skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Forgive me, this post is intended to be facetious.

My personal view is that the societal desire for and against privacy and human rights always trumps any technological barriers. Hitler and Stalin, for example, were able to do pretty bad things despite having relatively primitive technology. Examples date back to the dawn of recorded history. Even today, I can be tracked using my license plate number, fingerprints, DNA, etc. pretty handily. Where there is a will, there is a way. Fortunately, our society does not have the political will to do it--and, in fact, would likely find inappropriate tracking to be revolting.

In this respect I think Stallman is way off base. Fighting to make sure your phone runs OSS does little to ensure that the culture we live in values the right things and has an ideal political structure (representative democracy). I'd argue it's a dangerous distraction, in fact, because it promulgates the incorrect notion that if only we had open technology, we'd be free from criminals, dictators, and other bad things, and we'd live in a world of ponies and rainbows. Because this is not true, I fear this effort diverts attention from where it deserves to be. That said, RMS's scare tactics to help to some degree, by reminding people that our societal values will always need to be projected into the latest wave of technology. I think this tends to happen naturally and organically, but whatever.

Fortunately, the flipside is pretty good: given the right political environment, privacy and technological regulation can coexist peacefully. This is good because some amount of regulation of the commons is necessary and good, and this extends to new technologies (like the car, or the cell phone).
AskReddit: What are all your favorite gardening hacks?
The deaths from solar appear to be from falls while installing roof-mounted systems; this would be primarily applicable to residential and small commercial solar systems, whereas most larger systems will tend to be ground-mounted and safer to construct.
A more accurate title would be "SEO 101".
Impressive. My only gripe is that I paused it on the 9M quake and zoomed out to look at the 'reach' of it, but hovering the mouse over the quake in the list on the right displays the quake as if it were at the original zoom level (i.e. doesn't take zoom out/in into account). That's unfortunate seeing as the 9M quake goes off the map on the default zoom level.
It is indeed the case. You really can't live off it in the US though...
You could also conclude that nuclear weapons are extremely safe to have around since they haven't killed anyone for 65 years.

Indeed some people have come to this conclusion: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mutually_assured_destruction
That's what's holding me back.

The only solution I see is to start working on some new ideas on the side. But then, I'm worried none will get executed properly.
At first glance, this looks like a nice list. I really have nothing bad to say about anything on it.

It's a list of 12 items without much guidance about how important each one is and how much time to spend on each. To put things in perspective, I think that BUILD should be > 90% of your time.

I'd like to share my personal experience with OP's list. Please understand that this is not advice, just one programmer's experience of what works for me. Perhaps I'll try some of OP's recommendations, but I'm not sure...

READ Hacker News

An hour or two every day for 4 years. Thousands of comments made. Hundreds of bookmarks saved. Oddly, not sure how important all of this has been contributing to my work. It's been very important contributing to my sanity. I'm alone most of the time except for my cats and you guys.

READ Stack Overflow

Never been there.

READ a bunch of other stuff

I just follow links from Hacker News front page. Lots a great stuff out there. Still, not really sure how much benefit has been to my own work.

ATTEND local meetups

I have. I don't anymore. Met some nice people. Didn't help my work at all.

ATTEND OpenTech 2011

Never heard of it.

FIND an itch to scratch

Have built about a half dozen things for myself. Not really much use for others, but a great way to practice with new technology.

RESEARCH cloud

Good idea, but my experience limited to Amazon.

RESEARCH HTML5

Good idea, but haven't done much.

JOIN Twitter, Delicious

Never did. Probably never will. Unless I see some good reason. (I haven't.)

PLAY

Critical! I play with stuff every day.

BUILD

90% of what I do. Oddly, I look at very little other code, but I do try to reverse engineer a lot with what I'm already playing with.

POLISH

I do nothing mentioned by OP. I just refactor, scale, and fine tune as I see fit.

