skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
discussion around spell check is interesting...it was just a funny way of saying "i suck at spelling, sorry about that." I try to catch everything, just wanted to set a disclaimer that the spelling and grammar in this blog is not going to be of a professional caliber...
Been paying attention for the last decade? Noticed the record droughts in the Amazon River Basin or hundreds of thousands killed by the worst tsunamis in 700 years?

Whether humans are the primary cause or not, this is climate change, and its nothing like the pleasant Hawaiian vacation you seem to imagine it to be. I don't see the bright side.
I would recommend comparing this to http://www.skepticalscience.com/water-vapor-greenhouse-gas.h...

In particular, they give figures of 75 W/m2 for water vapor and 32 W/m2 for CO2. The link to the original paper where those figures came from is broken but here's a fixed one:
http://www.atmo.arizona.edu/students/courselinks/spring04/at...
Look at Figure 3, they also go into some depth about the assumptions and observations behind those figures.
Anonymous Pro is a lovely, free, monospaced font. http://www.ms-studio.com/FontSales/anonymouspro.html
Well... I was joking. There has to be a bright side in a billion people without water.
I suspect, although I don't know of anyone doing this myself, that there are people doing this all the time, just as a hobby or for the hell of it. The equipment required is minimal and so are the storage requirements, so you could easily log everything. Even in 2001 it wouldn't have been cost-prohibitive.

There are probably people sitting on years worth of data, just because that's a hobby for them. 9/11 is probably one of the only dates that's of interest to the general public.
http://www.worldofwarcraft.com/info/faq/realms.html

Probably near a million. There are 200 realms in North America alone, and each realm is capped at a few thousand players. If we assume that, at peak login (say, the 24 hours after the last expansion pack was released) there were an average of 2.5k people online per realm, that would be 500k in North America alone...I believe I remember reading that 50% of WoW players are in China, and there's also Europe, Russia, South America, etc. to consider.

From another angle, with 12m players worldwide, I think it's safe to assume that at some point in the week after an expansion launches, 1 in 12 players is online.
Can I just second that these are an engrossing read.

See the HN discussion here - http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=952029
Tsunamis? Climate change is responsible for earthquakes now?
WTF? Can't see it from a desktop browser; can't see it on an iPhone unless I "install" it....

Go away.
Quicksilver vs. Spotlight: Just in case your still debating
Stop Whining About Hulu
This was Chegg's original business model, and they hit on the right solution, IMO: textbook rentals.
But but but ... we're not supposed to reinvent the wheel! We're supposed to find some existing product/code base, no matter how marginally related it is to what we want to do, improve that, and hand it back to the community!

I've been told over and over again, don't write code that already exists! You're wasting your time!
Yes. It will work but not in the limited sense of shopping.
We just launched http://www.DoTogether.com.
Try out the facebook app, bit geeky but you will like the direction we are going.
Think of the synergy it could have when coupled with Geocities.
You've been SHODAN'd
Phil Agre Missing
The comparison above is absurd. Nobody os afraid of CNN. What frightens me is that there is a lot of people willing to do whatever is necessary to preserve their profits. An easy comparison could be with the tobacco industry and their studies that proved no connection between smoking and cancer and how addictive smoking is. Next to big oil, the tobacco industry is a bastion of morality.
Why is that a bug? 0 is as good a random number as any!
Do you always compare climatologists to pedophile priests or this was a one time thing?
Huh? I didn't say anything about nextInt.

The point is that if every time you want a random number you construct a new Random object using the default constructor, then (1) if you're using version 1.4 or earlier then rapidly repeated "random" number generation will give you the same result over and over, and (2) if you're using version 1.5 or later then it's (quite rightly) almost entirely unspecified what you'll get and whether it will be "random enough" for any particular purpose and whether it will be terribly inefficient.

(I'm wondering whether perhaps you missed the fact that lucifer's proposed constructions involve making a new Random object each time you want some randomness.)
There is some interesting stuff there. The object-oriented pattern matching paper is something I'll have to read.

What benefits do the upcoming 'invokedynamic' instructions offer to Scala? All the synopses I've read explain only how it will benefit dynamic languages like JRuby.
also, buzzword-laden mass emails sent from business school students to engineering student email lists are real turn-offs :) if you're a business school student, i'd advise to get some friends who are hackers to read over your recruiting emails before sending them out.
I think both you and the parent poster make valid points. The key thing is to send something vague-enough in the first email. For example, don't say "I think that's a problem with X and I'm looking into it", just say "I'm looking at it". In other words, only communicate the lock you're acquiring on the task and save the rest for the "done" email.
Recurring Events and Message Passing
I think we are all failing to realize this is no longer a scientific discussion. It's politics. It's about allocation of resources, changing industrial bases and more or less changing, or not, a whole planetary economy.

