skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
20-30 minutes of content is plenty to satisfy me. I really enjoy the ignite format, where the slides are on a 30sec timer, but they do too many presentations. We need events where there's lots of pressure on the attendees to keep the presentation tight and fewer presentations in the whole event.
I'm just flagging it all and suggesting everyone else do the same. I don't know how global warming skepticism got so popular here, but it's at best way off-topic and at worst trolling.
Answers OnStartups Roundup 1 - March of the parentheticals
The iPhone OS also runs a sandbox, but it's much less restrictive than it should be. Often public API's will just use a private API or write to an SQLite database directly; this behind-the-curtain behaviour could be replaced by background daemons wired up to the public API's.

Just because an application is native doesn't mean the kernel doesn't protect the OS from rogue processes; desktop/server OS's have been doing this for ages.
Also, this is the blog where the files were first leaked to:

http://noconsensus.wordpress.com/2009/11/19/leaked-foia-file...
Try the top search term under "Implementations":
http://lmgtfy.com/?q=quantum+cryptography

The Swiss ran a long-distance quantum crypto network this year for over 12,000 hours: http://www.swissquantum.com/

I think BT was running a quantum crypto connection over about 50 km over 10 years ago.
I've followed Steve McIntyre for awhile, and it is in fact shameful, damning, and unscientific how ardently climate scientists have fought to keep their data from him when he has requested it to check their models. The problem seems to be particularly acute among the old guard of the profession. Seeing the other side of the conversation doesn't add a whole lot, we already knew what bastards they are.

For those who haven't checked out Steve's work, look at http://www.climateaudit.org/ . But be warned, if you're looking for politics over numbers, he will put you to sleep. And the server is getting hammered at the moment. But please book mark it and go back later. His blog is an important piece of the internet, what we all thought the internet could be before lolcats disillusioned us.

It doesn't surprise me to see a lot of people here coming to the climate scientists' defense. They are, after all, a popular and respected group in society at the moment. But when you cherry-pick data, create unreproducible models, and then refuse to share your data with other people, you ought to lose a little bit of that respect. We will get precisely the quality of science we enforce, which at present is any quality of science the authoritative voices in the area chose to give us.

When Steve has been successful at obtaining the data he wants, he has been able to find flaws in various analyses. If you come from a scientific perspective, that ought to be great news! Independent confirmation or refutation of results increases the quality of our knowledge. But if you come from a political perspective then Steve is bad news indeed.

Why climate scientists are respected and treated as the high priests of truth while they hide data from the world and McIntyre is treated as a vaguely dangerous rogue, I don't understand it. I suspect it's politics. But in a perfect world there would be a thousand McIntyre's and they wouldn't have to fight for data. It would be available in public online databases, hosting paid for by tax dollars. That ought to be the least we ask of any science with the potential to route trillions of dollars in government spending policy over the next decade.

But sadly, when bad science comes to light, all we get instead is a circling of the wagons around the favored group. Why? Again, I suspect politics.
I don't know if that's how I'd describe it but, but one thing Android has is that each app needs to assert the capabilities it needs to run (can make phone calls, can keep the phone from sleeping, can access GPS info, can read anything on the sd card, will store data on the sd card, etc), and will not be able to do things it doesn't assert it needs in the manifest (this was actually a minor problem early on because the string for GPS access was unknown/documented wrong). And at least at install time, users can see these permissions so they can be aware of what they are getting into.
"A unique site analytics tool that can peek into your users browsing history and tell you where else your market is gath­ering online."

How would you peek a users browsing history, and if you did manage it how legal/unevil is that?
Or simply give you the list so you can check your binaries yourself! Of course the list might change frequently but it would save everyone time and grief.
Wait you're accusing the skeptics of politicizing the debate? It's the climate change promoters (many of whom are scientists) who have been saying that the sky is falling and that we need to cut our emissions now through massive government intervention. I don't know how that isn't politicizing the debate.
There is plenty of room for debate if the skeptics stop polarizing and politicizing the debate.

You're suggesting that the global warming folks would be willing to avoid politicizing? If it weren't for the policy prescriptions and other political fallout, the skeptics mostly wouldn't even care. I'm sure the vast majority of the skeptics would be willing, even eager, to drop all potential politics from the debate, but the whole reason it's important (from the viewpoint of such a skeptic!) is that it's now more about politics than science.
I think it would only constitute a "bad idea" if somehow having the only access to that data is the key to your business plan and revenue (if you even have one - not sure if this site is for hobby or for profit).

