skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
"... The first, and most convincing, given the forensic trail, is that a gang of professional hackers in Russia (Tomsk?) was hired by someone. The second is that the emails had been assembled by a person within the CRU in response to a Freedom of Information demand that had subsequently been blocked. This person then allowed the emails to escape 'in the public interest'. ..."

Williams is a science reporter for the ABC Science show which I listen to ~ http://www.abc.net.au/rn/scienceshow/ The Times article referred to in the article by "Bryan Appleyard" is here ~ http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/environment/article693...
Legally, yeah. But many startup founders consider carefully what the new owner is going to do with their creation before selling it. That's the responsible thing to do, because there're users who don't have a legal say in the transaction, but will often be impacted quite severely if the new owner buys a product to kill it.

Look at the outcry when the Etherpads sold their company to Google so it could be killed, for example.
Can someone copyright a SQL query?
The screenshots are too few and show too little. I get the impression of a very simple "me too" app that can do very little and provides no benefit over the cmd line. At least a screenshot for every bullet point in the details, and show how you handle corner cases such as columns with 10K text.

Ditto jawngee suggestion about creating "end user" pages with standard reports (e.g. graphs using http://www.simile-widgets.org/timeplot/). Allow me to let users view them without logging in. That is what cmd line can't do.
Amazingly, there's no mention of the effects the Suez canal had on the Mediterranean. The jelly fish population, for example, is known to have risen gradually since the opening of the canal. It's quite hard to see how whatever this article tries to chart has anything to do with the effects of global warming on the world's oceans. This is exactly the sort of really bad science writing that makes the whole global warming debate so shallow and useless.
there was a bunch of talk about using the coins on slickdeals.net for moneyback promos on CCs IIRC
A variation on a theme (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=992927). This one says that the WSJ is getting it wrong because you have to subscribe to read the story because the story or equivalent is widely available. Baron is right in the global sense, but wrong in the specific. The NYT cant force you to subscribe, because, except for some of their columnists, their content is available everywhere. They even syndicate it themselves. The WSJ is actually a counter example to Baron's point. The WSJ actually makes money on their web site. People actually subscribe because of the WSJ's reputation for its business reporting.

OTOH if a publication doesnt have the reputation and immediate need to know content of the WSJ, a walled garden will ensure its demise. Other publications that could (and do) survive on a subscription basis: Physician Desk Reference (even tough all its information is publicly available), Lexus, Nexus, and Bloomberg.
I think that's the point of the article (it's not something just anyone w/o the right connections could do). It's a satirical illustration of how this small group of people who should have gone bankrupt are making out like bandits at the general publics expense whilst the whole scheme is constructed in a way to obscure the nature of what is ultimately happening.

Also it isn't saying you should take out the .25 percent loan for 30 years it is saying you buy 30 year treasuries. I think it is assumed you can sell those treasuries back to the Fed at some point when the original loan needs to be repaid.
> "For entities with dynamically included parts, it may be the most recent of the set of last-modify times for its component parts."

The content is often considered a subcomponent of the whole page; other aspects of the HTML may change despite the content remaining the same.
Okay. I have a problem maybe someone can help me with.

The article says:

"If the machine prints NPRNPR, it has printed a false statement. But if the machine never prints NPRNPR, then NPRNPR is a true statement that the machine never prints."

This part seems logically true:

"If the machine prints NPRNPR, it has printed a false statement." It seems logically true, and I wont say why because I view it as obvious =/

This part seems logically false:

"if the machine never prints NPRNPR, then NPRNPR is a true statement" I don't understand the logic of "If it is not printed, it is true." I was under the impression that the only true statement was "If it prints, then it is true", and of course the contrapositive: "If it is not true, it doesn't print". The statement taken from the article is NOT the contrapositive. It is the inverse, and because the converse of a statement is not always true, the inverse is not always true because the inverse is always equal to the converse.
"if the machine never prints NPRNPR, then NPRNPR is a true statement" That statement is the inverse of the original if-then statement, and the inverse/converse is FALSE because it allows opportunities which violate the original if-then statement.

I logically concluded that the statement in the proof:

"if the machine never prints NPRNPR, then NPRNPR is a true statement" is a false statement. And therefore the proof is incorrect.

Okay. If I am wrong, can someone please tell me where?
mailinator emails work with NYT just fine.
"... And yet Morris sat on his data for years. If there were flaws in his theory, he was determined to find them before anyone else could. “We set about destroying this observation,” he says. “We brought in outside people with no blood in their veins, no interest, to destroy it.” But they couldn’t. His paper (“Coronary heart-disease and physical activity of work”) finally appeared in The Lancet in 1953. His hypothesis, as he still called it, was greeted with general disbelief. What could exercise possibly have to do with heart attacks? ..."

