skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
What I don't understand is that why politics got so injected so fiercely into the debate.

Because it was perceived as an unassailable reason for more lawmaking and regulation, which is what politicians do, even (hypothetically) politicians with the purest motives.

Are the skeptics listening to this new evidence objectively? All I hear from them is "Ah yes, that may be so, but...".

I think most skeptics have moved from "what global warming?" to the more defensible "there's been global warming, but less than at other times in the historical and (especially) geological past, and starting well before the 20th century CO2 output increases, so the cause is unlikely to be primarily human industry".

This is a position, however, which is hard to generate soundbites for, so they've taken a massive hit in the public perception department, as it's hard to argue their position at less than essay length, and book length is better.
> I see you conveniently left out California's low property taxes

California's property percentages, if memory serves, are about normal. They're artificially low because of the housing boom, not because CA assess low taxes on property.

How it works: Property taxes in CA are reassessed when a home is sold. My understanding is that the argument for that is that people's property taxes don't go up each year without anything changing on their part - for instance, an elderly person who bought their home in 1990 hasn't seen their property taxes triple/quadruple as housing prices did. But California by no means is trying to have low average property taxes, it only happened as a side effect of the explosion in housing prices.

> As for "overall revenues from taxes": That bullet point is meaningless, since CA has the highest state population by far -- 50% higher than the second-most populous state, Texas.

It's just one bullet point among many, but that's correct.

> "Tax yields per citizen" is better (although it would certainly be nice to see a number: do you have one, with a citation, and a table of numbers for other states?)

Read it before, didn't find it on a quick Google, so I did by hand:

CA total revenue: $249,057,158,000

CA population 2008: 36,756,666

$6,775.83 per person (includes children, elderly, unworking people, etc).

So yeah, California doesn't have low taxes, and that's not the reason there's budget problems in CA. Whenever you spend more than what you take in, you're going to have budget problems, regardless of how much you take in.
Sorry this is disingenuous. Sure, science is not about appealing to a specific authority, but you do need some background and training in it to be able to pull off the necessary experiments and understand the theory.

How would you and your 4 year old go about deciding whether you believe in Quantum Electrodynamics? Would you do an experiment, or would you ask an expert?
I wonder if some of those rigs are more fragile than the others. Perhaps some of them (rig (a) perhaps?) would wiggle more severely if the rowing forces were uneven while others would be fairly robust to differences in force.
Ask : Please recommend a beginner's book for LAMP
My girlfriend wants to start learning LAMP. The book should be simple to follow and keep her interested.
I love this site. Please think of adding catchpa for signup. Its very easy for a script to scrape and create quite a number of accounts. Very useful guide to improve search results.

* Voltmeter - How is the keyword targeting decided? I got unexpected keywords for my site.

* RANDAL - I used to check where my site appears for given set of keywords. It solves the problem automatically.

Haven't checked other tools yet. Will be doing it soon.
I got paid to work on OSS (OpenId4Java) this month by the day job. OSS largely makes my closed source application possible, since the majority of my toolchain is OSS and leveraging it makes it possible for me to develop new features much, much faster than I could myself.

In terms of actually making money through writing OSS, I've gotten significant returns out of writing A/Bingo. Mostly that has been through direct use of the program, but it has also been one of my best strategies ever for getting links, and I suppose if I wanted to do consulting the trickle of people saying "Would you be interested in consulting on ...?" would have value, too.

P.S: From the article: "Support, by the way, is a horrible business." Ye gods, yes. Who wants to get into this, honestly?
I'm a big fan of Torvalds as a person and Linux as a movement. However, taking intent of the peace prize in mind -- "during the preceding year [...] shall have done the most or the best work for fraternity between nations, for the abolition or reduction of standing armies and for the holding and promotion of peace congresses." -- I don't really see his eligibility.
Not in Factor.
I think it's easy to work against an adversary when you're being paid to spend your time doing exactly that.

Climate research funding is not paid so well as to give researchers time to deal with these specific issues. Maybe it should be. But it isn't.
I would ask an expert who could show me a reproducible experiment.
I think the author's conclusion was that while being a fast typist doesn't make you a better programmer, being a slow typist will make you a worse one, as it will take you longer to commit your initial mistakes and iterate, akin to playing many games of speed chess to improve at chess.
My current project is JRuby on Rails, so I wanted to inject my few cents, and also to ask what your long-term experiences with the platform were.

Rake tasks are definitely slow; you have to wait a few seconds for them to complete, which overall sucks. A lot. If anything, this is the one thing that has pushed me to thinking about using MRI again. Nailgun is supposed to help a lot here, and since JRuby 1.4.0 was recently released, I'll be giving NG a go and seeing what the improvement is for common rake tasks.

