skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
It's not useless - it's just limited.

"Warmest decade in 160 years" still tells you something. It just doesn't tell you _everything_. As we can never have perfect data on everything, learning to take things in context and understand what they are good for (and what they aren't) is a vital skill.
Actually, couldn't you cut into the power cable instead of the wall plug?
I usually just check my karma, if it has moved quite a bit then I go and check the reaction to my comment(s).
It's not that I need to answer in real time - it's that checking takes effort. It's yet another thing I have to remember to do.
Exec summary: whine whine, bitch bitch.

I wont pay editorial content online. Period. I dont even use google news either. They are not the problem.

I pay for subscriptions on dead trees to arrive at my house because that is the only way I can read it in peace. Now if Murdoch has a idea that his failing businesses are failing because of the internet, good riddance. Have fun selling used cars instead, atleast they cant be digitally copied.
Yes, how dare a company run by an Indian CEO put out such a remarkable device...they should be giggling their heads off.

EDIT: Based on the immediate downvotes I've received I would like to know: why should Apple engineers be giggling? Honest question.
The function's body is not part of the object itself

Most all of the time, yes. But the function could have been dynamically allocated to an instance of the object. You don't know from the definition of the question. A dynamic function, presumably, would be picked up by the dtor.
Brandbook - Custom designed notebooks
I would like an app that would scan my mp3s then generate a few Pandora stations from that. "Rap Music I listened to in High school" for example
Artificii de Anul Nou, focuri de artificii, artificii evenimente
What is AT&T’s Service Obligation in their TOS?
I pushed 30 of my programming related projects to github
I guess they buy their bandwidth symmetrically. Thus, as long as they have more outgoing traffic they can charge for, giving incoming away for free doesn't really 'cost' them much (off-course the do lose income on this, but not real costs). It's still nice tho! :)
Software process improvements with Lean and Kanban at BNP Paribas
I believe JGC is becoming a personal hero of mine: he's already deep into coding an analysis of the data:

http://www.jgc.org/blog/2009/12/google-earth-view-of-met-off...
"Arbiters of truth" ? Smug self-righteousness and self congratulation seem to get a lot of upvotes on Hacker News.
"Warmest on record" seems like a pretty accurate way to put it, especially with the quotes.

What do you want them to write? "This decade 'warmest on record' but actually don't worry, because some people think that doesn't mean anything, so actually maybe we shouldn't publish this article at all, after all it may rub some nay-sayers the wrong way, and what kind of news organisation would we be if we ever published news that not everyone agrees with 100%"?
You're being ironic, aren't you?

As a sketch that may well do the trick, but as a demonstration of drawing ability it's abysmal.
I know it is stupid to bite, but was this the best trolling you can do?

A claim that higher expressibility in a language (natural or not) doesn't imply better expressibility -- given that the user knows his tools.

(Well, your "argument" could also be taken as "anything that can't be written in standard Python isn't worth to write; that is all the expressiveness needed ever, Amen". Gödel might want to say something about that, but never mind.)

Dillinger(!) is claimed to have said "Bonnie and Clyde gave bank robbing a bad name". You give trolls a bad name.
Can you name one common instance of where working on live wires is done quite regularly. I'm not talking about the guys flying around in helicopters inspecting HV lines. Firemen don't even do that. They go straight to the breaker and kill it for the building.

So where else is handling live wiring done. I'm honestly curious.
I would be tempted to call these "co-objects" since they are in some sense dual to your standard objects.
Going to have to take a break from coding for a while to do $DAY_JOB, but tonight I plan to do the following:

1. Extract per location anomaly data and turn that into graphs so you can go from any location on Google Maps to a little chart of your local temperature anomaly.