Not for me. I've got 160Km to go before I've marched, run & hiked my way through 1000Miles in just under 15 months.
Dropbox: A Privacy Black Box
Lean startup tools for Rails apps
Ask HN: How hard for a SW guy to find funding for a HW idea?
Let's say a quite experienced (OS and API level) SW guy has an idea that he wants to launch as a biz, but the idea is focused more heavily on HW (say acceleration of some SW tasks using FPGAs).<p>I'm wondering how much of an obstacle the background mismatch would be when looking for funding.<p>Assume that before going to the potential investors, the SW guy does build a proof of concept prototype with the HW, but with many physical design considerations remaining to be addressed for a final product.<p>Also assume that the best co-founder candidates he can find are of similar backgrounds.<p>I'd appreciate any thoughts on the difficulties they might face being taken seriously by the investors (aside from the fact that HW ideas are a much harder sell), and whether some of the skepticism can be overcome.<p>I don't have a <i>very</i> specific idea at the moment, but I keepin coming quite close and see similar examples actually launched. So I'd like to know if I do converge on a feasible idea, should I invest time in it, or whether it'd be a pipe dream just because HW is a just different beast.<p>Thx
Apostrophes don't work like title's author thinks they do. Should I read them any further on the subject of, you know, writing about news?
I've just been reading an autobiographical sketch that my paternal grandmother wrote in 1926, after her third year of college. She wrote quite a lot about what she did to maintain her good health--which she remembered as being very good throughout childhood. She acknowledged health benefits of physical exercise and considered it an advantage that she walked from home two miles to her college and then two miles back home each day. She also noted that she liked eating a variety of fruits and vegetables, and not too much meat. She even reports her height (five feet and three inches) and weight (one hundred and fourteen pounds) at that age. It is apparent that in her milieu there were plenty of Minnesotans living in county seat college towns who knew exercise and good diet were good for health.

Alas, she was the only one of my four grandparents who didn't live into my lifetime. She died about twenty-five years later while driving across Minnesota in the winter to pick up my dad from the same college. Before she arrived at her destination, her car slipped on the icy highway and crashed head-on with another car, killing both drivers. Epidemiologically, there is no doubt that exercise is beneficial for health. But of course it is not a cure-all. My dad was paralyzed for six years before he died when he slipped and fell on the ice on a different Minnesota winter day while going out shopping for a condolence card for a friend's funeral. That kind of concern is what keeps some people in their cars.

After edit:

I agree with the other person who just commented that this is a particularly striking paragraph in the submitted article:

"And yet Morris sat on his data for years. If there were flaws in his theory, he was determined to find them before anyone else could. 'We set about destroying this observation,' he says. 'We brought in outside people with no blood in their veins, no interest, to destroy it.' But they couldn’t."

That, of course, is just what Richard Feynman recommended that a true scientist should do. "But there is one feature I notice that is generally missing in cargo cult science. That is the idea that we all hope you have learned in studying science in school--we never say explicitly what this is, but just hope that you catch on by all the examples of scientific investigation. It is interesting, therefore, to bring it out now and speak of it explicitly. It's a kind of scientific integrity, a principle of scientific thought that corresponds to a kind of utter honesty--a kind of leaning over backwards. For example, if you're doing an experiment, you should report everything that you think might make it invalid--not only what you think is right about it: other causes that could possibly explain your results; and things you thought of that you've eliminated by some other experiment, and how they worked--to make sure the other fellow can tell they have been eliminated."

http://calteches.library.caltech.edu/51/2/CargoCult.pdf
Nice story, but how do you then explain the massive numbers of women in sociology/anthropology/English lit? The pay is even worse in those fields.

I totally buy that guys are more willing to sacrifice pay for prestige, but it doesn't wholly explain why science in particular is missing women; just academia.
Schopenhauer also wrote some cracking stuff on women: http://www.heretical.com/miscella/onwomen.html
The only test that counts is whether the project was done as a work for hire. If so his copyright assertion doesnt hold water. You cant copyright work owned by another.

The takeaway from this is to always specify that the work of a contractor is a work for hire. Otherwise they own what they produce.

I suspect in this case the contractor was a lot smarter than the school district. If so, they need to hire someone else to produce a new query from black box specifications. Another technique that works is to ask for a copyright release or threaten to go to the local press.
I think this has a good side, reminding people that countries still exists and are different from each other, and those differences are not only holiday photo landscapes.
Do people move about lots because they are healthy, or vice versa?
Shady maybe, but not grey. The Federal Reserve Bank is a privately owned and operated corporation. It is not in any way a part of the US government; it is given special rights by our government to manage our banking system as a monopoly. The Fed Chairman is appointed by the CEOs of the regional Fed banks, and the CEOs are appointed by the shareholders of those banks. There are no elected representatives running the Fed, nor any political appointees selected by the Executive branch.

