skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Try bookfinder for used book search -

http://www.bookfinder.com/search/?ac=sl&st=sl&qi=5je...

New for $55, used for $4-65, but several in the $28-35 range
Happy Holidays from First Round Capital
To the Moderator: I am simply stating a fact. The facts are what they are down voting me to zero is not going to change the fact that the post is off topic. If you want to allow green posts in the forum then change the Off-Topic rule to include the following: except green energy topics.

Personally I do not care one way or the other if the green energy topics are in the forum, but according to the rules, it is Off-Topic.

I would suggest to save both of our times you might want to make an adjustment to the wording of the Off-Topic paragraph to read; Off-Topic: Most stories about politics, or crime, or sports, unless they're evidence of some interesting NEW phenomenon or green energy topics.

Having one standard in writing and another in practice by down voting me to zero leads to a pointless waste of time on both of our parts.
No conspiracies involved - just my view of human nature and how it is capable of responding in an entirely spontaneous way to the temptations around it. Others are free to disagree, of course.

I do disagree with you, quite strongly, about the idea that there are no vested interests associated with massive government power. A mere glance at what lobbyists do serves to dispel that assumption in my mind. At heart, this is the very debate that pervades the Federalist Papers at our country's founding - should government power be checked and balanced because, by its very nature, humanity will otherwise have a propensity to want to grasp for never-ending amounts of concentrated power in furtherance of self-interested goals? Again, you can disagree, but I side with the philosophy adopted by the founders on this one. Their major concern: what factions will do with their power. What they called "factions" I am calling "vested interests." Again, not everyone will agree with me on this. But, as I started my point, the topic of science and advocacy is an interesting one - this is my two cents on the question.
Yes. They probably don't know it though as the ads are run through a third party, such as Gambit, OfferPal or SuperRewards.
I don't know about others but I came to doubt AGW because of inconsistencies in their claims and the data they used. And because of their striking similarities in techniques (computer modelling of systems too complex for competent models) and prescriptions (we must suffer and gov't needs more power, MORE POWER) that they shared with other environmentalist claims that have been falsified over the decades. I already knew that they have been fudging the data, from their own reports, long before this leak from CRU.
Hehe, they kind of cheated by using tin.

For comparison: 10 Microns = 0.01 mm, which is about 1-2 orders of magnitude smaller than a snowflake.
First Round Capital Forces Its Start-Ups to Sing for Their Supper
"Web designer" is just a way to tell people what you do. Doesn't mean you're good at it, or formally trained. There's an artist outside that isn't Picasso. Still calls himself an artist.

The web is just a really easy place to find (and apparently dwell on and become offended by) novices.

Edit: As I think about it, this attitude really bothers me. I used to work at a design agency where my boss would pin poor resumés to a wall for group mockery. That kind of snobbish behavior is a plague based on insecurity. Everyone's gotta start somewhere, and formal education is not always the answer.

Furthermore, until some body starts issuing professional licenses for "web designer," it really doesn't matter what individuals think of the term.
Sure. I was more meaning that they may not be easy to monetize once they click through to your website.
Will Excel (or some other free spreadsheet) not suffice here?
I think the author covered that by saying: "Go is an object-oriented language, but not in the style that most programmers these days think of OO."
Look to history for the answer to why privacy is so critical to a functioning, free society.

If you don't care about freedom, then privacy is indeed overrated.

Basically, every law or power given to the government needs to be evaluated as if the most evil entity imaginable were using it. If it is bad in that context, then it is a bad law.
AT&T May Introduce Usage-Based Data Pricing
You have a beautifully structured online book. Thanks for making it. Using git to be able to easily compare v2.3.5 code samples to 3.0 could be an amazing resource.
While the numbers are falling, IE 6 users still account for a sizable percentage of the people that buy things from my site. Ignoring them would be "doing something wrong". Guess it just depends on what you're doing.
How to make money as a web developer
What a fantastic last paragraph. Something from the original essay that was left out:

"A future in which privacy would face constant assault was so alien to the framers of the Constitution that it never occurred to them to call out privacy as an explicit right. Privacy was inherent to the nobility of their being and their cause. Of course being watched in your own home was unreasonable. Watching at all was an act so unseemly as to be inconceivable among gentlemen in their day. You watched convicted criminals, not free citizens. You ruled your own home. It's intrinsic to the concept of liberty."

Foucault argued that the very act of being watched was dehumanizing. Google shouldn't watch us because it violates our rights, but because it's evil.
That is a great suggestion! We actually have an option available to the game developer to opt to preload each level - Essentially, they can choose to preload everything at once. There are some performance implications to this tho. In any case, we'll definitely look at an asset streaming option. Thanks for the input!
A quick Google search (http://www.google.com/search?q=websocket+compression) revealed that it's not supported yet, however it might get added in a future version: http://www.ietf.org/mail-archive/web/hybi/current/msg00789.h...
Your response is far from unusual; in fact, it's probably a greater example of the psychology of AGW denial than any of the ones cited in the article.

