Hacker News Reader

thrason Secrecy in science is a corrosive force

Or better yet, release the raw data and the transformation scripts.

thrason CRU Admits to Dumping Raw Climate Data

I like reading what the HN crowd thinks about this. And I like the articles posted so far on it...but yeah, you're probably right.

thrason CRU Admits to Dumping Raw Climate Data

No, no. I agree with you that we need to hold them over the fire on this. But "purposely" is going too far.

The best explanation, until proven otherwise, is that somebody goofed.

thrason As toll mounts, researchers peer into the H1N1 death spiral

There was a New York Times article recently that highlighted some research that claimed that the new "wonder drug" Asprin added to the death toll at the time, as it prescribed in far too high of quantities.

thrason CRU's "very artificial correction for decline" is dead code

It's even better if you read the Briffa letter to Nature that he cited: http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v391/n6668/abs/391678a0...

Something completely unknown is making tree rings too small after 1960. And if you correlate your tree ring data to post-1960 temperatures it makes historical temperature look way too high.

Bizarro-Briffa sent a similar letter to Bizarro-Nature warning of an unknown divergence problem and saying not to correlate tree rings to pre-1960 temperatures because it makes historical temperature look way too low.

thrason CRU's "very artificial correction for decline" is dead code

No, you are misinformed. Further, your tone is unhelpful.

This was the first time that the data was available. As McIntyre points out in the top of his post, the decline was discussed in the 1998 and 2001 Briffa papers.

Of course, scientists could not actually evaluate this because the data was not released. But that's not the issue.

The issue is, as McIntyre also points out, that the IPCC 2001 graph (and later graphs) simply truncated the climate reconstruction data in 1960 and pasted the (more accurate) direct temperature station measurement data onto the graph after 1960.

While this was done it plain sight, it's still lousy scientific practice. Why? After all, shouldn't more accurate data be used? The problem is that comparison of temperature reconstructions with direct measurement tells you a lot about the accuracy of your reconstruction.

In this case it tells you a lot about the inaccuracy of the reconstruction and the sorts of signals that are missed.

I'm sorry, the paleoclimate reconstructions available in the literature are not convincing. They often use dodgy statistical techniques, mixing data gathering steps with data correlation steps to increase apparent agreement with the instrument record. There have been huge problems with releasing data and there are often bizarre choices made in proxy record selection.

Without good paleoclimate reconstructions, it's hard to know how far outside (or inside) the historical standard deviation for temperature we are. I happen to think it's an important question to have answered. A trillion dollar question.

thrason CRU's "very artificial correction for decline" is dead code

Anyone searching for outright fraud in in these emails is going to be disappointed. The problem is not fraud, but rather scientists who believe that they are correct, and that their job is now not science but public relations.

That said, finding this was a big deal: http://camirror.wordpress.com/2009/11/26/new-the-deleted-dat...

thrason "There is absolutely no design document whatsoever...[it] lives in Sid's brain."

I'm curious, have you seen enough C++ to know the differences between 1990's C++ and 2000's C++, and really prefer 1990's C++ because "C++ guys don't like it"?

thrason Forty Years of 'Civilisation'

The history of Western art, literature, and science in the post-ancient world possesses more than enough justification for anyone to call it "high" culture.

If you can't make value judgments about Mozart, Michelangelo, or Shakespeare, that's simply a tragedy.

I strongly recommend Barzun's "From Dawn to Decadence: 500 Years of Western Cultural Life."

To take a direct shot at relativism: I think it's quite possible to justify the West over the last 500 years as the most productive era for art and science in all of human history up until now.

thrason Comments in ClimateGate source code: unambiguous smoking gun

You know, 20 years ago, the place of "climate scientists" in the scientific hierarchy was (justifiably) about the same as the placement of dentists in the medical hierarchy.

The physics behind global warming makes a lot of sense. The warming models aren't pure physics, however, and require feedback effects. Now, are the models right about 6 degrees of warming in the next century? I don't have a clue because the historical climate reconstructions are so shitily done. I have no idea if the temperature anomaly over the last 30 years exceeds historical bounds for standard deviation. I have no idea what the magnitude of the Medieval Warm Period was.

This is an important question. A trillion dollar question. We need to throw the hopped-up climate scientists out, fools who were lucky to be in the field when it became important, and get some real intelligence working on this problem. Cause this ain't it.

thrason Re: What You Can't Say

You can't say that.

thrason There is a certain inevitability to life.

I'll delete it myself if you'll explain exactly what's so objectionable.

thrason There is a certain inevitability to life.

I sat next to a girl on the airplane the other day who works with autistic children. She told me that the strange thing is that many of these children are good with computers and frighteningly addicted to YouTube. Apparently there is an entire community of autistic people making videos for other autistic people. The autistic viewers will watch the same minutes of autistic-produced video again and again thousands of times. They do things like read the contents of movie jackets on film, zooming in on each photo one by one. And out there in YouTube-land is an audience for it, obsessed.

