skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Ask HN: Best books about nuclear energy/power plant design?
I want to learn more about nuclear energy, nuclear power plants, the various designs, thorium, etc.

Any book recommendations for the nuclear noob? Thanks in advance.
Officials Profile the Climate Change Hacker
Exactly. (However Data.Set is only defined for comparable values, i.e. the Ord typeclass, not Eq.)
Not ramen profitable (yet). Right now the only thing people can pay for are Pro accounts - that's not how we plan on making real money. There are 3 other rev streams that are part of our bigger picture that we haven't yet started building - still working on our core product, making and keeping users happy. Those 3 streams in part rely on a large user base so we're not entirely in the wrong focusing on our freemium stuff right now.
I highly suggest buying the print version of Feltron's report, as it is inspirational, fascinating, and beautiful.
That would be a good move, it would enrich the office apps they already have. Its not hard to create the features that yammer offers and google will whoop them on distribution alone.
This sure would make working with WordPress themes easier.
What problem is this trying to solve?

I know it's not perfect, but doesn't the market end up doing this pretty well, especially when you throw contractors and consultants into the mix? It's perhaps not as scientific and certainly not optimal for each individual case, but in the aggregate, it would seem that the rate that developers and salespeople get paid is probably pretty fair.

The big problem is a lack of pricing transparency in the labor market.
No, it shouldn't matter, just an observation it's a dimension of ignorant distinction I'm not used to, is all.
Is there any software out there to manage alpha/beta invites and emails?
Is there any software out there to manage alpha/beta invites and emails?
Very interesting: Twitter started delivering about 100 fail whales (503) per second a few weeks ago for reasons that weren't immediately apparent. So this blog entry details their hunt for the problem and how they think they can ameliorate it. Lots of details including graphs and tables.
My one month project: Otakuwire
Probably as soon as someone creates a web server especially for child porn, with a list of features designed expressly to help child porn traffickers, and marketed as the best child porn server out there.

Tor?
The couple that tweets together, stays together
SHODAN - Banner grabbing search engine for pentesters
The history classes I had (post, let's say, eighth grade; I’m from Germany) were all about the “why”. The credo was not to even bother remembering historical facts unless they help you explain why something happened. I always hated remembering facts. But I always really loved history. It wasn’t about facts, it was about explaining why something happened (with the facts as your tool) and finding out whether some explanations are better or more plausible than others.

Remembering just facts is no fun if you can’t use them for anything.

(The “whys” of history are more than cute little stories about individuals as this article makes it sound, though. Explanations can include economic data, statistics, maps, laws, newspaper articles, cartoons and all kinds of documents.)

PS, history as taught in the United States can’t be that bad. I just finished listening to a lecture about Germany prior to the First World War by Margaret Anderson (Department of History UC Berkeley – http://history.berkeley.edu/faculty/Anderson/ – the lecture is available as a podcast – oh, the joys of the internet) and it pretty much echoed exactly all the things we discussed in the last two years in school. It was pretty nostalgic all around.
Couple questions:

1. How is this different from Django filters? Is it that the default is HTML escaping instead of having to specify the escaping with each template variable?

2. How does it handle different escaping contexts? For example, text in html attributes needs to be escaped differently from text in the body of the document. Text in URLs or JavaScript has to be escaped differently still, and often times you have to combine these escapings (eg. a JavaScript onClick attribute). Is XHP smart enough to recognize these different contexts and do the right thing, or do you need to fall back to some manual mechanism?
Fair enough, but considering Buzz has only rolled out to a small portion of gmail users, it's a premature in the extreme (hence "intellectually dishonest") to claim to be bored with it.
Probably best to ask these types of questions here http://startups.com/
I have to admit that it's a shameless clone of reddit/digg, and not all features are there yet... The purpose was to try to see if a focused community social news aggregator would be useful.
While I understand where you're coming from, I feel like that would result in incredibly confusing markup and only lead to increased headaches down the road. I'm glad they left that out.
I've been using Prefinery to put up teaser pages and manage a 'wait' list for my app. The free account should be enough for this.

