skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I, too, am curious how they've come to that conclusion. I would think it makes a difference what the app is asking of you. Asking for a "like" is certainly much less invasive than asking for access to your friends, photos, personal info, refrigerator, etc... In a split second, the longer/deeper that list is, I'd think the less likely someone would be to click "OK".
No doubt. But I mean 'care' in the touchy-feely sense of the word. Maybe there was someone there who obsessed over creating those 'magical' moments for users, but I can't say I've heard too many anecdotes about that.
But no one would believe that. It just wouldn't be credible. This isn't a new problem; it has been building for decades. Components age. Materials fracture. Seals crack. Everyone knows that and you can't wish that knowledge away.

I mean, the national labs that are charged with ensuring the safety and reliability of the nuclear stockpile are not some tiny 5-man operation in the middle of nowhere; we're talking about thousands of people working an hour away from San Francisco, very much plugged into the local university and tech scene.
The difference is, Apple's 30% is a requirement to do business on their platform. Apple can charge whatever they want because there is no competition--you're not allowed to use other providers. Your only option is to leave iOS, which isn't really an option for a lot of companies.

Google isn't mandating anything; if a company finds 10% to be reasonable for the services provided, they can make use of it. Otherwise they can do it themselves, or use another provider.
We're talking 2001 here, when Firefox was still mozilla/browser (and had no own name), an experimental branch of Mozilla, back when Venkman was the one and only debugger for Mozilla. KDE 2.0 (first release including KHTML), Opera 6 (new feature: unicode support), OSX 10.0 (and 10.1) bundling IE5/Mac.

The alternative to MSIE was Netscape Communicator 4 (which had been stagnating since 1998), Mozilla 1.0 itself was still more than a year away.
The advantage is that they really work. A Thorium-U233 core was tested in the Shippingport reactor and demonstrated slightly over-unity breeding without operational problems.

One disadvantage is that fuel cycle costs are higher, a lot higher. Some people estimate the cost of electricity from a Shippingport-style reactor could be 3-4 the cost of electricity from conventional LWRs. U-233 in a Thorium cycle gets contaminated with U-232, which has isotopes in its decay chain that emit nasty gamma rays.

Uranium Oxide or Plutonium-Uranium Oxide fuel can be handled manually, but U233-rich fuel is too radioactive for manual handling. The Japanese have managed to fabricate a few sample fuel elements remotely, but this is far from a mature technology.

Another issue with the Shippingport design is that the fuel assemblies are more more complicated and must be fabricated to more precise tolerances than a conventional LWR because reactivity is managed by moving some of the fuel elements relative to other fuel elements.

I think capital costs suffer too: I'd suspect you'd need a larger pressure vessel to contain the same volume of fuel, and power output won't be as good because heat production will happen predominantly in the U-233 'seed' elements, so power density won't be as good as a conventional LWR.

Now, the folks at Lightbridge

http://www.ltbridge.com/

have been doing some work on a seed and blanket core that puts U-233 into metal fuel elements (which would be easier to fabricate remotely) and puts the Th in oxide fuel elements. The metal fuel does better at transporting heat to the fluid, so power peaking may be less of a problem.

Reprocessing is also more expensive in a sold-fuel Th cycle. Th fuel can handled by the THOREX process, which is a modification of PUREX, but it's harder to dissolve Th fuel than U-based fuel.
This would mean customers who want to sign up for a Netflix Inc video account may have just two choices: They could do so through the Netflix website, in which case Netflix would keep the full fee, or they could subscribe through the applications in their iPhone or iPad which would cost Netflix 30 percent of its fees.

I haven't written an app, and I'm not entirely familiar with all the terms that have come up recently about Apple. Do I understand correctly that, merely by initiating the subscription from within an app running on iOS, that Apple is becomes entitled to 30% for all deliveries made on said subscription?

Is your only other choice then, within your app, to say, "please type this URL into your PC's web browser to subscribe..."?

