skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Like they wouldn't have boron near a nuclear reactor. I'm a PWR man myself, but I am 99% sure that GE BWR designs have a couple of big tanks of borated water specifically for a LOCA. I highly doubt they're having reactivity problems, it's probably just managing the decay heat, and now the radiation leaks, that's the problem. "Just" is a relative word, here, of course.

Boiling water reactors are simpler, cheaper, but generally aren’t made anymore because they are perceived as being less safe. That’s because the exotic coolant in the pressurized water reactor can contain boric acid which absorbs neutrons and can help (or totally) control the nuclear reaction. You can’t use boric acid or any other soluble boron-laced neutron absorbers in a boiling water reactor because doing so would contaminate both the cooling system and the environment.

He's completely wrong about industry adoption of BWRs. There are two BWR's planned to be built in the US (along with 3 or 4 PWRs), and I believe that China has contracted with GE for a few as well (along with 4 Westinghouse PWRs and maybe a few Areva ones too).

PWRs are preferred largely because of their higher power densities (a BWR core that produces the same power must be larger) and simpler nuclear calculations and control strategies (two-phase flow makes calculations much more difficult, and it's harder to calculate correct positions for control blades (whose effects are highly localized) than it is to calculate the correct boron concentration (whose effects are smeared over the whole core)). However, now that computers are faster and us nuclear engineers no longer have the excuse of slow computers to hide behind, PWRs are looking to move away from relying on Boron concentration as the main form of control (the Westinghouse AP1000, specifically, relies much more on rod movement than the AP600), because of the cost of performing regular boron dilutions.

He's right that BWRs are simpler and cheaper - about half the moving parts.
They could probably fly or ship or truck in some smallish diesel generators to accomplish the same thing -- they're just pumps, so I find it hard to believe any individual load is bigger than your average transportable diesel genset. It shouldn't be too difficult to divide a load connected hydraulically vs. electrically across a bunch of generators quickly (switchgear is otherwise fairly custom).
The batteries may also be someplace a workman really doesn't want to go.
I'll raise you - a friend of a friend's grandad sent his family for a summer vacation and was sitting in bathroom reading a book, enjoying the quiet. The bathroom door was left open and he could see out into the apartment. With a corner of his eye he caught a chandelier in the living room that started swinging and then he felt the floor moving underneath his feet. Since this was in Moscow, the city sitting on the plateau, his first thought was that he was having a stroke. And the second - that it'd be a shame to collapse with his pants down, real shame. It did not occur to him it could be a quake, which it was. The only time in modern history a noticeable quake was felt in Moscow. So yeah... quakes can really sneak up on you ;)
Quake moved Japan coast 8 feet; shifted Earth's axis
Man, you take one microeconomics class and suddenly you have absolute certainty about the forces at play in the global commodities market.

Did it ever occur to you that maybe it's no public knowledge how much oil is piled up where within a month of Libyan hostilities breaking out? Or that the demand for oil may be somewhat inelastic? Or that information in the oil market is not perfect?

I mean I don't know shit about commodities markets, but yelling "god damn it" isn't a very convincing argument.
Why is that
Have you seen awesome timezone visualization web app by Thomas Fuchs?
http://everytimezone.com/
Zynga Enables Donations To Tsunami Relief Through In-Game Purchases
Uncontested Divorce Jacksonville Florida
With the current spec, how would you listen for connections?
Windows Phone 7 marketplace hits 10,000 apps
Speculation is fine, as long as you understand my suspicion of it.

Cringely says Japan lost 20% of its electricity supply. I say I wont believe that figure until I hear it from the Japanese nuclear authorities themselves.
Well. The datacenter across the street from my office has backup batteries which weigh in at half a ton apiece. Arranged in groups of eight.

And I'm betting they're positively puny compared to what you'd want for a nuclear plant's cooling system, so simply "shipping in" some extras may not be all that feasible...
Cringely seems to think that the Japanese are big enough idiots not to keep boron near a nuclear reactor. I doubt this.

