skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Hmm, I think it is readily accepted and established that complete loss of coolant in a LWR will lead to meltdown - although I can't comment on whether that was the scientific opinion immediately after Chernobyl.

The problem at Chernobyl is not as you describe. The issue there was that through a process of bad core management, while trying to shut down the reactor and at the same time run an experiment, meant the core ended up in a very unstable state. Mostly the instability was managed automatically but at some point it went wrong; there is much debate over this, though conventionally it is accepted that someone, it is not known who, SCRAMmed the reactor - the poor design of the control rods meant that rather than immediately stop the reaction it actually made things worse as they were inserted, causing the core to overheat causing extreme pressure, cracking the control rods and essentially making the situation unrecoverable. Then a steam explosion broke the pressure seal and the chamber emptied of coolant.

After that the exact mechanics of what happened is somewhat unknown (instrument failure) but the lack of coolant lead to a critical "nuclear excursion"; i.e. essentially the neutron emission becomes so large that the fuel becomes supercritical. The excursion heated the fuel so that it expanded and "exploded" out of the pressure vessel; once that had happened the fuel was dispersed and the nuclear reaction ended.

At that point the graphite was exposed to the air and caught fire; it was this (and the resulting smoke plume) that spread most of the radiation.
I didn't find it smug in the least. (Alternate formation: it was not found smug in the least by this commenter.) One of the core principles of positive communication is to use "I" statements in place of blanket judgments: it's the difference between "This sucks" and "I don't like this".
Javascript, validity depends on how exactly do you define conditions and loops:

var items = [];
var rec = function(item) {
var func = [];
func[true] = function(item) { items.push(item); [item-1].map(rec); };
func[false] = function(item) {};
return func[Boolean(item)](item);
};
var item = [1000];
item.map(rec);
console.log(items.reverse().join(','));

Won't do in browsers due to recurssion limit but change [1000] to [10] and you'll see it works.
> If you're getting downvoted for bashing MS, then you must be doing something wrong, like being way off base with your hate or something.

No joke, sadly.

While I get carried away sometimes (Windows has improved a lot since my windows 2003 days, WP7 is neither "Vista Phone 7" nor "WinMo 7") I see very frequent downmods when I paint Microsoft technologies in unfavorable light, most of them occurring early in the morning PST (I live in GMT-3, so I post a lot before US west coast wakes up). Since I have been very active these days, most posts where this happened are buried deep in the threads pages and may take some time to unearth.

To be fair, I also notice some backlash when I paint Apple in unfavorable colors too.
From my standpoint, it's like trying to browse a store that first requires you to create an account before you can see what the true cost of the item is. I still have no idea what specific information is required to use (my information 'cost').

However, many people don't mind throwing an email/pass at anything that comes up so I can see why it works. I'd be interested to see if your signup conversion rates stay consistent though.
I'd love to see the NIMBY crowd's take on importing a cut-rate Chinese reactor.

But surely the electricity itself is fungible. I guess there's no grid connecting China to Finland to arbitrage the power directly (or conceivably no way to build Chinese reactors any faster than domestic demand and imperfect pricing mechanisms).
I still remember the voices after Chernobyl: Light water reactors are safe and core meltdown can never happen, because the moderator is water. If it evaporates, the moderator is gone and the core will cool down.

You misunderstood. No one reasoned that loss of water coolant would somehow cool the reactor (that's self-evidently absurd); they reasoned, and still reason, that loss of coolant would shut off the fission reaction. This rules out, not meltdowns, but uncontrolled power excursions like the one that created the steam explosion that blew up Chernobyl.
See also: http://copypastecharacter.com/
Big talk with the creator of Smalltalk—and much more.
Opera Alpha, now with SOCKS proxy support (bug 1)
A wonderful, human survey of the field, with pleasantly little jargon. Thanks ltratt!
No doubt functional programming has its place and is very powerful for many types of problems. Just curious, how do you maintain your lovely side-effect free structure while programming a GUI or other heavily event-driven environment?

I have a genuine interest in the answers to this as it is one of the things putting me off learning an otherwise very interesting paradigm.
The girls have lost before the match even started.
I'm not so sure you came off as smug or arrogant. Seemed to me you read one too many "pat little comments" and had a bit of a rant. That is ok, as it was decently written, coherent, and stayed on point.

If we want to start throwing around nearly antiquated terms of insult, it should be noted that the OP was being snide, and whackberry was being iniquitous. (This is true whether or not your comment was in fact smug btw).
The central problem is still ignorance, unfamiliarity, and fear. People are more afraid of death and injury related to radiation exposure because it's not something they're familiar with. That causes people to incorrectly weigh the risks and tradeoffs involved.
I think popup forms are annoying and spammy. I'll never use them on a website of mine.