Is the actual content delivery mechanism any different between the two cases?
Indeed. I still won't touch an Audi even decades after the 60 Minutes episode, even though it turned out to be false. Logically I know but logic only goes so far.
The truth is, despite my reply suggesting going straight to framework, going the from scratch is good if you're able and are willing to invest the time. But if you've got work to do, some times you need to learn as you work rather than learning first. Its in those cases that I recommend the framework route--with the caveat that you accept that theres a reason for the framework's complexity. Don't bulk at it, realize that its there for reasons you may not understand.

Luckily you'll gain "from scratch" experience even through the framework route anyways, since it naturally comes when you have create things that expand the scope of capability of your framework. Even when you are simply extending base classes of the framework, your addressing and solving problems that the base framework doesn't answer.
Unless you define "elegant" as "conceptually optimized" or something like that, this is just nonsense. There are many cases where a superior algorithm will run circles around an elegant but not so efficient algorithm -- and no number of "correctness-preserving transformations" will bridge that gap.
Why does Quora rock as a Q&A service ~ startup stardom
I love my AKG K240 headphones to an extreme degree.

http://www.akg.com/site/products/powerslave,id,1063,pid,1063...
From what I understand I think you're right, with the added bonus of being forced to offer the subscription in the app if it's available outside of it.
Languages like Haskell give more benefit in security/stability, testing, and refactoring. They maybe feel like they help you develop faster since they usually involve less typing, but typing isn't really the bottleneck for developing a major application. Any major project also has considerations other than code. To take the example from your other comment, there is an (open source) FPS written in Haskell, but it doesn't have the artwork, story, or level design of a modern production FPS, and someone still had to think about how to design the thing.

While it depends on what you're comparing to (is the competition writing assembly by hand or writing Python in a functional style?), I don't think you'll see someone working in an advanced language getting to market shockingly faster (and their code won't run faster), or something similarly strikingly noticeable from the outside. More likely, when a company working in an advanced language does get ahead, you'll see them having a much easier time keeping up with competition and adapting to new trends due to much lower maintenance overhead. Resources expended on debugging and refactoring isn't a measure we really look at when talking about most successful projects, but it is still worth improving.
This is a very interesting comment. It reads a bit like "phd hacking". Did you try this? The work done by the OP is indeed has potential to be published. The above comment, while written in an encouraging tone, has some caveats that might be worth pointing out.

"(1) At at least some of the best US research universities, there is no coursework requirement for a Ph.D."

* I find that to be untrue. In my case, I had a M.S. before applying, and still had to take nearly 2 years of required coursework. It depends on the program, but I have not heard of any U.S. program that will accept a B.S. and not have required classes.

"(2) The requirement for a dissertation is, say, "an original contribution to knowledge worthy of publication". Since you've already been there, done that, got the T-shirt, there's no question. Big, huge advantage."

* Most students accepted to the best PhD programs (computer science) will already have top-tier publications before entering. It is definitely a good thing to have a publication, but rather than being finished, you will have just begun.

"(3) One more requirement would likely be the qualifying exams. These exams are to show that you are 'qualified' to move on to research and do research. But, uh, did I mention that you've already been there, done that, got the T-shirt?"

* Quals will still require reading deeply from the literature. You will be expected to know all the fundamentals in your computer science area to pass. Having published is irrelevant here.

"Maybe the US DoD VA would give you a grant."

* Often only professors can apply for the big grants, and writing a grant is actually non-trivial. They need to see a fantastic track record, a solid proven team, and often nods to diversity and educating the public. Some students will help their advisors write the grant, but in the end it's the advisor who doles out the money and is the PI.

I feel the attitude of professors/academia being so easy to fool to be somewhat overstated here. I won't go into the "ease of publishing" comments, but my first top-tier publication took 3 years with many rejections, when I was an a non-student doing research. I also did a lot of research that was rejected and went into the "paper graveyard". After doing it a few times, publishing is significantly easier since you will better know the methodology, literature, and how to write academically. I'm not trying to be discouraging, but I find the above comment to be optimistic but a bit exaggerated.
And the effect of sand on glass panels...
This is what you have to deal with as a developer on the Twitter platform. Their policies have become so bloated and far-reaching that most apps are in violation.
Except Apple didn't build Netflix any more than HP, Dell or LG did, all of whom provide devices you can use for Netflix.