How ever you can use their API to build something to suit your requirements maybe.
I am addicted to data. I track my workouts, my diet, my performance against goals, my net worth, my time (RescueTime), my habits, etc. I can honestly say that almost nothing else in my life has had as big an effect on my behavior.
Hmm, that's a consistent approach, but it reminds me of a hill-climbing algorithm. Don't you think we could do better?

For example, it would probably be helpful to study how cultures and traditions changed in the past. At some point, some guy changed his mind from pro-slavery to anti-slavery without initially wanting to become anti-slavery. How did this happen? If we could identify the sort of thought process that leads to these novel conclusions, we could apply it to our own traditions and figure out beneficial changes.
I agree with that. I don't own a notebook, and here's why: as a developer, I find it very hard to work on a laptop: I need two displays, a proper keyboard, a proper mouse and a powerful machine. It's question of taste, I suppose. For my "mobile communcation needs", my Android phone is satisfactory most of the times. However, for casual browsing / reading, the smartphone is too small / slow and the desktop computer is too big / uncomfortable. Laptops are way to big for casual browsing either in my opinion. I believe a tablet would be an ideal device for me.

I don't know yet if the iPad will be the "one" for me, but right now I'm pretty much certain that I will purchase a tablet in the next few years.
What evidence does Mr. Greene provide for British connivance at Napoleon's escape from Elba, or for Talleyrand's masterminding the plot? Talleyrand was a thoroughly crooked operator, but prudent enough to see dangers in such a plan. Waterloo was anything but a walkover for the British and Prussian forces.

Heaven knows that a lot of history instruction can render the most fascinating characters boring, but some overview of Talleyrand's earlier and later career, the history of the Congress of Vienna, the campaign that led to Waterloo, etc. etc. might enable to raise such questions. Is it really a gain to escape from the world of disconnected dry facts to a world of dubious theories?
nice, I'm going to check them out.
Wasn't there just a thread complaining about how the end tags make HTML so much more verbose and difficult to read, and that's why people are writing preprocessors like HAML and XHP? I've found that the code is much clearer when you omit your end tags.

As for semantic correctness - it's in the HTML spec, and every major modern browser handles it correctly. Sometimes I wonder if Google's the only folks who actually read the W3C specs, there's been so much cargo-cult advice passed down between web developers.

The "always close your tags" advice came from the early 2000s, when people were pushing XHTML as a way to make your HTML pages XML compliant (the big buzzword back then). It gives essentially no benefit to users, no benefit to developers, costs you bandwidth, makes your pages slower, and clutters up your markup.
maybe there are other things to judge people on, besides money?
UI nitpick: you've got each item highlighting as the mouse moves over it. Usually if you flash a box it's because the user can click it and make something happen.
In financial services there are excellent regulatory and operational reasons for blocking a wide variety of web sites.
The useful abstraction might mean that they wouldn't need to be GPLed, especially if combined with a sane view/template separation (like Django's: the template just gets a dict as input and nothing else).
That is an efficiency hack to make it O(n log n) instead of O(n^2) rather than an intrinsic property of sets, functors, or Haskell :)
is there any open source software that I can throw up on my server?
Filters are tags in django templates that live in .html files with a bit of logic in a bespoke mini language. XHP for python would be something like this.

def view_foo( request ):
baz = "roger, roger"
return render_foo( baz )

def render_foo( name ):
return <html><head></head><body>hi, {name}</body></html>

The most glaring difference is that instead of template logic and keywords, you can use python. You definitely want to sequester rendering from the rest of your view, but I see little benefit to django templates. Missing from this code sample is some django middleware which renders a proper HttpResponse() from the XHP return.

