skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Mostly though I’m just sad. I never envisioned the CrunchPad as a huge business.

...makes me think there were handshakes where there ought to have been contracts (or the contracts should have been more tightly specified). It wouldn't be the first time people have cooperated in a spirit of mutual benefit without fully appreciating the efforts and value demanded of each other other, and both sides end up honestly feeling they've been ripped off - the engineering guys had to solve tougher problems on narrower margins than is economically feasible, the creative and marketing people having made expensive brand and financial commitments based on optimistic engineering estimates.

All the same, it would have been wiser to announce that the project had run into a legal hurdle and leave it at that, saving the complaints for a court filing rather than taking them public. Too bad. I would have happily bought this product at $400 :-/
Darn, I wanted to meet the Skribit guy!

I'll still planning to be there, anyway.
i'm just forwarding it to my other site ( http://styleguidance.com/the-life-and-death-of-crunchpad ), but once I have all the information and some free time, I'll build something on the actual crunchpad domain name.

So if you see any milestones I missed, please let me know.
Thanks for the feedback but the issue for me is not a desire to never touch code in my life again. I am very passionate about technology and coding too at times. Once in a while, I will get some crazy idea into my head and will sit in front of the computer coding at it non stop for nearly days on end. But all these times, my passion was towards the final product on what I wanted to make and not in the actual coding itself. For me "code" is just a tool for me to achieve what I want.

Also, the whole thing about not thinking of it as "working 9 to 5", I totally agree with you and I will point out that I am one of those people. The only difference is that I don't do that for my code but for my pet projects. I sleep with a moleskin book next to my bed for those times when I wake up in the middle of the night and need to jot down an idea.
This reminds me of one case where a person published a phylogeny, a reader felt that it was flawed, and so they went over the code together. They discovered a major bug which, when fixed, completely invalidated the results. The paper was retracted. (I can't source this, because it was a conversation I had with a postdoc and I don't remember the details)

In general, though, the fact that code isn't reviewed isn't the biggest problem with peer review. The problem is that it's simply very difficult to come up with the real problems if you're just reading a paper, even if they're lab experiments- just like you can't see the code, you can't watch them perform the experiments. With my own work, reviewers never actually pick up on what are the actual problems with the research (which I know only too well.)
1. Since they published papers that the IPCC used based on the raw data, it's apparently very valuable. Further, other scientists might want to try different types of analysis on the same raw data. They might get better or different results.

You are simply wrong that raw data is not valuable.

2. These were private emails between scientists at the CRU regarding the deletion/withholding of data. They signaled an intent to delete data rather than give it to people skeptical of their work, and intent to evade their FOIA obligations.

If you really dislike the comparison to financial companies, lets compare to Big Pharma. The data is messy, and they also have belligerent charlatans (aka lawyers) trying to anomaly hunt for a big financial reward.

Would you accept this:

"I think I'll delete the file rather than send it to the FDA". Fast forward a little bit, and the data has been "lost".

"What little malice there is in the equation is a bunch of scientists frustrated with silly FDA rules designed to avoid any bad publicity"?
Two myths my non-science friends understand to be true.

a) A peer reviewed paper is very close to fact.

b) Scientists are essentially free from backbiting, tribalism and empire-building. They dispassionately rely on provable data.

Modify slightly to ignore any scientist funded by the wrong people.
Software Testing Blogs and Tweeters
Seven Answers to Climate Contrarian Nonsense
Its not just saving on brackets; you get a few other benefits like not worrying about closing or improperly nesting tags. It also slightly changes your mindset from, "I'm just cranking out markup," to, "I'm building out a DOM tree," which turns out to be great thing for Javascript development.

ERB/"classic" markup still have their place though. HAML is a real pain if you need to crank out a web page that's heavy with content. I use both ERB and HAML in most of my Rails projects; HAML for the more "application/javascript"-heavy parts of my apps and ERB for the content-heavy pages.

At a glance, I don't see the value in jabs. While it might make code more compact, it doesn't seem to be as clear to worth with as HAML & SaSS. Trading clarity for compactness is a trade-off I reject.
I don't think there is any perfect language for beginners. I think the most important thing is teaching problem solving. So choosing a scripting language like python and getting your students used to solving problems with it is a really good basis for the future.
I threw up a quick, life and death of crunchpad page, with all the milestones.

Probably missed a few, so if you know of any, let me know.

http://crunchpad.com

but it currently redirects to a page on my other site( http://styleguidance.com/the-life-and-death-of-crunchpad ), but once I have some free time I'll make it a proper page.
Device for splitting restaurant checks
I agree with this comment from http://styleguidance.com/the-life-and-death-of-crunchpad:

"
Is the CrunchPad really dead? Honestly? I'd put my money on no. Arrington is way too "powerful", and did too much, to just roll over for a few bad apples. My guess, is that, at this very moment, his mailbox is exploding with tons of emails from Fusion Garage competitors, offering to finish the project for him.