I'd like to add one more thing to the list:

FIND A CUSTOMER

You'd be surprised at how fast you get good when you have to.
It's just a visualisation of http://nextbigfuture.com/2011/03/deaths-per-twh-by-energy-so... figures from a couple of days ago, which I found highly dubious.

For example where are all the biomass deaths from? Why no figures for non-rooftop solar?

What does this "Hydroelectric power was found to to have a fatality rate of 0.10 per TWh (883 fatalities for every TW·yr) in the period 1969–1996" mean? How does spinning a turbine from dammed water cause death?

Ah ... further down the page "... Paul Gipe estimated ..." - so someones estimates without proper working or sources for death rates and such ...

I would love to see a well worked properly sourced analysis along these lines however.
That seemed awefully smug and discouraging to me. I've been studying up on other people's successes and failures, and it seems there's no simple pattern that fits all.

"You are asserting that, despite the presence of 7 billion other people on the planet, ... you have come up with an idea, a business, a company that none of those other wonderful human beings have thought to invent yet."

Tell that to the Chinese immigrants running the convenience store around the corner. Their unoriginal idea is putting the kids through college.
What I've learned from the whole Xoom debacle is that the Flash codebase must be a massive stinking pile of shit. They can't give Linux security updates and they can't get it to work on one of the most important non-Apple tablets in existence.

This is why you write tests instead of adding features. Because while meeting your deadline today is good, not ever being able to meet a deadline again is pretty bad.
Collecting Personal Info About "Facebook Comments" Users for Fun and Profit
How much? Anyone know?
"It's certainly a common Erlang deployment pattern where no one Erlang process needs more than even a handful of megabytes necessarily, but the system as a whole runs past several gigabytes by sheer scale of accumulated processes that themselves may only have hundreds of bytes allocated."

From the release notes, it looks like the 32-bit emulator restricts the total for all processes to 4GB. Only ETS tables and off-heap binaries don't count toward that total.
This mostly serves to illustrate just how small the current solar install base is.
My point is that you or your child getting thyroid cancer, even if you or she recovers, is a pretty horrific outcome, and might deserve to be considered somehow -- not just fatalities.
"From what I could gather this was almost entirely due to a github page with lots of code and a portfolio of interesting projects."

I've been a hiring programmers for almost 10 years. It's so rare to get a resume with something like a link to a github page. You're pretty much guaranteed a phone screen with me if I see this. I know it's hard for people just starting out to understand this, but demand far exceeds the talent pool. You will always run into the managers that want to see "oracle blah blah blah" experience. When you get rejected by them because you couldn't answer how to solve some oracle specific problem in an interview you just ignore it, and keep applying.
Thanks for the heads up. Sounds obvious when you point it out that way.
Agreed, they have been, keywords is generally a low cost one to put in place, which often helps with ones for other searches. Some of the smaller players you'll see more long tail benefits from. The other meta tags such as description are more relevant to those still tough.
What does depth refer to here?

...

4.8M, depth: 17km 17/3/2011 00:00

5.3M, depth: 32km 16/3/2011 23:46

4.7M, depth: 38km 16/3/2011 23:38

4.7M, depth: 23km 16/3/2011 23:27

5.4M, depth: 1km 16/3/2011 22:38

4.7M, depth: 25km 16/3/2011 21:48

...
And yet you can't create a Zynga or a Twitter. Hmmmm.
Indeed there are, but one could suppose nuclear reactors would only fail catastrophically when something catastrophic happened, not when being shut down.
Ask HN: kan haz FF/Chrome button to access bookmarks?
I prefer to have FF's (and Chrome's) bookmark toolbar hidden, but I'd love to have a one-click-dropdown button for accessing them. Any suggestions for either browser?
Perhaps the best link would have been to the full recap: http://www.craigkerstiens.com/2011/03/07/startupbootstrapped... which starts with SEO and addresses cost/value of other means.

