skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I interpret the "worse than worst case" as "What the designers thought was the worst case in reality was not" so we are now faced with a case that wasn't predicted and the outcome is unknown.

I can see the sense, this reactor was designed 50 years ago even with upgrades it's old technology and there have been huge improvements in the past 50 years. So this shows that the designers 50 years ago didn't do a perfect job. This is what the author means I believe.

And a "major nuclear accident" is defined as a level 7 accident in the International Nuclear Event Scale[1], I have no idea if the author refers to it when he talks about major nuclear events but probably not since there has been only one level 7 accident and that's Chernobyl.

[1]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Nuclear_Event_Sca...
I personally suspect prudishness about clothing is related to how important clothing was, historically, in a given country. For example, Britain is very cold, very wet, and the British used to sail all over the stormy oceans in wooden boats. Consequentially, clothing would have been extremely valuable for warmth.
Hum, is there some kind of algorithm that tries to match people together?
Anything that is in the world when you're born is normal and ordinary and is just a natural part of the way the world works. Anything that's invented between when you're fifteen and thirty-five is new and exciting and revolutionary and you can probably get a career in it. Anything invented after you're thirty-five is against the natural order of things.

- Douglas Adams
Ask HN: What are your best life hacks?
What are some of your best life hacks? Not just limited to tech, although it is pretty ripe for hacking. I'm interested in social interaction-based hacks, too.
I disagree, Tom. You see, I believe entrepreneurs are heroes, and as such they need to lead and guide people who are unwilling to lead themselves for the greater benefit of all.
Actually 40-year-old Moms are not hardcore gamers at all. In fact the beauty of Zynga is that it went to the basics. Most people are actually not hardcore gamers. Rather they simple want basic games. These are the 40-year-old moms where the amount of technology they want to digest is limited. While Zynga has room to grow in technology, their success lies on everyone not being hardcore and rather simply willing to spend a few minutes every day playing a game.
What's galling is all the attention these stories are getting while hundreds of people are still trapped in ruble and have their lives on the line. The tragedy here is that probably several thousand people died from the earthquake. The issues at these nuclear plants are trivial in comparison.
Microsoft is still dramatically successful today. The problem is that people perceive differences in success, not absolute numbers. So if you were wildly successful ten years ago and you're still wildly successful, what the hell have you been doing? Why haven't you improved?

The problem Microsoft is facing is that they basically accomplished their mission statement. "A computer on every desk, all running Microsoft software." That is an accurate description of the world circa 2000. What the hell do they do now?

Google is likely to face a similar problem in the next few years. "Organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful." For all the flack they're getting lately, they've done a remarkably good job at it. People expect to have whatever information they need at their fingertips, and they get mad when they don't. You wouldn't see the vitriol toward bad search results that you do now if the Internet was like it was in 1998, because nobody really had an expectation that they'd be able to find what they were looking for then.
While the typical office workers averages 40hrs a week in the office, how many hours are they really productive? If they had to record only the hours that they're productive at tasks, would it come close to 40hrs?
A friend of the family, an ex-engineer, in retirement decided to teach to give back to the community. She was teaching the remedial students at the local high-school. Her students did better on the standard tests than regular students, her first year.

She was called in, and told to stop making the other teachers look bad or be fired. She quit.

This same high-school gave the teacher of the year award to which ever teacher had the most complaints against them...

Unfortunately, when I have told this story to other teachers in different districts, they have not been surprised.

This is so broken.
Awesome! Even works on an iPad.

And if you like this, check out this other amazing bookmarklet game:

http://erkie.github.com/
Dubai, is not money!

What most "good journalists" point out, is the period of the bubble. This period was powered by the wealthy wall street. Confused? Well, it is confusing. The bubble period was 2001-07, in which Dubai thrived -- build 4 man made islands, the tallest tower, the biggest mall, the costliest race track, etc -- to the point we know it today- a well built city. But what most don't see, is that period before the bubble and that after the bubble. We know the fact that Dubai served the rich in ways we can't imagine, but it was also Dubai's leaders vision, to catch the bubble and make use of it. Without the bubble, Dubai would be just another city. But this vision also include an overlook state: to stay close to it's core culture.

