skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Er, yes, but they call. It doesn't matter if I choose whatever I like, then send the hash. The other person then has a free choice, and they are right or wrong.

The coin is effectively irrelevant. Imagine we're together and I pretend to toss the coin. I decide what I want it to be, place it as that, and then hold it in my hand. Provided I'm not allowed to change my mind, this is just as fair as actually tossing the coin because you are free to call and are right or wrong with equal probability. The point about the real coin is that it prevents me from changing my mind. The point about the hash is it prevents me from changing my mind.

In effect, the hash is the coin. I am free to decide heads or tails as I wish - I just need to be prevented from changing my mind after you call.
Clojure is often slower, unless you often write everything in Java and call from Clojure, which kind of defeats the purpose.

Both have significantly fewer programmers who know them.

Nice try, though. :)
There is a process of nearly mechanical editing you can do to fix subjective "Criticisms" or "Controversy" sections in WP articles: you replace naked opinions with overt citations, like, "In 2007, David Broder remarked in the New York Times that...".

There is also a fairly straightforward process of assessing the weight that a "Controversies" section gives to a POV by repeatedly citing similar or related sources, and a set of editing tactics that can be used to collapse them into a summary graf.
Funny, graphic, amusing, easy-to-read.

But please not here. Please.

Here's the deal: whenever you write a funny article that basically trashes another person, you take the entire board to a new low. Then it becomes acceptable to trash anybody, as long as you're funny. Or it just becomes acceptable to trash anybody, as long as they're "bad".

So take the its-so-funny-he-told-that-guy-off stuff to somewhere else where it's more accepted to abuse one another publicly.

Flagged.
Neep bold might be what you're looking for, but it could be too pixellated.
http://www.jmknoble.net/fonts/

Here's an screenshot:
http://grace.evergreen.edu/~nybnik10/files/neep_big.gif
(I'm not sure if that's exactly 14pt, since it's not my pic).
I see your point, but I think looking for a new job/relationship now rather than later is actually better for both parties involved.

Sure, the party who finds out last will feel hurt (possibly betrayed) in the short term, but it's much better than staying in a job/relationship that only one party is interested in continuing. The other party will only grow more unhappy until they can't stand it anymore and will forcefully try to end the relationship anyway, except in a much uglier way.

Of course your emotions, as all of this is going down, will often make this kind of rationalization difficult to see.
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The nexus of startups, writing code and bootstrapping (podcast)
The trouble is the concern that this might already be happening. At least with the data out there the serious scientists have a very strong compunction to "get it right".
IQ =/ Genius.

IQ tests only show how good someone is at doing IQ tests, there may be some correlation to other tasks, however they're of little use except to examine how well someone performs in academia.

A genius is someone who can see things that no one else can, and by virtue of this nature them landing high on an IQ test is rather unlikely. Feynman was a true genius, but he admittedly spent the majority of his life messing around with things, which is why he is a genius.
The nice thing about WP is that there's no place to hide on it. Give us an example of an article where this happened, and the rough time it occurred, and let's find it and talk about it. Maybe there's a good reason you got RV'd, or maybe there's a great example of something pathological about WP editing that we can add to the discussion.
Your Google profile is now also an OpenId
So you think that the world is better served when science is done behind closed doors? People will spread disinformation regardless of whether they have access to climate models or not. This sort of attitude flies in the face of the open source philosophy.
You mean something like http://jyte.com/ ?

That also uses OpenID, to help strongly verify their identity.
Right, we can't have people who haven't already arrived at the "correct" conclusion looking at the data...

Is this really what "science" has come to?
Let's be freaks: how weaknesses reveal strengths
Another interesting thing to pay attention to is how often people talk about what's wrong and that it needs to be fixed, but fail to provide a road forward.

Example:

"This web page is horrendous"

(everyone nods)

"We need to find a way to make it better"

(everyone nods)

"Now moving on to the next topic, we're moving too slowly..."

It's rare to find a person that suggests solutions to problems rather than just pointing out that they exist...
If I'm the pope and I'm trying to cover up touching little boys in the naughty-place I would use the same reasoning. Imagine the liberal loons (or worse) getting airtime on CNN and huffpo and making it sound like all priests are pedophiles. We don't need those dirty filthy pagans, deliberately or not, spreading disinformation.
sounds like he actually meant that people are full of shit.
That's a lot of cores. While the hardware and interconnects are certainly different, a number for perspective:

The Jaguar supercomputer at Oak Ridge National Laboratory, currently the most powerful supercomputer in the world, has 224,256 compute cores.
http://www.nccs.gov/computing-resources/jaguar/

If all of the WoW players woke up tomorrow and realized they didn't want to play a silly game anymore, Blizzard could make one heck of a distributed computing cluster.
There is a bit of ad hominem attack in my comment, I won't deny that, because it's intentional. He's not reporting facts or offering analysis, he's offering advice and opinion, in which case the person offering it is an important part of evaluating the quality of the content.
That kind of comparison is exactly why the MMOG market is filled with so many failures.

