? There's no justification for publishing sheer nonsense; there's an infinite supply of that, and precious few journal pages by comparison.

If they did not see some value in it, they would not have published it. Therefore, they did see some value in utter nonsense. Therefore, I am justified in treating them as people who see value in total nonsense. As a person interested in learning, these are not people I want to emulate or respect.
TechStars Boston Moves to Spring, Apps Open Now
They never had a chance, really - they did not, and could not ever own the last-mile, which is the key to remaining viable as an ISP.
Directed Edge's landing page (http://directededge.com) is a good example of communicating product capabilities to non-technical folks.
LinkedIn is finally opening up their API
This is a rails gem, so you get all the benefits of integration with the web framework. As far as I know, GWO does A/B testing between hardcoded URLs, so the logic is then split between GWO (to redirect to the correct page) and your app (to serve the correct content for that page).
Ease of use, control, and not having to run the whole thing in javascript.
I understand why "Godwin's law" is so often cited, but really. It's silly to compare Obama or Bush or whoever to Hitler simply because you don't like them, but it's not silly to bring up Nazis when someone is advocating eugenics.

It's also not silly to bring up Hitler, Stalin and Mao when somebody claims that religion is the source of all oppression. They clearly demonstrate that atheistic worldviews can be radical and dangerous, too.

To simply point and yell "Godwin!" at every mention is more childish that bringing up these topics when they're not really relevant to the discussion. Surely there are SOME valid lessons from the worst mass killings in history.
Some good comments here (http://apps.ycombinator.com/item?id=812764) about GWO versus more specific A/B testing tools.

The linked comment was by Patio11 (http://apps.ycombinator.com/user?id=patio11), who also has an A/B testing framework for Rails that's worth mentioning (http://www.bingocardcreator.com/abingo). I don't know how ABingo and Vanity compare.
We went through the Boulder program in 2007, highly recommended.
JSConf US 2010 Announced
Wow, this API has been a long time coming.

It looks to me like there are write operations for status, activity stream, friend invitations, and direct messaging. I'm not too surprised that LinkedIn does not offer all the contact details.

Phew. This documentation is organized in a somewhat annoying fashion.
I dig it. Nice work on the logging/reporting. One preference: I'd like the alternatives to be blocks to execute, not just simple variable options.
Yep. And I don't have to bear the time cost of the interface downloading and rendering. As a user and not a developer I will take a native app over a web app any day.

But giving this article any credence is giving it too much credit. It's shock-blogging and nothing more.
I think I've read a couple of perspectives on why JS would be the "NBL", and I wasn't trying to claim I was the first to come to that conclusion.

I'm saying that I think that this is JavaScript's first implementation in the wild that I've liked enough to want to do non-web programming in.
Why so much hype around 'who' it might be?
As an aside, we don't call it socialism here. We call it social market economy. Also, true socialist parties aren't nearly as big as social democrat parties, which are more moderate.
What a Monad is not
Flagged. What is it about gold farming you want us to know? Where's the news, opinion, or discussion?
I was involved as a mentor in the Boston program last year. I thought it was great.

Great people and great energy.
Learning Scala right now. Seems it fits nicely as the NBL according to Steve Yegge's criteria:

#1 C-like syntax (might be closer to Ruby actually)

#2 Static-typing but feels pretty dynamic due to extremely good type inference

#3 Perform on par with plain Java

#4 IDE(Eclipse/NetBean) support

#5 Everything in the "Kitch sink" section included + Actor-based threadless concurrency + easy to write embedded DSL + (I heard even continuation is coming soon). So what's missing is a macro system ...

#6 JVM so multiplatform by default (even on Android)
NYC Subway Schedules for your BlackBerry
Gmail & What You Think
This makes me think of over-fitting in machine learning algorithms. The epicycles fit the data very well, but added a lot of parameters to the model. It makes me wonder if there is a bias/variance trade off for scientific models, but I don't know how to express the connection formally.

In machine learning algorithms, we hold out a dataset to test for over-fitting. We don't exactly have a spare universe to test our scientific models for over-fitting, but maybe if there were a second planetary system at the time to test against it would have been clear sooner that the "epicycles" model fit only this solar system from the vantage point of earth? Maybe you could "train" the model on some heavenly bodies, then test on others?

I'm pretty sure I'm making a fool of myself at this point and missing something obvious, and I'm hoping one or more of you will point that obvious thing out to me.
That's understandable. There're more shades to socialism than just the one that gets used again and again in America.

It's why this entire conversation is so ridiculous. Neither Paul nor the majority of the commenters here has a clue about what they're talking about. They're spouting talking points like there's a set-in-stone socialism that all would-be socialists have to follow. I'm not at all the pinko-commie sort, but it always tickles me when this particular weakness of HN comes out. For a bunch of people who work with complex systems daily, we suck at appreciating the complexities of economic systems and we adore Paul despite his habit of oversimplifying topics to the point of satire.
That's just not true. In the latest iPhone OS you can have a webapp run offline...
For those like me who find it difficult to parse things like this without examples, here's an explanation of how the No-Free-Lunch Theorem applies to evolution (specifically, why it doesn't apply):

http://www.talkorigins.org/design/faqs/nfl/#nflt
I thought doing "http server programming" is pretty much in the same category as doing "web programming"?
White House Pushes Science and Math Education
I know I'm repeating myself, but: I think this is exactly not the idea of a standard lifestyle business.

