skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
why not follow the established practice of writing to the journal and challenging the paper, or even submitting his own analysis of the public data and explaining how it improves on existing analyses?

It looks like, from the emails, (and I hate to prejudge) that "submitting his own analysis" is not going to be an option for him.

Which leads me to the discriminating factor -- if publicly available data and publicly available processes allow an independent to process the data and reach different conclusions and be published that's fine. But that's not what is happening here.

There is no mystery about what happens between Linus' source code and the compiled executable. It's imminently transparent and reproducible. Science should be exactly the same way.

I also agree with having alarm bells ring whenever you hear "OMG the conspiracy!". I would humbly add, however, that groupthink is a real and prevalent problem -- not just among academics but everybody. If your groupthink reaches a point where you view that it's "us against them" and that your job in academia is to defend a pre-established position? I'm thinking you should be fired and never work in that field again. It's critical among scientists more than anybody else to have an open mind and a large dose of humility. The entire idea of science is that what you're working on will be replaced or fine-tuned later on down the road. Everybody is going to be wrong to some degree. It's part of the job. Big egos are not such a great thing.

I don't have a lot of tolerance for taking public money and playing politics with it, even if you are proven correct in the long run. One man's troll is another man's skeptic, and it's your job as an honest scientist to deal with them. Good scientists should first and foremost always be open about data and methods. Good grief, it's 2009, publishing all of this on a wiki somewhere is trivial.
Well, I'm not a Senator. But one of my close friends works in the Senate, on climate change, and is responsible for briefing his Senator about the issue. And you know what? My friend doesn't really know that much about climate change. I would trust him less than the top commenter on a Hacker News articles. Hackers live in a world where they continuously have to make tough technical decisions that result in success or failure, that provides discipline at truth seeking. Staffers do not live in such a world. And while most hackers do not usually study climate change full time, on every comment thread on issue there are usually a select few who really know what they are talking about and get voted to the top.

I have two reasons for caring about climate change:

1) I find it intellectually fascinating. To me it unfolds like a mystery story, except one in which we're all involved. Thus I want to find the truth simply because I innately enjoy truth seeking.

2) Elite opinion matters for policy making. It might not matter directly. But maybe it's a NY Times reporter who reads a comment on Hacker News, that causes him to write an article differently, that is read by a Senate staffer. Or maybe it's a Hacker News reader who sees the article and decides to alter his career path and become a top scientist. Or maybe its a reader who forwards an article to his friend who is a policy maker.

Hacker News is a site of elite, intellectually curious people. Talking about important, controversial issues in any technical subject should be fair game. What's important is that whatever topic we discuss on this site, we discuss well (thoughtfully, politely, and backed with evidence).
"21 to nearly-30", yet you speak as if that is a large age range. 16-70 would be a large age range. Clearly whatever Thoughtscream is it only associates younger people.
Vimeo is hiring: http://vimeo.com/jobs
To make sure it's up, use a web monitoring service like: http://pingdom.com/
http://sitecanary.com/
http://dingitsup.com/
http://neighborhoodwat.ch/
http://uptimeparty.com/
http://aremysitesup.com/ or http://wasitup.com (my own creation).
ah, you meant that, ok :) Yeah, that was intentional :)
I've used this a bunch in prototyping and have to say that it is an incredible head start for anyone wanting to make a flash game, especially if you're not coming from a flash background but more of a programmer background.

I think that while it could be optimize the key is that it just works. No funny tweaks involved, you can build and go and have a game without deep diving into adobe documentation.
"We needed to find a way to make the filtering automatic and painless and thus provide maximum benefit to users," he wrote. "In summary, the XSS Filter will prove its worth by raising the bar and mitigating the types of XSS most commonly found across the web today, by default;, for users of Internet Explorer 8."

This XSS filter has to be one of the most braindead far-reaching decisions since the invention of magic_quotes in PHP.

