skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Japanese Govt. will supply radiation medicine, 'may quarantine area' - spokesperson. Sorry, didn't catch agency affiliation. There is some confusion over whether the reactor containment or the cooling system itself has exploded.

TEPCO updates - but pre-explosion

http://www.tepco.co.jp/en/press/corp-com/release/11031222-e....

http://www.tepco.co.jp/en/press/corp-com/release/11031221-e....
Oil isn't used to make electricity. The major options are nat gas and coal.

This disaster will likely drive DOWN oil prices since Japan will likely need less of it in the short term.
I removed it, thanks.
Scientific politics has been tried before, usually as justification for an oppressive government. Politics is perhaps one of the least-fit field to accept science and engineering. The participants have no interest in truth or reason, but rather power.
Is 20-fold increase in radioactivity actually hazardous? I was under the impression dangerous levels of radiation are many, many times above normal background radiation and typical 'acceptable' levels of exposure.

See http://www.geigercounters.com/Danger.htm for example. Occupational acceptable exposure is 25x that of non-occupational.
What is the optimum length of an explainer video?
I am working on a script for an explainer video for my product http://www.skillendar.com. To make it funny and more interesting I have to add some unrelated content which in turn is increasing the length of the video to about 3 minutes. Do you think I should restrict the length to 90 seconds in order to retain the viewer's attention? This would mean that I would need to compromise on the whole story line.
Bank of America subdomain at Anonymous site is live
Gawker reports Anonymous will release incriminating Bank of America documents on March 14.

http://gawker.com/#!5781158/what-does-anonymous-have-on-bank...
While you are correct that simply adding a core would not result in a 2x speedup you missed the fact that there are other significant differences between the A5 SoC compared to the A4.

* DDR2 vs DDR1 memory (1066 vs 800Mhz)

* possibly dual-channel i.e. 2 64-bit buses instead of one but this is hard to get solid info on atm.

Even so the speed up probably wouldn't be exactly 2x, but it would be close in some applications and make his claims a lot more reasonable simplification for the target market.
Anti Virus Protection
When you get out of the assets that you have to spend, then go to a new article on the new prayer of your choice. At first, you might consider selling the car, or if you thought about parking on the street, unemployed.
Nuclear Crisis in Japan
Some more information plus links to official press releases etc. http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2316371
I agree with your main point, that sites like StackExchange and Quora are not about discussions. From the get-go, Stack Overflow have made it very clear, through their writings and policies, that it is about answering questions, not talking.

Having said that, I disagree with your example. Oftentimes, when people ask a question, questioning their motives is a good idea. I know that when I ask a question, I often discover that I'm trying to solve the wrong problem.

A very common pattern on SO is that the accepted answer is a practical solution to the problem, and the highest-rated answer is a longer talk about whether this is something the questioner even needs to do.
The Secrets Behind Natural Link Building
I suggests to watch these documentaries, The Secret and What The Bleep Do We Know.

Observer IS the creator. He shapes the reality on his own image and beliefs. It's not easy to grasp the whole concept, specially considering that everybody is projecting different realities and they have to be combined together, but to me this just confirms that the world is based on contradictions and if we are able to accept those contradictions we will understand more, but we will never understand everything. There is no single answer on any question, there is only an answer for that particular person and that's most far we can go.
Dan Savage has become one of the most important ethicists in America
Japan probably won't need that 20% for a while. Their demand just dropped significantly.
I have no clue what's going on (and I Am Not An Engineer), but I'm fairly sure that in this photo

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/e/e8/Fukushima...