I don't know well enough to answer about escaping. Check out the framework, and try it for yourself :)
Free to innovate: an alternative entrepreneurship model to support innovation
Laptop graphics are always a minefield of barely adequate hardware. I really hope this, as well as Nvidia's ION chipsets see an end to these dark days.
Word of mouth isn't viral
Have you looked at the Geo features? The integration with several existing services? Of course it is not a new idea, but to say "just a Google logo" does a great disservice to the team who've been working hard on this project.
Describes Paul Kocher's Cryptography Research, which some HN'ers have some familiarity with, and which is a fascinating company.
Reduce your personal expenses and you can acquire a surplus. If you let your personal expenses expand to meet your cash flow, you'll never have excess cash flow to do with as you please.
Late Last Year, Google Overtook Apple In WebKit Code Commits
Clearly you are not a cat owner.
It’s been more than seven years since iRobot introduced the world to the Roomba robotic vacuum. Seven years without fundamental innovation...

Gee. Aren't patents awesome?
Intel, Micron announce 25nm NAND flash production
How many ways can you bow in Japan?
Real article: http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/blog/2010/feb/05/cru-c...

I'm not impressed. I find nothing in this article that budges me from the early hypothesis that it was a legitimate Freedom Of Information request response collection that the CRU stopped building after it won its appeal (the last dates of items are suggestive, as is the curation) and then the collection was either leaked or perhaps was carelessly left somewhere accessible.
This will give a whole new meaning to "turning in one's grave".
It would be nice to do this with Mixergy, but I don't see a way to download the videos. I guess I could do it with the audio...
This article about you is relevant and interesting to me (particularly as my site is based on a freemium model, too). Even if you had submitted this yourself, I'd still be upvoting it.
Thanks. I wanted to bring to attention of the user which story they were reading... but I think you are right.
Defining a Multivariate Test: Getting Started with Multivariate Testing
Multivariate testing is becoming more popular amongst the web design and development community, and rightfully so. Take a look and see how the smallest changes can produce the biggest results.
Google Buzz re-invents Gmail
maybe I've misunderstood, but this seems to advocate mixing inline HTML and php logic - isn't that a huge step backwards in terms of web software architecture? I thought we were all using the MVC model by now...

My head just hurts thinking how utterly unmaintainable all that spaghetti code must be.
If only there were a way to convey information in some kind of compact symbolic visual format that everyone could parse at their own desired speed.
I've worked in Healthcare, Law Enforcement and the Military; the only time it wasn't blocked was when I had my own company.
Before you read any of the following, go study a good thermodynamics book. Understand the carnot cycle.

Then:
Tom Clancy's book "Submarine" for a clear understanding of current reactor design, if simplified.

The thorium cycle is well documented in a fair amount of D.O.E. material which is available on the web. It is older but accurate.

Wikipedia has some (mostly) accurate data about the thorium cycle.

Check the American Nuclear Society web site for available books. Their really aren't that many to choose from.

All of this technology is well documented and pretty old. It is simply not used.
This really resonated for me. I've often thought through 'viral' aspects of possible products, but they've always been 'A YouTube video' or 'A themed game' kind of thing - relevant to the brand, but light enough for people to pass it along. I've called that viral, but it's not (any more than a Facebook meme, which I can ignore, could be considered more viral than smallpox).

Viral is Hotmail (and the other examples the OP lists) - when a person uses the actual product, they cannot help but spread the message ("Sent via Hotmail. Register now for your free account"). Great observation that I had previously missed.
Malthusianism is, fundamentally, a failure of economic understanding
Typhoonae - removing app engine vendor lockin
on a page like http://mixergy.com/daniel-brusilovsky/, there is an "original video" link under the "embed this video" link.
I feel that programmers tend to avoid manually collecting data. They program computers to do it for them, or have Mint.com do it, or use products like Nike+, but there are a lot of datapoints that cannot be automated and require discipline in order to accurately collect. Some of these datasets can be extremely insightful when analyzed.