If you go out in Dubai, the cultural difference is noticeable. You won't see any racism, indifference, etc though. People living together. What was created from this, a modern time marvel. You won't understand these lines, until you have lived in Dubai. It is what a modern city should be like. And now, with all the bubble gone, sure the real estate won't be like before, bu the bubble left behind a glorious beauty. And it now cultivates other industries, apart from just real estate and (ofcourse) its core oil. Dubai is now, the best city in the Middle East/ North Africa/ Sub Continent/ Most of Asia.

So yes, Dubai is great, in its own way.
How Howard Schultz returned to save Starbucks
from my understanding, S3 optimizes throughput but not latency. I'm not surprised that his performance serving from S3 is perfectly fine, but I think the "answer" is to skip straight to CloudFront. CloudFront can mirror directly from your appserver, or from S3, it doesn't matter.

update: did a little googling, and found only anecdotal evidence that latency to S3 is fine but not awesome:

http://www.cloudclimate.com/s3/

http://www.codeswimming.com/blog/2010/04/amazon-s3-and-cloud...

http://www.slideshare.net/ehwinter/using-amazon-cloud-front-...
That particular one has LSAT, GMAT, and GRE scores, it's a grad school study. There are also ACT and SAT studies that support it as well. I merely wanted to call attention to this data, take it for what it is.

http://www2.ed.gov/admins/tchrqual/learn/preparingteachersco...

"[C]ollege students majoring in education have lower SAT and ACT scores than students majoring in the arts and sciences. For example, among college graduates who majored in education, 14% had SAT or ACT scores in the top quartile, compared to 26% who majored in the social sciences, compared to 37% who majored mathematics/computer science/natural science. In addition, those who did not prepare to teach but became teachers were much more likely to have scored in the top quartile (35 percent) than those who prepared to teach and became teachers (14 percent) (NCES, 2001)."

He is there referencing pg 69 of "National Center for Education Statistics (2001). The Condition of Education, 2001. Washington, DC: US Department of Education" found at http://nces.ed.gov/pubs2001/2001072.pdf where you can see on the chart that education majors are more likely to be in the bottom quartile of academically qualified students than any other field of study listed. You also see there is a massive difference between those who teach who majored in education and those who teach who did not major in education. Teachers who majored in education are 27% likely to be in the bottom quartile compared to those who didn't major in education, at 20%. And as previously cited, 35% of the non-education majors who end up teaching are from the top quartile whereas only 14% of teachers who majored in education are from the top quartile academically. You can also see in the chart that the more academically qualified one is, the more likely they are to abandon teaching as a career.

I assert that this is all relevant and leave it to the curious reader to figure for themselves why this might be so.
I've come across this before... Am I the only one who finds it awkward? It's unsettling to me... all the whitespace at the bottom of the page.... it feels like gravity is sucking the two text boxes up and into the crease.

And maybe part of it is that I've read thousands of books in my life, and I don't think I've EVER read one with this layout.

And this guy going on and on about the golden ratio and all this pointless geometric coincidences. It's like some weird fetish.

Now don't get me wrong, I fully appreciate the need for harmony in graphic design, and the importance of geometric relationships. I just think that some relationships are actually felt by the reader, and others are utterly invisible, un-feelable ones that people like this jerk off to.

[cringe]. I need to go look at something beautiful to get the taste of that out of my mouth.

Edit: I also think the golden ratio is bullshit, but that's another story...
Tweeting with Twitter, OAuth and Django
I thank you from the bottom of my heart for helping me fall into a haze for about 45 minutes. That was remarkably ingenious.