Everyone says to themselves "WoW does this X way, if we do this X way, we can earn lots of money like WoW!" So you get a ton of failed WoW clones that earn pennies.

Just because WoW does something in X way doesn't mean that doing something in a way other than X prohibits you from making a lot of money. And it also doesn't mean that doing it in X way ensures that you will earn lots of money.
Here's a good summary of the fundamental science behind the climate change consensus:
http://www.economist.com/blogs/democracyinamerica/2009/11/bl...

It's a complex, messy subject, and as an engineer I hate the reliance on computer models to make predictions, but the dramatic increase in CO2 levels is a fact. It's plain common-sense that a big increase in one of the inputs to the climate has a good chance of causing disruptive change.

There's also accumulating evidence from independent sources that the temperature is rising, but pretend it wasn't there, would an increase in CO2 from 313ppm to 383ppm over 50 years worry you?
True friendship - Neil's MySpace Blog |
That code's not FORTRAN it's IDL.
IQuawave Launch New Startup: Manuals Search Engine
The indication that this isn't human-caused is just adding up all the CO2 output by cars, industry, etc. and subtracting from the amount of CO2 that has been added to the atmosphere in the same time period. I think it accounts for about 5%, but I'm not sure I read that right. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carbon_dioxide_in_the_Earth%27s... Since water accounts for up to 85% of greenhouse effect (including clouds), that means man-made atmospheric CO2 accounts for 0.75% or less of the greenhouse effect.
I use Bitstream Vera Sans Mono at 12pt. It looks great.

Here it is at 14pt: http://i50.tinypic.com/2z7fmgn.png
only 5, huh?
Wasn't some of the hitherto secret data included in the hacked emails as attachments? How much is still unavailable?

I wish the AGW folks would get out in front of this and stop acting like partisan hacks. As it stands today, many people have written off AGW as a fraud, nevermind whatever other other evidence may exist. Appeals to science and its trappings of legitimacy will fall on deaf ears if the researchers at the CRU all keep their positions and the data is not made publically available.
I said I understood. I didn't say I agreed.
Google Apps for Domains

+ myopenid.com

+ Weave / (this)

+ Boku / Zong

== Awesome total user experience.
I agree that it isn't that typos and misspellings aren't that big of a deal, but I think they correlate significantly with clarity of thought. Making judgments based on superficial characteristics isn't necessarily a bad thing; the key is to make sure that one is choosing the right surfaces to look at.

For me, the disclaimer is a red flag, but the quality of the text countered it quite well. Should I presume his logic is positively correlated with his strength of sentence structure? Usually I do.

But for me, this was overridden by the attempt to cite fiction as an authority. Good fiction is good because it appeals to our sense of authenticity, not because it actually is authentic. Thus using fiction as an example is usually just arguing that something 'sounds right'.

I just watched a very good documentary on steriod use (Bigger Stronger Faster) that pointed out that the real Stallone's physique as depicted in the movie relied fairly heavily on steroids. Sure, there were lots of crunches, but heavy drugs as well. Is the real message of this article that deception (self or otherwise) is essential to entrepreneurial success?
TI sports watch for hacking
PieGuy - fully cached iPhone webapp game
ha awesome, compare that with how much space a "hello world" executable takes when compiled on a modern OS with standard libraries
I had no idea anyone had pagers after 1992.
LLJVM
I have several add-ons installed but the only one I actually care about is TagSifter. It isn't available for 3.5 yet, but it's the only way of managing bookmarks I've found that makes any sense to me. It combines the ideas of folders and tags in a very nice way.
Bearing this in mind, I think most people--including me--missed the biggest part of the climate emails story. ...the CRU's main computer model may be, to put it bluntly, complete rubbish...The emails seem to describe a model which frequently breaks, and being constantly "tweaked" with manual interventions of dubious quality in order to make them fit the historical data. These stories suggest that the model, and the past manual interventions, are so poorly documented that CRU cannot now replicate its own past findings.

The interesting thing here is that having a bad model should have been okay -- you'd expect science to iterate a lot over the course of a few decades as it learned more and more about the climate. But for some reason it wasn't okay to be wrong any more. And whenever that moment passed it stopped being science and started being a religion, at least to some of those involved. Religions have "us against them" they have the elite and the unwashed masses, they have "we know the solution, just tell me your problem" They frequently have end-of-world predictions, a hierarchy of who can form dogma, a culture of secrecy, an emotional and visceral response to anybody who questions their beliefs, etc.