I thought of this while I struggled to figure out why the Zefrank video was at the top on Hacker News this evening.

thrason Nate Silver on the Leaked Global Warming Emails

I don't understand why conservatives are so happy about this. If an entire branch in the tree of human knowledge is unsound, that's an unambiguously bad thing. It means, at the least, that we have a lot of work to do over again.

Maybe those people are happy because they have been saying for a while that an entire branch of human knowledge is unsound and that there is a lot of work to do over again?

thrason Apple Wins Like a Champ - Psystar is Toast -- What? You're Surprised?

There's the EULA side of things, and there's the copying to RAM or hard disc side of things. That's why Apple won.

Neither of those things have anything to do with "respecting the intent of the author."

thrason Apple Wins Like a Champ - Psystar is Toast -- What? You're Surprised?

"They didn't respect the Author's (Apple) intent regarding their software."

Huh, is there a law about respecting author's intents?

thrason Microsoft calls Zoho the "Fake Office" - Zoho responds with a zinger

Microsoft isn't competing with Zoho. They're competing with Google which is competing with Zoho. If they were trying to trash talk, they would have trashed Google docs. Instead, they mentioned Zoho, Google, and Zimbra in order to make Google look like a bit player.

So, you've given Google's competitor's product a try because of what Microsoft said. Maybe Microsoft knows a little about marketing after all...

thrason Microsoft calls Zoho the "Fake Office" - Zoho responds with a zinger

I got to http://writer.zoho.com/home?serviceurl=%2Findex.do before giving up. I'm not going to sign in just so I can see how the Word Processor works.

thrason Microsoft calls Zoho the "Fake Office" - Zoho responds with a zinger

The comment from a Microsoft VP says "we're not seeing any inclination that Zoho or Google or Zimbra or any other of those offering fake Office capabilities can replace [Microsoft Office]."

Given that he's spot-on right, I'm not sure what the big deal is. The online office apps don't even compete favorably with OpenOffice, much less Microsoft Office.

On the other hand, Microsoft's Office Live offering isn't going anywhere as far as I can tell. They don't understand the importance of simple.

thrason Ask HN: Automatic Translation, why not?

I think that's what everyone tries to do. What your group needs to do is talk to some of the people who have already worked on this.

Then again, there's no reason, a priori, that your group can't build the better mousetrap if they've got the requisite skills and resources.

thrason You Aren't Average

You had the choice between attacking my statement by citing a few successful public education campaigns (there aren't many) or attacking me.

You attacked me. Wonderful way to convince others about your point.

thrason You Aren't Average

Yeah, because education is so effective.

thrason The Shocking State of Contemporary "Mathematics"

Maybe that's the reason. Or is it that the modern academic job scene pushes people to be big fish in small ponds rather than medium-sized fish in bigger ponds?

thrason 1 - 2 + 3 - 4 + 5 - 6 + ... made easy

It diverges under the ordinary definitions of infinite series, but one can generalize the notion of summation a little bit to allow for certain divergent series to have finite sums.

thrason Facebook Memorial Mode: I'm not dead yet

So they just memorialize the account without sending a "Hello, are you really dead email?" to check first. Design flaw.

(Hmm, maybe we need a form with "Just a flesh wound" or "I'm feeling better!" options.)

thrason HTML+CSS=POOP

Oh come on, layout languages had been around for years when CSS first appeared.

The problem with CSS is that it was designed by the sorts of people who like to design languages around vague concepts rather than design languages around getting things done. In the case of CSS, the overriding concept was semantic information. Surprise, surprise, it only turns out to be mildly useful.

The visual web was horribly crippled in order to achieve a mediocre result with a few non-visual edge cases.

thrason Ask HN: If C++ is so bad, what should game developers use?

Type checking is what you say when the compiler makes sure that you've used all your types correctly, and spits out an error when you don't. It's there to prevent you from trying to assign an int to a string, for example.

"Runtime type checking" is the same thing at runtime. Errors and exceptions get thrown, your program stops. So no, that's not what we're talking about.

Here is a description of type checking: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Type_system#Type_checking

thrason Ask HN: If C++ is so bad, what should game developers use?

Correct about RTTI -- and I don't think I used that improperly any place -- but "runtime type inference" is also something people talk about: http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&client=firefox-a&...

thrason Ask HN: If C++ is so bad, what should game developers use?

Sorry, but people use the term this way: http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&client=firefox-a&...

thrason Ask HN: If C++ is so bad, what should game developers use?

According to the very Wikipedia article you cited, there is no such thing as "runtime type inference"

I can't seem to find that statement anywhere in the article. And it hasn't been edited since September. Also, why not google for "runtime type inference": http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&client=firefox-a&...