skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
No contact at all I'm afraid. Don't worry about the refund - I've been ignoring the emailed invoices ;-) What I'd really like is to give you another try, so I've sent you an email with the details.
Hmm I think Pete and Ken (comments on the page) answered this one pretty well.

------

>How could anyone who calls himself a scientist allow the primary data and metadata to be destroyed?

Copies of the primary data.

>Somebody will have to do the work of collating raw historical data from weather stations all over again before we will know anything

If only someone like NASA had also been keeping an instrumental record, we could check to see if they agreed with the HadCRUT record.

-------

Skip – most of the climate data the CRU disposed of was hard copy, and one of the reasons it WAS disposed of is because they felt that the digitization efforts of other climate research teams covered it adequately.

For example, the open source data sets put out by UCAR include the raw and adjusted data, and is gathered from the same sources that the CRU massaged data comes from.
Whoa, 8000 words. Anything more concise?
I find that http://answers.onstartups.com/ has a more technical audience, with better quality Qs and As
And a host of Perl makes it possible for the BBC to serve up its iPlayer content. Some of it is even modern MooseX::Declare based Perl.
Distributed concurrent applications in Clojure
http://www.eenews.net/public/Greenwire/2009/10/14/3

> Tom Karl, director of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's National Climatic Data Center in Asheville, N.C., noted that the conclusions of the IPCC reports are based on several data sets in addition to the CRU, including data from NOAA, NASA and the United Kingdom Met Office. Each of those data sets basically show identical multi-decadal trends, Karl said.
9th Street, Darby, PA | Powered by Postlets
Well... there's CTAN.

Oh, hang on, that came first didn't it? Forget I said anything.
we're between 2 and 3 people, but yeah, only I'm full-time, and yes, that reduces costs.

Also, I build my own servers, which saves me some bucks, but it's not orders of magnitude.

uh, also, compare my SLAs to the other providers before you start saying it's weak. (I mean, my sla is weak, I agree, but so is everyone else's.)
[Jolicloud] allows me to install new apps without the hassle of Ubuntu. Believe me, I was running Ubuntu before and app install and maintenance is a headache.

I find this to be a bewildering comment. Unless you are trying to install something that is not in the extensive Ubuntu repositories, installation and maintenance is trivial.
People do it in all genres except fiction. There are tons of non-fiction blogs that get published by just printing out the words and putting them on the shelf. I've ordered books from bloggers expecting to get new content (lol, pg comes to mind with Hackers & Painters - but I'm actually referring to other writers who don't explicitly tell you.) and I'm kind of disappointed when it's just a printout of their most famous blog posts.
from my slice in Slicehost's DFW-1 datacenter:

----

processor	: 0
vendor_id	: AuthenticAMD
cpu family	: 16
model	: 2
model name	: Quad-Core AMD Opteron(tm) Processor 2350 HE
stepping	: 3
cpu MHz	: 1994.999
cache size	: 512 KB
fpu	: yes
fpu_exception	: yes
cpuid level	: 5
wp	: yes
flags	: fpu de tsc msr pae cx8 apic cmov pat clflush mmx fxsr sse sse2 ht syscall nx mmxext fxsr_opt lm 3dnowext 3dnow constant_tsc rep_good nonstop_tsc pni cx16 popcnt lahf_lm cmp_legacy extapic cr8_legacy abm sse4a misalignsse 3dnowprefetch
bogomips	: 3993.30
TLB size	: 1024 4K pages
clflush size	: 64
cache_alignment	: 64
address sizes	: 48 bits physical, 48 bits virtual
power management: ts ttp tm stc 100mhzsteps hwpstate

processor	: 1
vendor_id	: AuthenticAMD
cpu family	: 16
model	: 2
model name	: Quad-Core AMD Opteron(tm) Processor 2350 HE
stepping	: 3
cpu MHz	: 1994.999
cache size	: 512 KB
fpu	: yes
fpu_exception	: yes
cpuid level	: 5
wp	: yes
flags	: fpu de tsc msr pae cx8 apic cmov pat clflush mmx fxsr sse sse2 ht syscall nx mmxext fxsr_opt lm 3dnowext 3dnow constant_tsc rep_good nonstop_tsc pni cx16 popcnt lahf_lm cmp_legacy extapic cr8_legacy abm sse4a misalignsse 3dnowprefetch
bogomips	: 3993.30
TLB size	: 1024 4K pages
clflush size	: 64
cache_alignment	: 64
address sizes	: 48 bits physical, 48 bits virtual
power management: ts ttp tm stc 100mhzsteps hwpstate

