skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
While their culture might be necessary, its not sufficient.

You also need the high end of the market with its fat profit margins to support the cost of maintaining that culture.
Realistic breeder fuel cycles also use a mix of actinides that would be unattractive for bomb makers: you're going to start with fuel that's been through an LWR once or twice, so contamination with Pu240 and Pu241/Am241 will be high to begin with and will just get worse the more cycles you spend in a fast spectrum.

Now, hypothetically, a country like Iran could develop a fast reactor that's optimized for producing plutonium for military purposes, but practically this would be much more difficult than developing a heavy water reactor like the U.S. used at Savannah River.

The isotope which is most problematic in commercial fuel cycles would actually be Np237. It's easy to separate Np chemically from other elements, and Np237 is longer lived than other isotopes of Np, so it can be prepared in a very pure form. Np237 has a low spontaneous fission cross section and a critical mass close to pure U235 -- it would be an attractive material for primitive gun-type bombs.

Note that Np237 is produced from U235 by the chain of absorbing two neutrons, making U237, and then beta decay to Np237. A plutonium-fueled or thorium-fueled reactor isn't going to make as much of it as our current reactors do.
From the article:

BLADE "thwarts the ability of browser-based exploits to surreptitiously download and execute malicious content by remapping to the filesystem only those browser downloads to which a programmatically inferred user-consent is correlated, BLADE provides its protection without explicit knowledge of any exploits and is thus resilient against code obfuscation and zero-day threats that directly contribute to the pervasiveness of today's drive-by malware."

This sounds like a great idea, but here's the problem that I have with BLADE: if we're going to create something to semi-intelligently decide whether browser content is actual user data or something malicious. Okay, that sounds good in theory, but I think it's a little more difficult to implement in practice. Wouldn't it be easier to simply prompt the user to ask?

I know, I know--users would just be fooled by tricky malware or would deny session ID cookies because they look like a random string of letters and numbers (looks like a hacker!). Instead of reinventing the wheel with an academic system that can't possibly stop all malware and can't possibly allow all legitimate traffic, why don't we simply encourage end users to run noscript and adblock (pretty much eliminates the adware aspect) and the ability to allow "drive-by" downloads on a per-site basis?
Have you considered it a problem of committing? Sometimes, when you have bucketfuls of experience, there doesn't seem to be any good choices, and you are paralysed by the fear that you might incur a technical debt that will be expensive to pay later.

Secondly, is it your development environment. Some tools have gotten very large and can disrupt the flow of reasoning.

Thirdly, try doing as much of the design work away from the computer. Then when you are there, you are just writing code.
Yes, this is what I think happened too (I'm the original owner of vb.ly and that's my blog post linked above)

EDIT: and therefore I do feel Bit.ly need to be worried - perhaps they'll be able to do a deal rather than have their domain removed but clearly something is stirring here thus ".ly domain space to be considered unsafe".
In 1998 I wrote some documentation and offered it to the GNU Project. To my surprise, I got a reply back from Richard directly. He was very pleased that someone had written such documentation and offered it to them. (I remember him using the word "Hooray!")

However, in retrospect, what I wrote was pretty poorly written. It was my first major attempt at documentation, and Richard critiqued it heavily. I felt very hurt, but he was probably kinder than he needed to be given the low quality of my work, and, more importantly, he was correct. Once I got past feeling hurt, I learned a lot from his critiques. I essentially got free training in technical writing from Richard, and I look back on that as one of the more awesome moments in my life in software.
* Apache's implementation is a clean room one - the ASF agreed to no such restrictions on the TCK, and did not get a license for it.

* Dalvik, as other people point out above, is not Java. It is its own virtual machine, built from the ground up by Google, so Oracle can't claim copyright on it, but is going after it with patents, which seems like a low blow (we can't compete, so we'll sue).
Actual damages in copyright can be the profits the infringer made from the infringement or the profits the copyright owner lost due to the infringement, so first of all the potential damages (if there was copyright infringement...which is an allegation that as far as I know no one has even been able to guess what it might be) could be up to what Oracle would sell a license for, which I suspect could be a considerable amount. So, I'm not sure PJ is correct here about the potential damages being cut immensely, at least if Oracle asks for actual damages.

Second (and this is the part that is relevant to file sharing), actual damages can be difficult to calculate. It is often highly speculative how much an infringer profited from an infringement, or how much the copyright holder lost due to the infringement. To deal with this difficulty, US copyright law has a thing called STATUTORY DAMAGES. The plaintiff can elect to ask for statutory damages instead of actual damages, and the court is then allowed to come up with a damage number from a range specified by the statute. That range is from $750 to $30k per infringed work, with the court having discretion to drop the low end to $200 if the defendant was not aware and had no reason to believe they were infringing, or to raise the high end to $150k if the infringement was willful.