It just smacks of marketing-driven technical incompetence. How could anyone at Microsoft think this could do anything but make the situation worse? As if XSS were somehow distinguishable from legit scripts. As if most sites have great XSS protection and just need a little help with the edge cases. I just came up with a brilliant idea to prevent buffer overrun exploits as well: a C compiler that doesn't allow indexes past 1000. Developers shouldn't be using those high indexes anyway, and they're just an accident waiting to happen.

Thanks for expanding the XSS vulnerability footprint Microsoft, browser parsing wasn't opaque enough yet. Now we can enjoy another decade of IE-induced headaches.
I fail to see how it's theistic. I'm an atheist myself, and in the opening segment it criticizes people who worship an actual God.
You're continually testing your skills with steadily-increasing difficulty. You have an inherent yet self-imposed objective (to beat your own score or someone else's). It requires high concentration but allows you to run on autopilot. It's textbook Flow Theory.

See:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flow_(psychology)

Also Raph Koster's book A Theory of Fun
Robert Downey Jr. 'eyeing' retirement
Hacked E-Mail Is New Fodder for Climate Dispute
Yes, the alberta HU bot plays limit. No limit is a vastly more complex game and the state-of-the-art in HU poker bots couldn't beat a competent low-stakes player.
You might be quite OK with that, but what about someone who is barely scraping by and wouldn't be OK with it?

If you want something fund it with your own effort, not by pointing a gun at someone and telling them it's good for them.
Thanks, good point, implemented it that way now.
Good point, I'll add it next.
Level playing field?

Startups can now do some of the things that large companies could do ten years ago; there's still quite a few things that large companies can do now that startups won't be able to do easily for another ten years.

Et cetera.
It clearly was secular humanist and not theistic at all, you just did a really good job of making the analogy to "regular" religions.

I give broad latitude for HN submissions particularly so I can pick up pieces like this. It reminded me of all the times great works of art have made me transcend the human experience. What a feeling! Wow!

I think the flagging system is terribly broken. You got whacked because of the word "God", plain and simple.

I did a 3-part series this summer "Does God Exist?" that examined the proofs for and against the existence of some sort of thing beyond our understanding. I didn't espouse a particular religious view (I really don't have any) and just tried to logically look at the debate from the point of view of being intellectually curious.

Every one of them were flagged. But I submitted all three anyway.

Keep up the good work and don't let the bastards get you down!
Using statistical tracking software is pretty standard for any serious player. It can help a lot playing full tables against 6 to 9 players as stats are used to get an idea of how opponents play, what their ranges are etc.

However I think, these programs are less useful for HU play. When you have only a single opponent and you are concentrating fully on their play your own powers of observation will pick up reads more quickly and consistently than the than the stat programs.
Indeed, there must be a trick somewhere. First, the guy opens 6 tables and doesn't win. Then there is this "brb" moment where he shuts down 5 tables and start to focus on the last one. The pattern is similar with the other opponents, first he loses, then something happens, then he starts to destroy his opponent.

There is a pattern here. Maybe the guy has programmed a tool/helper that can learn from the playstyle of his opponent really quick (multiple tables at first), making them more predictable and modifying the stats accordingly. I don't know, but something is definitly happening somewhere in the process.
"Killer app" usually means the app that motivates you to switch platforms. For PS3 or Xbox 360, it's the game that made you want to buy the console. For Windows in the '90s, you needed MS Office to get your work done, so you bought a PC. All other things being equal -- i.e. assuming the system has a web browser and the other essential software has cross-platform equivalents -- the killer app is what kills off rival platforms.

When I hear someone say "I wish I had an iPhone right now", it's usually because they're either (i) lost, or looking for something, and want access to Google Maps, or (ii) in the throes of gadget envy. The App Store addresses (ii), but not with any single app -- it's just the idea that there are thousands of fun toys that only iPhone users get to play with.