processor	: 2
vendor_id	: AuthenticAMD
cpu family	: 16
model	: 2
model name	: Quad-Core AMD Opteron(tm) Processor 2350 HE
stepping	: 3
cpu MHz	: 1994.999
cache size	: 512 KB
fpu	: yes
fpu_exception	: yes
cpuid level	: 5
wp	: yes
flags	: fpu de tsc msr pae cx8 apic cmov pat clflush mmx fxsr sse sse2 ht syscall nx mmxext fxsr_opt lm 3dnowext 3dnow constant_tsc rep_good nonstop_tsc pni cx16 popcnt lahf_lm cmp_legacy extapic cr8_legacy abm sse4a misalignsse 3dnowprefetch
bogomips	: 3993.30
TLB size	: 1024 4K pages
clflush size	: 64
cache_alignment	: 64
address sizes	: 48 bits physical, 48 bits virtual
power management: ts ttp tm stc 100mhzsteps hwpstate

processor	: 3
vendor_id	: AuthenticAMD
cpu family	: 16
model	: 2
model name	: Quad-Core AMD Opteron(tm) Processor 2350 HE
stepping	: 3
cpu MHz	: 1994.999
cache size	: 512 KB
fpu	: yes
fpu_exception	: yes
cpuid level	: 5
wp	: yes
flags	: fpu de tsc msr pae cx8 apic cmov pat clflush mmx fxsr sse sse2 ht syscall nx mmxext fxsr_opt lm 3dnowext 3dnow constant_tsc rep_good nonstop_tsc pni cx16 popcnt lahf_lm cmp_legacy extapic cr8_legacy abm sse4a misalignsse 3dnowprefetch
bogomips	: 3993.30
TLB size	: 1024 4K pages
clflush size	: 64
cache_alignment	: 64
address sizes	: 48 bits physical, 48 bits virtual
power management: ts ttp tm stc 100mhzsteps hwpstate
You have a changing feature area on your front page. Please either add next/prev buttons and an easy way to navigate it or break it out into normal HTML. It currently changes faster than I can comfortably read.

Edit: Oh, you have navigation - but it is visually detached from the feature area (looks attached to the area above) so I missed it.
I was actually surprised by this post. I had seen the claims of missing data some time ago, before this latest media wrangle. I had not mentioned it in any of the comments on the most recent bunch of posts, either at esr's site, HN, OB, or any of the other sites weighing in on the matter, because I had, apparently wrongly, assumed everyone else already knew about the missing base data.
Synthesis report of policy-relevant climate science
Which is why, if you're starting a Perl project today, you turn on warnings and strict, you choose between TryCatch and Try::Tiny and you seriously consider adding autodie to the mix.
Sweet graphic, thanks for that.

Hmm, I've heard it both ways. 'Freemium isn't a business model, it's a marketing tool!' 'Freemium isn't a marketing tool, it's a business model! '

The problem is that we'd like to launch (since we're doing this big press launch and stuff) with a more perfected version of our model, so we want to find the best way that works first before launching, you know?

Thanks very much!
Gmail has an feature where it will pull over the contacts and mails from your Yahoo account, and tag them with a label:

http://mail.google.com/support/bin/answer.py?hl=en&ctx=m...
If you think Patrick's startup is actually about bingo cards, you need to re-read pretty much everything he's written here.

I guess I must have been mislead by the URL "http://www.bingocardcreator.com.

His technical challenges aren't about putting random words on a page.

I'm clearly behind the times. I thought bingo cards had numbers. :-/

You in particular would benefit a lot from what he's writing about.

Patrick's blog seems to be far more about marketing and business strategy than it is about technical issues. I'm sure I could learn a lot from him -- those are definitely not my strong points. But they're also not particularly areas which I find interesting... and they're definitely not areas where it would make sense for me to be advising someone else!
I signed up, emailed Luke my SSH key and said CentOS. He emailed back saying it was ready and off I went to setup it up.

