skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
"I'm criticizing you for not reasoning through this stuff."

I did not even say that I was alarmed, so I criticize you for lumping me in with an imaginary enemy you seem to perceive (the anti-nuclear, global warming warming kind presumably). I just said the XKCD chart is not as comforting as it seems. I don't know what a spent fuel pond is, btw. How did they even measure the increased cancer risk of radiation anyway, if any other daily activity seems to increase the cancer risk much more? I mean how did they isolate the radiation effect among the noise of all the cancer causing things? And what if you eat steaks AND are exposed to radiation? Does the effect of the steak cancel out the radiation effects? I think not.

Do you have a chart about the cancer risk induced by steaks, preferably drawn by XKCD because he makes it so pretty and soothing? And he is a geek, so I must believe hime?

I could point out that I don't eat steaks, but it is not really relevant...

I've read the "Fukushima is a triumph for nuclear power" articles, and I HOPE they are right. I don't think we have all the information yet, though. We don't know what things have leaked exactly. Those articles tend to not mention the cooling pools that don't have enclosings. They say Chernobyl was a cloud of ash that spread very far, but why shouldn't other clouds also spread far? In any case, if those articles are right, the media should be blamed for unnecessarily causing a panic.

If at one measurement point there was 20th of radiation for increased cancer, who says that was even the highest concentration to be found? What if by random chance there are dirt particles from the explosion that radiate more, and I swallow them while I walk my dog?

Btw. I don't like having to breathe the pollution of cars and fossile fuel plants every day either, so it doesn't really comfort me if they are also toxic. I think most cars are superfluous, but that is for another discussion.

Could you link to the source for the nature of the fission products that were being measured?
I like the chart, but it's a pet peeve of mine to see one-time, daily, monthly, yearly doses all mixed together on the same infographic. Getting 3.6 mSv in 2 days is very much not the same as getting getting 3.6 mSv in one year.
> Presumably they rule the Internet because you'd be labelled sexist if you claimed men ruled the Internet.

This is drivel. They rule the Internet because they love to shop and connect with their friends. ;-)

Seriously: That article had actual numbers. They may be right or wrong, but acknowledging numbers matter in these discussions is an import step away from the handwavey pop-psychology bullshit this article might have been.
The one issue with T-Mobile is it uses the fairly nonstandard 1870 MHz frequency

Actually, T-Mobile uses the AWS spectrum (in addition to PCS/1900MHz spectrum) which has the uplink around 1700MHz and the downlink around 2100MHz. AT&T and Verizon both have AWS holdings as well as Cricket, MetroPCS, and others. It's standard spectrum and MetroPCS and Cricket are actively using it for service today. AT&T and Verizon seem to be holding it to use for LTE in the future when increased capacity becomes necessary.

If you'd like to learn more about AWS spectrum and see some nice maps of who bought what, Phone Scoop has a great article: http://www.phonescoop.com/articles/article.php?a=99&p=14...
Totally agree.

I think it's because "ultra strict" and "dynamic" both oriented on programmer. "Non-strict" oriented on compiler.

"Ultra strictness" and dynamic typing in different ways, but both gives help to programmer. Non-strict is just a pain without benefit.
More dot-coms are embracing the idea of drinking at work
"Another part of the appeal of dynamic languages appears to be that they have acquired an aura of subversion. Dynamic languages fight against the tyranny of static languages, hooray for us! We’re the heroic blackguards defending freedom from the tyranny of typing! We’re real programmers, we don’t need no stinking type system!"

I don't know anyone who prefers dynamic languages who actually thinks this way. I program in both statically- and dynamically-typed languages, and I prefer dynamically-typed languages because it's less code I have to write.
This should not be allowed to happen if there is any kind of regulation oversight at all left in this country.
You would still need to verify the data is still typed correctly. You just can't trust bits in general.

I've come to thinking of a strongly-typed program as being like a cell. Once you cross the cell boundary and it lets you pass, you can trust it and do all the wonderful type-based magic and optimizations that we know and love, but you have to get past that cell boundary first. And as annoying as that may be, poking a gaping wound in the cell wall and just jamming stuff in is likely to have bad results. Even between two cells of the same type, you really ought to do the checking, lest it turn out they not be quite as same as you thought (versioning issues).