And if they aren't...then their CEOs need to be kicked out.

Where else, will you find a partner, who has the connections to have a major retail chain(most likely Best Buy) who not only are willing to help you with shipping costs by letting you use their planes, but will also sell your product with zero margin and will pay upfront?

Where else, will you find a partner, who has the connections to get your people advice from the guys at Intel? And a huge discount on pricing?

Where else, will you find a partner, that already has investors lined up for the project?

Where else, will you find a partner, that already has brand recognition, with millions of people?
"
I just can't imagine a world where you can't ssh into linuxy servers and do things.

Trying to run anything on top of windows doesn't fill me with confidence. Do all windows servers still insist on having a GUI etc? I honestly don't know, but I'd be extremely worried working on a startup running things on windows.

(Note I'm really talking as consumer facing website/webapp). For b2b microsoft is probably a saner choice.
I've found that smaller, more expressive DSL's drastically improve productivity over time. HAML, SaSS, and Compass have saved me an insane amount of time. I'll keep using these types DSL's for as long as they keep making me more productive.
This article confused me. CouchDB and Redis in the same category?
Serious Business looks for life beyond Friends For Sale
The appeal of TC (for me atleast) is that they produce a lot of content. The subjective nature of the content is one aspect I won't address, but the simple fact is that they are very active reporters. Like it or not, it is often the first place I hear about up and coming startups.
Uhm, YouTube being big before adult websites adopting flash video isn't really true. And HD-DVD failed because Bluray offered porn and video games.
Getting more members of your online community active
Still not getting it. It doesn't matter how. Just imagine for a while that we could. Please reread what I said without focusing too much if it's really going to happen and if so how and to what extent.

Is it so wrong to focus some effort in studying the climate change? After all we all depend on it and we definitely don't want to loose our home, however probable or improbable.
Tested in the field: Will monkeys type shakespeare?
There was an awful lot of "deals with partners to sell it at cost" in there. If I was Arrington's partner looking to recoup my investment on my part of the project, that might not sit well with me, particularly if I had no say in the matter.

For Mike, it was an ego thing. He promised the crunchpad for less than the price of just the screen when this all began. Perhaps FG didn't want to cash that particular ego cheque.
Windows Server 2008 Core runs without a UI
Understandably I disagree. Specifically: I'd like you to point out where I say delayed gratification is a bad thing. If you want a house, you save money until you can buy a house. Otherwise you're not getting what you want. But if you have a house, and you have comfortable money, and still you find you're working long hours for the sake of making money and nothing else, then there's a problem because you're not really doing the things you'd like to be doing.

But it's not about money. It's specifically not about money. It's about being happy with your life. And it's less about doing what you love than it is about not doing what you hate. There's an important distinction.
Fair enough. I don’t like the special semantics then, that say that string objects take regular expressions as possible slice indices. It's trying to be too cute, and compactness comes at the direct expense of clarity. Basically the reason I don't like Ruby generally, is that everything tries to be too clever by half, too many behaviors crammed into too few parts. It's sort of halfway from Python to Perl.
edw519's post is based on the assumption that you are going to take on a programming job. If that is the case, you will probably burn out on programming and not really have the passion to be a great programmer.

However, there are tons of business people who have never done any programming and are still great business people. Imagine how great a business person you will be if you do know the technology.

A lot of business people go the business route and then are forced to do programming from time to time and they really write crap code and it breaks and it's horrible to maintain that stuff. Your code will be better than that.

I had this guy tell me one time, he was a business grad, he said, "Coding is easy, all people should take business courses and learn the programming on the job." But believe me, I had to fix that guy's code and integrate it into the big picture and it was total garbage. I suppose the Dunning-Kruger effect kept him from realizing how bad his code was.

Anyway, point being, I think if your passion is in the business side and you go through the ranks in school getting your CS degree, then you could be unstoppable in the tech world. If more CS grads had the business passion, they'd be better entrepreneurs.
Maybe the person who works for a non-profit doesn't give because he/she knows more about how your contribution dollars are actually allocated.

The naive giver thinks that all or most of the money is going directly to the part of the non-profit that does the charitable work. In reality, that part may only see very little (or even none if the donation isn't high enough) of the money. A lot of it may go to administrative costs and internal-facing departments. Like any large organization, a large non-profit has a lot of overhead.