There is a pattern of thinking which is common in many areas of expertise, but is especially prevalent in technical professions. It goes like this: the best solution to a complex problem is a simple one, and if the problem is so complex that I can't understand it in ten minutes, then it isn't worth my time.

So, for example, rather than taking the time to absorb the myriad complexities of climatology, and rather than reading the emails ourselves and analyzing their content and context, we instead take the "simpler" solution, the shortcut: we say, these emails are evidence of what I always believed all along, that the entire field of climatology is a hoax.

And really, that's a beautifully simplistic explanation for a very complicated field. Rather than needing to understand the field, it's much simpler to just say, this thing is a global conspiracy, and then move on to the next simple solution to a complex problem.

Not to put too fine a point on it, but the inconsistencies in claims and data that people love to point to are actually things that have explanations, that can be understood -- if someone takes the time and effort to do it.

It's really rather like the Monty Hall Problem. Marliyn vos Savant ended up having mathematics professors -- among others -- writing to her for a long time after she published the correct solution to that problem. The solution they proposed instead -- while much simpler to understand -- was wrong.

Understanding the right solution took much more effort, and required abandoning certain preconceived notions.

Climatology is much the same in this respect.
I really enjoyed the Box2D example:

http://www.effectgames.com/effect/example.psp.html?rev=box2d
Why is being watched evil?

EDIT: I hear this claim all the time on the internet: Collecting data is evil. So please, go beyond the claim, and give me an explanation. Why is knowledge about people inherently evil?

EDIT 2: I know you're not supposed to complain about downmodding, but this comment has been downmodded four times. If you disagree so vehemently, then try defending your position rather than censoring me :)
This was a rambling waste of time--why is this drivel getting up-voted? There are many branches of science and many practitioners. Peer review is not dead or some secret cabal, it does improve papers and help weed out some bad papers. As near as I can tell the posting is by another global warming denier dressed up in fancy gibberish--quoting Crichton is a strong hint in this direction.
This article is one of the few times, I disagree with the auther and still think this article would earn 2 "ups".

It is a very good thought, that a professional should see his profession as an art and know much of the topic. And, true, it is sad, that there are so many "professionals" out there, but only such a small percentage of them is really good in their profession.
I am not a designer. I am not even a wannabe designer. My designing just sucks. But I think because both arguments of the article apply 100% to software development, too (and every other profession, I know), I think, I can say something about this topic, too.
Namely: the biggest thing about the real "professional" - let's call these guys artists - is that he wants to make his products better every day. It is the hunger for perfection. And the second biggest thing is talent. U can be hungry for everything, but somethings U come just much easier to U as everything else. And the third point is experience. If U do something for 10 years, it is very very likely U do it much better as people with 1 year experience, even if U don't try very hard.

So if we have an artist, who wants to create better designs everytime he works, has a good talent on this matter and a lot of experience, does anybody doubt that this guy will do great stuff, at least after some experience?

I think the answer is "no". So, why should he need to know what a grid is? Or all the other theory stuff? I think theory, well applied, helps to sharpen Ur senses, increases the point "experience" much stronger as from a dry try-and-error process. And that is the point I disagree with the author. Theory will not make Ur skills much richer and U actually can overemphasize the importance of theory. People do this all the time and much too often...
The Making Of… Carmageddon
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X0oyaA1iNFs
Fitting In or Starting New?
This argument could easily be extended to other services. Thus, we should not have fire or police services, because they make us too comfortable and might stop us from reaching for the stars.

If you draw the line so that tax money does fund fire and police services, then why not medical? It's easily as big of a benefit to society, imho.
EC2 is to the hosting world as McDonald's is to the restaurant world. Consistent, predictable, obvious.
It doesn't actually benefit anyone to convince people that sex outside of marriage is bad unless it really is is bad. In fact, it's a huge hedonic loss for everyone. It doesn't even help the political classes, because as rich high status men, they are prevented from having the extramarital sex which comes easily to them (or at least they must hide it). However, it's in the direct benefit of perverts and sex freaks to convince people that extramarital sex is harmless. One side has motives and vested interests to lie, the other really does not.