2. Produce a KML animation of global warming since 1850 in Google Earth. For this I need to reproduce the Met Office's gridding of data as used in the HadCRUT3 dataset. Luckily the techniques used are nicely described in a paper and so I should be able to recode their algorithm, output KML and paint the global with animated anomaly data.
refresh, luck and memory; usually if it drops off the main comments page I usually forget about it :)
The only way to access your personal twitter stream is via authenticated access, like any other twitter client.
First Idea in that statement: There are many people who are good implementers or good designers. Only a small group can do both.
Second Idea: Normally companies employ the good implementer as an programmer.
Third Idea: There is another person who designs the product, a product manager.

Maybe it is because english is not my mothertounge, but should the conclusion not be as I understood it "U should pay the programmer to design" but "companies employ good designers as product managers"? Than U don't have any problem with a designer who cannot implement and an implementer who cannot design.
PG, what do I miss here that U think a company should make people to do both jobs, if they are most likely just good at one of both?
Claims that 2009 is the hottest year? Really? The past few years have been cold and wet in the UK compared to the previous few - in a manner that would tie in well with the solar cycle.

I'm not saying yes or no on all the other crap (and it's possible the temperature is offset by hotter temperatures elsewhere) but 2009 has certainly been one of the wettest years here, and not the warmest.
I tend not to, then now and again I'll look at my comments and see if there's anything worth looking into.
I agree with your point in general, but if coffeebus' assertion that SSD access will become limited by the bus, it still makes sense to allow programs to be sent to run directly on the SSD. Remember, video cards originally were just big ram buffers that were accessed directly by the CPU, but that wasn't fast enough so now we have shaders on the cards. Having something similar in an SSD will allow a lot of data searching and crunching to happen on the SSD, and it'll run in parallel with whatever else the CPU might be busy doing.
My take on it:

The multitude of useful apps that are already on the market and can be easily ported for maemo makes it a very strong player.

I know I'm not mainstream market, not even close, but KeePassX, Vim, Mplayer, VLC, Xmms, Abiword. Those are valuable open source projects that are already there for the maemo.
A Look Into User Representation
That would be the kind of car dealership commercials you see in Silicon Valley...
Here's a great presentation on understanding just how limited the data is: http://web.mit.edu/esi/symposia/symposium-2009/wunsch.html
"160 years" tells you a lot more than the current title: for example it tells us that the data is probably a bit useless for making any kind of prophecy about how bad the climate is :)

160 years isn't even a 10th of the time humanity has hung around for (in a "civilised" form). It doesn't even register beyond that :)

I know it is an accurate statement and for people like us who know the limitations it's not too bad. The problem is titles like this are deliberately used to try and cover up the limitations of the data.

It's an interim step for some official to claim "this is the warmest decade since records began, panic everyone". Joe public has no idea of why the limitations are important and how this then forms a small part of the larger puzzle.
The Power of Free
The world of e-commerce is about change forever.
Classic David vs Goliath.
The "a" in the title is wrong; "software" is a mass noun, not a count noun.
Hacker Dojo needs a hacker to fix their HTML.
Kind of a simplistic post, but one thing I did like was the pink dot at the end of the first column and the beginning of the second. It gave a really clear indication that you didn't have to scroll past the bottom of the quote to continue reading the text. I'd like to see this convention get used more in the magazine-style blogs where formatting is not quite as predictable.
Getting 100 miles up is one thing, getting 100 miles up and then also travelling at 18000 mph is another. You need an extra mv^2/2 energy, which is quite a lot.

To get to 160km ~ 100 miles you need about 1.6 MJ/kg.

To travel at 8km/s you need about 32 MJ/kg.

There's your main difference.
Rutgers EAD Finding Aids (a new prototype)
Seeing replies to one's posts is easy, just click on "threads" at the top of the page.
Because Apple's rumored to launch a tablet themselves in the next 6 months, and with all the scandals surrounding this one, they'll have even less competition.
That's the "comments" page I meant above, sorry that wasn't clearer.
The arrogant VC: entrepreneurs share their horror stories
I guess the implication was that something that Apple had designed would have been better in some way. I don't think it was intended as a slur against Fusion Garage in particular. I imagine someone would have made a similar comment regardless of who had produced this.
Implementing A Scripting Engine
I met one of their engineers earlier this year.