He also seems to think that water with some boron in it is "exotic".
Given my username, I'm shitting bricks right now.

Money might be tighter than I was anticipating for me in the not-too-distant future.
I work for the company, so color me a little bias, but the point of these teardowns has always been threefold. First, learn about hardware design. See how a company was able to make the latest cool new device. Second, some people are interested in only buying devices that they can repair. This teardown showed that it would be damn hard to repair most parts in this. Third, people want to know about how green the device is, and what other companies Apple is using for chips, etc.

Hope that explains. If it doesn't just chalk it up to to the fact that the same people who like reading engadget tend to like iFixit's teardowns. Gadget lust if you will.
I was actually thinking about going back to school to do a nuclear engineering phd and try to work on commercial next-gen nuclear power. I'm glad to have chosen tech startups instead...
Because websockets, by definition, can only connect to the same domain as the page was served from (or another domain that opts in using CORS), websockets do not speak raw TCP but instead a special protocol that is designed to not allow them to trick browsers into accessing services that aren't expecting the browser to connect to them (such as using websockets to connect to SMTP servers and send spam, unbeknownst to the user), and because websockets can only be used for connecting from the browser to a server, not for listening for incoming connections.

Don't be fooled by the name. Websockets are not a general socket interface in the web browser. It is simply an API and protocol for establishing a persistent, bidirectional communication channel between the browser and the server in order to better support applications like chat, notifications, live editing features, and the like, without having to resort to COMET techniques like polling, long-polling, and so on.
Losing a plant means you lose a percentage of your peak capacity but not necessarily that you won't be able to provide the total amount of energy demanded by the economy. You could potentially move a portion of the usage to off-peak hours, starting with some industrial loads for example, moving a few factory shifts to the night.
Ideally you'd have a removable power module which you can take from device to device... a "zap drive". Brought to you by the US Nucleics Corporation.
And if those speculators are right, people will be praising them for having the foresight to save oil for such a situation, which will lower prices compared to the speculation-free scenario.

Speculation could probably have negative effects on markets in theory, but it's so hard to take such claims seriously since they're rarely based on sound economics.
7 million copies sold puts Atlas Shrugged 33 million copies behind Jonathan Livingston Seagull etc.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_best-selling_books
COMMON: Collaboration is the new competition
I'll try to address some of your questions.

1. It's ok to use violence within a constitutionally limited scope. Common elements of this use of violence are: Property rights must be enforced, legal contracts must be enforced, violent crime must be punished, negative liberties must be protected and enforced, due process must always be used. The justification for this narrow application of violence (state power) is that absent such a minimum floor of rule of law society would devolve into chaos and rampant violence.
2. The answer to most of your more nuanced and complex questions is "It will be adjudicated by a court." Libertarians believe strongly that the court is the branch of government best suited to settle most of these matters because a) it will restrain the power of the other two branches by holding them to the limits set forth in the constitution and b) it decides all conflicts on the individual circumstances and facts of the situation rather than attempting to paint with a broad brush a set of regulations that apply in all circumstances irrespective of context.
3. Libertarians always make clear distinctions between limits on federal, state and municipal government. It is not inconsistent, for example, for a libertarian to want the federal government to be limited to the powers enumerated in the constitution while supporting building codes at the local or state level. The justification for this is usually that powerful central governments breed corruption and cronyism that cannot be addressed through the democratic process or courts like it can at the local or state level. This also creates a series of competing communities that can "experiment" with different sets of regulations to see what works. Successful communities will thrive (more people will move there) and unsuccessful ones will fail (people will move somewhere else.
In 1889. Took 92 years, 2 world wars, and the invention of the computer before worldwide success.
Entrepreneurship: Incremental or Disruptive Innovation?
No, it's not a TCP connection. It is a persistent, bidirectional communication channel, initiated by the browser, which uses its own protocol on top of TCP. It is basically designed to just be better than AJAX and COMET for things that need long-lived bidirectional communication between the browser and server; it is not intended to be a general purpose TCP API.

