skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
What? Weren't you here for the Ron Paul epidemic of 2008?

I'd agree with you except 1) it's a story about server hacking, 2) it's a story about not only politics but science, and 3) there's been a long-term trend of posting climate articles on HN

I get tired of being sucked into the political side of the debate -- no winners there -- but dang it, climate change science is a really fascinating topic from a purely intellectual standpoint. The Earth is not just a black body, and various carbon-based molecular absorption spectra is not the do-all, end-all metric that pop science writers say it is. CA programming has a default behavior of producing runaway models, as Wolfram so aptly points out in NKS. Lots of cool and tech-weenie stuff in here. (But also lots of emotion, so I concede that it ticks a lot of folks off. But 100% "Erlang Innards" is probably not going to happen any time soon)
So when doctors say "we need to vaccinate all our kids through massive government intervention", that's OK?
This is a reasonable question to ask.

If global warming is "wrong" but the accepted answer, pollution heavy businesses go through some inefficiencies and there's a smaller amount of pollution production.

If global warming is "right", but not accepted as something that requires response, potential existential crises ensue.

It seems like betting on a Jack-high hand with your life on the line.
Yeah, I get where you're coming from.

I think this is rooted in a false dichotomy (edit: in the original author's post more than anywhere else), though. You could tidy up the typography of Reddit and it'd look nicer, be easier to read, and be less visually noisy without adding a single "Web 2.0" gewgaw. But it'd change the feel of the place.

Incidentally, The Elements of Typographic Style (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Elements_of_Typographic_Sty...) is an amazing book; I reckon a bunch of people here would love it.
Now That's Weird with Ross Hemsworth
Arguing that an idea doesn't make sense and then doing just that a few months later is Steve Jobs' modus operandi.
Software on the shelf
The thing that always puzzles me about the working from home discussions is why programmers seem to be the only ones affected by it.

I hang out on a few boards for machinists, many of whom have one-man businesses, some run out of their garages. I have never heard any of them mention issues with working alone except for safety-related concerns: having a lathe attempt to rip your arm off when there's no help nearby can be a problem...

Similar for other fields I can think of where people primarily work alone. Farmers come to mind. In fact, most of my wife's work is done with no other people around (she trains horses) and it's perfectly normal for her to not see other people from the time I leave home in the morning to when our son comes home from school.

So what's different about software professionals?
Binge Eating
"Dishonest scientists are still scientists"

I disagree. If they are not following the scientific method, but fudging their data to agree with their pre-determined conclusions, they are not scientists.
The only one that seemed pretty bad to me was:
The fact is that we can’t account for the lack of warming at the moment and it is a travesty that we can’t. The CERES data published in the August BAMS 09 supplement on 2008 shows there should be even more warming: but the data are surely wrong. Our observing system is inadequate.

They often claim to be able to explain, or even to have predicted, the recent cooler years by weather patterns etc., yet here they don't seem to believe their own explanations.
Remember that they have to resize the picture files before uploading them to the Haystack. That's computation you want to push as much to the client side as possible.
"PS why is there " a session entitled, "Is Open Source Old News?" at the Microsoft PDC (Professional Developers Conference)" The mixed messages on Open Source from Microsoft continue."

Is this a rhetorical question?
Thanks guys, they're all gone. I appreciate all the feedback and would love more. I'll sort through the ton of emails I got and notify everyone who sent me an email of their account status.
Tech that makes you smile
So you think it doesn't matter if there is an app store or an approval process...?
http://www.filehosting.org/file/details/75150/chrome-os-0.4....
"Dear Phil and Gabi,
I’ve attached a cleaned-up and commented version of the matlab code that I wrote for doing the Mann and Jones (2003) composites. I did this knowing that Phil and I are likely to have to respond to more crap criticisms from the idiots in the near future, so best to clean up the code and provide to some of my close colleagues in case they want to test it, etc. Please feel free to use this code for your own internal purposes, but don’t pass it along where it may get into the hands of the wrong people." [emphasis theirs]

A lot of the excerpted emails look like this- fairly understandable examples of scorn directed to people who produce "crap criticism". You wouldn't want anyone trying to square the circle to email you to dispute your work, would you?
Without the App Store, there would be dozens of download portals and review sites and countless blogs for iPhone apps doing marketing for you, just as they work for every other product or service in the internet. I don't think anyone is missing this, geekery aside. A free market approach rewards competition. Anything else, diminishes it.
I'm of the opinion that it's similar to cookies from a privacy perspective.

When a non-technical user hears about the concept it sounds a bit scary, and it may have potential for abuse. However, used properly I don't think it is overly intrusive.
Politics got injected because a lot of money is being spent on climate change research, clean energy, carbon credits, etc. Kyoto was all politics. A lot of money stands to be made or lost on climate change issues. You think Al Gore is doing what he is doing for free?
The snippets of emails I've seen that allegedly come from the Hadley archive do not, in fact, constitute "proof of tampering".
Regarding politicizing the debate, riddle me this: which side usually asks to see more data and more transparency?