He said it runs Linux, WebKit and GTK+ for UI. Of course if they hadn't changed it since then.
Compiling Scheme to C with flat closure conversion
I think he means things like this:

http://www.navigo.com/wm/paint/auth/cezanne/sl/cezanne.coin-...

The color is wonderful, the objects are wonderful, but they are hovering above the table and the fruit on the platter is painted like it's going to roll out. The perspective isn't right either.

Does anyone else feel uneasy if they see a painting with wrong perspective? It totally destroys the beauty for me.
While it's vague, I think the spirit of the "challenge" is that once a command has been used, you should not use it again.

Although one can make a cat() function in bourne-esque shells such as bash quite easily:

cat() { while IFS="" read l ; do echo "$l" ; done < $1 ; } ; cat /var/tmp/xmas.txt

:P

Bunch of other stuff you can do with only bash built-ins if you manage to completely hose your box but still have a root shell: http://www.h-i-r.net/2009/08/cratered-your-linux-box-here-ar...
The problem is titles like this are deliberately used to try and cover up the limitations of the data.

Please try to assume incompetence before malice. Headline writers optimize for punch not completeness.
Here you go:

http://hackernews.heroku.com/AndrewDucker

I have mine on my RSS aggregator.
You got downvoted because you baselessly accused the parent poster of being racist in his comment. If you had left out that comment and just asked the question, you would have likely been upvoted instead.

Apple engineers might be laughing because their prototype tablet - which they have likely been working on for a year - is probably far beyond the the JooJoo pad in innovation. The JooJoo pad is not bad, but it's also not particularly innovative (an iPod Touch resized to 10" would already be a better product, just to give an example).

Also, in order for the JooJoo pad to succeed, it needs strong marketing. Apple is the master of marketing, and the team behind the JooJoo pad abandoned someone who would have been an effective marketer and buzz-generator (and who gave it a great name - the CrunchPad). No matter what happened between Fusion Garage and Arrington, FG should have hired a competent marketing team to come up with a name and strategy for promoting the device.
If you haven't already maxed the RAM on the server in question, that's generally the first step.

When (the active working set) of your DB is much larger than the RAM your server can support, either get a bigger server or put heavy random IO loads on SSDs.

You're asking it as an A-xor-B when it's really a case of A-then-B.
For a potential reading pad I'd say that screen size is pretty huge advantage, especially if you are reading texts that also contain images. If there is a pdf reader for the joojoo I might actually be interested.
In case you haven't noticed, that rumour has been flying around for years now.

Someone has already made a device which they are going to start selling from next week. And you think that makes less competition for an imaginary device?

I couldn't think of a better definition of fanboyism.
The suggestion in the article seems to be that only designers are noble people, which is a bit silly.
The design of an iPhone application
Agreed, there are only 16 decades on record, so even if the average global temperature variation was random, there would be a 6.25% chance that the current decade is the warmest one.
Henry Baker's archive of research papers
I usually use the "threads" link (what you call the "comments" page) to keep track of current conversations, but I also use site-restricted Google search, e.g.,

http://www.google.com/search?q=site%3Anews.ycombinator.com+b...

on whatever subject is of current interest to double-check whatever threads may be attracting new comments. The interface here does require a lot more drilling down to follow my submissions than to follow replies to my comments, which I agree is an inconvenience.
First look at the Facebook AS3 API - Basics and hints
I have been recently using the Facebook As3 API in a project involving two banners and a campaign site. And the point of this post is to give you some insight of what it is like to work with this library, and also give you some handy hints and pointers.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2009/nov/09/mark-boyle...
Sorry the emphasis was wrong: I don't mean the headline writer (though potentially it was written to sell the story ;)) but others who pick up the story.
> Scraping might violate the TOS

If an orgasnisation publishes stuff on web pages, they can hardly object if others choose to access that data!
Are you surprised by that? This is a site sponsored by an organization that looks for elite people in order to sponsor them as they start businesses. As a result, a large part of the crowd here consists of people who either think they're elite or who want to learn how to be elite.