So there are a couple of killer features, but nothing that can't be replicated on other phones. Not necessarily as well, but that's not the point: without exclusivity, the iPhone will not get the same kind of dominance Windows has.
Ask HN: Hosting for multiple sites
Any hosting recommendations for a developer with multiple sites?
I have looked at a reseller account with hostgator, rackspace cloud sites and few others.
I'm sure some will provide kiosks chasing after similar goals as with self-checkout. I don't think adoption will be complete during this down economic turn and it may be cheaper and more customer friendly to provide floor staff again once the economy improves. Sure this is mostly wishful thinking.
You can tell Nate Silver's really definitely right, because he uses lots of exclamation points when he's strawmanning his opponents.
It was written for the poker community, not a general audience. As with any complex field, you need a specialized vocabulary to communicate effectively.

Further to the other reply:

- the rail/railbirds - observers to an online poker match

- hyperaggro - a very aggressive player (bets and raises a lot), such as Isildur

- n-tabling - playing multiple online poker games simultaneously.

- HU - heads-up, a two player poker game, such as the one between Isildur and Tom "Durrr" Dwan

- degen - dengenerate, someone who takes too many risks and plays at stakes higher than they can afford

Rereading the article, I can see what you mean. From the outside it can look like all the jargon is just to exclude outsiders, but it really is needed to communicate effectively.

Ah, this article makes me want to go back to poker...
It doesn't come from scribd. scribd automatically scrape every PDF they find and put it on their site. They do this without considering that many of the PDFs have copyright notices, and require the copyright holder to pay a lawyer to issue a formal C&D before they do anything about it.

I think what they do is reprehensible and I think they're scum. I don't know why the powers that be at HN automatically add the link to scribd.
It's kind of hard to bait and switch repeatedly over the number of hands this guy was playing. I think the number 10,000 hands was floating around in the article somewhere, for one match alone. And at the highest stakes players' edges are pretty thin. It's foolish to think that

a) you have a significant and consistent edge over most other high stakes players (Tom Dwan, Brian Townsend, Patrick Antonius, etc.),

b) those players would be fooled repeatedly by bait and switching without adjusting their game, and

c) you could run such a strategy successfully without having ever played those players at those stakes online before.
More likely he just took a break to calm himself and get his mind right.

Poker is intensely psychologically draining and the biggest enemy of winning poker players is tilt. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tilt_%28poker%29

Most good players will constantly asses their play for signs of tilt and when they spot it, stop and take steps to address it before continuing.
How much traffic does each site see? Any decent web server will allow you to do virtual hosting: lighttpd and apache do.
Why .NET Micro Really Went Open Source
I've been using ARM assembly language since the early 1990s. It's a beautiful instruction set, far nicer than the 8080 and Z80 I started with (and which can still be seen in the x86 line) and the m68k line I contracted for.

I've built robots with and compilers for Z80s, and programmed embedded m68k for food, but it was the ARM family that I remember with particular fondness. Every instruction being conditional, clean registers, orthogonal instructions. Simply fun to program.
The USPSTF recommendations for breast cancer screening: Not the final word
Not in my experience. Since the maps are generated on-the-fly, I think the gaps between buildings are dependent upon your current velocity. I am not 100% sure, though.
I think more to the point was that they used basically the full color spectrum to cover a few percentage points. It wouldn't have been nearly as dramatic if the color spectrum were mapped to the 0-100% range. The country really changes colors radically from national unemployment at 5% vs. 8%.
Can anyone explain how the browser can make a site unsafe? I thought rule #1 was "don't trust the client".
Health, Wealth, and Time
Google does the same thing, but no one ever speaks up about that. Realistically speaking, if you don't want your content to be scraped by such services, put it behind a login page. We as content owners need to stop fighting against technology; it's not a battle that can (or should, really) be won.
"He has cemented his name in the annals of online poker as one of the strongest players of all time."

Really? After just one week of running good?