All the file sharing lawsuit damage awards have been statutory damages, and have involved many songs. Each song is a separate work, so if the court is nice and goes low ($750) but there were 40 songs, that's $30k. The two most prominent defendants, though, were blatantly guilty, and in one case lied under oath and tried to destroy evidence and tried to frame her kids for the infringement, so the court was not inclined to go for the low end of the statutory damages.

(Note that when the RIAA goes after a file sharer, they usually offer to settle for an amount that is under the minimum they would get from statutory damages, which is why if you are in fact guilty, you should settle).

In the case of Android, it would be likely that there would only be one work infringed (although maybe different libraries are different works, so maybe there are more...), and so even if Oracle got $150k/work, it would not be an amount that would be large for Google. Maybe this is what PJ was thinking of?
Amazing idea. I may start using this more than the front page of hacker news itself.
I think you left out the most important thing - a BHAG focuses money. It's a giant bet. SCO's BHAG is the lawsuit, Netscape's BHAG was the browser, Pets.com's BHAG was serving every pet - all bets that didn't pay off.
...when everyone was throwing around arguments against "infecting the constitution with Sharia" even though no one actually knows what Sharia is.

Sadly, quite a few of the people who are ignorant about what Sharia is are probably also ignorant about what is written in the US Constitution. We're equal opportunity ignorant here in the US. :(
So given the relaxing of the iPhone development guidelines and the increasingly locked down nature of Android phones and impending fragmentation of the app store as every big player tries to grab a slice of the pie how far are we from the point where where the iPhone is the more open platform?

Google made a deal with the devil and now the carriers are going to laugh all the way to the bank on the back of Google's baby.
There are several comments about people putting them in MBPs, but I guess I'll ask you... since OS X doesn't support TRIM have you seen any degradation in performance? I've been on the fence for a while due to the cost and OS X being behind the times.
This is somehow different than other people?
That's true, but that doesn't make it OK. Google is making copies of other people's work without permission, and displaying them for profit. That is the kind of thing that copyright law was meant to prevent. This should be an opt-in feature, something that publishers can enable in robots.txt, if they think it will help them get more traffic.
KISS was always a business proposition. They never cared about making music and I don't think they ever pretended to.
That's not a good analogy, since doctors don't generally "forget" patients that the paramedics bring in. The situation for many developers is, first aid is all that you're gonna get no matter what the injury, good luck.
Sophisticated != good, necessarily.

I trust solid-state electronics (or whatever those old tracking systems are using) as long as our military does. What I would be more worried about is components deteriorating. However, I'll take an older but less error prone unit over a newer more sophisticated but more error prone unit any day.

Voyager 1 was older and less sophisticated. Launched September 5, 1977 and still going, reporting useful data back at least as recently as December 2004.

Mars Climate Orbiter was newer and more sophisticated. Launched December 11, 1998 and crashed September 23, 1999. Software failure.
If you liked Shogun you should read his book King Rat.
One of my top 10!
I think you're misunderstanding what is meant by Sharia. It is not a strict set of rules. Because of this, it is necessarily influenced by ethnic traditionalism. Now if you're looking for western countries which have Sharia courts, the United Kingdom and India are two which come to mind which allow certain civil disputes to be resolved in Sharia courts.
This article means a great deal to me. It's good to see I wasn't alone. I was lucky in high school, because our school wrestling coach saw the rage I carried and convinced me to come out for the team. I lost 30 lbs the first year and got the skills to defend myself. Because I was just a weird guy, I still was a target, but I could protect myself and my friends who were also targets.

I still carry it like a massive chip on my shoulder. I feel that it's the reason I've driven forward into endeavors with intensity. It's made me who I am today; but I still can't forgive the kids (and teachers) who made my life a hell, also in 5th grade.

When I see a picture of myself as a little kid (>4 years) I get really sad for the life that kid will have a few years after taking it. That's why I bust my tail - to tell my little 4 year old self that it's worth it.
If I'm not around, I won't be bothered.
It's not safe for work because plenty of people reading HN do so from their work during breaks and if they happened to be showing a page which has full-frontal nudity on it, even by accident during work hours they could get fired for that.

Your - or mine - morals don't enter in to it, it's just a fact of life. So it's common courtesy to label links that are not safe for work as such.

It's no trouble at all and if it helps keep the Hacker News crowd employed then I think that's a good thing to strive for.
It's in the patent license that covers the Java specification. That license specifically covers Java SE and Java EE and excludes Java ME, and it only covers you if you implement the full spec, without any extensions.