Rolling around on a huge page like the Wikipedia article for World War II (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_war_II) caused a pretty significant slowdown. Interestingly, once the ball got to the size to pick up larger images, the rest of the ball would clear and there would be a noticeable boost in speed. It was intriguing to observe the dynamics of the ball rolling on different sized pages.
I believe a meltdown, if contained, may not necessarily release radiation into the environment. That would qualify as "stable status" in my book.
Is this relevant to Hacker News because a significant portion of us are ADD and need to cut out the bahama mamas from our drink diet?
Ask HN: Quick 'n dirty Django scaling tips? (Wikileaks just tweeted and fb'd us)
Hey HN,

The site in question: http://epicstep.com

I recently helped launch a startup called Epic Step that crowdsources billboards in America. I work at a dev shop in Los Angeles, we built it, but it's not technically ours. The guys decided to launch it in a somewhat limited alpha mode (good idea) to prevent the site from imploding. Basically, launch with a few campaigns and let people interact with those, limiting the creation of new ones.

One of the first campaigns is for a Wikileaks billboard in Los Angeles. Wikileaks tweeted about it today, and just threw it on their Facebook page. The Facebook story has ~700 likes and a lot of comments, and the site is getting hit pretty good right now.

The site is built in Django. The stack it's running on right now is a 512mb Slicehost with nginx and uWSGI, MySQL for the db. It's actually doing pretty damn well right now... server was swapping but has about 130mb of free memory right now. CPU usage is also surprisingly low, most of what we're facing right now is high mem usage.

Right now my battle plan is: if mem usage gets too incredibly high, just resize the slice and once things settle out we'll built out better infrastructure.

TLDR: Are there any other things we can do to improve performance for this evening? I'm worried that the Wikileaks traffic is going to destroy this!

I'm terrified because while two very high-traffic sources are linking to us, the site is doing fine right now and that just doesn't sit right. Either the crowd hasn't really come yet, or I actually did a decent job with the server and I need to just relax.
I think this is the answer.

A JIT works by compiling some chunk of code into a section of executable memory, then jumping to that location. As I understand it, iOS hasn't previously allowed execution of code from "data memory" (various people were curious about this very thing when it was announced they were shipping a JIT). Presumably, the Safari process has some special flag that allows it to write to executable memory, but most other processes do not. My guess is that someone forgot to add this flag to whatever application handles "full screen" pages, although maybe there is a legitimate reason for this.

Edit:

An example of the curiosity I mentioned: http://twitter.com/mraleph/status/43030240175468544
Ask HN: Which RFCs illumined you and why?
For web folks, RFC 2616 could/should be considered required reading. I'm wondering which RFCs gave you the most "a-ha" moments and why?

And, which RFCs do you think everyone should read and why?
It's refreshing to see someone admit up-front that its just about the money (flip). Hearing founders talk over and over again about how they want to change the world when their primary motivation is status gets old.
In practice it usually amounts to that, because the term of a typical convertible note is a bit longer than the amount of time a typical funding round is expected to last.
There is a fair bit of composition going on, albeit all based on a single melodic phrase, so it is far from just being any old random combinations of tones from the C major scale.

It is definitely a canon, meaning the same phrase played at different starting points. A round is a simple form of a canon. Think of the melody to Frere Jacques.

From a perspective of form, this song expands on the basic concept of a round by playing with double time, half time, quarter time, etc.

It has a lot of elements of serialist music, in which a musical pattern is subjected to a number of operations, although this song doesn't venture in to the more strict forms of twelve-tone composition. It is more along the lines of minimalist composers like Steve Reich and Phillip Glass, who took some of serialism's academic approaches to composition and made them hypnotic and rhythmic. In a sense, making fruit-of-the-earth pop music out of some sort of cerebral concept.

Overall the musical production is of pretty damn good quality. The performances sound good and the recordings were well made. The variation of instruments is impressive and the introduction of various pop styles keeps the concept novel.

One of my main gripes with "math music" is that it can be downright unenjoyable on an aesthetic level.