Why doesn't Firefox get to charge 30%? A big chunk of people probably get to Netflix via it.
Actually, I only have normal respect for him, as he wasn't the one who was putting up the cash to see it done, he was only doing his job. And it DID take him a whole year to pull it off.
When I graduated with my degree in physics, I was introduced to something called Ruby on Rails, and instead of go on to grad school I pivoted into the life of a web developer. Best thing that ever happened to me.
'New signups have a 60 day money back guarantee, no questions asked!' ...so, 8 weeks. :)
http://chunkhost.com/faq

How long will the beta be free?

At least 5 weeks. Sometimes longer, depending on capacity.

When your beta chunk's time is up, we email you asking you to take a survey about the experience. At the end of the survey, you can choose to keep your chunk and begin paying for it or let it be shut down.
This is uncool. So I have an Android 1.6 phone. I use Twidroyd and the named alternative, the official Twitter app is for devices on Android 2.1 or later. I also have no plans to change my phone for at least another year. Maybe that's just me, but I doubt it.
SRWare Iron maybe ?
I specifically asked my devs to keep a completely neutral point of view. There is some novelty that puts it on hacker news: it shows how a tech like WebSockets can shed light on the enormity of an event.
I meant strongly typed. My previous post works just as well with for example Python 3 or Erlang code with type annotations enforced by static analysis.

I was trying to make point that simple nature of REST protocol makes it possible to write webapps ‘guaranteed’ to be correct, at least server-side.
So we'll let the market decide which approach provides better value and a better user experience. Sounds like we've all got options, so what's the problem?
Public Laboratory - DIY Climate Science
It's not like they are publishing in detail all of their findings currently. For all we really know, they already are bluffing, and just using all the money for hookers, blow, and blackjack.
I actually wouldn't be opposed to it if (big if) they hosted the content and allowed apps with subscription/content to not have any in-app purchase at all (no Apple / no flip to Safari) to avoid the 30%. This would let Netflix, last.fm, etc do their thing and Amazon to do its thing. Everyone already knows to buy books on Amazon, so no great loss not having something in-app.
I think the biggest challenge is teacher knowledge. There just aren't many people in middle/high school classrooms that know anything about programming.

Scratch does look really cool for lower grades. I was more thinking of teaching actual production languages to high schoolers though.
Ask HN: Is there a Hacker News Meet Up in Austin?
If no, does anybody want to start one? I am based in Austin and would love to meet like minded individuals in the Hacker and Startup community here in Austin, Texas.

We could meet every month at some great bar, enjoy some live music, and talk about ways to make our passions a reality. :)
Is that hard? I mean, yes, it took tons of manhours and billions of dollars, but the "fucking science fiction" they made is pretty much par for the course these days. You can say it is a "superior user experience" and stuff like that, but c'mon. That is how tech advances. If I wanted, it would be quite trivial to get something delivered to someone anywhere without anything made by Apple.

I'd amazed by how much people support one of the richest companies in the world get richer off the backs of others. After all, it isn't like they are hurting for money.
As far as I know this is correct: after IE6 took down Netscape as an actual competitor, Microsoft put MSIE in maintenance mode as a project and most of the team was sent elsewhere, until the IE7 reactivation as Firefox started gaining significant market share.
I'm just glad it's not closed-door and off-record like Cheney's meeting with oil execs in 2001 where we find out about it years later and wonder why we are paying $3/gallon.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/11...
It’s easier to play the option than the bet
That's not true. It depends on the kind of workload, which can be CPU-bound, IO-bound, network-bound, etc...

If a workload is truly distributed, simply fetches data blocks to process then goes computing for a while (Example: folding@home), the amount of bandwidth doesn't matter.