And which side accuses the others of being greedy corporate shills while comparing them to creationists and holocaust deniers?
Microsoft Student - Visual Studio, turn your vision into reality
I think you would have to explicitly define climate change skeptic. That term leads to confusion. The set of people who do not believe there is any evidence for climate warming are strawdogs -- they are simply wrong.

However, there are other groups that are conflated with the straw dog group.

Examples:

There are people who claim climate models are wrong, as they have lost all predictive ability over the past ten years. They are correct that these models have proven to be bad models; they are incorrect in assuming, as bad models, this necessarily means temperature will not be as high. It is also possible that the temperature could be higher than forecast. It may refute their estimations, but not offering a better model weakens their argument.

There are others who claim that not only is the evidence overwhelmingly in favor of global warming, but anthropogenic warming. However, they claim that the costs of adopting "do anything to stop this" measures are ill-advised. The costs would be too high, they don't take into account any benefits, and they completely discount the emergence of new technologies.

Skepticism is a good thing. When someone practices bad science by massaging data, it's bad science, regardless of what side of line they are on.
Personally, I roughly fit the mold of my second example. I think global warming is obviously true; sun cycle theories are wholly inadequate; anthropogenic makes the most sense; and spending hundreds of billions on existing technologies for reducing emissions is a foolhardy plan.
Software Irresponsibility
But there a lot of decisions like that.
1. If we don't invest in SETI aliens could come and wipe us out; seems like a bad bet to make we should fund set at 10000%
2. We need better protection from asteroids one could wipe us out; we need to tax every human being @ 80 % to build a giant defense network.
3. There could be a disease that wipes out the human race we need to increase the amount of spending on health care... etc etc

Looking at the extreme edges with out an idea of probabilities is an easy way to get confused.
Speaking of skepticism...

Skeptics Handbook
http://joannenova.com.au/global-warming

Skeptics Handbook II
http://joannenova.com.au/2009/11/skeptics-handbook-ii-global...

It's always been about the science.
Especially eye-opening was how they waited two years after release hoping the game would spread by word of mouth, it didn't, so they did a traditional marketing push and succeeded.
Grigori Perelman: The genius in hiding
Pascal asked a similar question:

If the bible is wrong but the accepted answer, you lose a finite amount of hedonic pleasure in the near term and there are some short term benefits (smaller amount of killing/stealing/coveting).

If the bible is right, but not accepted, you will burn in hell for all eternity.
You're right - there's no doubt M$ would be happy to use these for offensive purposes. They are evil, after all. But our patent system encourages this behavior whether or not you're evil. If you aren't able to throw your weight around in this arena, there are other evil corporations who are, and they will use it to put you at a competitive disadvantage.

My opinion is that focussing our hatred on M$ in this case is treating a symptom. Let's fix the patent system so that this kind of idiocy isn't possible or necessary.
If global warming is "wrong" we needlessly reduce our economy and people today feel real hardships from lower wages, lost jobs, and higher prices.

If global warming is "right" we might have a problem 100 years from now with rising sea levels and different weather.

If you have the luxury to be worrying about rising sea levels 100 years from now, you haven't seen someone trying to scrape together a buck in change to buy a cheeseburger at McDonalds recently. Who do you think businesses will be cutting first when they have to make up for carbon credit costs? Hint - not from the top.

This is what people who are pro-climate change legislation sound like to me, a bunch of whiners completely over exaggerating the consequences of global warming (existential crisis? really?) while completely ignoring the real human suffering their ideas will cause in the short term.

Lets wait until we can really prove global warming is true before we jump to conclusions, because we could very well be inducing even more massive suffering on the lower class in our country who have already been squeezed very badly over the last 10+ years with stagnant wages, lost jobs, and rising healthcare costs. I haven't seen inconclusive proof in a scientific sense (we're programmers, we all know you can put garbage in and get garbage out from a computer "model" if you do it one way or another. and if they aren't showing the data they have (see the whole lost temperature data debacle) and in same cases the code for the models, what are they showing?)
"hide" meaning "doesn't show incorrect results".

I have no doubt that this is exactly what the author meant by "hide". That doesn't mean that it was a good idea.