RAM hasn't been a big problem for me. The JVM does use more RAM than MRI, but it also seems to do a better job of managing it. I've never had an out-of-memory error, and the nastiest benchmarks I could throw against my code (a few hours' worth of solid requests) don't jack the JVM above around 200M of RAM, and that's with an embedded Solr server for indexing/searching. BUT... we haven't done a fully public beta yet, just the 'friends and family' version. So I could be talking out of the wrong orifice here.

You get real threading, which makes setting up a job scheduler a lot easier, and lets you run a multithreaded Rails server.

The performance is quite good when compared to the 1.8.7 MRI.

Accessing Java classes isn't as nice as Closure/Groovy, but that's to be expected. Closure and Groovy were designed from the ground up to use Java classes as their foundation, and Ruby... wasn't. Even so, JRuby does a decent job of autoboxing most of the time with strings and arrays, and I've had only a few speedbumps when using Java classes in JRuby.

Loading JARs seems to work fine with 'require' for me; what problems have you run into?

What is the long-term memory use for your application like; e.g., does it grow hugely over time, or remain relatively stable after the JVM warmup?

What JVM/JRuby are you using?

Other than startup slowness, what other issues have been problems for you?
Fixed-Schedule Productivity, what is it?
I’m not people. I’m one person. And this is me at my most normal. I generally hate jumping to conclusions. (I could be misjudging myself now, don’t want to exclude that possibility :)
Your point in your EDIT about being unaware or unaccepting of (potential) real ways to mitigate climate is an excellent one, thanks!
I'd say the critical factor for the usefulness of fast typing is the verbosity of the programming language.
Mind Blowing Hyperrealistic Sculptures
Torvalds, Stallman, and Lessig would make an excellent combination, in my opinion - they've done incredible things to expand the intellectual commons, and that does great things for the "fraternity of nations". Think of all the international friendships and other relationships maintained using open source tools and the ideas of open culture.

The nomination process is described here:

http://nobelprize.org/nomination/peace/
What a weird list of things to be thankful for.
s/Programmer/Coder/
Totally broken analogy. If it took a significant amount of time to move your chess piece after you'd decided what to move, then yes, moving it faster would be a good thing.

I can definitely say that pair programming with a slow typist drives me NUTS.
I started my current project in Grails, and switched back to Rails, because debugging was a nightmare. Massive stack traces (multiple hundreds of lines) due to reflection, and some really irritating typecasting nightmares due to the String/GString difference. The long-running memory leaks were the sort of things the Vikings wrote poetry about, because even Beowulf couldn't smite them.

Not to mention some massive showstopper bugs in Grails, things like 'logging doesn't work, and yes, we know.'

Also, if you want to 'break out of the box' in Grails, and are not a really seasoned Spring/Hibernate developer, good luck.

Groovy is a nifty language, and I like the idea of Grails. It's a great tool if you're already an experienced Java/Spring/Hibernate developer, but it isn't really a Rails replacement.
Speed? I doubt it.

Fluency, absolutely. If a programmer is spending a lot of time thinking about typing, instead of "just typing", that's time spent away from the core problem.

While fluency and speed are related, and fluency may lead to or imply speed, the actual rate of typing seems (to me) to be unimportant.
I always found this to be a silly question - RedHat, MySQL and others have proven this. The meaningful question is "How can you make an acceptable amount from open source to make it worth the opportunity cost of not selling software?"
http://blog.iangreenleaf.com/2009/02/pascal-and-global-warmi...

I totally beat you to the punch on this one :D
Maybe he should talk to "LondonVC" in the post about how you need to work all the time to be effective...
It all boils to discipline. Easier said than done.
The flaw in Pascal's argument is that just because we can imagine something, doesn't make the probability of it occurring greater than 0. Since there is evidence for it, however, the probability of climate change is certainly greater than 0.
Well, the only true test for his eligibility is "Does awarding the Nobel Prize to this person advance the interests of the Nobel Committee?", but given that an award to Linus doesn't obviously embarrass George Bush, I'm thinking you're probably right.
I am currently sitting in an apartment I rented for a week from AirBnB. Overall my experience has been positive and I would rent again.

First apartment owner I attempted to contact never replied, so had to cancel. Next one worked out better, although I had to mail twice to get a reply. The listed price of $90 / night in Boston turned out not to be true, there were hidden fees in addition to this. AirBnB adds a fee which is not included in the listed price, and the apartment owner also had their own cleaning fee.