Very minor issue when I first signed up, but I hadn't even logged in to the box yet. I emailed Luke and in about an hour I got a response back saying it was fixed.

I'm not using it for anything critical, so if something goes down or seems not correct, I might email and ask what's up, but usually I probably won't even notice or care enough.

I also follow his twitter, which he seems to keep updated if something is not functioning as it should.

https://twitter.com/prgmrcom

Edit:

I've been using it for a few months and there was only been one instance that I noticed where things were not working as they should.

I emailed and got a quick response back that he was working on resolving the issue.
Rsync.net has offered similar services for quite a while now. It's a little more product-ized, they have more options for service, and they guarantee you can talk to an engineer at any time.

It's a little more expensive than Dr. Percival -- or maybe not, depending on your access patterns and volume discounts. But I'm a bit leery of trusting an organization that is just one guy who already has a day job.

http://rsync.net/
Thanks, I'll be looking into that. Does mingw provide a full POSIX API layer?
check out prices two years ago, using archive.org.

as far as I can tell, most of the competition has not been lowering their prices by much over the last few years. (linode has some.)

Also, to be fair, if you pre-pay for a year, ec2 gives me a run for the money; I only have a 20% discount if you pre-pay for a year.
I have a problem going to a service provider who's website doesn't even load....

http://www.prgmr.com/
Rsync.net has offered similar services for quite a while now.

rsync.net is a great service, but I wouldn't say that it was similar to Tarsnap. If you backup your data to rsync.net, they can access it.

I'm a bit leery of trusting an organization that is just one guy who already has a day job.

Erm... what's my day job? Other than Tarsnap, that is?
Not according to MW:

Innovation
1 : the introduction of something new
2 : a new idea, method, or device : novelty
It loads for me!
Supply meeting demand explains why there is now a 'Vampires' book section in Barnes & Noble

http://www.flickr.com/photos/echoman/3883032294/

Also, "Revenue reality of a book on the NY Times best seller list" was about a Vampire genre author

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=949044

50 Cent (Vitamin Water) on Business:

> Most people think first of what they want to express or make, then find the audience for their idea. You must work the opposite angle, thinking first of the public. You need to keep your focus on their changing needs, the trends that are washing through them. Beginning with their demand, you create the appropriate supply
First off I'd change the name. It makes no sense, and is hard to pronounce at a glance. Getting people back to your app is step #1 in both engagement and virality, and your name is harmful there. You seem to be about sharing stuff with family (which is inherently viral) so make your name reflect that. You chose some stock photography designed to play in Middle America, make your URL match.

The nice thing with this type of product is that people upload photos and videos of family members mainly to share with other family members, so right there you have inherently viral behavior. Your job now is to make it as frictionless as possible.

Add in those viral channels. Make it easy to share via Facebook or email. I can't sign up for the product to see what you have enabled, but you should have Facebook Connect at the very least. I'd use Google Friend Connect, Yahoo's equivalent, and MSN's as well to make it easy to import contacts and email them a photo or link to a group of photos with one click.

Do you have embeds? Can people embed a family video on their blog trivially from your site? Can they share it via Twitter with a click?

Just spend some time figuring out how your users want to share these things (this is one of those rare instances where simply asking them will return high value info) and make that easy as pie.

So there's your traffic. Freemium seems to be almost a necessity here. I really can't think of an alternative monetization model that makes sense.

Premium-only is death to viral spread. If you decide to go that route, I'd assume you'll have to purchase traffic via AdSense and the like. Get some metrics in place early so you can calculate CPA and RPU. Test with a few thousand bucks worth of ads. If your RPU turns out to be a large multiple of CPA you're set. Just know that with premium only you're aiming for relatively low traffic and relatively high RPU. Not a bad way to go for the right product, but you need to be insanely metrics-driven to make that work.
Before anybody goes and switches hosts, be sure to consider the cost of actually moving servers. It does take quite a bit of time to move servers, and while it may be worth it in the long term, it may not benefit very many people in the immediate future (I'm not saying definitely don't do it).
As far as I can tell, the amount of ram is more important than anything else when it comes to real-world performance, but it doesn't really feature in most synthetic benchmarks, which I believe is why I did so well in Uggedal's first benchmark, and so poorly in the second.
At least 50.