There /is/ a lot of oversight, and the Fed chairman is required to spend a lot of time dealing with the president and congress. However, all Fed meetings, particularly policy-setting meetings, are private and hidden from the public and US government. No government agency is allowed to do that; even the most top-secret black projects of the CIA and DoD are ultimately overseen by someone in Congress, at least to some extent. (Congress could stop funding these projects, as a final control. They can't do that to the Fed.)

The government agency you're thinking of is the Treasury. It is the Treasury's job to produce and manage US currency, as directed by Congress. Congress had done a lousy job of setting economic policy, so back in 1913 Congress decided to outsource the job to a private corporation: the Fed. The Treasury still makes all of our coins, but the paper money and 'accounting' money were given to the Fed. This wouldn't necessarily be bad, except the Fed effectively charges the government a fee for every dollar put into circulation; $1 of circulating currency is added to the economy, but $1.05 in debt is added at the same time. That doesn't balance, so the currency has to be inflated to make it balance; the value of $1.05 has to be reduced to the value of $1 in order for the originally created $1 to be sufficient to pay it back. Except that $1 is now worth only $0.95 if used for any other purpose.

This is a very, very rough and inaccurate description of the situation, but the basic premise is correct: the Fed is a private company that makes a profit by lending money into the US economy at a rate that can't be paid for using the money that's been lent into the economy. This allows the Fed and its shareholders to slowly draw all of the wealth out of the US economy, leading to the highly concentrated wealth in the hands of very few very rich people we have today.
I like the idea, as long as it's very far away away from my house.
I appreciate the point.
But,
If this was a website that made tangible revenue via Sales/webLeads, I suppose the tone of this discussion might change? ;)

One wouldn't then, be happy to rely on a 3rd party (Google/browser design committee) to tell users what to do.

Just saying.

BTW, I just noticed my 'reading' browser of choice (Opera) has a URL completion config option in Preferences>Advanced>Network>Server Name Completion. Can't say it works. Maybe a restart will fix it.
Bring back the evening paper
Cargo Cult Science by Richard Feynman (.PDF)
I think a good part of the 'reluctance' is that HN has plenty of problems accomodating the growth as it is, both on the technical front and on the change of atmosphere due to a large influx of new users.
Echoing the other views around here:

The internet is giving rise to even better hand crafted content, not worse. Pick up any newspaper printed at any time and compare the entire thing (every section, every page) to the entire first couple pages of Hacker News links. It doesn't even come close. Most newspaper articles are pure drivel and ridden with ads, while the front page of HN has incredibly well written views on markets, business, technology, finance, etc... One of my favorite sites of all time is dustincurtis.com, a guy so far from cramming out a McDonalds article a day that it is silly.
denialists, troops, mob, goons...

Can we please have a climate article without all the hyperbole? (rhetorical question. The answer is obviously "no")

This is not an either/or situation. Most likely the emails were illegally stolen but they were also the part of the data that legally needed to be released to the public. (Hence the lack of emails with lots of personal details. These emails had already been filtered as part of the preparation process. Just a guess. That and 5 bucks gets you a cup of coffee)

The "crime" here, if there is one, is refusal to allow independent verification of process (a crime against science) and refusal to allow open inspection of work progress (an ethical lapse and also perhaps a real crime of fraud, depending on how seriously you take your FOIA laws) It's not the end of climate science, just an embarrassing peek at how little clothes the emperor is actually wearing under there. Attempting to prosecute somebody for stealing information that needed to be released to the public anyway would be amusing, at best, to watch.

Nothing to see here, please move along.
The submitted article reports one of the first published findings by an epidemiologist showing that moving around a lot protects health, and is not just an outcome of being healthy in the first place. Since his work, there have been many more studies that reach the same conclusion, quite a few of them having been done in Canada as the provinces of Canada developed their health insurance programs.
The Haskell runtime with DTrace support: threads, sparks and the GC
I don't mind at all having a nuclear power plant upriver not particularly far from my home. It makes the electricity rates here noticeably less expensive than in many other parts of the country. That plant has been operating harmlessly for about four decades now.

After edit: indeed, I prefer having a nuclear power plant (somewhat) nearby to having a coal-burning power plant equally upstream and nearby, and prefer both to living without inexpensive electricity.
Demand Media wants to produce 1 million pieces of content a month
The big difference is that when a bank loans money to a business, the business can bring in revenue from other parts of the economy to enable it to pay that loan back.

When the Fed loans money into the US economy, there is no place to pull money from to pay the loan interest; only the principle can be repaid. The loans can only be repaid with hard assets (gold, real estate, etc) or by inflating the currency sufficiently to devalue the principle that was borrowed to below the repayment cost.
If you want to be technical about it, wages went down because women wouldn't leave the workforce when the men got back. Happy?
Then why do so many females like Twilight?
Ouch. That really sucks, because without assets there's no way to pay off that debt. Unless of course they can just file for Chapter 11? I don't know much about finance, but if they can, that would be really, really cheap!
I do read what he says directly; and I haven't called him crazy.

