skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Sigh, this article got killed last night. Here's my comment from then:

This is the type of stuff that just degrades the quality of HN. I'm not making this comment to spur a reddit vs hn argument,etc. I'm asking people to not post stuff like this as someone who spends a lot of time here because I truly care about the community/quality of articles. Thank you.
It's because both British and American Englishes (Is it correct to say "Englishes" heh?) are heavily written languages, so they tend to evolve much slowly and converge with their writing standard.

AAVE isn't so it evolves faster.

(btw, is it only me who hears something arrogant in "high German"?)
One really odd observation that struck me when spending some time in southern Africa (South Africa, Zimbabwe and Botswana) a couple years back: "AAVE" has had a significant influence on the English of southern Africans and other elements of black American culture are prevalent as well: hip-hop, basketball and, even, somewhat comically, fried chicken.

It really got my attention just after arriving when the brother of the bride to be, whose wedding I was there for, said while getting in his car, "Let's bounce."

Were I a sociologist I think studying the flow of culture from black Americans to southern Africans and trying to separate out the distinctively African elements of black American culture vs. the distinctive black American elements of southern African culture would be fascinating.
Indeed. Many ISP billing/CRM systems date back to the 1990s and store plaintext passwords as a "feature."

Non-technical users (say, customers of a dialup ISP) tend to like being able to "guess" at their password with the customer service rep instead of having to recite their exact password or pick a new one on the spot.
The argument here is in effect that no vernacular variant of any language could possibly embody a mistake. Which is true for some definitions of mistake, and false for others.

The problem with the definitions that make it true is that there's a slippery slope from dialects to idiolects. How many people have to speak a dialect for it to count as a dialect? You can't have any threshold, or you get weird consequences in hypothetical cases, like all the speakers of a dialect dying off except one. So if you decide that no vernacular can embody mistakes, you're bound to conclude that nothing any individual does can be a mistake, so long as they do it consistently.
The guy in the article wasn't a squatter.
Of course I disagree that any reasonable person would equate AGW and evolution, as you have done. In the spirit of Thanksgiving, that's as harsh as I'll be today.

I think your main point is that you feel there are too many threads on this subject.

On this issue, I almost agree with you. However, this is a watershed event, so perhaps it really does deserve more posts than the release of a new iphone app.

Happy Thanksgiving.
Why Google Wave Sucks, And Why You Will Use It Anyway
The entrepeneur doesn't seem to understand one of the vital components of entrepeneurship. The rewards for entrepeneurship are disproportionate because the risks are also disproportionate. Putting your time, resources, money and experience towards a venture that might never pay off is a choice we make as entrepeneurs.

This bloke seems to want the rewards without the risks.
It's well-written, intelligent and funny, and highlights a common problem faced by people in the web industry. So I don't really see your problem here, unless you share the conception some folks seem to have of "welcome to HN, from here on you must act as if sarcasm and snark don't exist".
And your script probably sets things up differently from everyone else's :)

But if you think it's a problem, why not publish whatever you use and encourage others to use it as well?

(also, FWIW I don't have such a script -- a new site at work always simply inherits default settings from other stuff, and those defaults are set up to match how our production servers work)
Searchy type problems
Well, to be perfectly honest I almost never use the 'startproject' or 'startapp' commands. When I'm working on a new app I just create the directory and an __init__.py, and then start filling in specific files inside it as I need them.

For stuff at work apps all go into one of a couple particular namespaces, so packaging concerns don't come up there; for my personal stuff the package name is almost never the same as the app anyway (e.g., django-registration provides an app in a module named 'registration').

Also, I'd really really like the concept of the project to die soon.
i meant it's not just making fancy looking PCs that got apple into what it's become today.
We as laymen can't really trust a source, any source. But we can still reasonably trust a process. If we hear that a part is not "showing the math", the process is flawed.