(And of course in both theory and practice you still can't truly fully "trust" it even after it gets past the cell wall, but at some point you hit the limits of what you can verify. Real-world cells have the same problem too.)
The article did not even mention radiation levels at Fukushima, yet you quoted it as radiation being not worse than cigarettes.
You're welcome. I open links in new tabs and come back to them hours later - I read this one and I could have sworn I got to it via HN and wanted to read the discussion about it, but couldn't find it anywhere for the life of me. So I posted it :)
Well it makes sense. Senior management positions and positions running companies all require one thing.

That you can tell other people what to do and that they'll do it.

By definition, an introvert is significantly less likely to be able to do this.
"I would have written a shorter letter, but I did not have the time." - Pascal

Most of the time you spend writing your YC application should be on making it clearer and removing unnecessary words.
We just did a podcast interview with a nuclear engineer (my brother actually) on the subject of Japan's nuclear situation that's worth checking out I think:

http://techzinglive.com/page/694/114-tz-breaking-news-jay-ro...

[Edit] For added context, after serving as a nuclear submarine officer, he worked at a commercial nuclear power plant for five years running computational simulations. Also, he spends half his time in Japan, where his wife and child are currently living.
Why the Quick Bar (“dickbar”) is still so offensive
This service is a great idea, although a bit pricey. Additionally - a $99/month plan that doesn't support HTTPS seems a bit rude. Especially when most developers probably consider their log data sensitive, to some degree. Find a different feature to up-sell on.

Also, no on-premise option?

Anyone tried Graylog2 [free]

"Graylog2 is an open source syslog implementation that stores your logs in MongoDB. It consists of a server written in Java that accepts your syslog messages via TCP or UDP and stores it in the database. The second part is a Ruby on Rails web interface that allows you to view the log messages."

https://github.com/graylog2

http://www.graylog2.org
While that's a good quote, it's not quite relevant for people such as waiters. In my experience, being polite and tipping generously regularly gets me a speedier and more pleasant service. Sometimes it won't make a difference, sometimes it will make even more of a difference, such as a free drink or two, but more often than not it does have a positive impact on the service you receive.

That's true not just with waiters, but in many service situations - for example, in Oxford (a fairly small city with fairly low numbers of taxis required) a lot of the drivers know me, and when I call for a ride it takes a taxi, in my experience, roughly half the average time to arrive, simply because the drivers on duty know that I will be a pleasant customer and a good tipper.

Getting better service shouldn't be a neccesary reason to treat people well, but it's certainly a nice bonus.
So you claim that cigarettes are worse than radiation? I think that is bullshit, sorry (obviously it depends on the level of radiation, and I assume average cigarette consumption - of course you can consume a lethal dose of nicotine, I think). And you are constructing a lot of strawmen. I am simply calling for precise arguments. Maybe those things you quote are true, but then cite the correct sources, not XKCD charts and articles that do NOT contain the information you claim they do.

Btw some people actually worry about the stuff they eat.
Well, at least Deutsche Telekom is probably happy to finally get rid of their stupid adventure in North America. They bought for 51 billion dollar eleven years ago, they are selling now for 39 billion dollar — all things considered probably not a bad deal.
Barbara Liskov on the Power Of Abstraction
I left because Verizon because it cooperated with warrant-less wiretapping (as did AT&T) and T-mobile did not.

Now I'm screwed because I have a Nexus One so I'm basically locked in. I bought the phone without a contract but it's not like it works with other networks.
Just ask your friend what all websites/web applications does he use on a daily basis, there should be something from open source out of that set. I believe many websites make money using open source technologies and many companies/startups release their technologies as open source helping others benefit out of it. Current tech scene would never have improved without open source community and collaboration.
Who listens to these analysts? They all work for outfits that bet against their own advice, most likely.
And if you want to parse the Insights data into pretty pictures and graphs that are easier to analyse than raw data, sign up for our private beta at PageLever.com.
Clearly I misunderstood what you were saying. It sounds as if we agree on most things :)