Did anyone really expect all the political and economical interests to sit quietly and not try to interfere with scientific research that could be a matter of life and death to them?
Math.random calls new Random() only once, the first time you invoke it. After that, it continues to use the same Random object.

If you say new Random().nextInt(x) every time you want a new random number, the documentation (very reasonably) gives you nothing even slightly resembling any sort of guarantee about what sort of distribution the results will have.

The point isn't that there's something wrong with using the no-argument constructor for Random. The point is that there's something wrong with making a new Random object every time you want a new random number. It's likely to be inefficient; there's no guarantee that the code makes any effort to generate good random numbers when you do it; and in versions 1.4 and earlier there was in fact a guarantee that it doesn't.

I was "changing the topic" because I was replying to someone who made a specific suggestion which happens to be a bad suggestion. To be clear: I wasn't objecting to lucifer's suggestion of using nextInt and nextBoolean. Those are good suggestions. The point is that in order to get the same little bit of convenience that you get from calling Math.random -- namely, not needing to set up a Random object and make it available to everything in your code that needs random numbers -- lucifer's suggestion does something that turns out to be bad, namely constructing a new Random object every time.

SecureRandom is rather a red herring. In any case, calling SecureRandom.getInstance every time you want a random number is liable to be extremely inefficient. Like, multiple seconds per call [EDITED: following three words added] on some implementations. See, e.g., http://marc.info/?l=wss4j-dev&m=119122666202674&w=2 .
That, unfortunately, is so common there's a name for it: second system effect or second version syndrome.
I think the real topic here is that most people are doing it for the money, not because they want to build a marginally better Twitter, Facebook, Youtube, etc...

You can use this do-it-yourself argument in every sector of the industry. But it all comes down to the amount of reward per effort.

Do you want to be the first in a store on Black Friday or the last? Do you want to be the first in a gold rush or the last? As the amount of competitors increase, your profit will decrease.

From an economic perspective, a monopoly is usually more lucrative. If you feel there's enough money in a crowded sector and think you can carve out a niche or shake the industry, then it becomes economically viable. I think this is a more realistic outtake than the author's "just-do-it" message.
yes, I agree perversely. Im assuming HN users value freedom of speech, and I think less down-voting helps preserve the value of HN by encouraging open discussion.

Im hoping that down votes happen less when people speak their mind.. and that downvotes are on average reserved for clearly offensive content.

I think the issue needs some introspection, hence I risked being downvoted.
Skeptical, I tried 'Crumar Bit 1' and it found the manual for my synth. I already have it stored locally, but this is very impressive and will come in useful for future synths/devices.
You're missing the point of the article. He's talking about products that are presumably closed-source, and the only way to improve them would be to get a job at someone else's company. If you want to encourage code sharing, build it better and make it open.
This can be explained by placebo. If you expect to feel more impressive and manly in a porche, then your body will react accordingly. It's not the car, it's the idea of the car, which is mostly marketing.
In some sense, hiring engineers is like selling. In both cases, you need to convince them that you've got something that they want. Neither group cares about what you need/want.

Two related points.

If you can't "sell" an engineer, why are you sure that you can sell to your proposed customers?

While developing your pitch, be sure that you'll be happy with folks who want what you're offering. If it's not unique, you'll lose the good ones to folks who offer "more".
Please have your friend try to sell to Verizon. I had the worst kind of experience when I was switching to FIOS. I put the order on December 21 for a January 3 installation. As soon as i put the new order, my existing phone line was cut off. I called them to point out the error and they had to put a new order for a conventional line. But then my FIOS order was auto cancelled. When I called back to get my new FIOS order, my installation date was fully booked and I had to wait until January 10.

In my long and multiple calls with customer support I could sense how frustrated the customer support people were with their project management software. I am sure a much better software can be written and probably already exists.
Im not keeping track...

I upvoted your comment to nullify a downvote, because I believe that downvotes should be reserved for offensive content.

[ Its a political position, context free, and orthogonal to your intent, so I hope you can forgive the upvote... its not personal. ]
How To Jumpstart the Economy and Create Millions of Jobs
They are not yet commonplace ? That's something else than they don't exist, where can I buy one ?

The article you cite is about the start of a project to index species, not about developing a hand-held reader.

