skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I've played around with it and my team is using it on our current project. I've found it to be a bit rough around the edges. It's still in the process of transforming from an internal resource to a community based open source project, but I think the two toasters crew is very serious about making it work and are doing a great job.

I'd recommend others try it out if you aren't afraid of dipping into their code. I found it to be quite readable and the two toasters team have shown themselves to be very good at communicating with other people interested in the project. My hope is that they will continue to work through the kinks and RestKit can become a standard library for apps dealing with RESTful services.
Clearly the article said that there could be a massive, accidental release of radiation from the California reactors. But that doesn't mean the way they failed would be the same as the way Chernobyl failed. Similar result does not imply similar means of failure.
But evidently, the water is not the only moderator they use.

Where did you get that assumption from? Water is definitely the only moderator in this form of LWR (based on the published design specs).
100% web evolves business processes and creates massive value.
Would you prefer "Mao", then? http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2328174
That means it doesn't work.
> REST is as simple as it gets.

It is not. It's quite complex actually. And I'm betting what most people who believe they have a clue think of "REST" is actually "RPC over pretty urls".
A big part of me thinks that Apple doesn't quite get that both developers and users both want the full capability of the device to be theirs ... whilst Apple still clings to the idea that they can control the line between device and network.
Microsoft did have one early venture capital investor: https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/David_Marquar.... They had VC investment since 1981, which was a full five years before they went public.

Here's some video on the subject: http://msstudios.wmod.llnwd.net/a2294/o21/presspass/BillG/Ma...
The article focuses on two cities that bought out their failing local providers. Considering that they were failing, it's probably no surprise that city managers with no experience in that business can't run them any better.

The article completely ignores Greenlight (http://www.greenlightnc.com/) -- the successful municipal broadband network in Wilson, NC that has been battling TW in the courts. To me, it appears the bill is aimed directly at Greenlight.

BTW I live in Raleigh, I pay TWC $105 per month for business class service: 10/2 with 5 static IPs. (I get roughly 7/1. They won't prorate for the missing bits.)
Many of the german reactors were meant to have been shut down a long time ago. The "conservatives" prolonged the uptime. The germany chancellor will be talking with the lobby about measures, how backwards is that.
The IA Ventures challenge: A start-up investing in start-ups
> We might be getting close to this point: Maybe we should just give up on the term REST, since it’s become so diluted as to mean nothing more than “HTTP API that’s not as hard to use as SOAP”?

Well except RDIO's API is not any simpler to use than SOAP.

It's RPC to and through, let's call a procedure call a procedure call.
Too many people write stream-of-conciousness emails, where they figure it out in their head, and don't clean out the cruft after (and if they don't want to read it, why would I)

I think people have evolved in response to this to scan every email for 2-3 actionable sentences and stop once their queue is full. The best I can do is to template the email:

[Pleasantries in on paragraph]
-action 1 (in 10 words or less)
-action 2 (in 7 words or less)
[Status updates and other fluff, they can read it or not]
You know, even if the opportunities for improvement were equal (and that is far from the case; solar power improvements look to be improving by an order of magnitude in the near term, for example), renewables still enjoy a massive safety advantage. So I say save the money and invest in something less fraught with hidden and/or potentially catastrophic costs.

Fact is, even in this still-not-disastrous scenario, there are people working frantically trying to contain the reactors, risking radiation exposure and harm from explosions. If one hundred windmills had fallen over, or 100 solar panels been cracked, there would be no urgency, and the hardware could be replaced easily when it was safe to do so.
Ask HN: Apply for Y Combinator or not?
Should I apply?