I'd like to know if there's a way to know for sure how your donation is actually being used. It would be good that if you found out your money wasn't being used satisfactorily, you could demand your donation back and it would all be legally binding.
yeah, same, i'm going to be out of town this weekend through monday. too bad, would've attended.
Well, not if - as the story suggests - the intellectual property is jointly owned by TechCrunch and Fusion Garage.
This quote is a great example of how to help friends and family with tech issues w/o pissing them off in the process: I've banished from my vocabulary in dealing with users the question: "what did you expect to happen?" (intoned inquisitively with stress on the word happen, not sarcastically with stress on the last syllable of expect). Because what the user hears when you ask that question is, "you disagree with the computer. The computer's right, you're wrong. So 'fess up on your idiocy, and I'll have a nice laugh with my techie friends later at your expense." Instead, I said to my friend, "oh, no! Still... I bet there are some people out there who really love their Project Runway reruns, and don't care for The Shield that much. How do you wish the TiVo had worked differently?"
I wonder how accurate that statement actually is:

One bad programmer can easily create two new jobs a year. Hiring more bad programmers will just increase our perceived need for them. If we had more good programmers, and could easily identify them, we would need fewer, not more.
If Arrington wasn't completely full of shit, he'd actually open source some or all of it instead of just "pushing" for it. I mean, it's a dead project right? If it's dead, then release what you've got to the community and watch someone else follow through.

Also how would he ever let Fusion Garage "jointly own" part of the IP? That sounds like a terrible idea. The only way that happens is if his "team" couldn't actually make the thing work (which is what I'm reading between the lines). So he's over a barrel because he promised WAY too much and couldn't actually make it happen.
how on earth did they not register crunchpad.com ?!
Seeking software developer for exciting new health services startup
Eventus Health is looking for exceptionally talented folks to join our
exciting new company. You must be highly motivated, independent,
result oriented and enjoy working in a start-up atmosphere. This is a
great opportunity to be a part of the team providing services to major health insurance companies
and to make major contributions towards the company's success.

Technical Skills

. BS/MS in Computer Science or equivalent
. 2+ years experience developing enterprise software applications
. 2+ years of Java experience for both client and server side development
. 2+ years of development experience with any leading database
. Development experience with Java GUI using Swing framework
. Development experience with a web-based application using J2EE technologies
. Good working knowledge of Servlet, HTML, Javascript, CSS, JSP, XML

Desired Skills

. Good analytic and problem solving skills
. Ability to understand the business requirements from technical perspective
. Prior start-up experience
. Ability to take initiative
. Good communication skills
. Ability to work independently

Please contact jobs@eventushealth.com with a resume and a quick background on yourself.
I ssh into my Windows machines all the time. And Windows servers don't insist on having a GUI - look up Server Core, the GUI is limited to a console and everything is (and must be) done with the command line.
From the start the promise of building a large touchscreen tablet for $300 was simply impossible. Either they were naive or dishonest. The 12" LCD touch panel alone is likely $200-$300 in bulk or even more. How can you price a product at retail below the cost of an individual component? As the price crept up to $400, then $500 and probably more realistically $800-$1k I think Mr. Arrington needed an end game that didn't make him look dishonest or naive. An IP dispute solves that problem nicely. Of course he could be telling the truth but based on the pricing fib/naivety I'm skeptical.
The idea is not to expect end users to program their client.

The idea is to allow 3rd party developers to build scripts/plugins/etc that users can download and change their twitter client experience.

Think less Eudora and more Firefox plugins.
CSS sprites shouldn't add production time (and 4 other tips)
I share your dislike for the Windows platform -- for uses other than as a web browser boot loader and media player -- but Red Gate are (smartly) following the money. How many non-MS developers do you know that pay for dev and admin tools?
Check out TeXmacs, which gives you the best of WYSIWYG word processors and TeX/LaTeX.

There is no good reason to compromise nowadays.
If this were a few more years recent, I'd hope the author would revise section 2.5 to be "The virtues of UTF-8", as nearly all modern text editors handle UTF-8 well.
You know, I agree with the author. But end users will revolt at the sheer mention of taking WYSIWYG away from them. I think it's unreasonable myself, but then again I'm a computer geek.
It's official, Haskell's boob combinator, (.) . (.), has competition. From the Goatse operator.
Your response to #1 is nonsensical. Please reconsider your response.

Also, could we please stop working in flawed analogies? You've tried to take my statement and substitute in things you consider similar to make a point. But the problem is, they're not similar at all except that there are people called "Scientists" involved. Different fields demand different levels of transparency, archival, and data fidelity.

And the decision to throw away noisy or corrupted data is not unusual even in the medical profession. Go ask St. Jude CRMD for their raw electrocardiogram data for every pacemaker and implantable defibrillator design run. Even the FDA doesn't demand it, and I know for a fact they delete the majority of the raw analogue data. It is not important.

We can reconstruct the data from previously published data and code, if you want it so badly. The operations done in the code are not particularly difficult to reverse to equivalent data.