If your logic is valid but mine is not, please explain to me why.
Are you interested in the job?
I think the main issue here is not IE6 but all the modern browsers (FF 3.5, Safari 4, IE8) that do not support this feature. Targeting Chrome users only is not that appealing.
Legal Fees on Facebook Beacon Lawsuit
If such people never have an outbreak, how can they shed the virus? Is the virus present in the mucosae even in the absence of visible blisters?
We actually support IE6 as well. It won't perform quite as well as browsers with optimized JS engines, but it should load, run and be playable.
I hear this claim floated a lot, and I largely believe it based on anecdotal evidence, but how do we know this is really true? Has someone done a study or have a meaningful way to measure it?
You could actually read the article instead of making a trite and obvious answer.
They should stick one of these sponsored spots at the bottom of the page too. No one would mind, and it'd provide a nice cheaper tier.
Good response.

While I think that it is worthwhile trying to increase privacy on the data collection side (eg Google recording search queries), the more important part is what happens after. Is it anonymized? Is it available to government organisations? What happens after they get it?
Faulty logic in my opinion: In the past, people used X to do bad thing Y. Therefore, X is bad. Should I not be allowed to have a gun, because someone else shot someone?

It's not having a gun that's bad: it's murder. You can murder in all sorts a way without a gun.

It's not collecting data that's bad: it's violating trust. You can violate trust in all sorts of ways without collecting data.
This argument could easily be extended to other services

If I thought this was some sort of generic argument for anarchy I wouldn't have used it. These questions are long settled: where private property rights intrude, some sort of collective protection of private property is required, whether military, police, fire, etc.

The edges of these arguments -- where they do not apply -- are as important if not more important than the arguments themselves. There's a good reason the police department is not like the social services department. It's not all just sort of the same.
IMHO: Whenever Microsoft gets a "vision for IE" we get ActiveX, document.all, CSS expressions, page load speed ups by ignoring HTTP specs (ignoring cache info), etc. Let's not. I am happy with Microsoft playing catch-up and implementing killer features of other browsers instead of inventing its own: ones without open specs or standards or documentation or sense or reason.
FWIW, pandoc is a Markdown-based tool that does all this very nicely: http://johnmacfarlane.net/pandoc/
The layout of the article is visually appealing.
It's similar to evolution in that regard. Much has been written by advocates of it that is wrong and disagrees with other things written about it. That does not mean one should throw the baby out with the bathwater.

But I'd suspect most people don't think as deeply as OP. Most people take a side in this debate based solely on their politics and/or wishful thinking.
AT&T To Curb Smartphone Data Use
I agree it's good people are talking about science, generally, but this:

in the 240 hours following the leak more pure knowledge
and analysis was made available to the public than in
the 24 years prior

requires a citation.
If something is 'inherent' it cannot be explained further almost by definition. I think this is what that paragraph is claiming.

It is claiming that invasion of privacy is evil in the way that hurting people is inherently evil. You do not call on someone to explain why hurting people is evil. It is calling on you to accept that invasion of privacy is just evil.
Samy is my hero (old - first MySpace worm)
> Not to put too fine a point on it, but the inconsistencies in claims and data that people love to point to are actually things that have explanations, that can be understood -- if someone takes the time and effort to do it.

Oh really? The procedure that generated the hockey stick graph doesn't generate roughly the same graph almost independent of the input data?

Unfortunately for the "it's all okay" theory, the CRU folks keep admitting things that show that it isn't. Today's is that they made up some of the "homogenized" data.

The initial dump contained the uncontested statement that they can't explain the last decade's cooling....

And then there's still the data gathering problems. (Stations have been moved to hotter areas and others haven't been maintained in ways that cause them to record higher temps even if nothing actually changes.)

> if someone takes the time and effort to do it.

And you know this because....
But manipulable. I mean, they told a sob story about a soap shop (true or otherwise...) and then got a massive amount of business.
You forgot XHR.
Air jet manipulation of Ping Pong in 3D. By U of Illinois
Wait, you say its a pure Javascript/DHTML engine, but it still using Flash for audio? I noticed your game is using http://www.effectgames.com/engine/audio.swf

Is that because there is no browser support for playing audio? I have only a passing familiarity with current state of HTML5 browsers.

Though overall those are the highest-quality mostly-JavaScript games I've seen yet.
I took it to indicate a bias against personal blogs, fiction, and other forms more likely to be in first person. That's in contrast to sources like Wikipedia, or virtually all news, which are in third person. Where it gets weird would be informally written blogs that are still using the first and second person.... or interviews perhaps?
Work inside a large corporate and check the budgets for projects vs budget for IT maintenance. Upgrading browsers, as a project, has no board approvable ROI.

This will change when there are applications on the internet that corporates need, but can't access via IE6. See GWave for an example of how this can be resolved.
I think the point of contention here is the definition of "invasion of privacy." (The op didn't mention this term by the way, he just said "watched".) Anyone would agree that having their privacy invaded is bad, but you can talk to 10 different people and get 10 different opinions on what constitutes an invasion.