Combine that with the fact that computer people have a tendency towards being smug/rude/insecure, and you have an audience that's drawn like a magnet towards anything remotely congratulatory.
Yep. STFU Rupe and put your money where your mouth is.
"The paintings made between 1430 and 1500 are still unsurpassed."

Art has progressed so much in the last 500 years that this comparison is utterly absurd. Francis Bacon comes to mind as a painter whose works simply cannot be compared to earlier pieces.
I would have thought though that 160 years when studying climate, is absolutely nothing.
If by elite people you mean talented entrepreneurs then you might have something ;-)
The Perfect Server - OpenSUSE 11.2 x86_64 [ISPConfig 2]
I've always wished Hacker News had a Reddit-style reply notification (i.e. something like Reddit's orangered envelope).

It's not just that I want to see who replied to my comments. Sometimes I ask a question or hope for a response from somebody else, but it seems somewhat rare that the other person actually notices I have posted a reply on their comment.
You need to understand that this is entirely a subjective opinion. There are forms of art where accuracy is prized, but in any kind of modern art, any rule can be broken if the result is interesting.

Are you saying you like none of Picasso's later work? Or even Dalí's?
I tag the HN page -- or any other blog page with comments I want to follow -- at delicious.com with the tag "c" (for comments; the one letter is easy to type).

I've bookmarked the delicious page for my "c" tags.

Then I check whenever I feel the urge and want to spend the time.

It's not as nice as the old co.mments.com site, but there you go.

I don't really want email notifications of comments; I don't need yet another distraction.
Ask HN: Non-CRU sources for a global temperature record?
As most of us know by now, the CRU was a major source of global temperature records including the famous "hockey stick" promoted by the IPCC and the media. However, their results have now become untrustworthy; their data is lost/deleted, they attempt to manipulate the scientific process, and their code is atrocious.

In various comment threads on this topic, comments have suggested the existence of paleoclimate records independent of the CRU's work. Can someone who knows more about this field than I do give me a pointer to these independent records?
The emphasized part is a quote. It just happens to be a long blocky quote, so it looks merely like a bold post.
Trick in a scientific context is just a clever thing to do. It's not a deceitful trick.

A lot of scientific papers use the term trick.
Yes but it is the global avg. not just your neck of the woods. In fact the reason London has been cold and wet is because the added heat has melted a large amount of ice in your neck of woods. Meaning there is quite a bit of extra cold water just hanging around making it cold and wet for you.
This is a great idea. I pushed my own projects to bitbucket lately. It's much better to fork, or monitor projects this way. If anyone still keeps their potentially useful projects on a blog or in some forgotten `~/tmp` directory - please upload them - it doesn't take much time, and someone else might find exactly when it's needed.

github/bitbucket is the new pastebin ;) (for projects)
Popular Bookmarks on Delicious
Yeah, but it's still hella fun to throw at a class of undergrads on a Friday afternoon. :-)
Google cracks down on fraudulant "Google Money" schemes.
This technology has been around for quite a while. I was able to attend a High Technology Crime Investigation Association meeting because I was helping with the computer forensics coursework at a local college (featuring a police academy and administration of justice program) and I got to use this very device.

They've made it about as safe as can be. You just can't be a complete moron. As long as the data has been handled properly, yes it's still valid as evidence. Hooking a computer up to a UPS in-situ, then plugging in the equivalent of a USB mouse will not invalidate the evidence.
Blogging strategy: copy what the clever web app businesses do
Yeah, Paul is talking up his ass.

Afraid I don't know enough about programmers or painters to spout names, but in any other artistic medium you've got a mix of all types. I'll use film as my example because film's a medium in which you have a hundred people working together, and very elaborate roles evolved to let people do exactly what they want to do.