Distilled: a lifestyle business is one that makes choices to optimize the lifestyle of its owners rather than the success of the business.

For that reason, "lifestyle business" owners are more likely to drive Porsches than startup owners.
NextATOM - social media blog
"Lifestyle business" is also a dismissive term used by financiers to describe the early stages of bootstrapped companies, but the nice thing about not needing VC money is: you don't need to care what financiers think about you.

Look at it this way: 5 years ago, investment bankers were laughing at all of us. Did we care? Where do you think venture capitalists come from?
Volunteers leaving Wikipedia in droves as it matures
I remember that "Things You Can't Say" was picked up and discussed a lot by people with no connection to hacking or technology. Several political blogs made their list of predictions for ideas today that will be considered barbaric in the future, for example. I specifically remember Andrew Sullivan linking to it (my favorite political blogger).
False. Please RTFM: http://developer.apple.com/safari/library/documentation/iPho...
Synchronous Reads Asynchronous Writes in Ruby
Its my understanding that Apple would like require an "explicit" rating, since you could change your web page to have pictures of an "inappropriate" nature.

So this doesn't solve the problem.
I hope someone standardizes things that go on inside social networks. Should we consider the money made from selling deceptive ads as a legal? Or is it even a proper revenue model? (For eg. certain ads say user will get points if he takes a 2 min IQ test, and in the end the user signs up for the service unintentionally, and ends up paying a monthly bill before he notices the charge and cancels it.)

And I may be wrong, but what intellectual capital does a company like this have? Anyone who buys it, is just buying the user base. And what about the future of the company? What would be the revenue 5 years later? How does a quantitative analyst factor this while calculating the worth of the company?
Ways Geeks Measure the World
It’s News On Academia, Not Climate
This article is about HTTP server programming, but node.js implements a number of features that are just good for general-purpose programming of all kinds: a good system for including modules, a decent I/O interface, robust events.

I'm not so excited by this guy writing an HTTP server in JavaScript. I'm excited about the potential of JavaScript in writing elegant, high-performance apps that aren't tied to the web.
Another Worm Strikes Jailbroken iPhone
A religious storm is brewing at Best Buy
Isn't this just a VPS?

"Cloud Servers" = 256MB for ~$10/month which is a great price - but it looks like a plain old VPS. I could set it up, but there's no "friendly" way to administer it.

"Managed Servers" are starting at $100/month, which is way too expensive.
Little confused - remove 'danger' or remove 'evil'? Surely they are different things.
Negative Cashback from Microsoft's Bing Cashback
Google web optimizer is a very cumbersome tool. Vanity is designed to work seamlessly in a Ruby/Rails environment. It even has a built in dashboard and reporting system! Also, its server-side, not client-side, which can really be useful in most cases.

I was very impressed with this when I saw it at RubyConf 09!
I found it interesting that there is a massive industry in the third world, entire factories of people "farming" gold and selling it for hard currency to people in the first world, complete with middlemen.

This industry has been created out of thin air. It seems like a giant hack to me. Now that I think about it, what about "gold farming" isn't hacker news? Possibly the "news" part, I don't play MMORGs, so while I know that there is a big business selling virtual goods for hard currency, the idea of industrializing it is news to me but might be old hat to you.

So it's news to me.
Tell HN NYC: Hackers & Founders NYC Meetup #7 on 12/3
Scratchware Manifesto: "There is no shelf space on the Internet."
I don't think Facebook has been immune to this at all - they've certainly put up fences, but have knocked them down quickly as it became apparent that's not what users wnat.

Leaving your app - using the trail analogy - as an open, untamed field may not be the best way to go, but I don't think any app would survive by setting up rigid fences and refusing to adapt them as they apparently become obsolete.
It may have been successful (though it also tells bloggers what they want to hear, and does so with a stamp of authority --- the fact that it came from a tech/startup person adds novelty for political bloggers, and probably subtracts nothing). That's kind of not my point.

I'm actually a lot more interested in what jimbokun really thinks of the article than what Andrew Sullivan thinks about it. What's the insight you got from it? That thinking forbidden thoughts is, in fact, like stretching your brain?
Additionally, if you do b2b:

* Charge more.
I'm pretty sure that whole "pedestrians defining the sidewalks" thing is actually a myth. It may happen sometimes nowaways since the myth is now so widespread but it's associated with so many schools now that I can't possibly tell if any of them actually ever did it. (And I'm pretty sure the majority didn't.)

My favourite example is when I hear that Berkley did it which doesn't seem at a plausible given articles like this: http://www.peterme.com/?p=18 that point out how they went out of their way to break the natural flow of pedestrians.
Also, at rev 2.0:

* Charge more.
Forgive the flag then :) I thought gold farming was widely known and didn't really need a crash course on its fundamentals. I stand corrected.

It's interesting to note that gold farming has brought up similar concerns as sweatshop labour in these same countries.
They laughed when I spoke about my lifestyle business, but when I started to turn a profit!
I am surprised this works. I was under the impression that more modern implementations write protected the pages that libraries in the initial link are loaded to. There is really no good reason for them to be writable save for extremely strange uses such as in this article.

Is this assumption false?