This song does a very good job of taking something inherently non-musical and making it pleasing to the ears, all while strictly adhering to a set of rules laid out before composition began.
Amusingly it works now. Not sure if something was fixed or if there is an off-by-one error (my previous comment was upvoted to give me 21 karma).
I esp liked the sequence starting at Slide 47 - Any company can be described in 9 building blocks - thru the complete picture of the idea, slide 57.
Simple Rails 3 Enumerations
I think I saw ambient occlusion done for the iPad2 vs. none on the iPad. I might be wrong though.
Oxford English is surely the most 'fun' because they differentiate between -ize and -ise suffixes based on the origin of the word (greek vs. latin/french IIRC). Though as far as I know, most British have standardised on the -ise suffix. In Australia we have definitely standardised on -ise, hence my own spelling. While Americans standardised on -ize.

None the less, I undertook one semester of commercial law at university a while ago and had to learn Oxford spelling for the exam as it is apparently used in our legal system. This is despite the fact that the government's own style guide standardises on -ise.
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Hell yeah, never thought I'd see another tech death metal fan on HN, especially not a fellow ATB fan.

Forging a Future Self is such an amazing album all around. I listened to Fingers Like Daggers obsessively back a few years ago and always loved the deep complexity of their music. Not a fan of the rerelease of Rareform though, the sort of quieting/dulling of the vocals in Ometh (best song in that album IMO) killed it.
denyhosts is configurable enough that I see no reason why it couldn't also work for other services. You'd probably have to hand-configure it (with a regex for each log type), though.

That said, I've only ever used it for ssh.
Yes, what was odd was that the 4.3 update started but hadn't finished when I was running those tests. Merde. I'm updating my numbers.
How to convert MXF to FCE with MXF to FCE Converter for Mac?
The proper way to address this is to add code to your site (or fix safari) to enable a text-zoom gesture. That way you'd have complete control.
Don't you think this is a problem, at least for some students?

It was for me. I was an awful student all the way through high school (graduated with something around a D average). I blossomed in college with a near-perfect GPA in a natural science major. (What I had to go through to get into the university I did is another story, and beside the point.) The important difference between these two environments is that I wasn't a prisoner at the university.

I have never accepted authority that I thought was unjust ("Who are you to tell me that you know what's better for me than I do?"), and that's exactly how I viewed my education before college. Granted, there are sensible limitations (mostly related to safety) on how far children can be left to their own devices, but all I ever wanted as a child was to spring from my daily prison and do something that I knew was worthwhile.
You should read this: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metre

"Since 1983, it is defined as the length of the path travelled by light in vacuum in 1⁄299,792,458 of a second"
Another option where you can have best of the both possible worlds is to do a convertible debt round with a conversion cap.
That way the deal gets executed cheaply and quickly benefiting the entrepreneurs. The cap benefits the angel for taking some early risk. And such notes have a clause that convert the debt to equity at the price implied by the conversion cap at the end of the term so no fear of going into default.
This is a good way to go about it. I use Supergenpass session (the bookmarklet version is exploitable by websites you visit) for Chrome for websites, and keys for most ssh purposes. I have a couple of strong memorized passwords for situations where keys and supergenpass aren't convenient.

I'm totally on board with having one long/strong passphrase memorized and using it to generate strong, seemingly random passwords algorithmically, and I assume that's what SHA1_Pass does. So, yes, using SHA1_Pass is probably a good way to go about it.
No problem. Love the script.
Freeman Dyson on Heresy, Climate Change, and Science
Vote for komodo island as the new 7 wonders of the world
I had read the article and read that section, but it doesn't answer my question - all that says is that teachers on break weren't included in the study, that doesn't say whether or not the data taken from the teachers included in the study were averaged across a (working or school) year just across the interviewees.