But these are small things considering we got a gorgeous apartment, more spacious and at a lower price than a sterile hotel room. This story is not yet over though, as we haven't yet checked out.
I think OP proved Seth's point quite well: there's a lot of scientific-sounding drivel coming from armchair scientists that just don't hold up to people in the know, but sound perfectly reasonable to laymen.
Is there any evidence that Apple's approval process is actually thorough enough to detect if an app is a virus or trojan? That's a pretty non-trivial thing to detect isn't it?
3 seater Honda Native Concept is a Chameleon ?
Another POV that should be considered:

Even if those fearing climate change are correct, the poor quality of the models shows they're right for the wrong reasons. And since they don't really understand what's happening, then any proposal to "fix" the problem might work, or might itself be disastrous. We don't know.

It should be completely clear that Al Gore's "precautionary principle" is bunk. And I'd claim that this whole thing is too important to use the Earth as a laboratory, to "do something -- ANYTHING -- to fix this".
Don't waste your time. It's just the Chrome browser. And you can't even change the screen resolution/keyboard layout.
we moved our startup from London to SV in Jan 2007 partly due to this line of thinking. it is false, no-one productively works 24/7 and trying to do so is a mistake i don’t intend to repeat on my next startup.

the vision of the workaholic, always at their desk entrepreneur is in my experience usually propagated by people with little actual operational experience of raw startups. this post from Naval Ravikant sums up what i've learnt about productivity, http://startupboy.com/2005/11/29/the-80-hour-myth/

and on the london vs SV work ethic. my peers in london work just as hard as my peers in SV.
Y'know, I hang out around smart people who like science, and I read a lot of science, and I do some science, so I get asked about science a lot.

And when I've said that I'm not convinced that there's human global warming happening, I've been called all sorts of nasty names. I didn't say it isn't happening; I just said the information I've seen doesn't convince me. I see a lot of strongly held beliefs that global warming is happening, but the actual data seemed murky at best to me. In short, I wasn't convinced either way.

But by casually interested people, I got called all sorts of terrible names. "Denier", things like that. Compared to a creationist as someone who obviously doesn't get it, who just has beliefs by faith.

Really? I say the data hasn't convince me, that makes me a denier and a creationist? This whole thing has seemed much more like a religion than science to me. There's some science happening, but a lot of people want and need this to be true as a part of their identity rather than science. It doesn't surprise me at all that you see corruption from scientists in a culture like that. It goes against everything science is supposed to be.
That was me being civil :)

Consider: If OP was trolling, I was trying not to feed them. If OP was serious, I was trying to point in right direction. Either way, I was trying not to waste much time doing it.

Edit: Wow, there's a great way to tank someone's comment score. Show up late to the thread and accuse them of being rude. Thanks for that. Judging from the upvotes, most people seem to think that your lesson on civility is the most insightful part of the thread. sigh
Rising sea levels and "different weather" could lead to the flooding of cities and death or displacement of billions (yes, with a B) of people.

Reducing carbon emissions would mean employing engineers and professionals to upgrade much of our industrial infrastructure. More employment, not less.
[PPT] VCTips Workshop 2009-11-16
Its a hard line to draw on global warming because most of what's written about it (probably on both sides of the aisle) is politically-motivated pseudo-science at best. You can argue about whether Al Gore is right or wrong, demon or savior, but his involvement has undeniably tied the debate in with our typical right vs. left political dogfight. It's sad and alarming to see science caught up in such squabbling, but it has happened and taints the whole conversation.

Science in general does not cause flame wars and would usually fit within HN's guidelines. A surprisingly large number of people consider themselves qualified to have opinions on global warming because they read about it on a blog. That isn't true of physics.

If this particular article were more about how the servers were hacked, in some new, novel way, I'd be more inclined to give it a pass, but its not. It's basically trolling via intentional sample bias.
It is a nice thought, but it does seem to not fall under the scope of the prize.

It would probably make more sense to pursue the creation of a Nobel (or other global prize) category for Compuational/Information Sciences. The impact of progress in this field have just as much, if not more, of an effect on the world today as the other Nobel fields (Chemsitry, Biology, etc.)
Note: I am not saying this is a realistic possibility, but it is probably more likely than a computer scientist winning the peace prize.

It seems like there are plenty of people in the field (as well as other Engineering related fields that are more relevant to the world now than they were during the creation of the Nobel prizes) that justify a global acknowledgement. Considering the importance of the internet in global daily life, and the fact that now jQuery is used on 1/5th of the world's websites, it seems Resig has had enough influence on the world to deserve metion too. Remember, the Nobel prizes stress more recent accomplishments over past successes.
What would you expect from microsoft-backed tabloid? Of course, they never heard about Redhat or MySQL (before they were brought by Sun).
You're view of the impact of climate change is surprisingly and disappointingly American centric. The result of doing nothing will be far worse for the world's poor in Africa and Asia than for the American working class if carbon emissions are restricted.