"Since the time I began writing this article, Isildur has lost 2.5M to Patrik Antonius in PLO, cutting his winnings on FTP in half."

What a surprise. Cemented, indeed.
Ghostbusters "Stay Puft" scene re-created using Apple Keynote
Ha! I doubt it's much different in the US.
Which means: don't do it yourself, unless you're an expert, which you are most likely not. Suck it up, it costs more money, but when you're just starting out and can't hire people dedicated to managing your servers, you should just pay another company to do it, otherwise you're just being penny wise. Downtime costs a lot more.
In that case I fully recommend that you also check out Steve Furber's "ARM System-on-Chip Architecture" as a very readable introduction to ARM assembler and an easy way to learn about the microarchitecture and design philosphy of early ARM processors (ARM7 and ARM9) [Furber was one of the original engineers that worked on the first ARM design].

The architecture has come along quite a bit since those days so if you'd like the most up to date release you need to look for the ARM v7AR Architecture Reference Manual which you can get (with a click-through) here:
http://infocenter.arm.com/help/topic/com.arm.doc.ddi0406b/in...

This will cover you up to the latest cores like Cortex-A8 inside the Beagleboard and Cortex-A9. Enjoy!
For those of you who aren't aware, that Canabalt game that was posted on HN earlier was written with Flixel.
Google provides search so people can find your site, and then sends people to your site.

Scribd do neither - they appear to take your content, put it on their own site, and provide nothing in return.

I, as a content owner, expect that a copyright notice should be respected, and I don't expect to have to track down every copy and sue the plagarists and thieves. I've certainly stopped providing PDF references to HN because they aid and abet such theft.

I'm not averse to technology, and I freely provide much of my written material for free, on my sites. I just expect to have people come to my sites to read them, and not have parasites like scribd steal the material without remorse or recompense.
Lord help us all if Rails 3 is so different than 2 that they're WAITING to make it compatible with MagLev.
> A councilmember mentioned the idea that we should help infrastructure providers protect their businesses.

No, we shouldn't help anyone protect their businesses. We should let them protect their businesses. Regulating a business because we think they're doing it wrong is just as bad as doing all sorts of other proactive measures to help them stay in business.

Interestingly, Wilson apparently changed his mind since he wrote this a month ago:

> But if the FCC does not set the ground rules and insure open access to the infrastructure for everyone, that will hamper investment in what runs on top of the infrastructure.

http://www.avc.com/a_vc/2009/10/net-neutrality.html

Basically, he's arguing for one group of businesses (telcos) to be regulated, so another (coincidentally those that he makes a living of investing in) can do better.

I'm sorry, but that's just not a coherent argument.
Just use a message queue with multiple consumers, no need to reinvent the wheel.

If your server (or whichever process that's making the log entries) is multi-processing (multi-threading, pre-forking, etc.) then all the log entries will be interwoven and mixed, if each log entry is > PIPE_BUF.
But I can do internet, email and chat using any one of the major OS's out there now. What could a web OS do better than a regular OS + browser now?
All this learning means nothing until you make something happen
That assumes a high correlation between validity, acceptance and success.

Peer review itself is conservative, reactionary and political. There is a strong "confirmation" bias in what gets published. This is good, I suppose, but:

It takes a lot more than being right to get your results out there and accepted by your peers. And if your results contradict the existing consensus, god help you! You'd have to be very politically astute to be published at all, and hang on to your funding. Conversely, if your results appear to support the existing consensus, or can be doctored up to do so, then the "validity" requirement is greatly relaxed. Either way, political concerns will always play a role.
Why do you think those additional processes require maintenance? Phusion Passenger maintain them automatically without the sysadmin having to do anything. Even if Apache crashes they'll clean up themselves gracefully.
Impressed by "Maglev" Ruby Implementation
I download several a day an my browser auto-fills bogus information; I religiously use mytrashmail.com and similar services.
Arm chair that changes the look of your living space.
Successful Entrepreneurs (in Private): The extreme importance of faith and God
Key-Value Stores: a practical overview
PartyKalender - PartyPictures - FlirtCity & Chat - PartyGuide.ch
Vistaprint is hiring for a ton of roles as well. Software Engineering, Project Managers, Operations, Creative, Marketing, other. We also do a very limited number of internships.