You can read about it on Wikipedia:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WebSockets
Read the API spec:
http://dev.w3.org/html5/websockets/
Read the draft protocol spec that was implemented by some browsers, but later pulled due to security concerns:
http://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-hixie-thewebsocketprotocol-...
And read the current working draft:
http://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-ietf-hybi-thewebsocketproto...
let's just hope a loss of power supply is everything they have to worry about. it seems some caesium already got out.
Re read may comment. It means that the Japanese did their best to prepare. Unfortunately, the nature still manages to find ways to outdo us.
Yeah, I'm glad I live on the software side of things - I've got skills that'll transfer somewhere else if this ship sinks, thank God.

Of course, the human race really can't afford to slow down on nuclear power adoption.
This is total blogspam. Original message at http://groups.google.com/group/twitter-api-announce/browse_t..., discussed at http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2314791.
Unfortunate bug: if you hit encrypted.google.com on an iPhone, you're redirected to the unencrypted mobile version of the site... Not good!
they're trying their best to spin it in a way that makes it look like they have the user's best interests at heart.
uh no.

the problems WAAS solves are not big ones for spacecraft, and the accuracy it provides isn't particularly necessary for most of them.

lots of them don't even have GPS, and use other means (star tracking) of positioning themselves.
Fourfold: advertising impressions. Presumably that's why the article went up tonight rather than spending time doing more research into availability of parts and so on which would be required if people were truly interested in a device they can repair. :)
Yeah, I keep reading the post, looking for "no new clients" statement that is in OP's headline, and not finding it. I read it as you do; they suggest there's not a whole lot of opportunity in building more clients, but it doesn't read like they'd deny you an API key for it.
It started very factual and nice and then in Part 2 it went into a very extreme conspiracy theory explanation. But while I am inherently skeptic to conspiracy theories; I've heard this one so many times. It's actually quite believable.

If it's true, how could it possibly have happened? Could a powerful enough organization actually terrify all presidents from JFK and forward enough to not oppose them. Or do everyone see it as a decent system?

If it truly is "evil" what can be done against it?
Indian Hot Singles Chat Room
The same way that websocket servers currently listen for connections. There are websocket servers in production and they have a standard way to listen for connections. All you would have to do is implement that same functionality.
In my head I would do:

30 * 24 (which is just 3 * 24 * 10) = 720
6 * 24 (which is the same as 12 * 12) = 144
720 + 144 = 864
This is rubbish. First of all Japan's economic circumstances of the past 10-20 years are generally much exaggerated in the media, both Western and Japanese. And building codes, of all things, have almost nothing to do with that growth positively or negatively. Japan is one of the most earthquake-prone regions in the world, so we make sure that buildings are always built to withstand them to the maximum reasonable extent. That's the why the destruction from this massive earthquake is actually so light, considering. Perhaps we could leave things to the magic of the free market, but either that would work, in which case we'd be right where we are now anyway, or it wouldn't, in which case we currently be totally fucked. Japanese, not having the luxury of dealing with this issue in the abstract from the comfort of their apartment in New York, prefer not to take the risk. Also there is less belief in magic here than in the States.