But thank you for your respectful response.
What happened to Joel Spolsky? I saw him at a conference two years ago and he looks terrible in this video. Not sure if it's the stress or whatever, but I don't want to see him working himself into a hole... get some time off dude. It's more important than your startup.
It appears that Tegra 2 is missing the ARM NEON SIMD engine (http://www.anandtech.com/show/4144/lg-optimus-2x-nvidia-tegr...) which the iPad 2's A5 chip supposedly has (someone please confirm this report: http://pdadb.net/index.php?m=cpu&id=a50000&c=samsung...). This would explain the benchmark discrepancy. There is another benchmark (http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2381767,00.asp) that shows that A5 is 3x faster at matrix operations than Tegra 2, while being 1.5x slower executing code that likely does not involve matrix/vector operations.
Since it's an 8 tone scale why not use octal and get perfect mappings?

Pi in octal would be 3.1103755236215...
Sun. Oh, wait...
Yeah that was for me what made me share the slides to my friends.
اشتباه كردي
.....
Similar story, except it was mixed showering after martial arts practice in Germany. It wasn't especially uncomfortable, but I was thinking, "my friends back home are never going to believe this!"
SteamBirds: Survival – By the Numbers
It's a distraction. They don't want the news talking about how they are randomly taking over Amtrak and bus stations around the USA and doing searches now.

http://cs.trains.com/TRCCS/forums/p/188504/2059127.aspx#2059...

It's working, not a single word about it in that article.

Somehow the scanners are going to "pass". Or they will ask for funding for new toys and mothball these with the other hardware they've bought but never installed. Anything for a show of force.
Nuclear Experts Explain Worst-Case Scenario at Fukushima Power Plant
What about the future generations of doctors who had poor teachers and won't make good doctors?

Teachers are not the only source of drive or inspiration to learn. Michael Faraday had almost no formal education (and he came from a poor family), yet he rose to become one of the most influential scientists in history.

[He was apprenticed to a bookbinder, which allowed him to read a lot. His interest in science was inspired by a book (https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Michael_Farad...), not a teacher!]
Oh, "springs"! Silly me for thinking magnets were structures with aligned polarized molecules.
Yes, that is technically the definition now, but under that logic, since a foot is precisely 0.3048 meters, you can just as easily say a foot is the length of the path travelled by light in 1/983571056 of a second. The meter was clearly originally defined by earth, and the precise definition only clarified later.
I disagree with his views on climate change — but I loved his insights into space travel vs. space science. Definitely a podcast worth listening to...
Complete and utter bollocks.
Complete and utter twaddle.
Focusing on actual productivity instead of all the apps, software, and techniques to get things done. It's taken a while to learn that, but a very valuable lesson in my opinion.
Father forgets
A Macbook user here as well. To try it out, I forked seancron's repository and changed the right mouse button to left mouse button. You have to avoid clicking on links, though.

javascript:var i,s,ss=['https://github.com/anttisykari/kathack/raw/master/kh.js','http://ajax.googleapis.com/ajax/libs/jquery/1.5.1/jquery.min.js'];for(i=0;i!=ss.length;i++){s=document.createElement('script');s.src=ss[i];document.body.appendChild(s);}void(0);
From the second paragraph: In the ATUS, interviewers collect data in a time diary format, in which survey participants provide information about "yesterday."

So no, they didn't include data from summer vacation (except for Table 1).
I think you were not lucky because on my experience kissing is not the majority even in France. I would say it depends on the context. At work peoples only handshakes. In others situations the norm is: men handshakes men, and men kisses women (if it's an acquaintance, otherwise only handshake). In south, if you know well the other guy you may even kiss him (really weird)! And In families, everybody kisses everybody.
Yes, Tegra 2 is missing NEON. I can't comprehend why people still release CPUs intended for any kind of performance yet omit the SIMD engine -- my suspicion is nVidia is trying to encourage developers to use their GPU APIs instead by crippling the ability of the CPU to do number crunching.

I highly doubt it's an overly significant power or die size issue -- with the amount they're already spending on L1 cache, L2 cache, and so forth, it seems dumb to omit the kind of powerful ALU necessary to make use of it all.
For some information on why Erlang did not go the RPC way:

http://armstrongonsoftware.blogspot.com/2008/05/road-we-didn...