Using them might result in more email signups, but I think the response to your email blasts will be worse off and result in a lot of immediate "unsubscribes".

Popups are a trend I hope goes the way of blinking text.
We have load balanced servers so I'm surprised nginx wasn't able to handle the traffic. I will check the configuration once the traffic levels are low. I must have done something wrong in the configuration.
Google's app engine and Amazon's EC2 both offer free tiers. Windows Azure might offer a free tier too. I think for App engine, you might not need a credit card number.

My suggestion is don't waste cash on domain names and physical books. You can use the free subdomains that you get from App Engine for now. If you write something awesome that people start using, you might be able to make some cash off of that. For now, you should focus on learning and building.

For time, I'd suggest coding really early or really late. Basically, when you have few distractions. Blast the music on and give at least 2 hours per coding session.

Best of luck to you!
DIY web-enabled "Bathroom Occupied" sensor using Arduino
rsync is for bringing one tree in sync with another. It can do this relatively efficiently if you already have a previous version of the tree at the destination, which is a fairly common case. rsync compares (more or less) each file with its parallel file on the other side and transmits just the differences. rsync won't save you any storage, just bandwidth.

ddar is for storing things de-duplicated, possibly over the network. It will save both storage and bandwidth. However, you won't get a tree on the other side, just an opaque container than you can extract the data out of again.

So: rsync to bring two trees in to sync, Tarsnap or ddar to store things (eg. for backups).

You could use rsync to store backups, but only really with the help of other tools. Tools like duplicity, rdiff-backup or rsnapshot.

Tarsnap was the first common system (to my knowledge) to do full de-duplication for storage. ddar works in the same way.

By full de-duplication I mean for the system to have an overview of all data in order to optimise transfers and storage.

For example, if I were to download a large image (say a Debian ISO) and then back up my machine using Tarsnap or ddar, then delete the ISO and perform another backup, then download the ISO again and perform a third backup, the third backup will optimise out transmitting the image because it is already stored. I don't think that rdiff-backup, rsnapshot or duplicity can do this, since they only consider one backup at a time. I believe this applies to renaming files around as well.
It‘s not so much about the conservative base. The CDU can be relatively sure that their base will vote for them regardless. Opposition to nuclear energy is a popular position in Germany, also in the political center. This decision is supposed to appease those voters.
Time, Scope, Quality. Pick two.

Apple picks time and quality, and I appreciate it.
The loss of power is actually one of the aspects of the situation that I find especially tragic.

The USS Ronald Reagan is only 100 miles offshore and has its own nuclear power plant that could be tied into the local grid to provide emergency power to things like the water treatment plants, hospitals, and even the cooling system at the Fukushima Dai-ichi facility.

I know the details of parking an aircraft carrier outside a devastated port city and plugging it into the grid aren't trivial, but I wonder if it's something that's been considered?

FWIW: some great discussion here: http://message.snopes.com/showthread.php?t=52136
In Silicon Valley, no immediate threat to supply chains from Japan disaster
Google Makes Whitelist Admission
https://github.com/cyrilmottier/GreenDroid
There is no way the browser was rewritten "from scratch". If it were rewritten from scratch, the issues that crashed its predecessors (like http://crashie8.com) would not also crash IE9.
Most of the functionality is there, it is just lower level coding than is required for many purposes. Sure, you can do HTTP requests, but if you are interacting with a ReSTful service, having a wrapper that understands ReST is better.
I'm doubtful that the large round number quoted as deaths due to coal pollution have any foundation. China has half a million? How can we know that? Its such a large, round, made-up number.

Fewer people die from car accidents. I know several dead from car accidents. Why don't I know one person dead from "coal pollution"?
However, I will suggest that his various missives, rants, and other statements contribute positively to the general fabric of discussion around software freedom and personal privacy.

ESR stated in Revolution OS that RMS's 'wholesale attack' on (was it software patents or intellectual property? i don't remember now) was one of the reasons it was hard to convince businesses this wasn't just a hippie pipe dream.

The OpenMoko runs all Free code, afaik, so the whole "being tracked by Big Brother" deal sounds like tinfoil hat syndrome. This particular rant only points out that most cellphones run on proprietary software. Why don't we just shout about anything that uses proprietary software like cars or industrial manufacturing equipment? We know it's proprietary, but comparing it all to a fascist regime isn't going to contribute positively to a discussion to make it more open.
Very interesting article. As a primarily OO programmer that's been playing more and more with functional concepts due to javascript, I definitely see the theoretical advantages mentioned in the article.

However, I also see that there are very hard parts to purely functional as well. For instance, to be entirely side-effect free your language has to be able to enforce immutability (which JS lacks). It's also hard (or at least not obvious) how to do certain types of logic flows in a purely functional.

For small domain spaces I can visualize how purely functional bottom-up programming effectively causes you to write a DSL for your problem.