Otherwise, why not share it? Especially if you rely on users contributing the data to you in the first place.
This is a valid question I think. "An Inconvenient Truth" came out three years ago. In that time it may or may not have come to light whether or not we can afford to wait. I think it's likely that it in fact has. If you disagree please reply instead of downmodding.
Hi Wade, this looks great! I gave Voltmeter, Randal, and Distiller a go and they all produced clean, easy to understand reports. This product actually comes at a great time because I was just about to get rolling on some A/B testing and SEO tweaking of a site of mine.

One weird quirk, on the Distiller page, when I came to that page from the Voltmeter, I found the site url I was checking was populated over the top of the instructions in the input box. (Win 7, Chrome 4.0249)
Wow! I'm in prelaunch development right now but in the next month or two I've got to kick in the marketing, seo, advertising, copy optimizing, etc. I was kind of dreading spending lots of time inefficiently and not getting much out of it, but these tools look like they could really help me focus and measure my efforts.
Ask HN: Any good links to how operating systems work?
I'll looking to understand more about how operating systems work. Does anyone know of a good text available online for a beginner that isn't afraid to throw me into the detail.
Thanks
http://www.stevenyork.com/tutorial/getting_browser_history_u...

Basically, you read a link's color in the DOM and you can tell if it's been visited. It does spot checking, not full history browsing.
"If the size of the data is as large as indicated, it should be fairly trivial to determine this one way or the other."

That's why I said we should wait, rather than claiming this is meaningless. This data set, if legitimate as it seems to be, is large enough to draw conclusions from, and if there are issues clearly indicated, OK, conclude away, once the data is in. I'm just not willing to conclude anything from a handful of selected quotes from a clearly biased source. And if those are the best quotes, I'm generally unimpressed.
The problem is that lots of these large companies claim that they are building their patent portfolio purely as a defensive tactic. But then as soon as they have this huge portfolio of bogus patents, they will immediately set about finding ways to stifle competition with it.

So really the 'we only intent our patent portfolio to be defensive' claim applies only to cases where the other company has such a portfolio. And they have no trouble being the bully in cases where the other company can't fire any shots back at them.

This applies to Microsoft specifically, but also to other large corps. So trying to claim that 'Microsoft is just playing that game' and that I should "hate the game, not the player" is ridiculous. Microsoft will perpetuate the "game" whenever it will be financially advantageous for them to do so. They are not filing such patents to 'protect themselves from someone else that might file a similar patent, then turn around and sue them.' They are filing them to serve a dual-purpose. A 'sword' to defend and attack with.
The search engine ranking tracker would be especially useful to me. However, when I run it I am seeing significantly different results than when I go to Google directly (with personalization turned off, i.e. logged out). I'll send you an email with the details.
A few months ago I saw a bunch of drunken youths on a train heading to a party. Incredibly they were editing myspace profile layouts on their Sony Ericssons and exchanging CSS and html tips. So coding on handheld devices is possible but we are not the target audience. Perhaps more yahoo pipes/yql style coding.
Here's an explanation of the "trick". Warning, the site is getting hammered at the moment:

http://www.climateaudit.org/?p=7810
Ask HN: What are your fav new web apps at the moment?
Personally I quite like thymer but was wondering what new apps are gaining traction amongst HN users
Wade, looks promising. I've used SEOmoz tools before, curious how this stacks up. The historian seems interesting, but could raise privacy concerns (guessing it's using browser history via visited links). Would be nice to see an FAQ on exactly what's being sniffed for.

Good luck.
Randal (keyword monitoring) and Historian (user history/analytics) are fantastic tools -- I've been looking for something like this for a long time. Well done, and looks nice too :)
How so? I've only heard of one instance of a trojan compromising a smartphone, yet I've heard millions of instances of trojans, virus' and other malware, spyware, adware infecting computers and costing people thousands of dollars.

So how do we have less control on a smartphone? All you need to do is format the system, which IIRC the iPhone actually has and can be done remotely (like any iPod can) through iTunes. Similarly the Pre and any phone can have its data storage 'formatted' and be reset to factory defaults.

Aside from taking my computer back to the medieval ages (IE full format) I have little beyond anti-virus programs that truly protect my OS from anything. Every phone's OS is on read-only memory that can be reset at any time by the push of a button. IMO that gives me a lot more control over my phone than my desktop.
I find that people consistently use 10 words to say what can be said in 3.
""The evidence was now visible that Google was attracting more internet advertising than anyone else, and these dollars were being siphoned from traditional media," we read."

That's just not true. Much of Google's ads come from sources that simply would not have advertised in traditional media, at least not in the same way. Performance marketing, which isn't really possible in a magazine, is a humongous share of their revenue.

I know of people who make a load of money selling things like obscure electronics or truck parts through Google. They pay dearly for those ads, and were never going to be placing them in the New York Times.
I'm more interested in the process of how science is conducted than this particular subject or this particular article. What we're seeing here, on both sides, is that folks have already decided on way or another. It's the solution looking for the problem. So I'm afraid the signal-to-noise ratio is going to be very low for this no matter what the entirety of the data shows.
Yet people doing climate science have enemies, and not imagined ones. This is not just group-think conjuring an imaginary "them."