I have a pretty unique idea, but live in Canada. I want my company to operated and be registered in Canada. I am also a single developer, I have friends who are interested in helping, but they aren't team members(designer). I also can't think of a time when I've hacked something. Any thoughts?
The picture is very misleading too a big black column of smoke rising up and the headline about nuclear reactors yet no clarification the picture isn't a reactor on fire, it's probably an oil refinery.
It's not supported: http://aws.amazon.com/vpc/faqs/#R4
Hacker Art from SXSW Interactive 2011
OTOH Hubble cost 3x as much to build because it had to be serviceable by the Shuttle and it's scientific use was greatly compromised by the orbit it had to be in.
Each service mission cost (in real $) as much as building a non-shuttle HST.

Compared to the Herschel space telescope I don't see Hubble as a great advert for manned space flight.
The headline is not just editorializing heavily, it's plain wrong.

[The bill] seeks to ensure that cities, who function in the dual role of regulator and competitor in such markets, don’t abuse their regulatory power to privilege themselves with respect to their competitors. [...] The bills require municipal broadband operators play by the same rules and regulations that apply to commercial operators, to refrain from cross-subsidizing their networks by raiding other kitties, to price at cost or above, and to allow fair access to rights of way.

Say what you want about Time Warner being out there, pushing any bill, but let's at least judge the bill by it's actual content.
I am already in USA and I went through all possible options to get there. And no - I am not in Visa Waiver Program list. It's very hard for people from some countries to get into USA. (I am not talking about India, muslim countries etc.)
Colin Percival is another classic example of someone being brilliant in their field, but a mediocre businessperson. This happens a lot; probably the most common examples are great chefs that open restaurants and bakeries only to find that actually running such things requires a set of skills that they don't really have, or are interested in acquiring.

(edit: I say that even though I don't even possess the aptitude necessary to fully respect his skills; he's a genius, and that's not a word I ever use lightly. I just hate to see a great work of engineering, like Tarsnap, languish in relative anonymity because it's poorly handled as a business.)
Japan's nuclear crisis: The story so far
That's hardly a widely experienced problem. Google "windows phone 7 text messages corrupt"; first result is a MS answers submission by DanTup - the same guy who's blog is referenced in the HN post.
> The mobile versions of all the major browsers are basically only the rendering engine stuck into a mobile shell.

So why hasn't MS done that with IE9 then? Why can't we have IE9's rendering engine on a mobile platform? From what I hear, that would be a significant improvement over the IE7/8 combo that they're shipping right now.

> And anyway, it probably won't be long until Windows Phone 7 gets a Trident refresh from IE9.

I'll take a bet on that. $10 says it'll be 2012 before that happens.
This is where recursive decent parsing really shines. When an invalid sequence is detected deep in the recursion, you don't have enough context to generate the best error message but as you unwind, you can add additional context such that by the time you're at the top of the call chain, you can generate very high quality error messages.

Of course, you have to be careful about dealing with recursion that's too deep. Large input files and/or grammars that require a lot of back tracking can make it a very slow parser too.

But for quite a lot of things, it's very appropriate. It's pretty much my go to mechanism when I need a custom parser.
> HTTP makes some simple guarantees in its spec regarding to the methods used. For example, GET must never have side effects. POST, PUT, DELETE always have side effects.

Except those are of course guidelines, the API implementor is free to entirely disregard them (much to the danger of everybody)

> For one thing, it makes your API actually simpler, since you don't actually need a list of 'methods' like rdio has, all you need to know is the representations and methods stay the same—which should be natural if you know HTTP.

Instead of a list of methods, you get a list of methods (which do not have to stay the same, by the way) and a tree of resources. Theoretically you should be able to crawl a REST API using only the document types and the root URL, I don't think I've ever seen a "public" API letting me that.

> OTOH RPC abstract such things away. For example if you have call like "addSomethingToList" and you retry that method you risk having duplicates.

Yes, because if you POST the same thing twice you don't risk fucking things up...