Though also, many early stage bootstrapping products, at least here in the valley don't consider SEO within marketing. A key take away I'd suggest is that they absolutely should. This is all of course after building a kick ass product.
The article postulates that time-traveling communications can exist, via devices yet to be invented. Since we currently have no way of interpreting the backwards-flowing information, we would not see evidence of its invention today.
I'd need to know I could do something to fix the situation. If the reactor is already FUBARed, the situation isn't helped any more by my death.
I don't think the radii of the circles actually correspond to a particular land area. How would one measure the "extent" of an earthquake, anyway? It's not like they have well-defined, circular bounds.

More likely, the circles are just sized in proportion to the magnitude of the quake, to give you a visual sense of scale.
"Even if you feel unsure about your current idea, just apply. Ideas change, awesome teams don't."

Don't think you can say it better than that. Nice article crowdboosters
Ok, so I gave this a really quick read-through, and as usual the article way overstates what's been done.

I'll try to put this briefly, without too much technical detail.

General relativity permits (and we've always known this) solutions that involve closed timelike curves (CTCs). Usually, when we look into these solutions in detail, we find that they require strange sorts of matter to sustain themselves, or that they're unstable. Hawking proposed that the universe in some way bans any geometry that would allow these solutions.

The authors here claim that by adding a fifth dimension that's curled up like a circle, and adding a specific sort of curvature to it (the metric contains a periodic cross term between the usual time dimension and the curled dimension), you can get CTCs that are geodesics (i.e. paths that particles will take with no forces on them), and you don't get weird energy conditions or anything like that.

Then they go on about the potential consequences if the universe is actually curved up like this, and so on, but don't offer any particularly compelling reason to believe that it is.

So basically, they claim to have shown that it's possible for the universe to be like this, and that no condition we currently know of prohibits it.

Meh. Could be, if we assume that they're right - it's always, of course, possible that there's some other problem with their solution that wouldn't be covered by the usual energy conditions, I'm not sure, I've been out of the GR circuit for a while so I don't know what people currently consider to be the most reasonable set of constraints that the Real World follows. But even if they're right, there are plenty of solutions to Einstein's equations that could have happened and don't, so there's nothing too revolutionary here, and mentioning a whole lotta shit about branes and the Higgs boson doesn't change that.

This is still quite useful theoretical physics to do, mind you, but it's nowhere near as important as the article makes it out to be.
Burning biomass causes high levels of particulate emissions, which are a very significant health risk (Burning firewood is the most important source of air pollution in much of the developing world).

Hydro is completely safe most of the time, but when a dam fails, it typically kills a lot of people really quickly.

It would be really hard to collect figures for non-rooftop solar -- simply because there is so little of it. (They would be very favorable.)
In that case you should also include all the people breaking their bones etc from falling down the roof without dying while installing solar panels.
I'm sure it works fine on Azul, and they've run some tests for us in the past. They've also been contributing a lot of work back to OpenJDK. It's unlikely anyone will be able to match or beat the JVMs currently available for a long time.
> really? looks like 50/50 to me

Yes, really. The claim, which I disputed, was that open pit was required. Showing 50/50 (open/closed) disproves that claim.
I feel like this line of reasoning misses the point a bit. Nuclear waste is dangerous for a very very long time, while deaths from these other sources are front loaded. When can people move back to chernobyl? If we have significant radiation exposure in japan, how long will that land be uninhabitable? Nuclear waste we create today is dangerous for how long?
Hi Phu -- the topic is addressed to internet entrepreneurs, not hard-working small business people. I agree with you.

M
This will take a lot longer than 12 months. More like 5 years, minimum, to be any good.
True, but if you're counting that, there must surely be many other equally bad externalities worth counting; e.g. environmental damage due to oil spills and incidence of lung cancer due to air pollution from coal mining.

You have to draw the line somewhere to make the chart, and drawing it at fatalities seems sort of reasonable. It certainly doesn't seem overly gracious to nuclear power.
Since the Bible doesn't say that govt should do those things ....