If such a hand-held reader exists then that would be very big news indeed.
From the discussed article [1]:

"The hypotheses implicitly posit increases or decreases in T levels in relation to an individual’s baseline T. As such, we compared the participants’ two baselines (samples 1 and 6), to assess which of the two would most accurately represent their true baseline T levels, and hence to determine from which baseline we would compare their hormonal changes. Upon arriving to the laboratory, the initial social encounter with the researchers can act as a differential stressor yielding an increase in participants’ T levels. Thus, in such instances the final sample might be a better indicator of an individual’s true baseline than the first (K. E. Wynne-Edwards, personal communication, October 31, 2005). A paired t-test comparing the two baselines confirmed this to be true: the T levels of sample 6 were significantly lower than those from sample 1 (Msample6 = 2.20, SD = .16 vs. Msample1 = 2.26, SD = .21; t-stat = 2.32, df = 30, p < .05). Therefore, to test our hypotheses, we used the baseline value that stemmed from sample 6."

So, the interpretation of the experiment can be swung either way: it looks like using the other baseline would have shown that the crappy car depressed testosterone, and the Porsche had no effect.

[1] http://www.sciencedirect.com/science?_ob=ArticleURL&_udi...
Twitter User Reputation Computed from Tweets
$5k to pitch your business? Who falls for this?
eight out of thirty-one candidates were disqualified due to excessive blood in the mouth?
Optimizations in the Symbolics CLOS Implementation
Not if you want to change the value of a.
There was a big brouhaha about the 15th street store because it looks so similar to smith, the pub next door. The fact that it's starbucks, but doesn't say that it's starbucks (they do say that they serve starbucks coffee, which no indy coffee shop would advertise), and the apparent copying of their neighbor left a bad taste in the mouths of many seattlites.

I've never been in, but I wonder why they chose Seattle as the test-bed for this sort of thing. There are so many cities that don't have a vibrant local coffee-shop culture (there are at least three indy shops within a two block radius of my apartment & the mom&pop convenience store across the street has an espresso machine). Why not try it out someplace where the consumers aren't as discriminating and aren't as likely to resent them for doing this?
Sure. It's all about judgement as to whether setting that lock adds too much overhead to be efficient. If it's a small enough task, it doesn't matter if multiple people do it.
POCSAG and FLEX pager reception and decoding
For me, these things will get my attention on social shopping site:
1. what my friend bought recently. human being has curiosity.
2. what is running hot in my local area.
3. I want to buy something, but, instead of doing intensive research online by myself, I'd like to see what people say about it. I will give higher weight for what my friend say, then what people has similar background like me say, and then total strangers.

Harry
> Pie Guy will run on iPhone 3GS with OS 3.0 or higher installed.

— http://mrgan.tumblr.com/post/257187093/pie-guy
Exactly.

>I always had a sneaking suspicion that the "manly" feeling that comes from driving a sports car was nonsense promoted by car companies. But I guess it may have some truth.

Correlation != causation. If feeling manly makes testosterone go up, and you think a sports car should make you feel manly, then your testosterone will go up in a sports car. But that can only be from the ads, not from the car at all.
I read a similar report a while ago that merely listening to a powerful car elevated testosterone from saliva samples, in women as well as men. The VW polo apparently resulted in a lowering of testosterone levels. Also, men and women responded to different cars. Interesting stuff. I would like to know if the response differs in females.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/2667136/Sound-of-spor...
No return on that investment. Hardly anything can be solved via e-mail. Call comes in, 99% of the time I need to log in remotely to solve it.
Microsoft has made major changes and additions to the C# core language with every release even though it has nearly as many programmers as Java. And it's still attracting lots of new developers, so apparently the learnability is not a problem in practice (at least not yet).
If you're using TextMate, make sure you turn on anti-aliasing. That's probably why the fonts look pixelated at larger sizes. For what it's worth, I just use Monaco at 14pt with anti-aliasing.
Perhaps someone can do a better study by having isolated tribes free of advertisement exposure to have a try.
The is a positive step, but the lack of control abstraction is a terrible shame. With control abstraction I could really cut down the boilerplate code.
Or it could be fast driving, not fast cars, that increases testosterone levels (the difference between highway and downtown driving in both the Porsche and the Camry group seems to suggest that possibility) -- and people driving Porsches just tend to drive faster, just like people in red cars tend to drive faster.
Even if those emails were fabricated I did find them entertaining. When I ask a good friend for logo designs I always make sure to at least buy him copious quantities of beer on completion; next time I'll see if he'd prefer money (he's an old friend though, would it make him uncomfortable getting money from a friend?).
Scala can already be made to run as fast as Java, so performance improvements aren't as critical for Scala as they are for dynamic languages on the JVM.

That said, invokedynamic might be able to optimize Scala's structural types, which are a form of duck typing.
Concur.next — More Clojure I/O
Stairway to Health: Interactive Tools - Public Health Agency of Canada
Opera-powered standalone desktop widgets
Heavy.com - Funny Videos, MMA, Humorous Articles, Original Shows
Sure - but if the point here was to demonstrate that a web app can be just as good as a native app, it fails due to lack of performance. (Unless you have the latest hardware, that is, but this isn't exactly a graphically intense game - this is something that looks like it would have run smoothly on an Apple II clone 20+ years ago.)
Discover From Your Favorite Topic or Web Page: benefits
Ask HN: How do you break into a different industry?
I recently graduated with a degree in architecture and I have been trying to break into another related yet distant field: real estate development.