I'm not trying to beat a dead horse, only to say once again that this story is much more than just about the politics of climate change. It's about how professional science and professional scientists carry out their business. It's very easy to get emotionally wrapped up with whatever you're doing, especially if you think you're saving the world. It's critical that we establish sort of system of ethics to make thinking and acting like this anathema to professional scientists no matter what field they are in.
First Else phone raises the interface bar for smart phones
To Sell or Not to Sell: Silicon Valley Acquisitions Market Heats Up
I agree with you. This sounds rather cumbersome to my head versus just asking for an address and sending the package.

To the other reply saying this isn't solving a problem but making something more convenient, I disagree. If it did make something more significantly convenient to me, it would be solving a problem. This one isn't.
Here's an example (credit goes to The Simpsons and Goedel): Can your team build an app so awesome that they themselves will not be able to build improved versions of it?
I think it's a fast rule of life in general. People will form together for collective power. Their "mafia" is similar to unions, communism, and real life mafias because cooperation is economically advantageous to individual pursuit.
Do entrepreneurs really ponder lists of traits of entrepreneurs in order to decide whether they are one?
I've never played The Sims Online, so I don't know exactly how it works, but if this becomes widespread, wouldn't trustworthiness ratings lose validity eventually?
A surprisingly detailed and informative news summary of this story: http://www.cbsnews.com/blogs/2009/11/25/taking_liberties/ent...
Closed doors? No way! I said I understand their concern that many well funded groups would certainly spread even more disinformation if they had a dataset to base it on.

In the current state of affairs, you can bet many people will publish wrong results for money, fame or any combination of both. It's not about you arriving at a correct answer, but if someone can be trusted to do real analysis on the data and not spin it in ways that suit their purpose.

Not all news outlets have a strong peer-review process for publishing news. Not all research organizations do real research.

If some of the scientists that have access to this dataset are right, the delay in addressing climate change caused by such confusion could mean our extinction.

I would not even suggest this as a correct course of action if there weren't so many different economic interests at play. Lots of people stand to lose a staggering amount of money and they won't place truth above their yearly bonuses, with little concern if a billion or so people die of thirst in the next 100 years.
Well, I understand it as well, but considering the data was collected by meteorological stations funded by public money it should be considered public domain. I wonder if someone tried suing them for access to the raw data, if not it might be a good idea.
A logo and a couple of pie charts
Out of curiosity, anyone know the peak # of simultaneous logins? I wonder as to the user/core efficiency.
Simple. It too snips nerds, but only the weaker ones.
The difference is that there aren't huge corporations willing to dump tons of money on research that shows you molested young boys.

And, in fact, if CNN and huffpo decided to say all priests are pedophiles, they would be spreading a lie.

How would that serve the truth?
I'm particularly fond of Monaco, the default font for Textmate (OS X). That being said, Textmate also supports anti-aliasing which might help solve this problem for you too.

What editor do you use?

Screen shot: http://img.skitch.com/20091125-riekchctmj7u1j812xdb6dqi28.pn...

Download: http://www.webdevkungfu.com/textmate-envy-aka-monaco-font-fo...
In a sense, global variables and mutable state are much the same. Even if the scope of the mutable variable is local, if it maintains state beyond any specific call, it has a global lifespan. I think using mutable variables within a function that don't live beyond the function is generally fine (for loops, etc).
If Spotify is the new radio, the artists are winning
The link between education of workers and their wages is indeed probably less direct and/or strong than he makes it out to be. However, the increases in productivity you mention have to come from smart people thinking hard about how to do things more efficiently, so you could argue for more education from that standpoint. If you read the rest of the article in that light, he makes some interesting points.

As for why higher productivity hasn't translated into higher wages, I think participation in the free market meant (and means) that gains in productivity are used to lower prices rather than increase workers' wages.
Pretty amazing none of this info been open to peer review. Shouldn't their conclusions be replicable by others? Do they just write conclusion papers?
I think this metaphor is somewhat wrong.

Log files are like attaching medical imagers to the maze and keeping a trace of it's physical and mental state as it executes the maze. Debuggers are like attaching medical imagers to the rat and being able to only see the immediate state only.

Obviously, debuggers are much faster to bootstrap than good logging, and in that category I can see them being a clear win. However, I still see them as providing less information.

PS: That said, there are a few situations I bust out a debugger too. Mostly when I'm too lost to get started.
I strongly believe code that can't be understood by inspection is code that shouldn't be.
Yes, but what if even a small oil company "invests" a couple hundred millions funding studies that - oddly enough - find all those other studies that point to global warming are wrong?

What if there is a ton of money in media outlets to voice those reports?

It would be foolish to disregard such a threat.
Why do the classes you take in college HAVE to help you with your work programming? Can't you just take something because you're intellectually interested in it? Or because it has an awesome teacher, or a lecturer who is world famous, or a Nobel laureate teaching it?

