skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
My impression is simply that people don't know Japanese geography, which isn't all together too surprising. There's no reason a person should know the geography of Japan any better than the geography of Uzbekistan if he or she doesn't have a specific tie to either country. They just hear "earthquake in Japan" and ask the people who live in Japan if they're doing alright.

My brother lives in Auckland. We had a lot of people asking if he was OK after the quake in Christchurch. They are ~700 miles away on different islands, so he wasn't affected at all by the quake there, but we patiently explained this. It seems silly to get so haughty when people are expressing genuine concern for your well-being.
Patio11's post both shed light on facts that were receiving little to no news coverage shortly after the main disaster and gave a valuable personal perspective on the unique ethos and role of preparedness and engineering in Japanese society.

Sometimes when people write from a contrarian or polemical viewpoint, overstatement occurs in the effort to create balance. I can certainly understand if Patrick's case was slightly overstated. The situation has evolved since his article was posted, but his overall point of the success of Japan's preparedness remains true and still under-reported.

Remember, this earthquake was one of the most powerful in history[1]. I think for many it's difficult to imagine just how much worse the devastation could have been from this compound disaster. I shudder to think of the physical destruction and social chaos that would ensue should such an earthquake and tsunami strike my beloved Bay Area; compared to Japan in this context our social fabric is a very loose weave.

[1] http://simple.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_earthquakes
So just out of curiosity, does GE have any liability since they built all those reactors?

Or does "earthquake" get them out of any responsibility?

Any GE Mark I's on the west coast on the USA?
We will let you test that theory out. Certainly you don't have a problem with someone else, perhaps more cancer prone and risk averse than you, opting out. Right?
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This piece gives some perspective on the tsunami's effects in small coastal villages: http://www.nytimes.com/2011/03/16/world/asia/16scene.html
Breaking NEws Over japan earth Quake Info
Spam. This site will just spit out the city you're visiting from based on geolocation, in an attempt to gather your information, mobile number, and possibly a fee. Spam. Just like your other submission. Please stop.
I am not a legal expert, but I do not believe you are forced to use the airport and thus the 4th amendment does not apply.

“The right to travel is a part of the ‘liberty’ of which a citizen cannot be deprived without the due process of law of the Fifth Amendment.”

Care of SCOTUS in 1958, Kent v. Dulles.
And yet...have you never stepped on an ant on vacation?
They don't feel embarrased if naked public, at least until sometime in twentieth when they finally prohibited child porns. They still have public spas that allow both men and women in one tub.

I don't think your story represents Japanese people's personality regarding not looting. Read <The Chrysanthemum and the Sword: Patterns of Japanese Culture>.
First of all, people don't often cancel once they are getting something. That's why those CD-of-the-month club things worked in the 90s, and book-of-the-month before them.

But I'm not even sure that's important. I don't think the goal here is to directly make money on new subscriptions. This is a massive strategic move.

It sends a signal to content providers that Netflix, if need be, can cut them out of the picture, or at least can make things very expensive for them by bidding up the price of content.
Ever been to Puerto Rico?
>there's no looting because the Government's emergency response is very good...

That wasn't particularly the case during the great Hanshin EQ of 1995. I think they did try to improve gov't response to disasters since then. So, yes, I believe they have faith in the gov't, but it's not because of a stellar record.
PEGs are one class of cleanly composable grammars. OMeta uses that attribute of theirs to great advantage. And PEGs are, formally speaking, parsable in worst-case linear time, although whether that linear time is fast enough to be practical is still unknown, and it also potentially uses large linear space. I hope it's not vulgar to post yet another link to my minimal PEG parser generator in one page of code: https://github.com/kragen/peg-bootstrap/blob/master/peg.md

In particular, the example here of embedding SQL in C would be pretty trivial to do as a PEG.

PEGs can parse some languages that are not context-free — the example from Bryan Ford's thesis is aₓbₓcₓ, where xᵢ means "i repetitions of x". I think there are also context-free languages they can't parse, but I'm not sure.

(Operator precedence parsing is particularly ugly in PEGs, since by default, they don't support left recursion. The OMeta folks figured out how to cleanly support left recursion in PEGs, but you lose the linear-time guarantee.)