Thus, independent Java implementations relying only on the spec and its patent license are not covered if they do Java ME.
Pointing out that first impressions are important.
It seems inefficient now. But don't most visions of the future include people flying through tubes like bank deposits?! Probably safer than bike lanes too..
I think scraping a constitution and writing a new one inevitably brings about political turmoil precisely because the stated goals aren't being accomplished.

You're right in that duration shouldn't be the only measure, but I think the longevity says something about how society feels in general about the constitution's efficacy.
Right, I should have mentioned that I only do C development, not packaging. So I compile everything with CFLAGS="-O0 -ggdb3".

But of course if you're producing binary packages you may want to use other criteria than compilation speed and diagnostic messages to select the compiler.
A standard design can be done by one person and printed by millions. That's the theory anyway.

Perhaps a more realistic scenario is that cheap manufacturing tech reduces the barrier to entry enough that small startups can mass produce affordable gadgets, without contracting everything out.
Apple looking to hire Tech Crunch blogger?
Having a plug-in is a descent idea. That's essentially the same concept as what Nielsen does with their black boxes. Thanks for the input!
Bricks out of wool
Don't Stick It In (the security risks of using thumb drives)
The linkbait title was ripped straight from reddit where it was also a bad title.
I guess it depends on people. For me announcing goals make them a lot more likely to happen. Also, from what I remember about that TED video, the studies were not really convincing to me. Anyway, see what works for you, that's what's important.
Underpromise, overdeliver.
(I'm the [former?] owner of vb.ly and that's my blog post linked above)

I found the complaint that the rules weren't in English really amusing.
Why should a country's national ccTLD rules be in English? It's a domain space for that country, not for making convenient short URLs for Americans to use on Twitter.

So I'm not American, so this isn't about imperialist America wanting everything to be in English.

The issue is the Libyans WANT international folks to buy their domains - they have all of the site in English, English-speaking pre- and post-sales support and even the domains themselves are sold in US$.

The issue I'm suggesting is that if you are going to put regulations up for the use of the domain that include needing to be in compliance with Libyan Law, it's quite unhelpful not to provide ANY resources or links to where I can read Libyan Law in English (ie the same language the website is selling the domain in).

As it happens I can't find any online resource for explaining to me the gist of Libyan Law in English.

Why would a country run under Sharia law want to allow services like bit.ly and others to use their ccTLD to link to porn and other things they find offensive?

Well with that chain of thinking then bit.ly, and everyone who uses it, should be very worried. Thus I hardly think this is a "rant" as you later describe my post!

It's our internet and we're just letting you weird foreigners use it'.

That's actually your somewhat judgmental opinion. Like I said, I'm not American so this "weird foreigners" remark is off-base.
Ask HN: Inspirational money making web apps made by hackers.
Please post money making web apps that you know of, like 37signals stack, dabble etc. That

1. were made by single hackers (or verry small teams)

2. make money

If possible add a short description.
You are oversimplifying. See http://www.infoq.com/articles/java-dotnet-patents for more information.
I would presume that there is some sort of new method for OTAs on this phone, that overwrites the hidden portion of the iNAND. However, whether that method can be exploited to permanently root the phone remains to be seen. At present, no one knows how it works.
Smarties in US: http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_Qm2M81VKS-s/SaC6lVU2-UI/AAAAAAAADn...

Smarties in Europe: http://www.sogoodblog.com/wp-content/uploads/2008/11/smartie...
I've got an Intel 80M in my dev machine (ubuntu 10.04), running a pile of KVM virtual machines. I've got it split, 40gig to / and 40 gig to flashcache for (a large partition on( the 1TB drive that I'm using for bulk storage. It screams. It can start 6 vms in a couple of seconds, with 250+ meg random read speeds while all 6 are starting up. I've tested with flashcache off, and It's a good 4x slower.

I'm starting to cycle these SSDs into production, got a couple coming Real Soon Now as vm containers. DBs are next, I just need to decide if I'm going to use flashcache or buy enough to go raid.
We are writing quite a lot more than 10GB per SSD per day on ours, and we have run into lifecycle issues. Of course, we are running a lot of these SSD's and striping across them with OS level raid, so we are doing a lot of write IO.
For a Sharia court in the UK to have the power of law though the participants in the case all first have to agree to that though, otherwise they don't have a legal leg to stand on.

So it is only after you've voluntarily agreed to be bound that the court can proceed.
It's fairly disingenuous to say that Google doesn't get paid for sales of Android.

They get no direct payment, but they are indirectly paid via:

- Increased take up of Google Mail and Google Apps (with associated desktop ad revenue).

- Increased take up of Google Voice (both for Android, and also for the iPhone which was at least in part a result of pressure from GV on Android).

- Maintenance of a viable mobile ad market. (By which I mean an ad market which isn't Apple-dominated.)