The longer, rectangular buildings on the seaside are the turbine halls, and the square buildings next to them (in the inland direction) are the containment buildings.
I've read somewhere (yes, this is not a good source; it's more of a hint of where to look) that some markets are seeing longer-term futures, e.g. where previously futures would be sold 6 months in advance of actual delivery, they are now sold 24 months in advance. This is not as physical as oil in tankers, but not all that different.
Fukushima nuclear reactor explodes leading to radiation leakage
Japan warns of small radiation leak at nuclear plant
Video EarThquake and Tsunami in japan 2011
Video EarThquake and Tsunami in japan 2011
today 11 march 2011 japan hit by tsunami because of earthquake. A massive earthquake has hit the north-east of Japan, triggering a tsunami that has caused extensive damage.
Ah. I'm not very good with colors unfortunately :P Do you have any tips? It's all CSS so it's very easy to change.
I've just written JSON-RPC over SocketIO (for another project). I was going to open-source it. Is NowJS a superset of this? If so, I don't want to create noise by releasing a less-functional alternative.
I'm trying to cobble together some statistics on the safety of nuclear power, but unfortunately, the IAEA site is slammed presently (wonder why...), so I'm left with assembling them by hand, from Wikipedia. If anyone out there can point me at a better source for this data, I'd be most grateful.

As a preliminary indicator of my findings, I've gathered start-up dates (and shut-down dates for reactors that are no longer operational) for the 12 reactors in countries that start with "A", yielding some 322 reactor-years of operation. If 12 of the 500-ish civilian, non-experimental reactors, including decommissioned, in the world have a combined 322 reactor-years of criticality, let's guesstimate that there's been something on the order of 12000 reactor-years of criticality globally, across all non-experimental, non-military reactors.

In that time, there have been 27 civilian nuclear "accidents" (defined as damage to persons or property directly attributable to something Going Wrong at a reactor), and 8 -- count them, eight -- "incidents" (defined as something Going Wrong at a reactor, but not causing damage to persons or property outside the plant, itself). (Again, this data is from Wikipedia, so its accuracy is open to debate.)

Given the choice between one "accident" every 500-odd reactor-years (again, take that number with a cup of salt), and continually pumping ten gigatons of just CO2 into the atmosphere every year -- and that just from coal-burning power plants -- I know which I'd prefer.

That said, I agree with you on one point: we damn well should be investing massively more than we are into "green" energy technology. Much of that is unproven, and often has its own set of ecological consequences. Even leaving that aside, the best estimates say it will be decades, at least, before any of it can even start to supplant current energy sources.

What, exactly, should we do in the interim?

(EDIT: math is hard past 0300.)
Evacuation zone widened to 20km, per NHK
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IStunt 2
How to convert MXF to iMovie with MXF to iMovie Converter for Mac?
Evacuation zone was just doubled to 20km.
"This is starting to look a lot like Chernobyl" Walt Patterson, an associate fellow with Chatham House, has told the BBC after seeing pictures of the explosion at the Fukushima-Daiichi nuclear plant. "The nuclear agency says that they have detected caesium and iodine outside the unit, which certainly indicates fuel melting at the very least," he says. "Once you have melting fuel coming into contact with water, that would almost certainly be the cause of the explosion." (BBC)

(EDIT)
More from Walt Patterson of Chatham House. He says the presence of the radioactive caesium in the surrounding area does not pose a huge threat to public health in the immediate aftermath of the explosion. "What would be serious is if there was an explosion or fire that lifted this stuff high in the air, meaning it could get carried over a wide area."
I'm sorry? Oil isn't used to make electricity

Oil is used in some types of power station, and the markets are already reacting to not only the increased demand, but due to the infrastructure damage in the north of the country, the fact it'll be harder than ever to get it delivered.

http://online.wsj.com/article/BT-CO-20110312-700945.html
Watching BBC, it seems mainly the walls and roof have been blown out.

The main steel structure is still standing, and the expert in the studio was saying something like there still is a chance of the 3-Mile Island like scenario. That is that the nuclear material is still contained within the core structure.
You don't know what you're talking about.

At this point of history we NEED power and there are only two power sources with high enough availability and low enough cost. It's either thermo plants or nuclear plants. Everything else wont cut it. And turning off the lights won't do a shit to alleviate possible lack of energy if we stop using nuclear.