One very appealing attribute of PEGs is that you can conveniently extend PEGs to support parameterized productions, which could be crucial in building up a library of general-purpose parsing productions that could reasonably be used to shorten the time to define new languages.

k4st claims in http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2330672 that Pratt top-down operator-precedence parsers are also cleanly composable. I didn't know that, and it seems like a surprising claim, but I don't really understand Pratt parsers yet. Crock has written an excellent article on Pratt parsers as his Beautiful Code chapter, and his JSLint is written with one. I think this is the same text as his chapter: http://javascript.crockford.com/tdop/tdop.html

Earley parsers can parse any context-free sentence in worst-case O(N³) time. Context-free grammars can, of course, be easily composed. Quoting Earley's abstract, "It has a time bound proportional to n³ (where n is the length of the string being parsed) in general; it has an n² bound for unambiguous grammars; and it runs in linear time on a large class of grammars, which seems to include most practical context-free programming language grammars."

John Aycock has written an Earley parser generator called SPARK which is included with Python, and is reportedly pretty efficient. He's advocated using it specifically because of the composability concern. http://pages.cpsc.ucalgary.ca/~aycock/spark/

Laurie Tratt just posted this other thing about parsing that's currently on the front page of HN; it's really excellent, and duplicates much of what I've written above: http://tratt.net/laurie/tech_articles/articles/parsing_the_s...
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<i>What will magically lower the radiation when the workers leave?</i>

Time.
Maybe the long term plan is going vertical, this is the start of owning content production, then later expand into broadband.
That was 600-800 uSv.
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Typically the operating agreement giving the company a monopoly ensures that they provide service to everyone as one of the conditions.
How does one disable popup blocking in chrome 10? I searched for `popup` in the settings tab and nothing came up.
It might be a little unfair of me but I personally really, really disappointed at the way a web giant with serious engineering chops like Google has dealt with the issue of accessibility.

I take an admittedly purist view and say that we as developers should be striving to maintain the initial principles of the web in allowing everyone equal access to content. As more and more sites act as 'applications' and the web moves further and further away from static html I think the principle still holds - it just becomes more difficult. I really would have loved to see large web companies like Facebook and Google drive the focus on maintaining accessibility for all users.

Instead we've seen exactly the opposite and for me the most disappointing part of it has been the way Google handles it - probably because I really have a soft spot for Google in all other situations.

None of their web applications are accessible to any usable degree and they don't seem to be showing the slightest interest in improving their standard of offering. A few of their products attempt a half-arsed implementation of WAI-ARIA but they never seem to actually follow through on anything. It's as if they launch a new product and then all instantly wander off and start something new. Accessibility requires a pretty hefty chunk of maintenance and user feedback but the tools are there if companies invested in it.
Watch the video. He specifically said milli-Sievert.
Reminds me of http://www.feep.net/~roth/geek-humor/unix/unix-crash-recover... , which talks a bit about the pains used to work around the lack of ls(1).
So... it's quora for SXSW?
The reactors didn't fail; the site did. If the backup generators and power grid didn't fail, there wouldn't have been any issue. It's well known that you can't just unplug a nuclear power plant and have it shut down safely.
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In addition to (and duplicating some of) the other recommendations:

Sony ACID (I use ACID Pro extensively, free trial, free lite version)

Ableton Live

FL Studio

energyXT (Linux and Mac versions available)

Other stuff to check out: console.jp, Audiomulch
Ask HN:Facebook comments and SEO
Hi HN.
Here is the small question, you have added to your website facebook comments, that's good a lot of facebook users are out there and you don't have to worry about much.
But the comment system will be shown only to logged in users of facebook in a IFreame on your site, no problem here.

Now for the question, what do you think will happen for SEO? I am asking this because on blogs I have found my answers within the comments, but since this is an iframe with login on top of it, is google going to read it as part of your content or as facebook content?

I had this discussion with my partner about we should have any other login system on our website or only use facebook as login, we asked if we had more then 3-4 friends (active internet users) that don't have facebook.

I argued that we have around 1.5 billion internet users and have only 600 mil facebook users, so we should have the 2 login / sign up's, but then what about the comments? We should have a facebook comments system and a normal comments system, based on what the users is using as it's login, that again if we can figure out what the facebook comments will do to our SEO.

Thanks
Why would one meltdown cause evacuation?

The meltdown would still be contained
And then he was corrected by the dude in the white lab coat.