Some directors function as merely directors. They decide what they like, and they have other people execute. But other directors can and do insist on controlling other parts of the creative process. I'm not a fan of James Cameron, but the guy writes, directs, and edits his movies, and he's very involved in set design as well. Some props he insists on making himself because he doesn't trust anybody else to do it right. So there's a guy who knows what he wants to do, and is also capable of the incredible technical feats required to pull it off.
I'm not really a programmer, so I can't volunteer for this, but: Assaf Arkin, who ran the co.mments.com site, might be willing to let some true programmer work with PG to bolt his code onto the HN site somehow - his main site is http://labnotes.org/.
... and the article has random line breaks which makes it almost impossible to read. :)
Cezanne was not in competition with photography.
Thanks. Now I can stop looking for the associated footnote at the bottom of the page. I couldn't figure out what that dot was doing there.
Gosh I would love to play around with this.

Thanks for taking the time to do this, John.
This comment and the votes for it are just sad, and you people should be ashamed of yourselves. Welcome to groupthink, dorks.

(I'll proudly sacrifice my mojo just to sneer at this stupidity.)
Nasa has one
http://data.giss.nasa.gov/gistemp/

But then there may be problems with that as well but they at least seem to be playing fairly.
http://news.mongabay.com/2007/0811-nasa_snafu.html

There is also the National climatic data center
http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/oa/ncdc.html
Ah yes, vote me down, you're elite people you are.
And there's the possibility that gobal warming could shut off the warm water that comes to the UK from Florida. If that happens the UK would have weather more suited to its latitude (think Moscow)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_cities_by_latitude#60%C...

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

Of course, there's a chance it might go the other way and we'd get an extra rise in temperature.
"...the ranking makes sense."
PR and rank are often correlated, but PR is not a good predictor of actual rank.

"How in the world Altavista has a PR of 9 is a mystery though."
A large volume of natural links is probably the explanation here. altavista.com probably ended up in some trusted repository as well, which may render it relatively immune to "penalties" or other dampening factors.
Mind your slanguage: teenagers finding it hard to speak without slang.
Craigslist, Ebay Face Off in Closely Watched Trial
Good point.

And some degree of overconfidence and maybe hubris is perhaps necessary to start a company and to suffer the slings and arrows of that experience long enough to have a shot at success.

Channel that kind of energy into creating something useful, and you can do a lot of good in the world.

So it comes with the territory. But the self-applause can get a little monotonous when there isn't also interesting new content.
Recommended Cron Practices (SysAdvent Day 8)
The actual article is pretty good. I just think the title in particular, probably due to headline length restrictions, draws a fairly arbitrary line between on record and not.

We know what the temperature was like before 160 years ago from lots of different sources. Indeed that's a big bit of climate science right there.

To act as if there's a big discontinuity between those and recorded temps is a bit simplistic. After all those man-made measurements can be off for a million different reasons too, so you still need to do some science to e.g. average them and throw out crazy outliers because of malfunctions.
Free inbound data transfer to S3 until June 30, 2010
I'm merely trying to explain the line of thought of many people to the downmodded parent poster. No need to become rude.
Best Tools To improve your Best Twitter Experience.
They're not random, they're at 75 characters! But granted, it does make it difficult to read. Transforming between soft line breaks and no line breaks is a trivial ignored computing problem in my opinion.
I won't downvote you, but you're accusing a bunch of people of upvoting that comment just because it was already upvoted, then insulting those people, then sneering at them and calling them stupid. If your goal is really to reprimand the community, you don't do it by being a douchenozzle yourself.

I upvoted the comment because, for all Wired is jizzing over it, we're talking about a product that was just released. There're no really interesting information here. And from what I see of the product, it looks painfully limited. Perhaps it executes well, but it's just not doing much. Compare to Apple, which makes products that do a lot and still manage to do it well.

So when Wired mentions how it's just like the iPhone zomg!!!, I get this little voice in my head telling me the author doesn't know what he's talking about. That makes me more willing to upvote somebody making a snide comment that I agree with.

Maybe it's not the most intelligent HN comment, but how's that become groupthink to upvote it? How's it stupid or worth your losing your mojo?