Your PC ain't consuming that much power, we need power for industry. So if nuclear power was to be turned off immediately we'd have some shit on our hands. People without food, work,...

Don't talk silly.
First, for all those long only positions, for each of them, there needs to be a corresponding short position. The article never explained where all those short positions will come from.

You might have glossed over the food section of the article - it discusses exactly that.. basically, that the market has transformed from a balance of long- and short- positions to only long, made possible because regardless of whether the price went up or down, the big names would make money (if prices went up, they make money the normal way, and if prices went down, they make money via their profits gained through replication).

So long as corporations like Goldman Sachs are making this sort of crazy money regardless of whether prices go up or down, you're going to be in a world of hurt.
You can't see peak oil, really. You'll just observe more and more "unexplained" fluctuations in the oil price, oil reserves, and subsequently the global economy.

I suspect we'll go up and down for many years while it gradually becomes more and more expensive to drill oil all the time. The supply and demand fluctuate due to speculation, unsold reserves, and reactivity of demand of oil, so it will be hard to see the bottom line. It's not going to be cheaper than today in 20 years, and that will inevitable manifest in the global economy.
These "three things" boil down to one thing (the earthquake) and its foreseeable impacts. I certainly hope the disaster planners wouldn't see these things as independent failures (and assess probabilities accordingly), but that kind of hubristic "we can calculate the probabilities of all failure modes" thinking is one of the reasons I'm not a big fan of nuclear.
> Like they wouldn't have boron near a nuclear reactor.

They probably do, the question is whether they can carry it to the site faster than the US navy, and whether the boron tanks have not been compromised.
the sum of my knowledge on nuclear energy and human flight is nearly nothing, so forgive me if i'm wrong... but comparatively, isn't the potential aftermath of a nuclear meltdown a bit more concerning than a plane crashing?
The Evolution of Google's Rankings
what I understand now is that the blast at the nuclear plant may have been caused by a hydrogen explosion (pressure) or If nuclear fuel rods overheat and then come into contact with water, this produces a large amount of highly-flammable hydrogen gas which can then ignite. Right?

Can anyone with more knowledge and experience of this confirm?
IPad 2 introduces new headphone jack
Does anyone have some source for this? It interests me.
99 Inspiring Modern Ads
99 Inspiring Modern Ads
Can someone provide background information on the type of reactor at Fukusima, it's age, and it's failsafe mechanism. I was under the impression that no modern reactor would sustain criticality in the event of a failure.
Video: http://www.stormsurfing.com/cgi/display_alt.cgi?a=npac_250
I seem to have the opposite problem. Spent the last 10 years getting degrees and certifications, constantly reading, learning new technologies, techniques, theories, attending conferences, workshops and tutorials, yet during the work day converting the same old boring enterprise specification documents into the same old boring enterprise code.

I can suggest ways to leverage my knowledge, and convert it into practical experience, but unless the decision makers aka managers are familiar with it (i.e. whatever we have been doing up till now) it gets dismissed as fringe.

That is why I am becoming a manager, so I can finally turn that knowledge into practical experience in order to create great products.
No, they're centralized like Twitter. StatusNet is like the Wordpress of microblogging. Each Wordpress installation is its own isolated island. It's the same with StatusNet.
Big dreams for Ubuntu Ocelot
begin bla bla bla.

... and since bernanke is printing money and making stockmarkets go up, therefore the oil exporters also are printing what they have, i.e.oil, making their "valuables" go up...

bla bla end

signature: soylent green is sheeple.
A nuclear explosion? No chance, it will "simply" leak, worst case it catches fire and goes Chernobyl but spreads its radiation over a more populated area, which is probably worse that a nuclear weapon going off.
It was, at least unofficially, via Gruber.
Huge explosion at Japan nuclear plant
The explosion was likely a containment failure of the previously reported (radioactive) steam that had been building up in the containment building.

More info: http://www.world-nuclear-news.org/RS_Battle_to_stabilise_ear...
So, don't laugh, but...