Plus every other indirect network benefit. I think a good lawyer could certainly establish a plausible link.
What I find most interesting about this is the combination of two materials which have a rich history.
When I was visiting Tasmania ( below Australia ) they talked about the locals from there used to make items out of dried seaweed and how versatile it was. To think a combination of seaweed goo mixed with wool, to make bricks... Its like fiber glass but different.
It's great to hear what's happening in the middle east!

I'm very open to sharing the results with my partners. However, slicing the data partitioned by their competitor will surely not work across the board.
Oracle's lawsuit contained patent claims and a copyright claim. The parts that the parent comment is quoting refer to the copyright claim.
Here I was expecting some hexes and cryptic symbols...

Neat. Good job. :)
500. But it was influenced by his warning not to underestimate.
I suppose "ly" is considered harmful as a suffix now too then?
I love how you change the argument. But in any case.

First, I have tried one. In fact I owned one. If you go back far enough in HN I even talk about it. I generally liked it, but found it too heavy. I'm waiting for the 7" version. With that said, I don't think it can do most of what a PC can do, but I don't think that's its goal either.

And I never claimed that a Win7 slate is more effective than the iPad. In fact it was you who claimed that effectivness wasn't the metric being discussed, but purely capability.
1) So printing isn't there.

2) OK, so now an alternative is something that is slower, requires an account, and only really works at all with an internet connection.

3) I'm not even sure what that means. There are probably more AD users than there are owneers of all iOS devices combined. Certainly at least iPads. If you use your PC for work there is a very good chance your on a domain.

5) This isn't about "every device".... it's about PCs. Most people don't even claim netbooks are real PC replacements. They're meant to be a portable secondary device. No one I know has a netbook as their primary box.

It just seems that many iPad owners contort themselves into pretzels to prove that the iPad is more powerful than any other device at any price point ever conceived. It's simply not. I realize you iPad may have fixed your paralysis, but you still can't print from it.
I think the fact that this thread has only the two of us interested sums of the interest in Silverlight/Moonlight in the hacker community. ;)

I guess I wonder why I would want to write C#, Scala, etc on the clientside? Javascript is an already established cross-browser standard that I'd say any good developer is already familiar with; certainly jQuery strengthens the case for JS and also is bringing more people into the fold.

And with Node.js - which clearly has a lot of interest in the HN community (node.js stories always get upvoted as well they should) - it seems that things are moving in the opposite direction from what moonlight/ms is trying to accomplish with this particular tech.

For all those reasons it just seems like a fools errand to me.
Add Planet Mu and Ninja Tune to that list.

edit: and most importantly don't forget XL Recordings, who have Radiohead, the Prodigy and the White Stripes among others.
W3C: HTML5 not production ready
Reminds of that "animal crossing" story about the guy with the dead mom.
That's pretty absurd, I'm not a specialist on the guts of java but from what I do know ME (mobile edition) is a subset of SE (standard edition), or isn't it? By that reading you'd be allowed a full implementation but not a subset?
"I think it's a little bizarre that people without technical skills (or startup skills) feel compelled or even entitled to start a tech company."

Don't worry, I have no such ideas of grandeur, only ambition. Although the lack of startup skills shouldn't be a barrier to starting a startup, right? After all, isn't that the best way to get the skills?

As for technical skills and tech startups: I agree, and this isn't strictly what I'm looking for, anyway. I have enough tech skills to hire a good programmer and to do every-day coding work after the initial core of a system is completed (by someone with better skills than me). Luckily, knowing this is an advantage: it puts me a step ahead of the people in my shoes who don't realise this.

That's great advice in terms of tech startups vs. tech-enabled startups. Thanks for that.

I'd be interested in your thoughts on roles such as 'advisor'? A friend of mine started a small tech company a few years ago and asked me for some advice. Having a good understanding in the theory (that's the CS degree doing its job) I could tell him what was needed and some possible issues... but I couldn't do it. That was enjoyable and worthwhile for all involved. I've no idea how to evolve that, though.
Freckle - http://letsfreckle.com/ - made by a very small team, very usability oriented. Came into a tough space, and is now making a ton of money.
I wouldn't spend the money on them. Essentially, you're asking a third party that both of you trust to hold the money for a sizable fee.

For previous clients, you've built a relationship with them. Build on that. Stay in good contact. This eliminates the need to proxy money.

For new clients, or folks you don't get a great feel from, just do the 33/33/33 path. 1/3 (33%) due on signing the contract (usually when you agree to the specs / sign the statement of work). 1/3 when you've reached an agreed upon milestone. And 1/3 upon completion. This limits your exposure, limits their exposure, and encourages good communication (which boosts trust, moving the new/untrusted clients into the trusted clients pile).

Really, why would you give someone a cut of your money just to hold it, when you can use other (pretty standard in the industry, btw) methods?