Over the past year or so I've thought several times about writing a product like Daytum, although I can't tell you exactly how many times the thought occurred.

I'm glad to see that somebody made this type of product.
Agreed. Most of my posts here are based on ideas I read on Less Wrong and Overcoming Bias. Anyone who hasn't visited these sites should probably take a look at the sequences:

http://wiki.lesswrong.com/wiki/Sequences

http://wiki.lesswrong.com/wiki/Map_and_Territory_(sequence)

http://wiki.lesswrong.com/wiki/Mysterious_Answers_to_Mysteri...

http://wiki.lesswrong.com/wiki/How_To_Actually_Change_Your_M...

The meta-ethics sequence is probably the closest thing to what I read on fallibleideas.com: http://wiki.lesswrong.com/wiki/Metaethics_sequence

If you're easily distracted on a computer and you want this sort of stuff in book form, I recommend Good and Real: Demystifying Paradoxes from Physics to Ethics by Gary Drescher.
Jaron Lanier on Staying Human in a Tech-Driven World
The most significant lecture of the decade.
Why Do I Need Facebook When I Have Twitter
Your first one, commented with ??????, is an instance of a Duration object. It implements the #ago and #from_now methods, so that Integer objects aren't cluttered with methods that mean nothing to it.

http://api.rubyonrails.org/classes/ActiveSupport/Duration.ht...
They used to give away free copies of MS Office at Military conventions to senior personnel. The idea was that those people would start using the new default formats and others would be required to buy upgrades. It worked quite frequently that I know of.
And I think it is, so I did upvote it. :-)
I don't know why there couldn't be 'filler' space at the top put there just to achieve the depth requirements.
You could also use VLC (on windows) to play back the video at more then 1.0x speed.
I'd be happy to do better, but I don't see any limits my approach imposes that are problematic.

For slavery, I think he first noticed some kind of problem. Maybe he was a slave owner and didn't like disobedient, unproductive, or dishonest slaves. He may have at first thought this was just a problem with how he treated his own slaves that his neighbors had already fixed.

So he goes and asks his neighbors about it. He's not trying to rock the boat, just make a bit more money. He finds out his neighbors have the same problem. So that pushes him in the direction of seeing it as a problem with slavery in general. But he still expects there will be a solution that keeps slavery more or less in tact.

So then he looks for a solution. He tries different ways of treating his slaves and tries to figure out which result in more cotton production. As he learns about what works, it gradually leads him away from slavery.

This example shows how someone could end up becoming anti-slavery by accident, just by trying to solve immediate, practical problems.

There were also other ways to become opposed to slavery. For example, one could notice that slavery is an exception to widespread traditions that existed at the time. And one could wonder: what is the reason for making this exception? People did wonder that, and they had answers like that black people are less than human. But one could notice problems with those answers. They aren't very intellectually satisfying arguments and they had logical flaws. Or one might talk to a black man for an hour and notice he seems like a normal human.
I helped beta this and it works great. Since it just just a typical script you can write the script in whatever language the distro has an interpreter for. Bash, Ruby, Python, whatever. If the distro doesn't have the interpreter you want, you could always write a StackScript to install it ;)
Jaron Lanier is the most significant thinker in tech today. Here is his long lecture, this is the most important video in the last 15 years:
http://zocalopublicsquare.org/full_video_2010.php?event_id=3...
I always use the 1.4x feature at BloggingHeads.tv, and it's amazing. The talk usually gets more engaging and easier to understand because you're paying more attention. It's not at all hard to understand people.

This definitely needs to become standard. In fact, one of the major reasons I'm rooting for HTML5 video replacing flash video is so that a browser can add this functionality.
Agree about the book.
First of all, you shouldn't take the prices on wire services websites as the price everyone pays. In my experience, these can be discounted 50-75% if your account rep is hungry believes you can be more than a one-off client.