By way of comparison though, let's imagine the fate of New York and rest of the eastern seaboard of the US were a similar quake to hit there. I think you would not fare so well, and I suspect the low cost of your Chevy Impala would give you little comfort.
Right, so the choice is, find a DTD that keeps IE6 in standards mode, or spend countless hours debugging hundreds of tiny layout issues that exist nowhere else.
Similarities between High School and a Startup Community
what one pays you money?
In college I used to have dreams about differential equations all the time. I remember one in particular about dispersion relations and non-linear responses to oscillations that wound up with me realizing that the forcing function was a fire alarm and waking up.
Honestly, I'm trying to remain reasonable here, but are people seriously upvoting a post where a guy comes out and says that Japan would be better off without strict standards in place for buildings to withstand earthquakes, 24 hours after one of the most massive earthquakes in recorded history struck off the coast of the Japan and those very standards saves countless lives and billions in damage? How many lunatics do we have on this board, anyway?
It's actually the only thing I order at In-N-Out - It's a pretty good low-carb snack.
Is one of the advantages of the BWR that you don't need a large pressure vessel? I remember news articles about JSW in Osaka being the only source for the huge forgings required for PWR pressure vessels, and only having the capacity for ~4 reactors per year.
http://english.kyodonews.jp/news/2011/03/77025.html

The core at Fukushima No. 1 nuclear power plant's No. 1 reactor may be partially melting, the nuclear safety agency said Saturday.

Radioactive substance cesium was detected around the reactor, it said.

edit: http://www.tepco.co.jp/en/index-e.html

this seems to be the best primary source.

while personally i'm opposed to nuclear power, i'm really commend tokyo electric on their relative transparency. compared to what we get from ansto in australia im floored by the clarity and timeliness of the info we are getting. (i imagine it would take years of foi's and senate inquiries to extract this kind of data from ansto).

but im just an anonymous armchair observer, take my word for what its worth.
I don't doubt you can implement that functionality, if you were the browser. But from the specs of Websocket currently in the browser, you cannot.
The challenges are different.

Most startups struggle to get awareness. A very abstract tag line (e.g. "Do it the fun way") doesn't really help with that problem. Your customers are different too -- a "mainstream" audience is more moved by what feels good than early adopters (who, generally speaking, are trying to satisfy a "pain point").

Apple in 1997 was very well known. They were competing with PCs in a technical way (e.g. faster computers), and it wasn't working very well. Their shift in marketing was to build a stronger Apple brand and make more of an emotional pitch. It turned out to be a more powerful differentiator and was longer-lasting than focusing on the benefits of a particular product.
Linux' OOM killer, just to give one possible example.
I don't know much about nuclear reactors. To my untrained ear, what Cringely says sounds fairly reasonable. But then, having read a bunch of articles of his linked in the past on computer hardware and software, which I do know something about, I find that what he writes usually falls into one of two categories: (1) stuff that's obvious to anyone who knows what they're talking about and are paying any attention at all, and (2) crack-pot half-baked ideas that are laughable and completely wrong.

He's also lied about having a PhD. I wouldn't consider him a very trustworthy source. If he's saying something reasonable, someone else more credible has probably already said it.
> No, it's not a TCP connection. It is a persistent, bidirectional communication channel, initiated by the browser, which uses its own protocol on top of TCP.

So it is a TCP connection. It may have its own protocol on top of TCP but as long as the browsers can create TCP connections between each other then then it can be made to work right?
Buy gold. Or Linden Dollars.
They can be shaped as coins and become a new currency, it glows green when fully charged. Devices(including cars) have coin slots to take in power.
I agree wholeheartedly here. I've seen that communities which shuns failure are filled with people who disguise failure and twist outcomes to make them appear as huge successes in order to achieve bragging rights and consulting gigs.
How about if for every ten sandwiches you make you have to make an eleventh for someone else? If you don't, you don't get any bread.

The idea that everything a government and a society do is backed by violence is the flaw in the reasoning of just about every libertarian argument I've ever heard. It simply isn't true unless you so expand the definition of 'violence' that it becomes meaningless.
Twitter client source stats for the past week
What is the great idea are you referring to?

(not trolling, I honestly don't know what it is that you mean)
Great stuff!!
So, do you open up 2 channels? One for the client to make calls to the server (this could just be normal HTTP) and one for the server to make client calls?
XHR is restricted by domain and yet browsers provide APIs for extensions to get around this. Just be cause the spec specifies a browser/client <-> server design does not mean that browsers can't also be the server.