As long as you're genuinely interested in what you're taking there's no reason not to take it. Not everything is about learning how to do one job that you're stuck with for the rest of your life.
Yahoo loses the brains behind Yahoo Boss
> I think it accounts for about 5%,

Is there serious scientific support for what your claim?

There are (seemingly legitimate) sources like realclimate.org that claim that the increases in CO2 are virtually entirely caused by human activity, and that this isn't seriously questioned by scientists.

E.g. http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2004/12/how-do...

That article claims that humans release quite a bit more carbon than would be needed to raise CO2 by the observed levels, but that effects like absorption into the ocean compensate.

I think we can all agree that the highly modded-up parent that claims two significant figures of accuracy at 0.28% is completely wrong though, right?
Two observations:

evgen above seems to think it's wrong, and yet you seem to be saying it's right (implicitly, because it's "well known in crypto circles.") So, is it right or wrong? Obviously I believe it to be right ...

Secondly, I know that it's well known in crypto circles. I read about it, refined it (I hope without breaking it as evgen suggests but does not prove) and reproduce it here because it does not seem to be well known outside of them. I find that this is about the most accessible non-obvious result, and yet it rarely seems to be described in simple, clear terms. I've tried to do so here, but if you know of a better, clearer explanation I'd genuinely appreciate the pointer.

Thanks.

(small edits for clarity)
I think it can be summarized in one word: meeting. Do you agree?
"Be careful who you call sloppy! You have been warned: http://www.schneierfacts.com/facts/top

Thank you!
"Remember that announcing your plans makes them less likely to happen."

I partially disagree with this. When I publicly commit that I'll do x thing, no matter what, I'm more likely to do it because otherwise people would think that I'm only a charlatan.

I think talking in public about your idea is very important especially if you have to do some kind of report at the end.
Perhaps we could take a lesson and bring it here - maybe if downvoting cost karma people would prefer to disagree by replying and to save the downvote for trolls.

An added benefit would be to have a metamoderation Slashdot-style that gave back your karma if the metamoderator agreed the comment was a troll.
V. Important.

don't confuse ambition, audacity, etc, with lack of humility. you can be ambitious and humble.

humility helps you attract team.
humility helps you delegate when you have that team.
humility helps you pick your battles and focus your resources.
humility attracts investors.
humility helps you get customers.
humility helps you ask the real questions, uncomfortable questions about your current product and how its meeting customers needs.
humility helps you cope with the infinite number of small setbacks in starting up.
I think you have to see acquisitions like an organ transplant. It takes a lot of effort to keep the host from killing the transplant and even the best efforts can fail. It's the rare success that should be surprising, not the failures.
There is a link between temperature and CO2 concentration, as you know. For the last 18000 years, since the last ice age, pretty much, we've been getting warmer, and CO2 has been climbing. See the Vostok Ice Core Data. Even if there were no men on earth, the CO2 levels would be rising. That explains at least some of your 40 year CO2 climb that you mention.

Anyway, no, the 3.2% I reference is just by mass. 3.2% of the CO2 in the atmosphere is man-made.

If you care, only 2.2% of the warming caused by global warming gasses (excluding water vapor) is caused by man-made CO2, since different gasses are better or worse greenhouse gases, and CO2 isn't nearly as efficient as a greenhouse gas as some other gases, just using mass isn't quite accurate, in terms of percentage of greenhouse effect.

Now, again, ignoring water vapor, which is insane to do, but is "customary", your control of the system, if you eliminated all CO2 from every person on earth (perhaps we'll let you breath, but no campfires) is 2.2%. (Again, it's actually 0.28%, but just for the sake of argument, say water vapor is not a green-house gas, even though it is) So, how confident are you, that 2.2% is enough control to effect a reversal of the temperature rise? Now, given that you aren't going to get anywhere near a 100% elimination of man-made CO2, short of killing everybody, how much money are you willing to spend on this exercise, and shouldn't a little bit of number crunching (dollars per degree) be undertaken, before we start down this path?
"a genetic personal tendency towards future-mindedness"

That explanation seems very weak. And what about the difference in productivity between English and American weavers - also genetic? That seems very unlikely. Or maybe some other factor besides having access to the same kind of machines... Perhaps something was killing the motivation of the less productive workers (ie working harder might not have paid off for them).
Many super smart people look at the social environment as simply another set of problems to solve. If they turn their attention to it, and spend the same effort studying socialization as they might study something more esoteric, they can usually provide a good simulation of someone who is well socialized.

But it doesn't mean they don't think 90% of those kinds of activities are as dull as any homework assignment.
The biggest lesson I have learned was that if you fail people, you should make sure that those who fail correctly reflects the demographics (e.g. black people, women). Otherwise it is a fuck-up with some very nasty complaints.