Also, if we're waiting for "proof" of the existence of global warming, I image we'll be waiting quite a while. Correct me if I'm wrong, but I don't believe it's possible to prove anything in the physical sciences. Newton's theory of gravity was believed to be correct for over two hundred years before scientists began to suspect that it was inaccurate in certain cases.
While VC’s have become our favorite punching bags, it is important for entrepreneurs to understand that VC’s are “agents” no different than any other agent who gets a cut on the transaction. Whereas we are expected to put in our body-and-soul and our angel investors to invest their own cash, VC is all about making use of someone else’s money. So unlike us, VC’s financial interest is coupled with their professional interest, i.e., their career WILL come before ours. If they are not a partner of their firm, their personal goal is to make partner and if they are not a managing partner, then their focus is on raising the next fund and becoming managing partner.

They are not evil. They are simply an agent with different set of priorities.
So... yes. Doing more programming makes you better at programming. People who type faster can technically do more so therefore they are better at programming.

I'm not sure I agree with the second bit of my summary.
I've never met a programmer who isn't a good typist.

That said, we as programmers should know you shouldn't waste time optimizing things that don't matter. If I had to guess, your ability to navigate with a keyboard (shift+arrows to highlight, control+arrows to move cursor by one word, etc) is where better optimizations can be made.
I spent a month typing 25wpm one-handed with my other arm in a brace. It was incredibly, incredibly frustrating -- but mostly because of the communication slowdown over irc, email, ticketing systems. (Then, as now, I was in a shared office so voice recognition wasn't really an option.)

Using an IDE (Wing, for Python) that autocompleted locals without having to control-space to ask for completion helped a lot. Right now I'm doing mostly Java, and for some reason none of the big-name IDEs do that that I have been able to find. Kind of ironic given how proud most Java fans are of their IDEs.
I agree - it would be nice to be able to talk about these things in a healthy academic environment. Sadly, I think that's quite impossible at this point (at least in the U.S.).

These scientists were out of line, but I can understand how they ended up there. The "drill baby drill" crowd pounces on every bit of academic debate and builds a little strawman to agree with them. "I think your model is flawed" becomes "global warming doesn't exist," and "what about the impact of the xxx effect" becomes "global warming doesn't exist" and "we're missing some data for this period" becomes "global warming doesn't exist."

If every bit of your research gets twisted and misreported like this, it's easy to see why you would start talking about how to hide data and skew the facts to leave no room for doubt. Presenting a flawless, united, impenetrable front would seem like the only way to make any real progress. Not saying what they did was right, but the motivation is there.
Sure, there's a nasty popular undercurrent of slating anyone who expresses doubt. I've experienced it myself. But that shouldn't have a bearing on the facts of a situation.
There still are- 148apps, appcraver, appvee, etc. Cumulatively they just don't push the kind of volume that the App Store itself does. A more distributed system is only better for folks whose apps can't hack it in the Top 5 of their given category.
haha, seriously? Um, no.
To whomever hacked these emails, I thank you. I really think this was a valuable service to mankind that you've achieved.

You've lifted up the robes of the priesthood, and exposed them to be at best, flawed scientists, and at worst, social engineers. Whether this knowledge will have any effect on the truly brainwashed, we see that it doesn't, but it will have an effect on saner minds.

The marketing geniuses who turned 'global warming' into 'climate change','carbon dioxide' into 'carbon', and migrating polar bears into victims, will surely not be knocked out by this, but they're deleting emails this morning, you can be sure!
Yes, the peace prize has sometimes gone to controversial or unexpected people, but that doesn't mean the process is completely without rules. First, these people can nominate for the peace prize:

http://nobelpeaceprize.org/en_GB/nomination_committee/who-ca...

If you're not on that list, sending Norwegian Ubuntu CDs to the members of the Norwegian Nobel Committee as the article suggests is going to achieve absolutely nothing.

Second, read the actual will of Alfred Nobel:

http://nobelpeaceprize.org/en_GB/alfred-nobel/testament/

"and one part to the person who shall have done the most or the best work for fraternity between the nations and the abolition or reduction of standing armies and the formation and spreading of peace congresses"

Does Linus Torvalds fit that description? Not even remotely close. If the author of the article had spent a few more minutes actually researching the rules, and not just browsing Wikipedia, he could have avoided writing the thing altogether.