Oh you should be using PUT, not POST, you say? Good luck getting that one in browsers.
There has been some fear mongering in the press. E.g. The London Evening Standard: "Nuclear Fallout hits U.S. Rescurers" http://yfrog.com/h3z17vzj
When you say "cpp" do you mean "C++"?
The Obama admin has actually been better than every other administration about disclosing lobbyist visits, etc. See my link below. Note that no congressional offices or subcommittees have followed suit (and really, if you're spending lobbyist dollars and looking for results, swaying a subcommittee chair is so much easier than swaying the president, and might accomplish more).

I'd go as far as to say the problem is more "Washington in general and Congress in particular" than Obama. I mean, last week he was a socialist and now he's a plutocrat, too? The two philosophies are diametrically opposed, pick one.
Keep working on your idea, apply next time around if situations have changed.
How about calling it what it is, namely RPC?
Yep, that's what we are going to test next.
GET is idempotent. It's fine if the first GET request to a resource has side effects (like creating it on demand).
I agree that we probably shouldn't have communities running anticompetitive businesses, but as you say, I don't want to ban it. Also, if some community does decide run their own network, does this bill mean they can't use government grants to set it up and get it started before becoming profitable? That may effectually make getting these sort of community broadband plans impossible to start in the future.
Why Didn't Los Angeles Have a Startup Bus?
I would venture to say they do. After all, every major desktop browser has tabs (around 11% worldwide are on IE6, but I also doubt those users are getting iPads). How is a tap and another tap a simplified version of browsing compared to tabs?
Well, Apple practically invented that concept in personal devices. Before the iPhone sideloading apps and owning your device was the norm.
People deserve to know if anything is currently wrong, throughout this event. If a public health problem does obtain, that doesn't make people who suggested it obtained before it did correct!
"The 7 tones that make up a major scale are basically a cultural artifact of western music (which goes back to gregorian chant). Other cultures have more/fewer tones."

It's difficult to draw the line between culture and biology, but that's probably too far to the "cultural" side. There is a basis for those, which is that if you start on the base tone of C and run around the circle of fifths you'll get the white keys first: C -> G -> D -> A -> E -> B -> F#, and you get F by going down from the base tone. The importance of the fifth itself comes from the fact that the first harmonic of the base tone is one octave up, and the next harmonic is very close to an octave and a fifth with equal temprement. This seems more than coincidence.

I also find this a better explanation for why so many cultures pick this up once they are exposed to it. (Which is not to say they give up all their old harmonies but this tuning+scale has certainly gone global.) I really have a hard time imagining the mechanics of the Western Global Harmonic Imperialist Conspiracy; it seems much more likely that it so happens that people we call Westerners found this local optima first and it spread because humans in general like it, and it belongs to all humanity, not "the West", just like "perspective" and mathematics.
Something called a 'Private Registration' is offered by most domain registrars. It'll cost you a few extra $, but you will get total privacy in terms of Whois.

-HTH
It is a coincidence. When I registered 1every.com, it was about 4 months between when I came up with the name and when I finally registered it. I looked the domain up at least a dozen times from several different computers and the domain was still available when I went to get it. There is a very important lesson here though. Now whenever I have an idea for a domain and it turns out to be available, I register it immediately. Worst case scenario is I lock up $10 until I can find a buyer for the domain and best case is I have the domain I want when I'm ready to use it. Also, domains by proxy is the company godaddy uses for private registration. My domain is registered under them if you who.is it.
Metaio just brought AR to the iPad, do we care?
Will anyone actually use it?
I don't know about the UK, but there has been zero windows Phone 7 advertising in Sweden. No TV, no billboards, no in store promotion, hell I haven't even a working WP7 demo phone in any electronics store. If you don't follow tech blogs there would be no way to know that WP7 was even out. Compare this to Android where there is plenty of promotion on all fronts and it looks like Microsoft doesn't really want to sell phones here.
The small cost of not being able to declare your variables together with your pointers is nothing compared to the confusion it avoids.

int* var1;

is the way I (and I suspect anyone who's studied theoretical algebraic data types) think about my variables and types. It sucks that C forces me to mentally translate it to a much less satisfying form.