FWIW, religious folk do give more to charities than non-religious folk.
If 50,000 people were to die from a nuclear incident, a large portion of the public would absolutely lose their minds and insist that a nuclear reactor never again be built on the planet.

50,000 deaths resulting from <choose any other technology> however, is just an unfortunate incident. Hundreds of people will die year after year mining coal with nary a whimper of complaint, but we will hear about people sufferring from thyroid cancer 20 years after Chernobyl until the end of time.

(Sorry, a tad snarky....but also very true, no?)
What about all of the plants and animals killed from the various resources? Or the land and water that can no longer sustain life because of one disaster or another...
I've had four different companies and I've always worked on new ideas on the side. I don't know how the people that stay focused on one idea for years at a time do it. My brains not wired that way and I'm guessing yours isn't either.
yeah, might be time i upgraded :p
Is that really true? Do you speak from personal experience?
Infamous Android Hacker Koush Turns Down Interview with Sony ‘Out of Principle’
The earthquake's distance beneath the Earth's surface, which I believe starts at 0km on the ocean floor for the purposes of these measurements -- meaning, the water has nothing to do with it and the word depth is a coincidence. That confused me at first.

http://earthquake.usgs.gov/learn/topics/seismology/determini...
Look out Paypal: Visa jumps into personal payments
I don't disagree in principle, I'm just saying that putting up aggregated statistics for something that lends itself to once-in-a-lifetime catastrophic events doesn't tell us a whole lot. I think even the biggest MAD proponents would agree that the risk of nuclear war is greater than zero.
In Chrome there's the CTRL+SHIFT+B shortcut that toggles the bookmark toolbar on and off. At first glance there doesn't seem to have a shortcut for that in FireFox but maybe you can configure a shortcut or a plugin exists for that?
I could be wrong, but I think it's the depth of the rupture itself. Earthquakes don't really occur "on the surface"

via http://earthquake.usgs.gov/earthquakes/glossary.php

"The depth where the earthquake begins to rupture. This depth may be relative to mean sea-level or the average elevation of the seismic stations which provided arrival-time data for the earthquake location. The choice of reference depth is dependent on the method used to locate the earthquake. Sometimes when depth is poorly constrained by available seismic data, the location program will set the depth at a fixed value. For example, 33 km is often used as a default depth for earthquakes determined to be shallow, but whose depth is not satisfactorily determined by the data, whereas default depths of 5 or 10 km are often used in mid-continental areas and on mid-ocean ridges since earthquakes in these areas are usually shallower than 33 km."
Intel Announces Low Power Xeon and Atom Micro Server Products
How long would the atmosphere take to recover from CO2 emissions if we stopped burning fossil fuels today? How many people will have died as a result of climate change and lung problems before then?
Ask HN: How do you manage requirements?
How do you 1) ensure people are working on the "right" things (e.g. prioritize), 2) give external entities (whether that is the CEO or the board or your grandma) visibility into the status of the project, 3) encourage communication between team members, and 4) provide a way for everybody to provide input?

I've worked with many software project management tools (from Rational ReqPro to Scrum Ninja) over the years. I've also worked at large and (very) small companies. I want to put something in place that minimizes administration but provides the benefits mentioned above.

What tools and process (yes, even a two-person company can have "process", but I would hope you don't have Process :) work for you?
Read Techcrunch? Why? So you can daydream more lucidly about $40m exits?

From my journey so far, I think the foundation is understanding HTML and CSS and the DOM and basic Javascript interactions. It can take a few months for that stuff to sink in, but then you barely need to think about it going forward, it doesn't clog your thought-process. From there you could do a fair bit of actual coding, leveraging frameworks like jQuery and the various layout and template resources. You will get the hang of cross-browser stuff as you go. The next level is Ajax and server-side stuff, which IMO involves getting past a lot of over-coupling inherent in the technology, so that, again, will take a while to sink in. I suppose understanding databases would be a good idea but could perhaps be put off for a while.