Also I feel extremely strongly about FOSS. Disagreeing with stallman doesn't make you a proprietary apologist.

Stallman has been fairl consistent and I feel like that is the root of the issue. It's a very hardline attitude but more importantly one that treats every other view as entirely wrong and disdainful. I can't agree with that: I find it very damaging.

But then I also feel the gpl is fairly damaging in it's attitude too. So I appreciate it might be just ones stance over hat Free actually stands for (for me it is "without limits" :-))
Seems like sound advice wherever you are. I have found that I need to start following it.
>Fundamental goals are neither rational nor irrational.

That's a rather controversial statement. You have to bear in mind that the very idea that there's a clean split between issues of fact and issues of "values" or "goals" is a very controversial one. Hillary Putnam's book on this issue is a great read ("The Collapse of the Fact/Value Dichotomy").

Of course, there are also issues with the notion of "observation" used in Bayesian statistics. Since any observation which isn't actually just a direct report of a sense experience (e.g. "I see red in the top left corner of my visual field") involves the application of some theory, it's not clear what should count as an observation for a rational agent or group of rational agents. For example, did John observe that a car drove past? Or did he observe that something which looks like a car drove past? Can John observe that Bill was being petulant, or is that a value judgment? Did John observe that the current is 0.5A? Or did he observe that the ammeter reported that the current is 0.5A? Etc. etc.

The Bayesian framework is an idealization, resting on an ideal notion of "observation". I personally think that it's crazy to take this framework to be a model for rationality itself. We are not able to make observations in the Bayesian sense.
It is interesting because every time I ask someone what hooks they use on their git repos they look at me with a blank face. There are so many useful things you can do with commit hooks. I have written dozens of hooks for my repositories. Spell checking my commit message and running the unit test on the file I just committed (and only that file) are the two bare minimum basic hooks that I always install, but there are dozens more depending on the repository.

I wrote up a bunch of different ones I used last year on a blog entry: http://benjamin-meyer.blogspot.com/2008/10/git-hooks.html

Think of it as the next level of unit testing. Have some bash scripts that you occasionally put an error in? add a bash -n hook on bash files to prevent mistakes. In the Arora repository there have been probably a dozen commits total that broke the build on one of the platforms. How many build breakage commits do you have in your repo?

Speaking of this, the ruby on rails guys seems to be really for tests, but to run a test (even the hello world return true one) takes several seconds... how do I improve this to take ms?
Give it up. Africa is hopeless.

Whitey's great weakness is this weird urge to help other races. We need to help ourselves first. God knows everyone else does - by feeding on us.
Crafting the PatternMusic User Experience on iPhone
I don't know if it's a good thing that some countries handle things more stupidly than others. If the differences were value-free you might have a really strong claim there, but the good side is vanishingly small in the sea of colossal buffoonery that this whole situation represents.
That's a good observation. Much of Greenspun's theory is based on male irrationality (men are more likely to pursue science Ph.D's because they are less likely to make sensible decisions than women). However, the legions of women in lit PhD programs proves that they, too, can be incredibly irrational by this standard.

A few possible differences... Greenspun does include "quantitative ability" in his agument that "Adjusted for IQ, quantitative skills, and working hours, jobs in science are the lowest paid in the United States." This wouldn't include lit students. However, women who purse lit Ph.D's could still do law school, and perhaps B-school.

Another factor is that nobody is trying to trick women into lit PhD's by claiming that there's a shortage, whereas many people in high positions in the US government and corporations do promote the notion that there's a critical shortage of Americans pursuing PhDs in math, physical science, and engineering... though still, this doesn't really address the "irrationality" of lit PhDs - it just means that there isn't an industry of pushing people into degrees that don't pay in the humanities.

Anyway, this is a good observation, definitely a potential weakness in Greenspun's argument.
Sometimes you want to widen the divide.
You don't need to take any loans at all - the bank with $1B in deposits could just "loan" a subsidiary $9B to buy US treasuries with via the magic of fractional reserve banking. Then it's earning 4-5%.

The real problems I see with the plan is that 1) that rate is on 30 year treasuries - so you don't get income immediately and 2) inflation may exceed the return on those treasuries.

Why not just use $3B of the $9B the fed let's you effectively print to buy 300% overpriced assets (say, mortgage bonds) from shadow companies you and your buddies own and lend the rest to whomever eg: loans for overpriced homes.

So you spent $1B on the bank, $1B on the assets and sold the assets you sold for $3B. You end up with $1B in profit (100% ROI) and who cares about what happens to the rest?