This is true regardless of whether you believe in their integrity or not, and as a result they can no longer behave objectively, even if it turns out that their conclusions were reached in a thoroughly objective manner.
"Understanding the Linux Kernel" from o'reilly goes into a surprising amount of detail not only from the OS's point of view, but also the architecture it's running on and the memory management unit. It's approachable and is not light on detail.

edit: email me if you have any specific questions.
When Harvard Teaches Networking, They Use Her As A Role Model
"Consumer Liquidity, Fingerhut, and Good vs. Evil"
Is Typing Speed A Factor In Programmer Productivity ?
It's an old and well documented exploit that never has been, and probably never will be, fixed due to it's intrinsic nature to the web...

We can't actually peek into anyone's history the way a layman might take this statement. What we can, and do, do is load up a list of links and see which one's have been visited. The freemium accounts just load up our default list of the top 100 sites online and looks for hits. Pro users can customize their check list to ad competitors and other URLs of interest.(See timdorr's response below.)

A tool like this good for finding out if your users are more of a MySpace or Facebook crowd, more of a Yahoo or Bing crowd, etc... for market research purposes. If you have a PRO account and can customize your list you can ad direct competitors and see which ones get cross-shopped with your product the most online, etc...

Example usage:
Let's say you want to run an ad on one of the top tech blogs. You could plug 100 tech blogs into this tool for a week and see which ones your crowd reads the most. Now you know a good place to advertise to get a second brand impression.

Addressing "evilness" - I don't consider it any more intrusive than any other type of analytics. And it's also completely disabled with Javascript turned off. So, as always, users are welcome to empower themselves.

On another note, I've been waiting to have this conversation with an informed crowd, what do you guys think about using this for the purposes stated above?
It's only a few accounts that post almost all climate change 'skeptic' posts here.
Wade - so far so good. I love tools that require minimal input from me and perform some magic. Will be in touch.
OK. We get it: You don't like Al Gore. But he is completely, utterly irrelevant to this discussion. He's your bugaboo. Bringing him up is just trolling.

Also, the quote you've selected is quite obviously not the author saying, "These data can legitimately be used to prove urban warming." He's rather plainly saying that he thinks the data will be misinterpreted and so needs to be placed in its proper context. This is neither nefarious nor even the least bit notable.
Seriously? The level people will go to blindly defend these guys is astounding. I just had flash backs to "it depends what the meaning of is is".
Hair Raiser
Malcolm Gladwell is a rare figure: A science journalist who is loved by everyone except scientists and journalists.
> It doesn't matter whether or not you plan to do predatory lawsuits.

So because Patent Law encourages Microsoft to get away with as much as they can, as soon as they can, they are not longer 'at fault' for predatory lawsuits? We can absolve them of their crimes then? That somehow seems wrong.

The 'War on Drugs' might encourage drug dealers to be ruthless in an attempt to evade the law, but I'm certainly not going to forgive them for any crimes that they commit as a result of trying to evade the law just because 'the system encourages it.'
Chrome OS: Internet Failing At PC  PC Failing At Internet
You don't think moderation of a neutral site by one side of a debate might be giving the appearance that "the debate is over"? Maybe the debate isn't over and its just about who has control of the appearance of the debate.
I'm agnostic on climate change - haven't scrutinized the data myself. That said...

Climate scientists that produce polarizing studies - either the world is freezing or boiling (mostly the latter) get fame, fortune, respect from colleagues and huge grants to further their groundbreaking research. They are more incentivised to create a wow factor than to be rigorous and subjective with the data.
Apple will fix these problems. But Apple does things at their own pace. It can be frustrating, especially to independent developers who are used to operating at a lightening pace. Remember cut and paste? Apple took "forever" to implement that, but when they finally did, it's far better than cut and paste on other platforms.

The same thing will happen with the App Store. Instead of "solving" the problems the way most companies would: throwing money willy-nilly at the problem, hiring hundreds of new untrained reviewers, etc., Apple will look at the core issues and figure out ways to fix it. Keep in mind the App Store is unprecedented in numerous ways (size, growth, etc.) and is new and not even Apple anticipated it would be this popular. It will take time, but it has been getting better and will become great.