If something is both Important and True, then the fact that the current data seems not to show the truth clearly might be thought a good reason to fix it. I mean, it's not like other people have to do this -- we can assume that everyone else's results are straight, so that means that there's something wrong with the data, and we can just fix that up so that it provides the correct correlation with what we already know is true...
Upmodded you for the first part, but the "that person" and "sink to his level" parts remind me of junior high. Can we just stick to code here? Parsing HTML is nasty enough without these catfights.
I think if the earth has actually been cooling since 1980, that's pretty good evidence we can wait. It's actually evidence that it isn't human action causing the climate change, so we can forget about trying to change whatever behaviors it is of ours that are causing it and focus on the real problem: How do we adapt to a warmer planet?

That is the real problem with the whole debate. It is centered on "humans have cause climate change." If the reality is that the sun is causing climate change or, "Climate change happens in cycles," which it has since the earth formed, then the response and the path forward is very different from the ones currently proposed.

EDIT: You know, in a way, saying climate change is human responsibility is enabling us to avoid doing what we have to do now. For example, if sea levels will continue to rise for 100 years, we should stop all new coastal development. Saying humans can stop the warming and lower the sea levels allows us to keep building on the coasts. Essentially, saying, "In the future, we can stop climate change" allows us to do nothing in the present.

Imagine the difference if we knew it was not caused by humans or in fact, there is nothing we can do, the planet will continue to get hotter for 100 years, then we start building cities underground, moving civilization to the poles of the earth, inventing more heat tolerant crops, better local climate control, etc.
Huh, odd that Wikipedia had a "citation needed" note on there. This indeed is exactly their business model; we found the same while scouting the news publishing market.
The fact that formatting your computer brings it back to "the medieval ages" shows how important third-party software is.

A full-format/reinstall of your desktop OS is almost identical to resetting your phone. It wipes everything, and restores the machine back to "factory defaults". It's exactly the same level of control, only you lose all of that valuable software and customization.

The problem of trojans and malware is orthogonal, since virtually all that nastiness seems to be confined to a single platform. That's not a "computer" problem, it's a Windows problem.
I think the analogy doesn't quite fit with typing speed in programmer productivity. If anything, it's analogous with time spent thinking on a problem. It's easy sometimes to spend quite a bit of time just determining how to attack a problem.

And often times it's a good thing, but in my experience sometimes it's good to just throw your first instinct at the problem. So instead of determining it doesn't work in my head, I find the problems while running the code. This usually reveals more information than dismissing the idea during the planning process.
They are spammers and they spam on craiglist all the time. I do not trust spammers.
Some random schmoe with an opinion is not engaged in "debate" when he questions scientific fact

Sigh.

I'll do this one time, and then I have to get back to work.

Here's the deal: science is not dependent on "smarts". I can take a 4-year-old kid and we can test Newton's Laws of Motion just fine without any knowledge of algebra. In fact, the whole point about science being based on reproducible experiments is that we take appeal to authority out of the mix. If we still keep appeal to authority as a legitimate scientific tool of investigation then we might as well be studying phrenology or Lysenksoism (look it up).

Now the appropriate response is: but this isn't about science, this is about prevailing scientific opinion -- the best guess we have at what might happen. If you're prepared to go there, that's awesome, because then we're in a spot where we're talking about how political decisions get made, both inside and outside of science. But in that case, both sides are more on equal ground because the topics are all about how different groups arrive at various forms of consensus, not science.

It's when you get the two mixed up that the discussion gets really out of whack (to my lights, at least)
However, the fact that the people in the email are moderating the comment queue at RC.org clearly shows that they ARE running that site, hence the editor's right to call into question the neutrality of the site.
That is exactly what Palm announced last month.

http://investor.palm.com/releasedetail.cfm?releaseid=413826
There's no need to give an attitude [1], she might not be the only one with this question. Just explain what VMWare is: it's a way to run a virtual machine inside of your main box, so that you don't need another computer to test operating systems out on. And linky: http://www.vmware.com/products/player/

1. Remember the guidelines: Be civil. Don't say things you wouldn't say in a face to face conversation.
The author is making a flawed comparison. Typing faster isn't equivalent to playing blitz chess, it's equivalent to reaching down and moving the piece from the source square to the destination square faster.

Likewise, playing blitz chess is about making fast decision. How fast you type has no (significant) bearing on how long you spend thinking while you're coding.
Why CPU load should not be a critical alert in monitoring systems
Scaling Security in the Cloud- Just Hit the Reset Button
Well I don't know about you, but personally I'm pretty scared of the damage that could be sustained to me and my country over the next 50 years when I'll still be alive, and the next 70 or 80 when I might be.

If we have to make sacrifices now to mitigate that risk I'm prepared to do so. I'm also prepared to pay more tax to help the less well off who lose their source of income. We've been doing it in my country for nearly a century.
I just used em, and delivers as advertised. 2 nights in portland, 40 bucks a night, nice room, nice hosts, no hassle.

Beats the motel 6, that's for sure.
Linus Torvalds for Nobel Peace Prize?
The 'data' was claimed as lost 2 months ago, by these same folks conversing in the emails. They only noticed they had 'lost' the data when a FOIA request was made - which they specifically claim as instructing their employees that it doesn't exist.