Now I know HN is probably not filled with property developers, but it is the site I visit most often and the community I identify with the most. I'd appreciate any insights or advice.

To my knowledge, I seem to be doing the general steps of finding work. I am applying to many types of entry-level positions, including internships (paid and unpaid), attending networking events, contacting my university's career center and alumni, using friends and family contacts, LinkedIn, etc). However, it has been almost 8 months unemployed, and all sorts of anxiety is creeping in. I know the industry is at its worst currently (or heading that way), and I understand that could be playing a major role, but I'd at least like a 2nd opinion on if what I'm doing is actually productive.

If I wanted to pursue software development from architecture, it would seem like an organic process: start with personal projects, contributing to open source, meet people, collaborate, attend local events etc. Meaning, you wouldn't have to rely on others to give you an opportunity to learn and advance (initially).

I also haven't been idle for 8 months - I've also been making time to learn about real estate law, finance, and business and economics to balance my architectural background. I'm not sure how I can add this to my resume since its self-taught and not exactly credentialed. I've been applying to development firms and RE investment firms that offer internships, but these stress finance/business backgrounds (I have been applying anyway). I've also been applying to construction management firms that offer project management related positions. All to no avail. No call backs or feedback.

I'd appreciate any input, even if its to keep my head down and keep trying. If anyone has a story about drastically switching careers, it would be great to hear it.

Summary: I have a degree in X with Skills A . Would like to work in field Y that require Skills Y. I have been teaching myself skills Y in my free time and applying to all related jobs like a mofo. Would like to gather advice on how else I can make a productive transition into field Y.

I also wanted to add: Going back to school at the moment is something I'd like to avoid if possible. I'd like to get a handle on my student loans that have kicked in.

Thanks in advance. I'd appreciate anyone's input.
Once you lose faith in the system, it ceases to be useful.

Lost faith will be a dominant trend for the foreseeable future, not limited to science. Sadly.
Most likely, they were taking the testosterone samples through cheek scrapes or something similar, I suppose.
I'm reminded of this Nick Szabo post on ways the Coase Theorem fails when actors are incented to be more of a nuisance to extract payments:

http://unenumerated.blogspot.com/2009/09/coase-theorem-in-ac...

(An on-point Dilbert cartoon is featured there, as well.)
I wouldn't call it "placebo;" more like "social status." Which makes me wonder what studies on males of varying social status would indicate about long-term testosterone levels.
Kubuntu + MacBook = Circle Slash (Prohibitory) Boot Error
"Closed doors? No way! I said I understand their concern that many well funded groups would certainly spread even more disinformation if they had a dataset to base it on."

If the standard for claims is such that code and data must be publicly available, claims made without such backing would be more easily dismissed.

As it is right now, the CRU is behaving exactly as I would expect a manipulative liar to act, and the justification seems to be that it's done to control prevent manipulative lying.

It's not a compelling argument, because it doesn't, really, and since no one is showing up with runnable code and complete data, all sorts of claims appear to have equal footing.

"Lots of people stand to lose a staggering amount of money and they won't place truth above their yearly bonuses, with little concern if a billion or so people die of thirst in the next 100 years."

Are there no millions to be made or lost for some of those arguing that climate change is man-made? Please; scumbags will play any side for a dollar.
This is easy if you're speaking in English: http://english-jack.blogspot.com/2007/09/if-they-will-only-l....
well a Porsche might be a poor example because its an easily recognized symbol.

what about two men entering a trendy club and one is dressed in an off the shelf suit and a $20 watch while the other is wearing a suit that costs as much as some people's monthly paychecks and a watch to fit. Will the second man project more confidence and therefor be more successful?
He has a small link at the top of the post now but it isn't very obvious and can easily be overlooked. I assume that he must have assumed that the indentation would be enough to show that it was taken from another source.

Yet I do feel that Bruce did not do enough to credit the original writer.
Their logo hints at it, albeit vaguely: http://swipely.com/
Downvoting isn't always about trolls, its about pointless comments as well.
Artwork, Logos
Sacramento based Abacus Designworks offering a wide range of promotional products as well as screen printing, embroidery, and signs. The site features an on line design tool.
I work for a government agency. In order to have even a meeting the managers exchange emails to test the waters to see if an action group needs to be formed to assess the viability of creating a comittee to study the concept for eventual inclusion in a meeting agenda. You guys in the private sector have it easy.