I'm not sure what being ridiculously easy to make errors in has to do with dictating how to write your programs.
They can do that at any time, software updates don't need to coincide with hardware refreshes.
Why would this standard be applied only to nuclear power? Would you say the same about aviation, oil production, dams, or any other highly useful but occasionally dangerous technology?
Even he still requires email from time to time he admits, he just proxies them through his secretary. I wish I had one of those myself to filter my communications with the world. Then I wouldn't have email or anything. Just a wonderful assistant who managed it all and let me be free to focus on other things. I need me a Pepper Potts to my Tony Stark dammit!
How Funding Rounds Differ: Seed, Series A, Series B, and C...
Mission Statement killing the Mission
Is Greenlight profitable on its own (including capital costs), or is it subsidized?
Yes, but I think makmanalp point was that earthquakes of up to 8.9 are not unknown in Japan, and there's also been a 9.5 in the world. Thus it would be reasonable to expect 9+ earthquakes and tsunamis in Japan.

Now, can you make anything withstand that? I am not sure, but I think it is possible. It would make electrical power more expensive but how much would more expensive electricity shave of Japan's GDP? Enough to justify not doing it?
now imagine the same in antarctica, when drunk, without a sharp blade (no electric razor ofc) and no light :) add extreme pain that can drop you unconscious at any moment... some serious preparation would be needed, hard to imagine what he must have been going through.
YouTube - Radiation update - Earthquake watch - March 15, 2011
Twitter wants to leave SF for a suburb over $1,500/employee in taxes
I am just hoping that for a 10 inch device it wont tell me "Location Services isn't ON go to Settings to activate it", at least just put the damn button in that disruptive notification window you have.

The hardware is impeccable, but nobody had any problem with the thickness of the first iPad and that's what they changed. They know their average consumer don't know all those things and functions like tabbed browsing, so they take advantage of it by not taking some of their time and budget to develop those functions. They take advantage of their market.

How can a consumer complain about something they don't know; they can. But they still have the right to fully understand what is available elsewhere and what functionality (that is quite crucial) they just decided to omit. Consumers have the right to know all these things.

Defending the product and just saying it is all nice and good means that it will stay that way. Criticizing and getting informed is what everyone should do in order to make good decision and keeping every new technology advanced and innovative not repetitive !
How does Facebook Comments affect Disqus?
Yup, except that XSL-FO output is of shitty quality, especially if you are doing heavy math typesetting, and I know at least one pretty successful open access publisher doing this DocBook->TeX workflow for all their puplications.
We've been using BackupPC (http://backuppc.sourceforge.net/) to accomplish something similar for a long time, and have been amazed at how it's able to store huge amounts of backups on relatively small amounts of disk space. It's highly configurable and has a decent web interface.

Sometimes, though, it can be challenging to get it working, and it has a few other issues (e.g., moving backups for systems from one pool to another) that can make it difficult in the long-run for some use-cases.
I think he was thinking of the peoeple at AIG or Lehman Bros or Goldman Sachs, who generally walked away with million dollar bonuses even if they did lose their jobs. A good number of people would be quite happy to lose their job for a million dollars.
We considered that, actually. I need to look into it a bit more for them.

The guy lives about 1/2 mile away and there's quite a bit of trees in the way.
What SSL error? Site looks fine to me, no cert issues or anything.
You can be tracked anywhere there's a communications infrastructure. It is required for things like law enforcement as well as being part of the protocols that run the network. Since basically every country on the planet does this, comparing it to a Stalinist order seems retarded, and I don't think it will ever change.
And a related cartoon from the comments: http://tomfishburne.com/2011/01/mission-statement.html
GET must never have side effects. POST, PUT, DELETE always have side effects.

Pedantry: because they're supposed to be idempotent, POST, PUT, and DELETE should only have side-effects the first time they're issued against a given resource.