Head over to Fark, look up whatever the latest thread is. Yes, there are trolls and idiots. There are also knowledgeable people providing useful information. I'm basically refreshing that every few minutes and using it as my baseline for what's going on.
Come on, there is absolutely no way for a nuclear plant to make a nuclear explosion. Nuclear fuel at high temperature touching the cooling water separates the water in O and H2, which is an highly explosive cocktail, didn't they show you that in high school?

The main danger now is of a fire lifting radioactive material away. This isn't in any case an immediate life-threatening risk, except for the people in the power plant immediate vicinity.
That's certainly possible, theoretically. However, I'm not sure if those conditions can actually be met (rods should not ever come into contact with water and nothing should be able to ignite the gas, especially not at higher pressure levels).
Planes crash far more often than reactors "melt down", so -- and I'm admittedly guessing here -- it's probably a wash, at least in terms of property damage.

In terms of human cost (lives lost, injury, &c), plane crashes are far, far worse. All but the most egregious damage from radiation can be mitigated, if not prevented outright. If you're on a plane that's going down, or in the thing it's going to hit when it does, there's precisely fuck-all you can do about it.
Developing original IP for the Iphone – the market today.
Please note that I have not said that earthquakes are not something they took into account, I've said beside earthquakes, terrorist attacks and anything, there is also an additional risk that no one can calculate. Every engineer knows that prevision has its limit. So it's all about inner danger. In case of an earthquake, a barrage could also break and make huge damages. What such an accident would not do, though, and what an airliner accident would also not do, is damaging big areas during decades in unknown ways.

Of course they are risks, but if you look at the Rasmussen report, it tells a meltdown is likely happen all 20000 years per reactor. We have around 430 reactors over the world, so this event should happen every 46 years. It seems that this calculation is optimistic at best (if you don't take all the partial meltdowns into account) https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Nuclear_meltd.... So I think we might need to reconsider nuclear energy - at least have a public debate on that topic.

Also, using capitals don't serve your argument.
From wikipedia: "Fukushima I – 1 BWR First criticality: March 26, 1971". So it isn't a "modern" reactor, not sure what the fail safes are but I have read from some sources all the fail safes are older generations which require power.
Being straight out when planning a unpopular move would do them more damage then lying. Pretending to do the exact opposite of what you plan to do has been a standard tactic in sports, politics, warfare or any kind of games for ages.

* http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Head_fake
build great stuff and we'll win

Does that strategy work at all?

To me it seems companies like Google that did that are rather the exception that confirms the rule - building a great business model should be a top priority.

You know what I consider a fun place to work? A company that doesn't have to borrow money to stay alive that also happens to work on cool projects. Even Mozilla is profitable; and even if their partnership with Google goes away in flames at some point, how fucked up is that?
As I understood it (when discussing it with someone in the know), was that it was likely caused by zirconium in the fuel-rods reacting with water.

This hydrogen should be taken care of, but without (enough?) electrical power levels of hydrogen gas builds up.

This does not mean that containment is broken, or that there is an imminent danger to outsiders. But it is a very serious situation, especially since there seems to be at least two more reactors in similar situations at Fukushima Daiichi.

(http://www.world-nuclear-news.org/RS_Battle_to_stabilise_ear... also refers to a problem at Fukushima Daini.)
This is quite different from Chernobyl, which didn't even have a proper confinement wall. It's unlikely that it can get as bad as Chernobyl was.
Japanese authorities are extending the evacuation zone around the two Fukushima nuclear plants from 10km to 20km, according to local media.
I'm also most impressed by Salman, definitely a genius.

