skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Does nature just keep jacking up the pressure to beat every security measure? Of course not. Nature doesn't do arms races.

Nature's effect is finite and measurable... earthquakes are easily predictable in the long term... the terrible cost of radiation leak is easily predictable.

Like most other human efforts, the goal posts are pretty clear. Make nuke plants stronger than the strongest that nature is capable of producing.

A tsunami + earthquake in japan is not a surprise to anyone.

What is a surprise is that the people running the reactor consider it a surprise.
"Whether you like it or not, the beliefs of most intellectual engineer types is that the nuclear power plant dangers have been solved."

This belief is basically it's own logical fallacy; the idea that because someone has figured out a theoretical solution to a problem, the issue is moot. I feel like I've posted this previously, but I can't find now so maybe not.
Is it even possible to handle all contingencies though? I don't know enough to do the maths, but when you've got

four different reactors

an earthquake

followed by a tsunami

followed by loss of electricity for the emergency pumps

followed by parts of the plant blowing up

followed by tons of dust getting in the way

followed by possibly more aftershocks

followed by possibly more tsunamis

followed by possible injuries to the personnel needed to run these operations

considering other equipment can break down

considering political pressures to make certain decisions

considering some of the physics/chemistry here may be entirely novel

...

Think of all the different permutations in those variables, just how many scenarios have been prepared for? It has to be more complicated than just 'if casing 1 fails, casing 2 will stop it, and if casing 2 fails, casing 3 is there'
I was including the power generators. After the reactor went into automatic cooling (which actually worked), the backup diesel generators were destroyed in the tsunami, and although the battery backup-backup power worked, it ran out before power could be restored. Also, venting the coolant helped a bit but not enough, and flooding the reactor with seawater helped a lot, I think that's the point when everyone got optimistic.
> because there have been no nuclear disasters.

You can't simultaneously accuse your OP of being disingenuous about nuclear power (which he is, and I agree), then claim there have been no nuclear disasters, because that is probably more disingenuous than the original claim. That's just not true.

Are we working with the same definition of the word disaster? Even bloody Wikipedia, which I'd hardly call the tome of truth, calls Chernobyl a disaster[1]. Human life, property damage (ask Belarus), worldwide fallout...you don't get to rewrite what disaster means so that nuclear power keeps an untarnished image. There has been at least one. Debatably -- and I don't care to get into it -- there could now be as many as three.

There's a parallel with airliner crashes. More people die every day on highways, but an airliner going down is a very serious thing because there are hundreds of lives suddenly ended. So it was with Chernobyl: due to a catastrophic failure of engineering, humanity, and government, dozens of peoples' lives suddenly ended. You can argue that tens of thousands of lives are now in jeopardy due to the radiological effects. That is a disaster, regardless of any pro/anti-nuclear agenda.

[1]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chernobyl_disaster
Musicians don't become musicians to make money. The vast majority of all active musicians don't make any real money at it. They do it because they enjoy it.

If music was where the money was, we'd be discussing chord progressions, not data structures on this board. :)
Cell phones are 'Stalin's dream,' says free software movement founder
Ask HN: Should I leave this startup?
Dear HNers,

I have been a reader of Hacker News for a while. This post is more of a "help needed" post. I am working right now with a social network in pacific northwest and joined this company few months back as a SDE. To give some background about me, I hold a masters from one of the good universities in pacific nw and also an undergrad in cse from india. After school, I worked with a small company before joining this social network startup for couple of years. They got acquired and the engineering staff was told to look for other opportunities.

Not a big deal, I got couple of offers and considering that I was on a work visa, I had to accept whatever offer I got so as to stay in US, I accepted this offer.

However, after working for a couple of months, I am not liking it. I was hired as SDE but they have asked me to work as SDET. I have no problems with testing if it was 5-10% of time. I tried to take it as a challenge but the features are being launched so quickly and so many releases every week that any automation I create, starts breaking with the next release. It has gone so bad that I have been limited to doing manual QA. There are a total of 2 QA for a team of 25+ engineer and with at least two releases and many other minor releases every week, it has gone really crazy with a 75+ hours a week being a norm.

I have worked in startup earlier and I really enjoyed working in startup where I connected well with product and coded all day long, but here I just don't feel good.

Having said all these things, I want to ask good folks at HN whether this has been their experience at working for startups and if it was, did they stayed there and made it work or switched to some other position? Also, will it look ok on my resume if I stayed with an organization for a short period (3-4 months)?

Thanks for your help.
Angry Birds Rio for Android will be an Amazon Appstore Exclusive
First this:

"The first half is going to be your pitch, the second will be me hitting on you."