(I predict the same kind of slow fix on the App Store itself, in terms of discovering apps, which I think is a more important problem than a handful of frustrated developers. Even if that handful is tens of thousands, finding apps is an issue that effects millions of users and developers, since if users can't find your app they aren't going to buy it.)
Title as submitted here is pure flamebait. Most of the quoted statements aren't in fact problematic at all (many of them I would in fact describe as so obviously not-problematic as to call into question the integrity of the person offering them up as evidence of dishonesty, and I wouldn't be surprised if every one of them turned out to have an innocent explanation), but even if each of those quotations demonstrated that the person who sent it had no integrity whatever, that would not justify the scare-quotes around "scientists" (dishonest scientists are still scientists), nor the blanket condemnation of "the climate scientists", as if the ones whose emails have been pilfered are the only climate scientists in the world.

Better would be something like "Leaked email archive allegedly calls into question the integrity of a few climate scientists". Better still would be "62MB of climate science emails leaked; here are some alarming quotations" or something.
I find it odd to say that the climatologists are the ones uninterested in an "honest debate". Not to mention that "honest debate" would involve acknowledging who has the, you know, expertise in the field.

The reason they use the word "idiots" is that it is a descriptive term. Some random schmoe with an opinion is not engaged in "debate" when he questions scientific fact, and the emotional charge here is entirely due to the fact that public opinion seems to think that such entitlement is perfectly legitimate, when in point of fact it is a waste of everyone's time.
# This doesn't use Beautiful Soup (yet) because there's a Berlios case
# BS may not be able to cope with. We'll check sometime.

I wonder if he's having issues with 3.1.0 which frankly never worked for me (as clearly stated by the BS developer) when used on normal web sites.
The UI looks great! I really like how simple it is to get around and how you're notified when something is going on.

My report was a little slow and it let me know I could come back to it at any time. (it wasn't obvious at first)

I set the account up for my wife's retail site online and the reports look pretty close to what we document now.

I think I'd have trouble explaining how to use the Darwin tool. Maybe have some more information on how to set that up for people who are a little less technical?
In many scientific fields, having one's research methodology and professional communications publicized would not be considered a bad thing.

Perhaps that was a low blow.
Where are the skeptics trying to get the government to pass a bill stopping climate change research? Skeptics have no goals politically other than to STOP the legislation put forward by people politicizing climate change research.
Hi Wade,

This looks like a good site. I checked out the Voltmeter test and it gave me some info I already knew, but also some information that might help with site ranking. So it seems like you're on the right track!

I'll definitely be checking out your site more in-depth moving forwards!

Btw, I enjoyed the little messages that appeared while I was waiting for the report to run (e.g., "Web crawlin' ain't eeasy!"). It may be a bit trivial, but I got a kick out of it anyways.
Can you please let go of this topic and that person ? I'm pretty sure most people don't want to see a respected HN member sink to his level.Thanks.
Absolutely it's more about politics than science. What I don't understand is that why politics got so injected so fiercely into the debate. Because of all the anti-climate change efforts, the climate change case actually got better as scientists did what they do best: they found more evidence to settle the points of contention raised by the skeptics.

Are the skeptics listening to this new evidence objectively? All I hear from them is "Ah yes, that may be so, but...".
Running Windows on a Mac is just wrong... I really miss the Windows-proof PowerPC Macs of yore ;-)

But... If they want to know where the world is going, they should really reach for those few who don't use their products. You can't predict the future just from looking into the mainstream.
Or possibly don't offer an open source build at all. If someone wants an executable, they pay for a distribution of it, while they can get the source code for free.

This opens the door to the possibility of someone else making builds and distributing them for free (legally), but there may be something to be said for you being the original source of the software, rather than a third-party. If you can market your website as the place to get the software, maybe enough people won't bother looking for other sources anyway.

EDIT: ...depending on who your market is, of course. If I found a website distributing software as described, I would first look for a free build of it somewhere else, figuring that it probably exists. Failing that, I would probably download the source code and spend a small amount of time trying to make it build. If I can get it built in short order, then great. If not, then I'd probably buy the "official" build, depending on the cost and how much I want the software. (It might be more cost efficient for me to keep trying to get the build to work, vs. pay a high distribution fee.)

But I am not the average computer user. Neither are most people who read this website. Most computer users have little or no concept of what open source is, no capacity for building software from source, and, I suspect, less savvy when it comes to finding a build from a third party. So if your software's target userbase is not computer nerds, then charging a distribution fee for a build may be more feasible... and not unjust, either, as you are truly providing a service to such people, compared to just offering source code, anyway, which, in theory they could learn how to build, or could pay another programmer to build for them.
4 years with nothing but a Dell 15.4" laptop left me loving simple tools like vim.

Finally wanted more screen realestate and a better body position, so dropped some money on a really nice system with dual 24" monitors.

Could have done the docking station, but instead went with a desktop + an eeepc. eeepc is great!

I highly recommend to anyone doing web development to have a full desktop + a tiny laptop. The netbook lets you realize how painful your app is on a slow, tiny screened computer!