Locations include Lexington (Boston area), MA, Barcelona, Windsor Ontario, Venlo Holland, Winterthur Switzerland.

http://careers.vistaprint.com/
Pinvoke - Icons and pixel fonts
I don't think email is the right medium to ask whether he is interested in being a cofounder. I think email is a fine medium to say, "Hey - I've got something I want to talk with you about. Got time for lunch on Thursday?"
Mostly low traffic. I'm just looking for recommendations.
Harvard University

The business has managed to create one of the strongest global brands after more than 350 years in its market, and is expected to produce the best quality product among its competitors without charging the highest prices.
they claims to be fast. do they provide bench compare with alternatives ?
Dupe!
Ask HN: I want to learn statistics and data mining
I want to learn statistics and data mining. I can't afford to buy many books right now, so I'm asking for one or two on the topic, and also one or two available online, as ordering through amazon would take a month for shipping.

I'd like to get your opinions before spending time on random books. Thanks a lot.

P.S. My math background is not very strong but I'm willing to learn.
As far as I know (correct me if I'm wrong) passenger is maintenance free. Anything else wouldn't make much sense anyways. It maintains a pool of workers and distributes load over them, just as it should be.

mod_wsgi for apache seems to do the same so I should have been more specific: I'm still waiting for a proper mod_wsgi for nginx. The nginx mod_wsgi is not the same as the apache version. It has some very unfortunate problems which effectively rule it out for production use:

http://blog.dscpl.com.au/2009/05/blocking-requests-and-nginx...
DRW Trading Group is hiring. Its a group of ridiculously smart folks. You'll have fun. Chicago, IL.

http://career.pereless.com/index.cfm?cid=83084
I guess the question is why are people still building/managing their own servers for startups? EC2 and Rackspace cloud is cost wise equal, with the ability to have cold standbys and somebody else manage the infrastructure.

The only case that I see for having your own machines is for a development environment... Though if there was a reputable firm hosting SVN/Trac/Bugzilla etc. one might not even need to have anything more than boxes for compiles -- in this world it's your macbook..
It would be interesting to find out who performed this crack, and who was the paymaster.
Server side JavaScript with node.js
Cheap Web Design
web design by total creation total creation specialise in web design in the UK London They offer cheap web design.
Or in the nicely chosen words of Tim Bray, "A lot of people don't get along with Dave"
Er.. this isn't the dupe. It seems a bit trite to be saying I posted first but google is doing something odd with their links that come out of google reader and it would appear HN isn't recognizing the dupes.
I think what you see are scientists trying to do their job in an incredibly politically-charged climate.

E&E is not a peer-reviewed scientific journal, but a social science publication (or perhaps trade journal?), whose editor (Sonja) has claimed: “I’m following my political agenda — a bit, anyway. But isn’t that the right of the editor?”.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_and_Environment

I imagine if I were a scientist it would be immensely frustrating to see politicians citing articles published in E&E as if it were a credible scientific journal, knowing that most people are not aware of the difference.
From the linked page:

Why ? There are already mod_wsgi, flup and lot of protocols (fastcgi, scgi...).
Is this faster or simpler to configure ?

Stop acting as a Rails user ! Deploy of python web applications is not a problem.

No need of ultra-hypeous next-fu*king-useless almost-working deploy technology.

The challenge in the python-world is now "features", uWSGI is a feature rich
application, developer (and administrator/security paranoid/business environments)
friendly. Stop.

Other deploy systems, works very well, this one does only more things.