Then this:

"Honestly, the thing I'm most excited about is the prospect of seeing you naked later tonight."

Please don't forget that any pitch must work both ways. We entrepreneurs should be evaluating potential investors with at least as much rigor as they evaluate us. They're not giving away money to lucky lottery winners, they're trading it for something else, something often much more valuable than their money: our blood, sweat, and tears in what could be a once in a lifetime opportunity.

It's difficult to find a silver lining in this cloud, but let me give it a try:

Anyone spoken to by people like these, no matter who they are, should thank these investors for eliminating themselves. Better to find out what they are like now before wasting any more time (or worse) on them. The only thing that really surprised me about this story was:

She said she felt nauseous but pressed on with her pitch.

Why bother? Better she should focus her energy on building a great business that will attract investors with professionalism and integrity. They're out there, just harder to find.

At least they were until the pigs like this opened their mouths.
why don't we focus on facts?

Because we don't have any actionable ones?

But, okay, as you wish. I have the crisis firmly in mind now. I will not "rush to believe that everything is fine" or anything.

So.

Do you have any advice about what action I should take next? I live twelve time zones away, am a citizen of a different country, and have only a passing acquaintance with nuclear engineering.

I can't accomplish anything useful by panicking. I can't change building codes from N years ago, I couldn't prosecute anyone in Japan for negligence even if I had any evidence of same (which I do not), I can't dictate to Japanese industry even if I knew what to do (which I obviously don't), I can't run the Japanese government, I can't even vote in Japan. Neither I nor anything else we know can stop radioactive elements from decaying, and I can't unwind time and stop the earthquake.

I suppose I can raise my blood pressure, and raise the blood pressure of everyone else I know, and we might even achieve mass hysteria. Is that really a good idea? Why? Like every citizen of the USA, I happen to have some experience with mass hysteria. It didn't turn out well in 2001. I'm not anxious to see more of it.

What would you like me to do, instead of waiting for events to unfold, staying away from certain portions of the Japanese coast, hoping that various Japanese nuclear engineers have done their duty well, and meanwhile focusing on other things?
I like Rework the best.
Honestly everyone needs to get over themselves and their opinions on "roles" in this terrible time.

This was an inspiring story coming from a truly frightening and terrible situation.
Not trying to be contrary, just sharing what I have heard.

I don't know what you consider 'Serious Harm to Humans', but as of Sunday, there were an assumed 160 people with radiation exposure (9 confirmed).[0]

From what I remember on the news the other day, the reason for the failures of the plants was the fact that they had not conceived of an earthquake and tsunami of this magnitude. PM Kan said that there were adequate protections in place for the facilities, but the earthquake was beyond the conceived scope of the protection.

Also, while 20km from site 1 have been evacuated, they've needed to extend the radiation-affected area to 30km. Unfortunately, it's too wide of an area to evacuate, so they have told people to stay in their homes.

[0]http://jp.reuters.com/article/mostViewedNews/idJPJAPAN-19971...

edited: edited "poisoning" into "exposure"
edited: Added evacuation distances
Solar array and wind farms kill people too. The by-products of mining and industrial production are often dangerous and result in disease. Solar cells in particular require lots of energy to create.

Is your home off the grid? Have you really considered the compromises that have to be made to live entirely(electric, heating, cooling, transport) from wind and solar? It's not easy, it demands changes to all aspects of ones lifestyle and has a significant price.
The rich can already invest from outside the country-- capital flows freely across our borders.
Do you know if it's 11:59pm March 15th? Those of use finding out today might be a little pressed for time.
Those are not comparable power sources. They cannot substitute for fossil or nuclear plants, because they are way too expensive and do not provide 24/7 power without even more expensive batteries.
FFmpeg Developers Just Forked As Libav
If your goal is to be acquired by Google, writing the app in Python won't hurt your chances as there is more resident knowledge of it (for front-end) than RoR in-house. This also has implications on the integration of the app with their product suite. On the flip side, depending on how complicated your app is, there is also a chance a Google engineer could reverse engineer and integrate it in their sleep (or 20% time) -- especially at the sensitive phase of growing the product.

Perhaps some alternate questions:
Which will get you to create your app as close to your initial version 0.1 in the least amount of time so you can test your assumptions about the market?

Which community will you learn the most from and is the next logical step from where you are now as a developer?

Which will reinforce core computing concepts with a decent framework to resist the temptation to give up out of sheer frustration?
Apple is a company; their primary obligation is to their shareholders

Apple is doing business in Japan, where that notion of company purpose isn't necessarily so universally applied.
For the record, this is how it's always been on Etsy. However, we pushed a change earlier tonight that removes seller feedback from public view. This seemed like the right thing to do and is appropriate now that we are using the newest PayPal API to ensure payment before an item is sold on the site -- this removed a lot of the reasons for the public visibility of the specifics of seller feedback. Note that your feedback score as a whole is still visible, so we haven't removed seller feedback altogether.
Indeed, and that goes both ways......just as several decades of extensive use of nuc lear power generation with practically no deaths in multiple countries has done absolutely nothing to quell some people's fears.