Why do we trust physicians or mathematicians? Why don't psychologists or historians have the same disputes? It's not the difficulty or fuzziness of the subject that's the difference, it's the process: openness and reproducibility.
Seems like Django is more comparable to Sinatra? And is 4 spaces the python way? I like my font big and my lines short.
On a related but completely different note, if you are looking for Emacs key bindings in Firefox, try Firemacs:

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/4141
Have you considered drugs?

Seriously, for better or for worse I took Ritalin from age 6 until age 18, then stopped for about 5 years. Afterwards I started working with a doctor to try and find a ritalin replacement that didn't include the daily emotional roller coaster that came with Ritalin.

After 7 or 8 meds I found that Provigil (Modafinil) is flipping awesome. It has no side effects, and is milder but more consistent than Ritalin. I don't get hyper-focused like with ritalin, which is great because it doesn't make me get hyper-focused on the wrong task. I can easily coax my brain back on task when distracted now.
This isn't just gaps. This is an outright conspiracy to present a certain case and make sure no opposing view is heard.

If we had such a conspiracy in the field of evolutionary biology, then yes, I'd be rethinking how seriously we should take the theory of evolution. Fortunately, biologists are a lot more open with their data than climate scientists.
Maybe we should be asking, "What if Jobs didn't beg Bill on huge screen television for $100m".
Whatever. One experience doesn't make good data.

My personal experience:

Windows/dos user for 10 years
Linux user for the next 10 years
OSX for last 3 years or so

From my experience, the last 3 years has been my most productive, and I've spent far far far far less time messing about doing unuseful things (Trying to get wifi working, trying to work around OS issues etc).

Don't just dismiss everything as 'fanboyism', I used to do that 10 years ago. I thought Mac users were rich pretentious egotistical people who didn't actually know anything about computers.
I'm in agreement. Jordan Cooper's posts are thoughtful and coherent.

Fred Wilson pen's many of his posts on his blackberry and in many ways that adds to the conversational tone he tries to set on his blog.
When an entity only advertises a domain name www.domain.com rather than the URI http://www.domain.com/ then as far as I am concerned, I have been invited to query that server concerning the services it offers, namely: a portscan.

For instance the page at http://www.amazon.com/ contains an advertisement that simply says "amazon.com". So I should scan it to see what they offer. It might be http / https / irc / echo / heck even a shell for all I know. If it were "1 Amazon Street" I would be perfectly entitled to arrive at that building and see if any entrances were open to the public.

It might say "Amazon club card holders only" on a door and I might be asked for my card should I try to gain entrance. It would only be "criminal" if I decided to gain entrance despite such constraints.
Personalize your Google Wave
That makes it a very good embeddable program, but then I do like Free Software.
asciiarena just opened
That's very good. You can't have your cake and eat it too, as they try to do. Here, they admit it's by far, the dominant greenhouse driver, and yet, in the next breath, they jump back on the CO2 bandwagon.
My impression from doing the story is that they want to use the farm for experiments in living. Trying out solar, wind, raising animals, growing with intensive raised beds, etc. But I don't think they expect to be completely self-sufficient, in the short-term anyway. I think they're fairly realistic that their entire community isn't set up that way at this point (good points about what it takes to supply solar, wind, etc). Tim, the farm's owner, is also trying experiments in more sustainable city living (for more, I did a video on his small town green highrise going up in Chapel Hill, NC http://faircompanies.com/videos/view/a-small-town-green-high...
BiwaScheme: In-browser (JavaScript) Scheme interpreter
Eventually, TechCrunch headlines will just devolve to "Click here for FREE Laptop!"
You can't have any threshold, or you get weird consequences in hypothetical cases, like all the speakers of a dialect dying off except one. So if you decide that no vernacular can embody mistakes, you're bound to conclude that nothing any individual does can be a mistake, so long as they do it consistently.