I however heard micro on my translation and was a little bit confused during the correcting.
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Well, to be clear, he says you should certainly use the Accept header, and if you want to be nice you should provide the formatted URLs as well.
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It's actually understandable to be so haughty, at least after you've had roughly a hundred people do so. As someone who's here right now, I can tell you we've got enough on our minds that, while we certainly get that people are concerned with us, proper information in the hands of others would make life infinitely easier on our side.
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That's possibly a misleading question when you're talking about odds. Say you play a game with odds at 20% and something raises your odds to 25%. You win.

Was that thing vital?
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There's no reason a person should know the geography of Japan any better than the geography of Uzbekistan if he or she doesn't have a specific tie to either country.

I'm going to agree here. I went to high school in Tokyo and I hadn't heard of Gifu until patio11 mentioned it. This is not really a problem due to the availability of these things called "maps", however.
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Under the new AOL Way, linkbaiting seems to be a good thing. :)
The college I work for used to host student email accounts. But it got so expensive in time and money, that they had to stop. Thus, no student ever gets an email account from us. One of the options we've considered was using Google Apps, but if it really isn't accessible, then we likely won't. A good portion of us are sticklers for making sure the ADA requirements are met.

That said, as a former student of the college, it stinks for most of the students. One of the primary ways to get education discounts is having an .edu email address. My colleges students are just out of luck there.

As for the ebook reader stuff, um, were inaccessible readers the only way to read the material? That would be bad.

If there were other, accessible, ways, then there's no good reason to stop the students who can use the readers from using them. Or to stop the College from encouraging their use.

Basically, every effort should be made to make sure those who need accessibility help, get that help. But if there is a tool that is inaccessible that would help all the other students, then that tool should be used. The only time tools like that should be blocked are when they are the only way for a student to complete a course, or get essential information from the college.

Preventing non-disabled students from using tools that will help them succeed, just because those tools are inaccessible, is just as bad as not providing methods for disabled students to succeed.
Having worked in the higher ed vertical, I've interacted with a lot of college IT groups. The clownish appearance of IT in higher education has much less to do with the people in the IT (though there is a higher-than-industry-standard proportion of those, there are also some of the most dedicated and smarted people I've had the privilege to work with) and much more to do with the structure of higher education in general.

Every single major IT decision in a campus has to be sold to the faculty senate, which is the organization that really wields the power of the organization. Unfortunately, if you don't have IT management who are amazing sales people, you get decisions that are all about "will this make the grant I'm proposing tomorrow easier or harder".

There are very few centralized IT projects, because it is such a nightmare to get approval across campus. Instead, every department solves the problems for themselves and expects IT to cobble everything together. And almost nobody gives a flying fart about the students and what they see of this mess. Given students today were born very shortly before the Internet went "mainstream" is a major issue and smart schools with strong central control (there are some...) are using it as a differentiator for student prospects.
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It might be where they're measuring. He went on to indicate that at the gate, the measurements had just reached the milli- level; perhaps the exorbitantly high figure is very close to the core?
One small nitpick: if earthquakes were still measured on the Richter scale, the difference between 8.2 and 8.9 would be 5 times (as stated in the corrected article). However, the USGS uses the Moment magnitude scale (M_w, see http://earthquake.usgs.gov/earthquakes/glossary.php#magnitud... and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moment_magnitude_scale for details), so the difference between an 8.2 and an 8.9 is 11.2 times--more than double the stated increase. And now that the magnitude has been adjusted to 9.0 (see http://earthquake.usgs.gov/earthquakes/recenteqsww/Quakes/us...), the amount of energy released was 15.8 times more than an 8.2 earthquake.
It seems people got really upset at Bing for doing something similar. Except they were just giving away free money for tweets!

http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/microsoftpri0/20144932...

Personally, I think the backlash was a little harsh and was probably a result of it being too soon.
How good would this be for computer vision applications?
You left out:

Registrant:
MIT Department of Nuclear Science and Engineering
77 Massachusetts Avenue
Cambridge
Cambridge, Massachusetts 02139
United States

and:

Administrative Contact:
Subbiah, Ilavenil subbiah@mit.edu
MIT Department of Nuclear Science and Engineering
77 Massachusetts Avenue
Cambridge
Cambridge, Massachusetts 02139
United States
617-576-0593 Fax --

Edit: fixed formatting
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This has the potential to make relations with other content producers a bit stickier, and I'm not sure if that's really good considering that the media industry is terrified of the internet anyway. Netflix has built its business as a supplier -- now they're competing with their vendors.
> My unix/linux box doesn't have overlapping software

Not really true at all. find is especially heinous. "find ... -delete" is equivalent to "find ... -print0 | xargs -0 rm --"
I think the figures that were thrown around in that press conference--either by Edano or 'white lab jacket guy'--varied by location however the translator had my head spinning and I couldn't deduce what's what.