Also, some people have substantial amounts of bandwidth to their house :)
Non US guy here. Which company is it? (Must be famous, but does not ring a bell to me, right now).
It's called Autosweep and you need to call up to enable it as far as I'm aware. It's not possible to activate on the site alone. I'm not sure if it also authorizes them withdrawing from your account or not.
I do like this answer, but I'll also point out that making someone guess two strings is just as secure as making them guess one long string. If root has a random 10-char password, that's roughly the same number of guesses as a user's first name with an 8-char password.
What's even better is setting up an access sequence to allow you to connect to SSH.

In the past, our experiment had a server that was hit particularly hard with SSH attempts for some reason. So, you had to visit a page on port 8080, which would temporarily add your IP to an allow list, in which case you could then attempt to access ssh on port 22.

It works exceptionally good because port scanners usually start low :)
Making wordpress faster with many tools
One more: really advanced type-checking.

I've been using Haskell a bunch lately, and I've found that by the time the compiler stops snarling and hissing at me, most of the stupid little bugs are gone. That's a nice thing sometimes, even if appeasing the type system can be annoying.
Having some free time on my hands lately, I've been cruising iTunesU for stuff like this, it's been pretty great. I can sit in my living room doing work on my laptop with courses from Stanford, MIT or ${reputible_university} playing on my TV. It's amazing how accessible knowledge is these days...
I don't think he attributed disbanding the IE6 team to malice, MS had no need for that team anymore since they controlled virtually all of the browser market, and their main platform focus was never the web so there was little incentive for them to keep innovating there "for innovation's sake".

> It's not surprising they also could't come to grips with getting IE out.

It's not that they couldn't get it out, there was no IE7 project until they reactivated MSIE in 2005.
I believe the latter. Android has always allowed app installs not-from-the-market. Some CARRIERS (notably AT&T) have removed that ability for some handsets, but it's not universal and as far as I know, not common.
Google Launches New Web Referral Program

Google today announced a new Web Referral program as part of their search engine. Indexed web pages that accept payment will be required to accept Google Checkout as a payment option. Google Checkout payments now give Google a 30% cut per transaction.

CEO Larry Page stated, "Our philosophy is simple - when Google brings a new buyer to the web page, Google earns a 30 percent share; when the company brings and existing or new buyer to the page, without using the Google search engine, the company keeps 100 percent and Google earns nothing. All we require is that, if a company is making a product or service available on their web page, the same (or better) offer be made via Google Checkout. We believe that this innovative Web Referral service will provide companies with a brand new opportunity to expand their exposure on the world wide web, delighting both users and companies."

Page added that customers will benefit from a consistent user interface and less distribution of their credit card and personal information.
Marshall Kirkpatrick (of ReadWriteWeb) tweeted that Twitter suspended UberTwitter for "changing tweets to monetize, trademark infringement, privacy issues with DMs."

Marshall's original tweet: http://twitter.com/#!/marshallk/status/38679317034565632
His point is not that we might be unable to communicate, but that we might be so comparatively stupid that communication would be laughably pointless.
Pretty sure he's referring to the MPAA and RIAA (they aren't actually companies.)
Absolutely, apply to any of those if you feel any of them would be beneficial to you. Don't forget, that only less than 5% of applicants get accepted, so in a way it is a lottery (where you can influence the outcome of course).
Interesting idea. Perhaps there should be a cadre of several thousand of these people, trained to subdue criminals in a non-violent way, but with access to lethal means when absolutely necessary. Ideally, they should be distributed throughout the city in various secure bases. The best part is that the very presence of such a force might be a powerful deterrent to crime. They could all share the same branded uniform, perhaps with a special color and insignia.
I just tried twidroyd, and my feed for the last three hours only contains these two tweets:

Support: UberTwitter, twidroyd, and UberCurrent have been suspended due to policy violations. Read more here: http://t.co/HHGa9k1

Support: Want to keep using Twitter on your phone? Download an official Twitter client here: http://t.co/rxwSYuW
The Psychological Consequences of Money
Not entirely true, Paypal is treated as a bank in Europe and is regulated as such. I believe the only place it isn't is America.
Can you talk a bit about how you scale it? I'm especially interested in if you use a shared filesystem like NFS to keep the blogs.dir consistent across multiple web front ends, or do you use something like fuse on top of mogilefs or HDFS? Do you use varnish? Could you share your config?