So, good luck with finding anything in that 'data' that confirms or denies anything, it's been lost so that the public doesn't get to see it.

Anything with this level of corruption in the scientific community deserves a serious amount of scepticism.
Would you advocate flagging all posts about global warming, period? Or just about skepticism? Would you advocate flagging all posts about science, or just scientific matters that are controversial?
That's one of the worst things I noticed from the data, the overwhelming and negative responses to Steve Mcintyre. Mcintyre is not some demagogue. He's extremely dry and analytical. Why are they strategizing on how to give him dirty, annoying, and obfuscated data?

I don't care if climate scientists consider Mcintyre an adversary. Does everyone remember how the shuttle software is written? The testing team has an adversarial relationship with the developers. This is how quality work is forged. If these guys can't stand to have an adversary review their work, I submit that something is seriously awry.

Peer review isn't strong enough right now. If you read these docs, you find that they are asking that reviewers be hand-picked for "objectivity", and it's clear from the context that this means "not global warming skeptics". Peer review needs to be more adversarial. I don't think the scientific literature is much less important than the shuttle software.

If the scientific method is working, then the data and methods should be able to withstand ANYONE'S scrutiny. It should be completely open. Most people here are strong supporters of open source software. Don't tell me for one second that free and open scientific debate doesn't benefit exactly as much from being open.
They talk excessively.
Geeky Things To Be Thankful For
Misleading title, but nonetheless a really interesting take on time management.
Sure, but that's rather over-exaggerating to make a cheap point.

Every business asks a similar question every day.

"If I decide to do A, I might make $B dollars or lose $C dollars. Is this a wise thing to do?"

We tend to think that Pascal's cost benefit analysis was flawed. That doesn't mean we should drop the principle altogether!
While farmers and mechanics work from home their actual work environment is outside of their normal living space. Its pretty easy to stay on task when you're out in the garage or barn. Meanwhile, we all know what its like to sit down in front of a computer and have a whole world of distractions at our finger tips.
Not sure what was more thrilling to read "Dracula" or this "Old journals".
"Once upon a time Second Life had a Twitter level of hype"
If you treat it reddit-like, then yes. But it still is a pretty interesting mix of how to do (or not to do) science when a lot of politics is involved.
I suspect his point is that the blades of the oars, when immersed in the water, don't move (much) relative to the water. Approximating the blade as stationary in the water, we can see that the boat moves because of a lever effect. If the oars moved freely through the water there would be no thrust, as would be the case when rowing in liquid helium.

However, given the context, it seems a singularly pointless nitpick.
I'm typing this on a MacBook Pro running Vista x64. It's a MBP because those are really powerful machines, but still have great battery life and are very compact and portable. It's running Vista x64 because I'm doing scientific computation that involves Windows-only software (mainly SolidWorks). It feels weird and a bit dirty, but I'm pretty sure there isn't another mobile hardware platform that can meet my needs as well as the MBP. I still boot into OS X when I'm doing something like watching a movie or if I'm "off the clock" and doing personal stuff with the machine. It constantly reminds me of just how big a difference there is between Windows and OS X in terms of everyday usability.
It is extremely easy to see how politics got injected into the debate.

There was a move from "these are our findings" to "lets try and stop global warming". The second step requires government action. Hence, politics. If the climate change scientists had stayed in the "lets refine our findings" area then it would never be political. As soon as you say "lets get the government to do something about this", it is political.

There will always be people who question why you should expand government. And it is up to the people trying to expand the government to clearly show WHY we need to.

What are you expecting? Some people show up with their computer models and say LOOK, WE NEED TO DO SOMETHING, and no one would object? No one would look at it critically? If the science was so indisputable then the bill would be passed, just like the Clean Air and Clean Water acts were when they showed real science on pollutants.
sigh I had to switch from being a really fast dvorak typist to a hunt and peck querty typist due to RSI issues. Luckily my particular job doesn't involve churning out huge swaths of code, but I definitely feel handicapped.
Twitter COO Costolo: Advertising Coming To Twitter Soon
IMO, Stallman should be nominated too.
Have you tried following the instructions on the BeautifulSoup site[1]? The HTML parser it depended on was removed from the Python standard library, and its replacement doesn't work as well at processing bad markup. You should install html5lib[2] and use it for parsing:

import html5lib
from html5lib.treebuilders import getTreeBuilder

parser = html5lib.HTMLParser(tree=getTreeBuilder("beautifulsoup"))
soup = parser.parse(open("mydocument.html"))

[1] http://www.crummy.com/software/BeautifulSoup/3.1-problems.ht...

[2] http://code.google.com/p/html5lib/