I'm so famous that there are lots of people in warm countries that want to enter into an enduring business relationship with me. I'm apparently also very handsome, there are tons of women out there that mail me because they've seen my picture somewhere and consider me so absolutely gorgeous they want to start a relationship with me.

It's flattering, to put it mildly. I wished I had time enough to mail them back.

And then there are people that seem to have found out all kinds of medical details about me...

--

On a more serious note, I receive more email than I can keep up with, every couple of weeks it starts to get on my nerves and I spend a whole day taking care of the backlog.

Note to self: improve email discipline.
odd. I've tried three browsers and nothing and I am having no problems with other websites... strange.
Ask HN: Things you wish you'd learned about programming in college?
A friend and I will be giving a talk to a group of computer science students in a few weeks. We're both students ourselves, but are a bit older and have more working experience than the average attendee will probably have.

Here are some of the ideas we've had so far:

- Present on "using and knowing the tools" from OS to editor to libraries.

- Something interactive, like working as a group through one of the problems from the New Turing Omnibus.

- Talk about the social aspects of coding, like group dynamic and collaboration tools, and maybe introduce pair programming.

The audience will be mostly undergraduate CS students. My friend and I are 25, and have worked freelance and at startups/medium sized companies on mostly Rails, PHP, and Java web apps for 5+ years. We have a lot to learn ourselves, and see this speaking opportunity as a way to better ourselves as presenters and learn more about the topic we pick.

So, what's a good topic? What's something every CS grad wishes they had learned or heard about? Thanks in advance for your suggestions!
Do something that is pressworthy outside of just 'x startup has launched.' Playing off current events is always great, but an even better way to gain mindshare among normal people is to get reporters to cite your company any time they talk about related issues.

The hard work is figuring out what reporters need that you can provide. They love statistics, and you can always try to get quoted as an expert source on something related to your company.

This kind of thing will get your name out there and get you the kind of traffic (and links) you want rather than short bursts of disinterested blog readers.
Secrecy in science makes it non-science. If your claims cannot be tested and falsified, then it is not scientific; hidden data or techniques prevents replication.
Prgmr have been quite accommodating in my experience. I'd have to characterise their support as like working with a peer. Using their support address I was able to provision a couple of instances on separate hardware with an additional floating IP and at a cost that borders on a quarter of what I'd have paid with Linode.
Work or personal? I get maybe a half dozen legitimate personal emails on a busy day. I get over a hundred work emails - but there's a blurry distinction between what's "legitimate" on my work e-mail, since I like to stay informed on a lot of code reviews and mailing lists that aren't directly addressed to me.
I don't think it's that many. This year I signed a new credit card contract, contract extension with my landlord, mobile phone contract, some online service direct debit signup and a car rental paperwork. That's it - and I read all of that. I'm not sure a typical person ever goes over 10 things to sign a year... It's not that many and it really pays off to read them before you sign.
>Hmm, I've heard it both ways. 'Freemium isn't a business model, it's a marketing tool!'

I'd say it's a marketing tool if no one else has sold what your offering for free before; so the idea of it being free is engaging and people tell their friends

For a business model I think it only makes sense for products that are easily consumed and need to be accessible with little commitment.

> we want to find the best way that works first before launching

I'm with Steve Blank on this one. You won't find answers in the building. You have to go out and find what people are willing to pay for.
Wow, Matt—thank you very much for the thorough suggestions.

> First off I'd change the name. It makes no sense, and is hard to pronounce at a glance.

Hell yeah, this has been a gut instinct since day 1. I've been trying to brainstorm new names, but have come up with nothing. I think a name change is a good idea, though, for sure.

> but you should have Facebook Connect at the very least.

Yeah, we're tied into Facebook Connect and Twitter: http://screenshots.markbao.com/a137e44e036028bb19f171c201b2f... -> http://screenshots.markbao.com/082acda74154efb50e52d95a11a1c... -> http://screenshots.markbao.com/b2baae910327fd86f658f2fd29c46...

> Do you have embeds? Can people embed a family video on their blog trivially from your site?

That's an oversight. Thanks, putting that on the imp list.

> Just spend some time figuring out how your users want to share these things (this is one of those rare instances where simply asking them will return high value info) and make that easy as pie.