But lots of disciplines involving living things have problems like this. You can't "define" species. A species is a historical happenstance, which can only be precisely defined in retrospect with minute information we usually never have access to. You can spend all day coming up with corner cases and boundary conditions where any such attempt breaks down. But that's like deciding if a particular boulder in Panama is a North American one or a South American one. Just because those terms break down in boundary cases and are not like mathematics doesn't mean those terms aren't useful.

Things pertaining to human beings and culture are even more prone to this.

In the case of African American vernacular, there are sizable populations with high degrees of consistency in their patterns of speech. Quite far away from boundary conditions.

Another thing I've noted, since dating an African American woman and attending family gatherings with her, is that the manners and rules of social conduct of rural African Americans are more complex than I am accustomed to. When I am with her family, I have to think about how I'm going to excuse myself and navigate leaving a room. Otherwise, I never think about this. I reflected on this, and realized that it reminded me of watching Masterpiece Theater as a child. I'm probably witnessing throwbacks to French and English culture from centuries ago, still rippling though rural Louisiana.

Homo Sapiens are complex -- period. Even many so-called "country bumpkins."
"you're bound to conclude that nothing any individual does can be a mistake, so long as they do it consistently."

This is exactly how languages evolve over time, actually. A group of individuals makes changes ("mistakes"), and is consistent in the usage of the new ("mistaken") forms over a given period of time.

If you didn't accept that, you'd be forced to conclude that we're all just very bad speakers of our modern languages' predecessors.
I read not only the whole quote but the whole (very long) file from which the quote was cherrypicked.

Of course the model has been tweaked several times. What the hell else do you think scientists do when they have a simulation of a large complicated system and there's a constant influx of data for seeing how well it works?

The fact that they have to work with messy data is hardly their fault.
I'm a "software engineer". I said can to try to hint that sometimes someone who's an expert at one thing, who, unlike your dad, happens to not be an expert at a second thing, fails to appreciate the challenges of that second thing, and that general pattern can specifically cause an illusory case of the issue described by the OP.
In other words, you’d start to see ads with “You’ll only find The Wall Street Journal on Bing.com”

If I know I want the WSJ, why wouldn't I go directly there? Does anyone think "I want to know what the WSJ says about X" then goes to do a news search and, not finding any WSJ links then thinks "Well, I guess the WSJ didn't have anything to say about X". No, they go to the WSJ directly to find out what the WSJ says. I bet it's more likely that wanting to know what someone specific says isn't often a use case of searching for news.

That being said, I do use Google to find Wikipedia articles just because Google's search is so much stronger than Wikipedia's at honing in on the entry I want.

Sure, while people do use searching to find websites, people actually need to use a browser that defaults to bing or have changed their default search engine to bing, or need to change their habits to use bing to do search. Is Microsoft's browser monopoly still strong enough to allow them to influence the default search engine use?

One way this could play out is that, if people use "news search" to see what _anyone_ has said, rather than what a specific source says, then the fraction of sources that are listed only with bing (or not with google) are not going to be part of the discussion.
Accessibility and the iPhone - a tale of woe
Whatever makes you think there is only one global climate model?
By that circular reasoning you could also say that developers are important, since that's the way to attract users ... since nobody will use your OS if it isn't capable of running your favorite apps.

I know that the browser is the new OS and all that crap, but a laptop/netbook capable of only running web apps (or apps designed for Chrome's APIs) seems pretty pointless to me. And I'm really thankful for Moore's law ... with multi-core Intel/ARM processors, and all those GPUs ... you'll now be able to run your all your apps in a browser. That's a serious accomplishment.

Developers should be able to choose the platform based on real technical requirements, not on artificial limitations. All your applications running in the cloud? Who's cloud?

Meet the new boss, same as the old one.
In my experience the users prefer the apps right up until they stop working. Maybe the developer leaves, maybe the mainstream development organization changes some other system it relies on, maybe the auditors show up and the security guys lock down the firewalls and stuff running on a PC under someone's desk no longer has access. Hell, maybe that PC's hardware fails for some reason, maybe someone makes a mistake and said developer didn't use the central, backed-up version control.