What I want someone to do is justify their claim, point by point, that what Google does with information is an outright invasion of privacy.
Indeed, Wikipedia and the CIA do not have data that corroborate that statement.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_Angola#Ethnic_g...

https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-world-factbook/...
This article was such a rambling mess. I read the whole thing but learned nearly nothing from it except that Crichton didn't believe in anthropogenic global warming.
You can use a Flash compatibility shim to make your sites use Web Sockets in some browsers and Flash sockets in others: http://github.com/gimite/web-socket-js

This is the best of both worlds; Flash works for IE users, and Web Sockets will hopefully be available soon in plenty of non-Flash browsers (like the iPhone).
jeez i wish someone could comb through my site with this much detail for free too.
Election Protests in Iran Through Hypercities Platform
The part that is astounding about this article: it was written on December 9th, 2009, well after the CRU email/data dump; it is about climate skepticism; yet, it has NO mention of the CRU email/data dump while discussing said skepticism.

(to be fair, perhaps the interview was conducted before the CRU dump and only now is being published; but why didn't the editor catch it?)
"The Helioculture process utilizes highly-engineered photosynthetic organisms to catalyze the conversion of sunlight and carbon dioxide into transportation fuels and chemicals" - http://www.ethanolproducer.com/article.jsp?article_id=5858

How long before a future in which we're pumping back into oil fields to get CO2 out of the atmosphere?

Out of all of human history, technology at the scale of helping climate change is more likely this century than any other. I haven't seen anyone suggesting we push on towards it full steam ahead, but slowing down isn't enough. We either get such technology at some point or we stop polluting completely, anything else is just a delay tactic and will prolong the problem. Who is to blame doesn't really help anything.

Also:

Guess who's taking it seriously? "Copenhagen climate summit: 1,200 limos, 140 private planes". ""We haven't got enough limos in the country to fulfil the demand," she says. "We're having to drive them in hundreds of miles from Germany and Sweden."

And the total number of electric cars or hybrids among that number? "Five,"" -
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/earth/copenhagen-climate-change-c...

(People in power) can tell me to take it seriously and drive five miles less per week all they like, I'll be more likely to listen when they stop their much more polluting ways.
Your argument is invalid because there are practically no scientists (social or otherwise) coming out against premarital sex in modern societies with adequate screening against STDs and responsible use of contraception.

Honestly, sex outside of marriage probably was bad in the medieval society where the Roman Catholic Church pushed that doctrine on all of us. It wasn't until the invention of reliable birth control in the 20th century that it wasn't a bad idea, but religious doctrines tend not to keep up with the times as well (hence modern day Muslims and Jews eschewing entire categories of food because they couldn't be trusted to be healthy in ancient Israel).

Interestingly enough, the RCC hasn't managed to buy off enough scientists to fabricate much evidence that condoms and the pill are a bum deal. I guess to some Catholics though, all the scientists who publish studies saying that the pill is 99% effective and condoms can stop the spread of HIV are secretly agents of godless secular humanism.

While I'm sure some environmentalist devotions rise (sink?) to the level of unexamined religious belief, most of them push silly pseudoscientific hypotheses ("Gaia") which do not, in fact, actually get much scientific literature to support them.
Yeah, probably not good for ad-based sites, but those usually don't have high enough revenue/user to make advertising cost effective anyway.

For a cool new consumer product or service that makes money directly, though, this could be great. When I tried it, the CPC was very low. Whether it's worth it depends on how good a fit the thing you want to advertise is with the audience of Reddit.
These questions are long settled

Don't you find it even just a little curious that in every other developed nation, the questions have been settled in a different way?

where private property rights intrude, some sort of collective protection of private property is required

My body is the most important piece of property I own. If the government protects some of my property (e.g. my house, from a fire), why does it not protect the most important piece?
OT, but are there dedicated tools to create these kinds of interesting infographics? Or do folks just use Photoshop, Illustrator, etc?
People forget that CEOs, politicians, celebrities, and everyone else are people too. Everyone knows what it is like to say something, but mean something else. Everyone knows what it is like to have to clarify what you just said. People who speak publicly, as part of their job, make far fewer errors than us "normal" folk, but they still make errors. When they make a single error, it is perfectly acceptable to raise an eyebrow, but it is almost never acceptable to sound an alarm. Having seen Schmidt speak, both on video and in person, I have no doubt that he'd respond much better to a polite request for clarification than a misguided angry letter.

EDIT: And I don't even think he made that much of an error! The full quote was:

"I think judgment matters. If you have something that you don't want anyone to know, maybe you shouldn't be doing it in the first place. If you really need that kind of privacy, the reality is that search engines -- including Google -- do retain this information for some time and it's important, for example, that we are all subject in the United States to the Patriot Act and it is possible that all that information could be made available to the authorities."