Also, RFC 2616 uses "SHOULD NOT", as opposed to "MUST NOT" to describe the behavior of the "safe methods". To wit, "in particular, the convention has been established that the GET and HEAD methods SHOULD NOT have the significance of taking an action other than retrieval."
A good read for entrepreneurs learning their way around Sandhill Road's alphabet soup.
This is an increasingly common extension of the REST paradigm. Google ran into a number of problems with the restrictions of REST, so their new APIs all work this way. See their justification in this video: http://www.google.com/events/io/2010/sessions/how-google-bui...
Ask HN:  Text to Handwritten Letter Service - any interest?
I thought it was interesting that I couldn't find this anywhere. It's kind of a hassle sometimes to get stamps, write a letter, and send it in the mailbox. I thought it'd be cool to have a text to handwritten letter service.

Idk, maybe charge $5-$10 to write a letter and send it in the mail. What do you guys think? Viable?
...there quite likely will be or have already been deaths stemming from lack of electrical power.

Last I heard the rolling blackouts were not needed because everyone voluntarily reduced power use. Also planed rolling blackout are designed to be as safe as possible.

But people dying from illness from lack of clean water because their water treatment plant is offline and their hospital is out of emergency power..

This is Japan we're talking about, not Haiti.

The tsunami hit, it was a huge tragedy, but it is over and people are recovering. The nuclear disaster on the other hand is happening as we speak. Naturally people are more interested in the ongoing danger with a great range of possible outcomes.
"What I have seen is a huge number of media outlets [...] falling over themselves to assure everyone that everyone is safe and everything is under control."

Not surprising, considering most of those media outlets are owned or funded by the nuclear power industry.

edit: http://www.dailymotion.com/video/x6t515_conspiracy-theory-ro...
Japan's nuclear crisis: A timeline of key events
Someone who has working OpenGL should try this benchmark in the new Opera 11.50 preview with hardware acceleration. It doesn't work (yet) on my integrated graphics so I can't test.

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2328010

Note that you are also using setInterval in this demo which is actually causing a 4-15ms delay between frames. Not a problem for Firefox/Chrome but I bet it will be the limiting factor for hardware acceleration.

See my comments here about the setInterval problem:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2327768

I changed this benchmark to also use setZeroTimeout and it ran slightly faster FPS on Chrome 11 (but Firefox was already maxed out).
I wonder if you'll see more of the store-specific EFT cards pop up. The one I have from Target is connected directly to my checking account through an ACH transaction. Obviously Target is saving the debit fees here because they discount 5% off the sale.
Study: successful day traders stay in the black by syncing up via IM
> Except those are of course guidelines, the API implementor is free to entirely disregard them (much to the danger of everybody)

Witness the Google Web Accelerator debacle.
Strategically, I think it is also easier to recover from "a bit too far" in terms of over-reaction, since it can be written off as "better safe than sorry", however there is still a line and balancing act between "crying wolf" and "being extra careful".
No offense taken :)

Yes, I can see that A/B testing is definitely getting attention and hype and some people may directly implement results from A/B testing (which defeats the original purpose).
Having met RMS a few times in my years at MIT, I have no doubt that he is genuine in his views and it's not merely the hyperbole you get some from pundits.

The unfortunate downside of this is that he doesn't generally see the need to find compromise positions that are palatable to those who maybe agree with his thoughts but don't have the exact same value set. I may see his concern about privacy, etc but I also need to be reachable when I'm not at my desk. By being too extreme in his views, he reduces the chance that they'll be taken seriously.
Sax also favors the C major scale [].

Back in the early 20th century, sax salespeople would take advantage of this to sell the sax as an "easy to play" instrument. You can hang a saxophone from your neck and in 5 minutes you are playing the C major scale, Twinkle Twinkle Little Star, whatever.

Compare with the trumpet or the violin, where just playing your first major scale in tune scale in tune takes weeks of practice.

[] Actually, sax is a transposing instrument. But it does favor whatever scale you read as C major when you play it.