Any guess as to who understands the science better? But then, its not about science is it? And its certainly not about facts.
This is just another example of Microsoft not having their act together. I mean, forget Windows Phone 7, but Vista was just a disaster. The company nearly sacrificed it's main revenue source. Apple isn't exactly known for being transparent on matters either, but you can imagine if something goes wrong there what the internal pressure must be to get it fixed ASAP. Because soon enough they do fix it. As Steve Jobs himself said, "great artists ship"

I still really feel Microsoft can get back on track if they had new executive level management. Someone younger, bolder, a little audacious but with the ability to execute - like for example bringing back Gundotra at the CEO level. It's just that they need to do it sooner rather than later.
I hope this means zfs on root is around the corner!
The top graph is now nosediving. An hour ago the upward-trend doubled in a 10 minute span.

What is the bottom graph representing?
I don't know enough about the situation either. But now investigators can subpoena the documents whose numbers were given in the email. The purpose in detaching the DTN's from the loans they referred to, would be to prevent finding those documents even though they could (according to the email exchange) not be entirely deleted. They say in the email that the document will now only show up if you search for it by DTN, not by the loan.
Bottom just fell out of Nikkei
I feel like you could make your point in a more constructive way. Let's keep things civil on here.
Which tool do you use? I've been considering switching to Picasa recently. [1]

[1] I've held off because my GAFYD account seems to be in the "transition limbo" that occurs when you have accounts on services like Analytics. I'm doing my best to hold off on any new Google services until this all gets resolved.
>Well, we're seeing them being proven wrong yet again. How much more proof are they going to need? How many more nuclear disasters is it going to take?

You've had one and a half. TMI had no ill effects on health, Chernobyl was caused by Soviet incompetence, and Fukushima is the result of an earthquake 7 times more powerful than it was designed to survive. Compare that to the damage caused by oil spills alone.

No power source that is economically viable on a large scale is 100% safe, including nuclear. They do their damndest, but sometimes it fails. There were some design flaws in Fukushima, namely the placement of the backup generators and the height of the tsunami barriers, but the precipitating earthquake was still the strongest in 1200 years. It looks like the containment vessel on the #4 reactor has been breached, and that's very, very bad. Still, the only people injured were those injured by the hydrogen explosions, not by radiation. There's been a few people (~12) who suffered radiation exposure, I believe all plant workers.

Is this event bad? Yes. Could it be another Chernobyl? Probably not. Reactor 4 is on fire, and is releasing radiation into the atmosphere, but on nowhere near the scale that Chernobyl did.

Most of the "optimism" yesterday was based on what had actually occurred: the coolant had failed, #1 was flooded, and #3 had encountered the same problems. Both reactors had hydrogen explosions outside of the containment vessel that didn't compromise them. No significant radiation had been released.

Today is a different story. We'll keep an eye on things and see how they progress, but the optimism was based on the situation at #1 and #3, not the yet-to-happen situation at #2 and #4.
I believe the bottom graph indicates levels as measured one year ago.

EDIT: Looks like data from a little over a year ago- The date range in the screenshot is from Dec 4th to 5th 2010.
FFmpeg has to be the best example of OSS done wrong. While it is incredibly powerful in what it can do and is overall a great project, it is crazy difficult to get it to build right, documentation of anything is scattered across newsgroups, the developers are always having arguments like this lately, and the API has breaking changes all the time, including completely removing functionality without any sort of replacement.
Solar and wind are not always there when you need them, so you need some source of electricity that is. Current ways to store power (batteries, pumping water uphill) are too expensive.
In the post-mortem this will probably be the lesson.

How many times are you going to hear:

"The issues were easily avoidable with proper upgrades, but it was decided that the cost of upgrading the plant was not justified given the low probability of an 8.9 earthquake"

:\
> "Who's watching your kids?" She retorted, "Who's watching yours?"

Let's be honest. It's a rather valid question, from an investor perspective.
It should be noted, though, that solar thermal plants can indeed generate electricity during the night, by collecting heat in reservoirs to later produce steam, be them water or molten salt[1] heat reservoirs.