Then the users come to IS and piss and whine but get nothing but blank stares in return. And you know, stuff IS does takes time, because we build it to be supportable for the next decade or two (yes really). We write a runbook so someone who's never seen it before can recover it if it fails at 3am, and we make sure it's monitored. We get it signed off by compliance for regulatory oversight. We penetration test it. We back it up offsite and replicate it to the DR site. We stick a generator behind it and we know how many Watts of power it needs (we even know what it weighs so we don't overload the floor in the datacentre). We take its dependencies into account when doing any other work.

Basically, we act like grown-ups with other people's money, something they've largely forgotten in the front office.
"I know many of the best security people in the world, and none of them work for the British police." - Ian Clarke
Agree. I didn't notice it the first time, and when I went back to look for it, it was the second-last thing I noticed before the main area (list of members who recently joined).
The Hyper Island Way
Hamlet and Pfister forms (A tragedy in four acts)
Media Temple Hacked:  Official Statement
Hbase and bigtable comparison
Or Reddit.

http://blog.moertel.com/articles/2006/12/15/never-store-pass...
Linux, Windows and the whole PC world has also progressed a lot in the last 13 years, it seems a bit unfair to compare the state of now with the state 10 years ago. I am not saying Mac lovers don't love their PCs for a good reason - they have their personal reasons, so be it. All I said is that basically Macs also are just PCs.

Also, it is not really fair to compare Apple to all the other PC vendors out there. Some of them probably produce crappy machines, but others don't.
10000+ networks created on ShoutEm
Calgary Pontiac Buick GMC Cadillac Chevy Cars, trucks dealer in Alberta
Computer hacker Gary McKinnon to be extradited to US
Alright, I'll elaborate, you vicious downvoters, you.

EVE is a great game. The way the game world evolves naturally it's fascinating for all sorts of reasons, and I love open-ended gameplay.

I played A Tale in the Desert for some time.

But this time of gameplay is hard for people to get into. It demands a lot from the player. You might call it "active" gameplay.

WoW is the opposite. The story is crafted for you, not by you, and it is more about pure gameplay than these higher-order things in EVE. It's a much more passive experience.

I don't think it should surprise anyone that EVE is less profitable. It is, by it's nature, less inclusive.

EVE is your favorite indie band. WoW is the latest pop hit.

Also, I wouldn't discount the amount of time Blizzard puts into crafting the in-game experience of WoW. It's very polished and very fun, even if on some level it's less fulfilling than the do-it-yourself nature of EVE.

The upcoming Cataclysm expansion is just one example of the kind of thing that can happen in WoW, but could never happen in EVE.
These days, the Cocoa text system on Macs is so ridiculously feature-complete that you can do this in web browsers and chat programs as well, along with “smart quotes” and automatic spelling correction.
although it points to useful things like

git add --patch

which not all tutorials teach. But all in all, there is better "advanced git" material out there.
Why do some people complain about everything | My Complaint
My usual half-serious stance on this is that a language is just a dialect with an army. But this does of course break down in the case of Icelandic, which is definitely a language, but has neither, but clearly captures tha fact that answers to these questions are to a large part political. When I was younger, there was a language called serbocroatian, spoken in one country and written with two different scripts...
The most annoying part about doing Django as a dev coming from Rails is the RequestContext that isn't used by default, if you want to access specific contexts like settings. Then it means having to hack it using direct_to_template or writing a decorator.

It's a different philosophy, but it's hard getting use to having to explicitly spell out everything when I just want to get going with defaults that make sense.
Thanks, I do plan to follow up with calls. Took a quick look at Jigsaw, thanks for the tip.
Apparently Michael Mann and others involved in this scandal are directly in control of realclimate.