However I don't have the experience/wisdom to understand if this holds true as the size of the domain increases. Basically, I have concerns that purely functional solutions don't scale (not from a performance perspective, but from an organizational/architectural one).

My experience with complex business logic makes me worried that complex new business rules would be difficult to implement in purely functional way and would cause frequent, painful refactoring.

I would love to hear from someone that's done a purely functional application with a large surface area that has been subjected to a real-world business environment to comment on the subject.
uvdiv, I did not misunderstand.

The light water is the coolant AND the moderator. You need a moderator that slows down the emitted neutrons to keep the nuclear chain reaction going.

But evidently, the water is not the only moderator they use. They don't use graphite, though.
I tried to ask them but there's always so many blocks. I have to explain so much just to get them to do something. It's like an inefficient bureaucracy with lots of red tape. I can't really contact any of my relatives because they are in another country. I think they're hostile to the idea because my grades have been low (although they are improving) ever since we moved to a new state over winter. They are also worried about my vision...

Right now my main goal is to make money. In the long term I would want to have several websites set up and do some research in CS. I've only completed one web app, and it's a really simple one in Sinatra (it's a pastebin...). I plan to learn Rails, JS, and graphic design with Inkscape.

Thanks for the links!
Dropbox Mobile Apps Are Less Secure than the Desktop Utility [Updated]
There are degrees of certainties. If for instance one of your beliefs is based on crushing evidence, then changing your mind on that matter will require super-crushing evidence. If someone comes and assert the contrary of your belief without presenting evidence, you should believe the other person is wrong.

Wrong beliefs are often dangerous (an extreme case would be believing that prayers are better than western medicine at curing most illnesses). So your duty is to convince the other person, or at least control the damage.

Now of course, if you do see that super-crushing evidence against your previously strongly held belief, then your duty is to change your mind. The most difficult part here is correctly assessing the weight of each piece evidence, and how they interact.
Say you were to use a pebble bed reactor (Modern aircraft, modern reactor).

The reactor is designed in such a way that in case of coolant failure/containment failure/etc. the pebbles equilibrate at a stable containable temperature, and as such even if you could obliterate the reactor itself, the pebbles wouldn't melt down and as such wouldn't contaminate the environment with radioactive waste. Similarly as the coolant is helium, it is less radioactive in normal use and as such the coolant leak wouldn't be a critical disaster.

The pebbles themselves are coated in silicon carbide and as such are probably hard enough that you could use them as impactors against softer targets like, say, tanks. Due to this hardness it is thus unlikely that you would damage a large number of pebbles and hence release a large amount of core material.

Disclaimer: I'm not a nuclear scientist, I just think it's freaking cool.
I'm not sure what I'm supposed to be concluding from this. The first link is just a list of profiles/interviews with various employees of the company (the newest being over a year old). Strictly speaking, it's possible that some of them are the same people working at the site at present, but this is a company with (according to the site) over 15,000 employees. That nobody on Reddit even bothered to run the site through an automatic translator is telling.

But more to the point, there is no indication of "people sacrificing their lives" unless you count the extremely hyperbolic assumption that everybody working at the site is automatically doomed.
No, sorry. Cocos2d is the first I've tried using, as I only just started iOS dev.

edit: A quick peruse through some github samples from their framework, and it looks like their API is busier, but seems to be less mature. This is from five minutes of browsing so may not be completely accurate.
1. Read this article and follow the advice. If it works for college in three semesters, it will work for high school in eight semesters http://www.stevepavlina.com/blog/2006/05/10-tips-for-college...

2. Solve the bank account problem by buying prepaid debit cards. If you really need 30 dollars for VPS and a domain name (and I agree with others that free services are the way to go here), you can get that quickly by walking around asking to weed gardens or mow lawns.

3. You need to get connected, so go to meetups, try to get informational interviews with local software companies, etc.
I'm not quite sure what to make of this article. On the one hand, I completely agree that bottom-up programming is a great approach.

On the other hand, I completely disagree that top-down programming is strongly tied to OO programming. At the very least, it certainly is possible to do bottom up programming in OO languages. That's my normal working mode...
This interview started out on a cell phone, but with repeated dropped calls they had to finish it via email, presumably on RMS's all-free-software laptop. So in this instance covenience and privacy were on the same end of this supposed continuum.
Open New Tabs by Dragging Links and Text to Chrome's Tab Bar
There are many valid criticisms of Richard Stallman: He sometimes fails to show ordinary courtesy, even to his supporters; he can be spectacularly bad at common techniques of persuasion; and he has creeped out some women by making passes at them (or so they tell me).

There are some morally neutral things which may be said about Stallman: His views are far out of the mainstream; he is uncompromising even in small matters; and he occasionally has a weird-but-powerful charisma.