[1] http://www.research-in-germany.de/61660/2011-03-08-molten-sa...
Looks like you need to read this other guy's comment:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2325377
It will not be possible ever, to keep handling cases of escalating complexity one of top of other. When things get complex beyond certain level, a kill switch should be triggered. The Kill switch should not depend on If-else cases ...
That study is somewhat questionable. Official estimates are 4000, generally regarded as low, but probably not 3 orders of magnitude low.
Why I AM CONCERNED about the reactors in Japan
I have been reading the articles here about how wonderful Japan is, how prepared they are, how everything is under control.

However, today as I write this, the news is they reactors are leaking toxic fumes. The wind in Tokyo has shifted my direction, and as someone who has worked in a Nuclear plant, I am concerned for my families long term health.

There are so many who make blog posts to make others feel secure, make themselves feel secure.

The truth is, we are just at the beginning of this disaster and do not know how bad it will get. It has the potential to poison a large population base here in Asia.

From where I sit these self appointed experts look very silly, arrogant, elitist.
So, coal is the car, and nuclear power is the airplane.
No one complains about the lack of female plumbers, sanitation engineers, or electricians. Men are four times more likely to be murdered, and ten times as many are in jail. Why is it that genders are supposed to be equal except when men are considered inherently inferior?

Life isn't fair and people with treat you unfairly. No this doesn't entitle you to special treatment. Yes it will limit you if you fixate on it.
"those of us sitting on our couches in silicon valley may very get a nice early spring gift from jet stream."

This brings up a question I've been wanting to ask since the ordeal started. How much do we know about the severity of radioactivity being spread to Hawaii, California or countries outside of Japan?

Assuming worst case scenarios, are the citizens of Hawaii in real danger of poisoning? Should neighboring countries be stocking up on potassium iodine?
I could be wrong, but based on news this morning it was my understanding that it in fact had a concrete "tertiary" containment including a dry and wet-well.

There were apparently some minor inaccuracies in what he wrote, which were pointed out by HN readers.

Not that any of this is terribly relevant now.
Is Your Son a Computer Hacker? [2001]
Calling people idiots for expressing their concerns about an emergent disaster is a sure way to alienate them for a long time. Lecturing people about a complex problem using second-hand information about a situation which is changing by the hour also severely undermines any credibility one might have. Waiting for the situation to stabilize and evaluating the lessons afterwards seems a much better response than shrill, ignorant insults. All I have learned from this article is that the author labors under the delusion that people can be bullied into agreement - an immature response to say the least.

I consider myself pro-nuclear, by the way, and am also unhappy with the sensationalist media coverage.
The reactor was designed to withstand an 8.2 quake - very, very strong. It withstood an 8.9 quake with no damage! That's the 7th strongest quake ever recorded, and 700% of the rated strength! The tsunami physically washed away the generators, but the battery backup was sufficient for new generators to be trucked in. (The new generators could not connect to the old water pumps, but that's not the fault of the plant's designers.)
There are many that say that our taxes are too high, our regulations are too burdensome, and that in general the climate for business here is abysmal and is driving business away. This position was taken by many politicians who won overwhelmingly last November.
I'll step in and defend nuclear power. This crisis looks horrible and might even lead to multiple core melts with containment breach. But let's not forget this was a horrible natural disaster first. We engineers never said a meltdown could never happen but that we have done everything possible to minimize the risk. I can predict that the amount of lives lost and property damaged due to this accident will pale when compared to other forms of energy including coal, gas or oil when things go wrong -- a price we pay every single day and is so common it hardly registers as news. What was cost of the BP oil spill? Read your local news for local gas explosions, oil spills, injured workers, etc. People are killed in the coal industry every single year. These are such every day occurrences they don't even register unless many people are killed or it involves barrels of oil. This accident is like a plane crash that draws attention to the horrors of flight when things go wrong -- but we still fly and flying is orders of magnitude safer then getting in your car.

All energy sources have risks and I believe that nuclear can be safe and reliable and better than any of the alternatives. In the end we will build nuclear power plants because there is no other large scale source of energy that can power an industrial civilization. (If you think so-called green energy and solar power can save us you need to learn some math. You are an environmentalist dupe). Need I remind all the ambitious hackers on HN that computers and the internet do not run on pixie dust -- it is running on oil, gas, coal and, yes, nuclear power right now. We know that at some point the oil will run out or become too expensive to mine. At that point its nuclear or turn off the lights and the drastic drop in living standards that implies.

This accident will teach us a lot about how to design and build reactors and nuclear power stations and maybe will delay the construction of those new plants which would be the real tragedy of this accident. We need to start building them now.
I ran one of the Relcom nodes at the time. It was a major pain to setup but once we got going the service was very reliable. Our setup wasn't UNIX based though, it was a home grown UUCP peer-to-peer client running on DOS, I think it was called UUPC if I am not mistaken.