And that API could be extended to support p2p design patterns if browsers decided to do so.
Cost of revenue 44,826

Sales and marketing	58,978

Product development	65,104

General and administrative	35,064

Depreciation and amortization	19,551

Total costs and expenses	223,523

http://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1271024/0001193125110...
Depends. We're built on top of Socket.IO (http://socket.io/) which uses a websocket connection when possible. It falls back to assorted other transports if websockets are not available.
We don't regulate ATVs that way because they're recreational vehicles and the part of the point is that they go fast. It's a luxury item that we expect people to accept a bit of risk to use. As far as housing is concerned you've pretty much described office buildings and apartments at least where I live. For individual homes I think the idea is that if you can get out faster then there is less need of those safety devices. Nevertheless there are still pretty tight standards in my area at least (Japan).

It seems you're trying to point to the absurdity of infinite regulation for total safety as an argument against all regulation, even if it is affordable and reasonable. I don't get it.
You must not have been a NES player. A bunch of their NES games were loads of fun: Marble Madness, R.C. Pro-Am, Who Framed Roger Rabbit, and probably their biggest NES success: Battletoads.
On Charging Money: A Post for Freelancers
Maybe I misunderstood this:

>Seems like an instance of a common metaphor

That gave me the impression that A) it was new to you (due to the "seems to be") and that B) you weren't impressed ("common").
Yes, it is a TCP connection in the sense that it is its own protocol on top of TCP. But then again, the HTTP request that you make with an XMLHTTPRequest call also uses a TCP connection; however, the mere fact that it creates a TCP connection doesn't mean you can implement a web server using XMLHTTPRequest.

The key is that websockets are limited in what they can do; the API and protocol are fundamentally designed in such a way as to make peer-to-peer communication impossible. It opens up possibilities that XMLHTTPRequest does not, but it does not allow you to do everything you could do with raw socket access.

There main reason it is impossible to do peer to peer with websockets is that you can't listen for incoming websocket connections using the websocket API; you can only initiate outbound connections, which connect to a server not written in a browser, as there are no APIs in the browser for listening for inbound connections.
bill and melinda aren't asking me for money though
Overconfidence and Innovation
> Anyone want to hack together a little API/framework for LFSR Generation?

I'm kinda interested. But I'm opposed to blowing the balls off anything.
I'm sure the Japanese have robots capable of it, they are the best in the world at that.
Google at their best. Facebook at their best.
Interesting, thanks, I'll consider using that next time I'm building a prototype that will eventually become a Rails app. But who knows, I might write a rails-app-exporter for StaticMatic just for fun :D
You might want to read this:

http://rondam.blogspot.com/2008/02/what-are-programming-lang...

(Submitted to HN -- http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2314572 -- but it died with a whimper.)
And in the next release of Socket.IO Guillermo has promised us multiple channels, so projects like nowjs should get channels for free!
SMS may be the ONLY Reliable Communications Channel During Significant Events
Uhm... the other units at Chernobyl re-entered service for a solid decade after that incident. (Only one of them lasted a decade. Unit 2 caught on fire in '91. Unit 1 was shut down in '96 and Unit 3 lasted until Dec '99.)

Cringley's prediction will be wrong. There are a lot of units at that station, two of which are ABWR cores. I would speculate that the majority of these units will return to service.
The backup diesel generator at Oconee Nuclear Station (Oconee, SC) is fashioned out of a pair of modified diesel train engines ... it isn't exactly a simple "throw more power at it" problem. Even if it were trivially possible to add power as if you were filling up a tank of gas the bigger problem would be mating the power output and frequency of these generators with the rated values for the plant's electric system (on the fly, in an increased radiation environment, under high stress, with damaged basic infrastructure).

The people on the ground do not have an easy task in front of them.
It was back in the early 90s, but now TLDs have nothing whatsoever to do with what they're used for. All those .tv sites aren't run out of Tuvalu...