Anyway, I wanted you guys to know that you’re free to use RC Rein any way you think would be helpful. Gavin and I are going to be careful about what comments we screen through, and we’ll be very careful to answer any questions that come up to any extent we can. On the other hand, you might want to visit the thread and post replies yourself. We can hold comments up in the queue and contact you about whether or not you think they should be screened through or not, and if so, any comments you’d like us to include.

http://www.examiner.com/x-25061-Climate-Change-Examiner~y200...
Thank you for your response, I have had a very hard time converting people for my main product, so doing it again for another one seems like a daunting task. Thanks for the comments.
I'm highly skeptical.

An interpreter-only implementation that performs better than compiled implementations?... Oh, but wait, it says it's better than "some" compiled implementations, so I guess if it beats "some" shitty compiled implementations that's true... How does it compare to, say, SBCL?

As for the "As a consequence [of being interpreter-only], Pico Lisp is the most dynamic Lisp in existence today." part, I don't really see what notable advantages an interpreter-only implementation would have over a proper compiler-implementation in flexibility, given that it's Lisp we're talking about. Unless you wanted to muck with the deep internals or something... Also, I'm in the process of making my homebrewed web framework more flexible by making use of more compilation, thus making it less of an interpreter.
First osmosis power plant goes on stream in Norway
I think the important point is the utility of language, not its "correctness". Regardless of the political issues involved, speaking the "standard" language or the prestige language is an asset in most circumstances.

Speaking Ebonics would make it harder for a doctor to win patient trust, harder for an interviewee to get a job, harder for a politician to win in most districts and even harder for a defendant to get a favorable judgment. Any teacher who ignores this fact does a disservice to the students.
That's unfortunate, but I don't think the appeals of the iPhone are really that applicable to blind persons for reasons like this. A touch interface isn't going to work very well without visual feedback, even if the mentioned issues are fixed; it would be better to search for a device more well-suited.
Regardless of the school board debating the potential validity of AAVE, I think it's misguided to experiment with asserting such "correctness" to teach kids that will grow up in a world that doesn't regard it as such. Save such philosophy for later academics, where the author/speaker can make a conscious choice of use - similar to the stylistic, but "incorrect", use of 'But' or 'And' to begin a sentence.
I think it is also that not a lot of people get worked up about mathematics. With the climate thing, a lot of money and lifestyle issues are at stake.

I don't even trust complaints about "not showing the maths". With creationists it is the same, they always claim that the science of evolution is shoddy, but it isn't true. They pick some obscure details nobody cares about, but if you don't know much about evolution theory, you might be fooled. With the climate debate likewise I might not be able to tell which calculations are relevant and which aren't.
Entering-the-Company Ceremony (1999)
The fact that a sum of squares yields negative numbers is their fault. The fact that they can't reproduce their own numbers is also their fault.
I'm impressed with the design =). I like how the right column is used as a per page FAQ.

A few minor suggestions:

- Consider merging or ditching one of the two taglines. The site becomes easier to read if the eye doesn't have to jump around.

- When a user is not signed in, there are 3 buttons in the nav bar which lead to twitter login. It may be a good idea to remove them or add example content for guests.

- The "Get Started" link is really a "Log in" link. This could be confusing.

All in all, great work! Especially for a little over two months development time. I'm curious, how are you marketing the site?
This is simply a problem with definitions, though. Whether mistake or habit, or language, dialect, or idiolect, what matters is the part that comes after. People still study the Akkadian language, despite its lack of speakers.
I would also like to see this.
Also works in Ubuntu 8.04, it's apparently not a new feature.
Oh, for the Good Old Days to Come (Second Life and multi-core)
Same here - MTC would have been simpler to understand for me.
Sometimes faster than other new Ruby VMs: http://twitter.com/avibryant/status/6073999000

It's a really exciting time for Ruby programmers! Too bad I don't get paid to write (much) Ruby these days.
I'd suggest changing it from a text link to a colorful call to action button. Try testing "Learn More", "How it Works" and "Take a Tour". You get the idea.