Definitely a good idea. I think we put together a Ramamia user survey a while ago but never acted upon it for some reason. Probably a good time to get that rolling.

> So there's your traffic. Freemium seems to be almost a necessity here. I really can't think of an alternative monetization model that makes sense.

You're probably right. I had a gut instinct that while Premium would be the easiest and most reliable way to get conversions (no unpredictability in the conversions, in some way) it would be restricting to growth and customer acquisition. I think we've come to the consensus that freemium is probably the way to go.

Thank you again, Matt!
Scientific American is a left-wing rag. I read it regularly as a teen ager, but quit in the 1980s when EVERY ISSUE had a prominent pseudo-scientific article advancing lefty causes, primarily disarmament.
Totally in the same boat. I started work on my own idea this past week and it would be great to discuss ideas and the usual startup issues. I'd be happy to help out.
weird. can you ping it?
I'd recommend going straight to premium with 30-day trial. Its too much work to segment and manage the fremium feature set.
The existence of reliable datasets does not contradict the argument that unreliable data should not be used.

The fact that there does not seem to be an overwhelming call among the climate-science community to purge themselves of unreliable research and researchers makes the whole field look like cargo-cult science.
I think that low standard deviation / variance is desirable. It provides a level of performance that can be predictable and reliable. Then just multiply according to your processing needs.
It appears that Gladwell wasn't in error - 'his webmaster' fesses up here (sorry for the horribly long url):
http://gladwell.typepad.com/gladwellcom/2009/11/letting-igon...
There could be a fourth option: An advanced civilization has control over our region of the galaxy. Perhaps the reason why we don't detect other civilizations is because the dominant civilization neutralizes others when they get too advanced? If they have a billion years head start, it's hard for other civilizations to put up much of a fight.

The reason why we haven't detected the dominant civilization is because they don't want to be detected :)

As an alternative, there could also be one or more civilizations out there that studies us and shields us from outside signals.
Zynga%2Bpoker%2BHack%2B-%2BHome
I agree the name needs fixing.

> Freemium seems to be almost a necessity here. I really can't think of an alternative monetization model that makes sense.

Families may find comfort in knowing it's a paid service, since they are uploading personal photos and information. It is harder to trust something new that doesn't have a clear way of staying afloat.

>Do you have embeds? Can people embed a family video on their blog trivially from your site? Can they share it via Twitter with a click?

This might be useful for marketing. But I'd make sure your market actually use blogs and twitter to post personal family details before investing in building that.
fallacious "skeptical" arguments

You're being a bit kind to yourself, don't you think? You're skeptical, as are those you agree with, but those you don't agree with are "skeptical".

The climate change debate was a controversial new idea thirty years ago

See, this revisionist stuff drives me crazy. 30 years ago, it was called "global cooling". Now, sophisticated punters call it "climate change", instead of the less sophisticated and more embarrassing flip-flop of "global warming". http://www.denisdutton.com/cooling_world.htm

Just call it global warming and admit that 30 years ago, climatologists were wrong. Don't try to obfuscate their lack of perfection (nobody expects perfection anyway) with this "climate change" nonsense of "we knew it all along, see, we predicted climate change 30 years ago!"
"Their fighting has little to do with helping customers and a lot to do with helping themselves to a bigger slice of the money we all spend to buy computers and surf the Internet."

We call this capitalism. A byproduct of trying to make more money than the competition is better products for us. Lyons conclusion that we will end up with devices bloated with ads also makes the assumption that Google won't continue to innovate on advertisement.

I'd love to see the day where I don't think of ads as ads, but instead "cool reminders for new products I might enjoy." For example, I go out of my way every day to read Engadget even though it's basically a giant piece of advertising, and I love coming to Hacker News to hear about start ups and services that could benefit me.

Lyons seems to have really oversimplified the issue here.
Hey, you finished second place in the application benchmarks, not too far behind Linode, and the stability looks quite solid.

Considering how little I paid for my 512M prgmr VPS, I'm very pleased to see these results!
> Families may find comfort in knowing it's a paid service

This was one of our arguments for a fully premium service. Don't know how much weight this holds.

> But I'd make sure your market actually use blogs and twitter to post personal family details before investing in building that.

For Twitter, I can divulge some details from the database... 26 out of 6236 user rows have connected their account to Twitter, for a percentage of 0.416%.