Second, you should take a hard look at how news-worthy your release is to the general public. If you're announcing a rewrite of your webapp into scala, then you should skip a press release and just target the handful of outlets in your niche. This can be a hard one to do since you may have spent the last 10mo tirelessly devoted to feature x and it's all you and everyone at your company talk about. Strive to regain focus and take a critical look at how exciting the mass media is going to find your announcement.

I've never just used a wire service and expected results. If you are a small startup and are really announcing something that meets the criteria of the paragraph above you'll probably land a few hits - small blogs, regional print, maybe a trade pub. Wire services should only be a small part of your strategy for announcing a new release.

The direct outreach is the most important for real results. Hopefully you've been building a list of media contacts that communicate relevant information about your industry, if not start now. If you haven't already, sign up for HARO (http://helpareporter.com) and look for reporters who are actually looking to write about things your company does//makes//gives away.

On the day you release your update, I would send an email individually to those people on your list. Write them a short, personal message explaining what you've announced and why it's interesting. Add the text of your press release below your email and make sure to include ample ways for them to contact you (cellphone, aim, etc) if they're interested in any followup.

As for writing a press release: very few PR people will understand what you're doing as well as you. On the other hand, those people spend all day interfacing with the press you're after, so they have an idea of how to effectively communicate with them. I would suggest the best writer on your team takes a stab at writing the press release. Then pass it around for folks peer-review it (friends, girlfriends, english lit majors, whatever). Don't be afraid to cut down the verbage. Don't over-inflate your accomplishment(s). Don't use geeky terms.

One thing I've had great success with is teaming up with a college student who wants to get into PR. It's a great opportunity to cut their teeth on something real, and for you to have someone else obsess about the wording in the release while you manage the 500-or-so pre-release emergencies that tend to crop up.

Lastly, you should also take a look at marketwire. I've had experience w/ most of the wires you mention and mw was my fav for tech.
"There is no reason for any individual to have a computer in his home"
Who else would you include in this category?
I feel like I'm not understanding something. How is this "signed"? It appears they're just storing the user's salt in their cookie... in which case you might as well store any other random info, it doesn't mean it's "signed", it just prevents people from changing their cookie's user_id and logging in as someone else. Didn't they already have something like that in place?
I imagine making every single coffin into a drill capable of boring a hole into the earth is a lot more expensive than buying a couple of sets of digging equipment per cemetery.
If you don't close your tags,

<div>foo<a>bar<span>baz box

how can you tell the difference between,

<div>foo<a>bar</a><span>baz</span> box</div>

and

<div>foo<a>bar<span>baz</span> box</a></div>
Assuming by viral we all mean achieving exponential growth without marketing, then this article is wrong.

The company I work at has been seeing 20% growth per month for many months now, and we don't seem to be meeting his definitions: "A user's usage of those products - without anything more - markets the products themselves."
We do facilitate the word of mouth process by including a feature that allows users to share with Facebook or Twitter, but there's nothing inherent in our service's usage that makes users market the service for us.
You're bringing up a world-class institution of higher learning, whereas the article is talking about average, run-of-the-mill education. History taught at the upper-college levels can be pretty good. History taught in public high schools, not so much. There are some good teachers out there, so YMMV, but history, as well as math, have a habit of being short-changed by memorization-focused learning and testing. Not even because it's easy to teach, but because it's easy to grade.
Well, assuming the minimum depth is even as low as three feet, the deceased is up to six feet tall and there's maybe a foot of additional space (thickness of coffin, the pointy drill bit, satin pillows, etc.) you're now looking at a ten foot long coffin. This seems to be a bit unwieldy at best, particularly when you've got to stand it up to bore into the ground.
Seriously, what does this have to do with Nash equilibria, and how is Google "violating" one?
This doesn't say that at all. The rendering code you write needs to be modular as well, and has quite a bunch of logic built into it (even when all the model and controller logic is separate.) So when you write your renderers as classes or functions, that is when you realize the benefit of XHP.