I'm pretty certain that anytime "600 to 800" was mentioned, it was supposed to be in uSv, and that those measurements were taken at the plant's gates.
I've heard anecdotally that the Japanese are horribly repressed. They also have the second-highest suicide rate among industrialized nations: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_OECD_countries_by_suici... (South Korea is #1, USA is #20). They may be composed, but their culture is far from an ideal.
Everything looks like it has been designed by﻿ an architect, a single mind, but of course that isn't true. This colossal and complex city was created by the collective will of the colony, the super organism.

These things are a lot simper if you have a less restrictive view of what qualifies as a 'mind'.
Can't speak for YC, but I can tell you that everyone in our group had at least 1 badass hacker on their team. I've never heard of a hacker-free team going thru YC. My guess is that you'd need some pretty outstanding accomplishments on your app to overcome it, but I'd wager it's theoretically possible.
They took an awful lot of investment rounds and dilution. (The alternative was closing the doors.) As tends to be the case several rounds down the line, the investors own nearly all of the firm.
Sorry I wasn't really complaining about your example, just in general. I've become trained by github to expect a certain thing. Keep on making cool stuff!
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Search source code from programming books
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Fair enough. Will be good to see a correction, then (like that'll happen) -- most of the big names in the media have already run with milli-.

Takeaway for me from this: units for radiation exposure suck, and don't communicate well to the lay.
Thanks for that - I shouldn't have said that what I said about IT departments. You're right - there are a lot of external factors that comes into play whenever these types of decisions get made.

I'm pretty sympathetic with the need to cut costs - hosting email gets expensive. I just hope that higher education pushes Google Apps and other education-based services to abide by Section 508 Accessibility Guidelines (and the guidelines are not even as sophisticated as they could be). You gotta start somewhere, yes?
I'd say the tags were more likely paid product placement, and not at all a judgment, much less an understanding, of who runs tech.
Sure, just don't call it REST.
I wonder if doing it this way will be cheaper for them in the long run than trying to buy the digital rights later from the content cabals.
"Leiningen versus the Ants" is a fairly famous short story; I read the first sentence and said "Oh, yeah, that one!", and was back in under a minute.
It's bias.

Java has ~3 times as many holes as Flash does (if one is comparing in the context of "browser plugins").
Excellent post explaining this sentiment here:

http://www.avc.com/a_vc/2008/11/trading-analog.html
This is not really a problem due to the availability of these things called "maps", however

Oh, how I wish this were the case. (The lady from the New York Times excepted, this has been a repeated issue when speaking with reporters. I have been falling back to my "If Japan were the United States..." explanation quite a lot.)
I'm willing to bet they will repeat that news conference on the hour (one minute) on NHK:

http://www.ustream.tv/channel/nhk-world-tv

EDIT: They indeed did so, but shortened and dumbed it down with only 2 figures being provided by 'WLJG'--2.3 and 6.4 mSv 'near the plant', with the latter being the peak at the time of 'leak.'
I upvoted it because I was looking for the underlying meaning of an elegant comment. Surely it means something, I said...
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Has anyone ever gone on vacation specifically to step on ants?
The app itself looks awesome. Until I can go really in depth hard to leave feedback beyond me being awed. Here's what I can comment on- the landing page:

a) Put the video above the fold. People want demos - A S A f'n P.

b) You need a phrase and simple way to explain it. Kind of an elevator pitch but not buzzwordy. Needs to be functional.

c) Start collecting email addresses asap.

d) Take me through some key example scenarios too.
if you have not considered it already, it would be nice if you could also write about napi, gro, and zero-copy among other topics.

on a side note, is there a equivalent of tcp-ip-illustrated-vol2 with a linux rather than bsd focus ?
- But the plans were on display.
- On display? I eventually had to go down to the cellar.
- That's the display department.
180 workers onsite now, according to YokosoNews folks translating the TBS.
I stopped applying because I realized my projects are just way too small for YC. I care about building stuff, but also just want to make something that can provide a decent passive income for myself. A few hundred grand per year in profit would be massive for me, but nothing to YC investors.
Doh, thanks.
Wind.
He misspoke. NHK correcting this now. micro is correct; NOT milli