Also I think it really helps to have someone you can meet regularly and quiz about development. It beats endlessly googling for an answer that makes sense from your perspective.
One problem with this visualization is that it does not account for future deaths and less noticeable health effects caused by radioactive waste and accidents related to its storage. On the other hand, it also does not account for the same caused by oil and coal and other pollution.
CTRL+B brings up the bookmark sidebar on Fx.
Dude. There is one piano, 2 xylophones, one accordion, three real hand drums, several Remo kids drums, two kids violins, and assorted small percussion around the house.

There are no plastic electronic drums, keyboards or other things that say letters, squeak, or otherwise make non-real noises.

At extra special times, all three of them will parade around the house with drums and sing Whiskey in the Jar. It's quite an experience.

But as for the electronic bits, He just likes the ipad. All three of the kids do.
Reminds me of my first programming job. One of my colleagues used variables named after baseball players.
No.

A corporation is only a group of individuals. The individuals that constitute a coroporation have rights, and the corporation is simply a legally optimized recognition of those rights.

Remember, rights are negative, in that proper rights can only prohibit one from initiating political force (violence and fraud) against another. Proper rights do not impose obligations on anyone to create anything for anyone else, because that would be a form of slavery.

No sensible person has ever claimed that a corporation is the same thing as a person.
Even if that were really true, the post itself offers you the opportunity to know someone on the inside - "shoot us an email with any questions you have about YC". What are you waiting for?
that's what nuclear fanatics here don't seem to get.

as I argued in other thread about the original numbers, what matters aren't direct deaths attributed to one or the other energy source.

what matters (to me at least) is how different energy sources affect our quality of life. I suspect nuclear isn't the worst offender here, but it isn't all butterflies and roses either.

For the record: I am responsible nuclear fission proponent.
Neither do the vast amount of respiratory ailments caused by pollution. Coal kills a lot of people, but it cripples more than it kills.
I personally believe the MRI core devs have done a great job of moving YARV and Ruby 1.9.x forward. We would not have added 1.9.2 support had they not cleaned it up and made it a really compelling set of features.

YARV may start to lag behind in performance measurements, but it's already faster than many popular runtimes (Python, for example) and there's nothing stopping them from making more drastic moves to improve it (adding JIT or concurrent threading).

And of course they are still the reference implementation; we want them to continue to push the boundaries of what Ruby can do, and continue to challenge us with new features.
I have a friend that is a research analyst in a bank that covers "Other Financials" (i.e. companies like Wonga that aren't traditional banks).

He mentioned a company (similar-ish to Wonga) that does Home Credit - i.e. people going round door to door in poor areas lending money and collecting on a weekly basis. These companies typically charge 183% APR.

The Joseph Rowntree Foundation (a UK charity) did some research to see if they could provide the same service on a non-profit basis. They found that with a government subsidy of £18m, they would still only be able to get the interest rate down to 123%. This is due to the large number of defaults and other costs.

http://www.jrf.org.uk/blog/2011/02/will-capping-cost-credit-...

I thought this was interesting - what seems like an outrageous rate really doesn't always translate into outrageous profits.
I think this depends a lot on how you define simplicity.

If we define simplicity as: a plain text interchange format, then clearly by definition a text based shell is simpler.

Piping objects instead of text allows a single command to do more, as it can operate on any of the object's properties that it understands. From a user's perspective, I believe, that this is simpler - however I will acknowledge that this is somewhat subjective. For example: The command ls | sort LastWriteTime would print a list of files sorted by their LastWriteTime. The command ls | sort Length would print a list of files sorted by their size. Doing this in bash is more difficult as it requires additional commands to parse the output of ls.
Think about what happens when a dam fails. For example http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Banqiao_Dam
That's the whole premise of Prolog (ok, if you squint at it from the right angle). Execute steps X Y and Z, but if Z fails go back and try Y again a different way, and if that fails back up further and try X again a different way...
awesome post guys... and yes the punchline is key: you have to have the stomach to pivot if you are thinking of applying to YC
Leaked: Julian Assange on the Dance Floor?