There are some praiseworthy things about Stallman: He appears to be utterly principled; he shows few signs of being tempted by money; and he has persevered for decades to bring about the world he wants.

None of these things, good or bad, affect the underlying question: Is Stallman right?

In my case, I often find Stallman's claims ridiculous at first. Why? Because Stallman is asking us to take extreme measures against threats which seem both unlikely and dystopian, such as the universal DRM he predicted in his 1997 short story, "The Right to Read."

But I've noticed, over the years, that Stallman's most paranoid fears tend to come partially true. Today, we have an acronym for "DRM", and we've spent years fighting the legal powers granted by the DMCA. So I no longer automatically discount what Stallman says, because his pessimistic predictions have a better track record than my optimistic ones.
Elena's Motorcyle Ride through Chernobyl
Geolocated images reveal a place's visual identity
What has Twitter become?
GUI isn't really the place to do functional programming imho.

But check out node.js for the rest of your pain. It is very event driven and can easily be coded completely side-effect free due to closures.
I'm going to address the monetary issues as others will be better at talking to time management/school work than I.

First off, don't buy books. Pleeeeenty of great reading for absolutely free online. Just dig around a little.

Talk to your parents about setting up a VisaBuxx card in your name. It has all the controls and such they'll love and will give you the oppertunity of purchasing things online.
http://usa.visa.com/personal/cards/prepaid/visa_buxx.html

As for a domain name, $7.49 with a coupon for Godaddy.com
http://www.retailmenot.com/view/godaddy.com

As for VPS. A one year contract with Linode (10% off if you buy a whole year) will get you 512mb RAM, 200GB of transfer for $216.
I'd consider selling your iPod or something to cover that, if a VPS is really important to you... you can always setup LAMP locally to learn server setup and programming at no cost.
iOS 4.3 Not Providing Nitro Engine To Web Apps Launched Full Screen?
Forensic Debugging and Crash Analysis
I think it's easiest to explain with an example.

So, every day at 10pm, I want to make a backup of my server to another server. I ddar or rsync the files to another server. Monday at 10pm, I do it; Tuesday at 10pm, I do it; Wednesday at 10pm, yep, did it. Now it's Thursday and for whatever reason, I have to restore the system to the state that it was on Monday. With rsync, changes have been overwritten.

ddar and Tarsnap are useful because they allow you to have a full backup of each of those days, rather than just the latest. Likewise, they package it better than the old "do a full backup and then do incrementals on top of it" way so that you don't have to restore the original and then replay all the incrementals. Now, you could just store full backups each night, but that would take an incredible amount of space. ddar and Tarsnap allow you to have the convenience of full-backup while having the data de-duplicated so that it doesn't take up too much disk space.

Rsync is more about saving bandwidth while transferring large amounts of files.
The gift/curse of the visionary is that they can see the future as clearly as they can see the present.

When Disneyworld opened in 1971, a reporter remarked to Roy Disney, "It's a shame that Walt didn't live long enough to see this."

To which Roy responded, "He saw it before you did."
Magically? We're made to believe that nuclear power plants are built for all sorts of compounding contingencies. Take a look at the list of significant earthquakes in Japan:

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

8,3, 8.5 and 8.4 are three major earthquakes I see before mid-20th century. If you're building a power plant, it should survive a large safety factor above the largest earthquake you have ever seen, especially since the cost of failure is pretty darn high. I don't think it's unreasonable to expect to survive an 8.9 in a major earthquake zone, especially since the largest earthquake the world saw after the 1900s was around 9.5.

I think the fact that the diesels in Daiichi failed because of seawater flooding is yet another gigantic contingency failure. The Japanese know that earthquakes are followed by Tsunamis. What happened?

I used to be pro-nuclear but I'm reconsidering my decisions too. I don't think that humans can be trusted with doing things right, such as decommissioning old plants in time or building in extra safety factors even though it costs way more money to do so. Furthermore, I shudder to think what a deliberate attack attempt at a nuclear plant (or several ones simultaneously) could do. If there are people who drive planes into buildings with no regard to their own life, there will be those who attack nuclear plants also.

Edit: reasons for downvotes would be appreciated to further the discussion.
Use Of Third-Party Twitter Clients Dwindles To 42%
This actually happened to me, and the domain name was registered within the hour I searched it up. I definitely believe this happens, which is why I will immediately purchase a domain name I like. I won't take any chances.
No offense intended, I am sure VWO is a great product. Haven't tried it yet, but have been meaning to. Also the blog is a joy to read. It was more expressing a general worry.
These libraries exist because iOS (IMHO) is too low level in places, such as HTTP requests. There is an interface you have to implement in order to make HTTP requests, and you have to handle all the data (bytes) that come in incrementally. It is very handy to have a library that handles the connection, caching, redirects, errors, etc.