Thanks a lot!
The Level and Distribution of Global Household Wealth
I remember her cost per vote acquired was something like 8$?

That kind of spending has an anti-democratic vibe to it.
Reddit surrendered almost complete control to the community. It led to some pretty amazing emergent behavior, but it had a very high price. Today the site is far more 4chan and much less Reddit circa 2006.

I think Reddit is kind of a brilliant failure. It's huge and impressive now, but so much more shallow and flawed than it could have been.
Pumped-storage hydro tends to be staggeringly expensive, because you've got all the capital costs of building the dam and then the pumps to pump water up, and then you've got to spend energy pumping water uphill.

Note that the reservoir for a pumped-storage hydro system will be environmentally degraded because water levels are going to fluctuate drastically.

Also, a pumped-storage system failed in the Ozarks, sending a wall of water downstream and nearly killing a family.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taum_Sauk_Hydroelectric_Power_S...

Although fossil fuel pollution kills millions of people a year, hydroelecticity is the most dangerous form of power when one considers catastrophic fatalities:

Workers at the plant were killed in this case:

http://www.unspillable.com/oil-alternatives/hydro-power/russ...

but a dam failure near Rapid City, SD killed nearly 250 in 1972 and the failure of Vajont Dam killed about 2000 people:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vajont_Dam

Some large dams are situated in places where 10,000-100,000 people could be killed in a failure.
Defenitley a milestone, although I'm not sure how someone can copyright a "triangle illusion".
I wonder how long it will be before companies realize how much trouble they will be in when people can download pirated designs an print out their own 'stuff'. Is thingverse going to be the new piratebay?
I find that to be untrue. In my case, I had a M.S. before applying, and still had to take nearly 2 years of required coursework. It depends on the program, but I have not heard of any U.S. program that will accept a B.S. and not have required classes.*

Then go to the U.K. or the majority of the commonwealth. Required coursework is not a necessary part of doctoral research in many, many departments of these universities.
5 weeks? Meh... I did sign up, almost out of compulsion... Can one have buyers regret from something that is free?

Most places have introductory offers of a month free or super reduced price with money back guarantees on services that don't need a shake down.

Had I not been acting so compulsively after just waking up, I wouldn't have bothered for a pithy 5 week (possibly more...) free "beta". It's not worth taking the time to setup something on this account if it's just going to switch to traditional billing in 5 weeks, IMHO.
Native Client: Getting Ready for Takeoff
> I'd amazed by how much people support one of the richest companies in the world get richer off the backs of others.

Apple is getting rich by making extremely good stuff. I support them getting richer because I want them to continue making really good stuff I enjoy using. Because I can't trust any other company in the world to do that hard work.

Let me show you something:

2001:

http://www.wired.com/gadgets/miscellaneous/news/2001/10/4754...

2007:

http://www.palminfocenter.com/news/9414/palm-treo-755p-revie...

One month later:

http://ipod.about.com/od/iphoneproductreviews/fr/iphone_revi...

Fucking science fiction. Consumer wireless devices were dull, stodgy things until Apple came in and said "fuck you, this sucks" and did it better. Innovation was putting an ugly resistive color screen into the clunky enclosures from six years earlier. Spicy.

2003:

http://www.tabletpc2.com/Acer.htm (Owned one of these)

2010:

http://www.anandtech.com/show/2904

Three months later:

http://www.apple.com/ipad/specs/

Hey, that looks familiar, where have I seen that before? Oh, right, in science fiction.

http://memory-alpha.org/wiki/PADD