Even then, would that constitute evidence to you? What's to stop a conspiracy driven group of scientists from simply fabricating realistic-looking raw data? This is just a talking point, and everyone who's not out here with an axe to grind knows it.
Utterly useless as long as Waffle House is missing.
Sure, nothing inherently wrong with that. "I don't like writing, I like having written." -Ernest Hemingway
Helping to nurture local startups is definitely cool. On the other hand, picking them off to integrate into their product pipeline also prevents greater things from happening. I feel that martinkl could have built a company able to stand on its own. The lure of an early exit is understandable however, particularly after a 2.5 year long slug.
MIT - the Georgia Tech of the north ;)
People really, really don't understand the concept of infinity, nor the concept of "with probability 1." The most interesting point about the idea that people actually go out and try these things, is to prove that people just don't understand these things.

The conclusion that "the theory is flawed" shows they don't understand the theory.

The question I have is - should we care? Should we try to explain these things? Or should we just shrug and give up. How will it actually make their lives better? For some people it might, but then again ...
"say that string objects take regular expressions as possible slice indices."

I think it would be more accurate to say that Ruby's String#[] aka String#slice method accepts arguments other than just indices (including regular expressions and other strings) for returning substrings/subpatterns. It's just a different approach, intuitive and rather uncontroversial, IMO.
In most universities, the computer science program is the best way for people to learn how to program. In the future, I think CS departments will split into software engineering (which focuses on teaching students how to program and engineer software) and computer science (which prepares students for careers researching in the field of computer science). But that's not how things are in most places.

Also, "theory of computation" is an area of computer science theory. There is much more to a CS curriculum than theory of computation.
If you are, be sure to sign up with the CamTechMeetup!

http://www.meetup.com/Cambridge-Tech-Meetup/
http://www.camtechmeetup.com

Disclaimer: I started it. :)
Your major doesn't really have much to do with your job. The CS you learn in school doesn't really make you a good programmer anyway...
I keep hearing and seeing all of this information about spider silk, and it sounds so very cool, but I feel like the loop will not be closed until we see a YouTube video of that very tapestry being shot with a gun and not tearing. Or is that not what would happen? That's what I want to know! Everyone says spider silk is so awesome... I want to see it!
There's a half-way point between Word/WYSIWYG and LaTeX/markup: desktop publishing tools. Write your text in Notepad (or perhaps Wordpad if you want some italics) and then create a textbox in the layout document and paste/link it in, kerning and leading and weighting and fonting and flowing it to your heart's content, all WYSIWYG.
You can't verify software is correct, it can always fail at time t+1.

Basic configuration testing on PPC or other architectures would highlight a lot of the error-sensitive paths in the math libraries.
happens all the time, Apple didn't register iphone, Dell didn't register Adamo.

But for this, basically the name came up in the comments, in the first post(on 07/21/2008). When it was just an idea. They didn't start calling it a CrunchPad until the 2nd prototype, 6 months later.
There is actually a easier way to do this. Pass this parameter while in your boot loader

init=/usr/bin/emacs-nox

This will fire up emacs instead of init once the kernel is done booting up. You also need mount, but you can run that within emacs.
It isn't clear who the author is speaking to here. I hope for his sake that he isn't really speaking to most users of word processors.

For most people, structure in writing is visual. It's a paragraph because it has an indent or a blank line before it; it may also represent one complete idea or all that good stuff they say in English class, but that isn't what makes it a paragraph. It was that way before they started using word processors, and it'll continue to be that way - any other means of describing structure is always going to feel like a distraction to most humans with a need to put one word after another.

That said, most people don't care about typographical quality. It satisfies their emotional needs for a memo or letter to look typeset at all.

For these people, telling them to take what's now a one-step process and turning it into two steps, to gain some supposed advantages that either don't demonstrably matter or that you won't ever persuade them to care about, is not gonna fly.

That said, for those writers who do care about structure and typography, Ulysses looks pretty cool.
I think you missed the point here. The warning sign would be a doctor who doesn't go to other doctors for healthcare.

A better software analogy would be a software development company that doesn't like using software.
In other news: Mininova now only serving 10 linux iso files and the contents of Project Gutenberg.
or change the text to 'Submit Comment'
> Citation please?

http://www.climateaudit.org/?p=6789 quotes them saying they no longer had the raw data in August.

> why didn't they say as much in their statement about the loss?

When exactly did they not say this? They say it on their statement on their website which is currently down but cached at http://74.125.155.132/search?q=cache:mcd09WUmm08J:https://ww...

> Furthermore, why did Jones, Mann, et. al. spend so much time talking about "hiding from" (their words) FoI requests if the data being requested were lost?

Presumably they were talking about different data.

> The proper response is to re-establish those results as quickly and conclusively as possible.

If this debacle leads to that happening then that would be a great outcome. I don't get the impression that's mostly what CRU's critics want though.