However I wonder if he should be the only one making those videos for his new non-profit? I'm sure there are experts in other fields than science who could keep his "style" and make the whole "reinvent education" thing go much faster?
Add to that the chance of one or more of the commenters here actually knowing something something about nuclear plants seems far greater than on one of the mainstream news channels. Thanks for posting.
To answer my own question, Fukushima is a first generation bwr:

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

It lacks the safety mechanisms of an abwr. Namely even after the control rods are deployed, heat can continue to build up. Hence the plant requires forced cooling, in this case provided by diesel and electric pumps. After the earthquake the diesel pumps failed and cooling was effected by battery power. While the government rushed in new diesel generators, they were not installed in time to prevent the build up of pressure resulting in this explosion.
Walt Patterson:

http://www.waltpatterson.org/nuclearpower.htm

http://www.chathamhouse.org.uk/about/directory/view/-/id/34/
That's correct. Of the four, it's the small building on the right that is reactor number one: the one that is melting down.
European Court of Justice rejects stem-cell patents
Any opinions on what the thing rising up very quickly during the explosion is? I initially thought it was the roof, but I'm wondering now if it isn't actually a flame from burning hydrogen. Ideas?
You can have a look at another (rough) estimate I did on my answer to geuis. I agree with you, and as I stated in my other answer, things like barrage breakings (due to an equivalent earthquake) can be also devastating for civilization. What I think would be useful is to have a public look at the track record of nuclear and compare it's impact with other energies. Nuclear power is going to stay for now, and that's probably necessary with the current state of the technology, but do we really want to invest so many billion in it for the next 100 year? Is really nuclear our safest bet against climate change?
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Photos: Fukushima reactor 1 before and after the explosion
You are just demonstrating your ignorance. The reality is that the only choice to power industrial civilization is fossil fuels or nuclear power. Even if this accident results in a core melt, in the large sweep of history, it will hardly slow down the transition from oil to nuclear power.
And what is a "melt down", but an accident at a reactor that causes damage to the reactor core. Nothing more. If a reactor core is damaged every 40-odd years, that's a pretty small price to pay for the terawatts it supplied during that span.

Yes, sometimes other things happen, and the damage goes beyond the core. That's deeply unfortunate, and I feel for the people affected. But "melt down" is one of those loaded terms like "death tax" -- it serves more to create an image of unimaginable dire consequence in the lay mind than support informed debate.
A situation like the one in Fukushima can occur whenever the power supply to a nuclear power plant is cut off. A similar situation occured in Sweden's Forsmark plant in 2006:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Forsmark_Nuclear_Power_Plant
Thanks, wiki continues to provide detailed information in the deep links on the page. It seems we are witnessing a case of failure upon failure. Truly a horrific tragedy for the country and the world.
The Introverted Leader:Thriving in the extroverted business world
B-b-b-but the shards from the broken window could have hurt you just as well!

Seriously, being used to solid reinforced concrete or brick buildings, building shoddy wood structures covered with paper-thin siding in tornado or hurricane alleys and then crying your eyes out when the inevitable happens is almost funny.
The hype and economics of group texting at SXSW
Explosion Destroys Walls of Japanese Nuclear Reactor Building, NHK Reports
No, actually the fuel pellets never need to come in contact with water; it is their cladding, which is a zirconium alloy ("Zircaloy"), which can react with steam under extreme conditions. It's a redox reaction: Zr + 2H2O --> ZrO2 + 2H2 or something similar.

This actually happened at Three Mile Island, and there was a hydrogen explosion in the containment building there (which did not break).

(I am not an engineer)
Wikipedia deletionists have already put a speedy deletion tag on that. Go Wikipedia!
I may have reacted too emotionally, but one of the point am I questioning is whether keeping old nuclear reactors is safe (I should probably have given more background on the German discussion). We may come to the conclusion that replacing them by new reactors could improve the overall safety. Of course that is going to cost money, and then we might find out that we are building us a debt that is not paying in the long term.

The fact is that some countries use nuclear power a lot, some other almost not, and that nuclear power only produces a minor part of the world electricity and energy. Probably a part we could gain back by investing in efficiency.
Okay, I can see how GAE is a PaaS. Is AWS? If so, why isn't linode? And, by extension, any server...