> Multimethods are sweat, but a bitch to optimize and only useful in certain use-cases

I'm curious, why do you think multiple-dispatch is more difficult to optimize than single-dispatch?
Apologies. I did check, but I didn't double check after pasting in the two forms (and pouring a cup of tea, IIRC.)
I may have been overreading into your comment. I tried to make my comment seem like I wasn't just assuming the worst of you, but it looks like I failed at that. My initial read of your comment was that it was just curiosity, but for some reason a second reading made me realize the 'oh noes! communism!' angle too.
Watch the video I posted at the top of this thread; they actually break down on the periodic table how the decay produced by the fission at reactors is produced, and the different types and half-lives of the nuclides involved.

The reason "other clouds of ash" (presumably you mean Fukushima's) won't be as damaging as Chernobyl is that Chernobyl was an unshielded graphite fire that raged, producing a gigantic plume of radioactive ash, while Chernobyl was still critical and fissioning. Chernobyl was like a gigantic generator of radioactive contamination; it would have taken engineering effort to make it more damaging.

The things that have caught fire at Fukushima are 100x less radioactive than fissioning reactor fuel, and the fires themselves were much smaller (because, unlike Chernobyl, they aren't essentially being fed by a fuel source almost as flammable as anthracite coal).

I don't think Fukushima was a triumph for nuclear power, by the way (and, because for whatever reason you brought it up, I believe in global warming and support policy initiatives to curb it). There are (more expensive) plant designs that handle loss of cooling power better. Fukushima is a disaster, and it may end up killing many volunteers at the plant itself. But that doesn't mean it's giving everybody --- or even anybody --- within a 50km radius cancer.
New Website Crowdsources Japan Radiation Data
If you don't want to pay upfront for your TV or laptop, you just use a credit card. And what is even more important here, if you can pay upfront for your TV or laptop, you don't have to pay any interest. There's no reason whatsoever your network provider should provide you a mandatory loan for your phone with completely non-transparent conditions.
As bpreit pointed out, sending the "200 OK" response is what stops the IPN retries. The verification postback is a red herring; you can do it zero times, one time, or a hundred times, and if you don't send a "200 OK" response to the IPN, it will be retried.

So the correct strategy is:
1. Receive an IPN from Paypal.
2. Post it back to Paypal.
3. Make sure the response is VERIFIED.
4. Idempotently handle the payment.
5. Send "200 OK" response.

Step 4 needs to be idempotent in case your server dies or times out before sending the 200 OK response, but there's no way to avoid this without potentially losing messages. (I can't remember what the theorem is called, but in a lossy system it's impossible to avoid both messages being lost and messages being duplicated.)

Paypal has 99 problems, but its IPN processing isn't one.
Another mini-app to show this and other FB sharing data: http://www.keithmander.com/temp/socialabacus/

Much like the others posted here, but a bit more AJAX and cute graphics.
I recently read a small autobiographical book by Richard Branson, and apparently at one point he took part in a TV show where he would judge aspiring employees. I thought it very cool that he disguised himself as an elderly driver who picked up the aspirants from the airport and noted how he was treated.
RDTN.ORG: Radiatation readings from the people of Japan
What you're seeing there is the distinction between "manifest typing" [1] and "implicit typing" [2]. With manifest typing, you actually have to tell the compiler the specific type. With implicit, it will figure it out, either because (as discussed in the article) everything is the same type "Object", or because it will do type inference. Most modern type inference has started with Hindley-Milner [3], but move beyond it in various ways with varying degrees of justification and success. Raw HM doesn't seem to be enough to work with in practice, but moving beyond it gets you into the realm of undecidability unpleasantly quickly. But some progress is being made.

The C(/#/++)/Java languages had a lot of people convinced that being statically typed required manifest typing. Including me. I thought I was against static typing, what I was against was manifest typing.

[1]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manifest_typing

[2]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Type_inference

[3]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Type_inference#Hindley.E2.80.93...
Cigarettes are far worse for you than radioactive contamination. Cigarettes will almost reliably give you fatal cancer, no matter who you are.
I find it interesting that the only people who spend this much time talking about and defending extrovert/introvert are, themselves, introverts.
Devops Is a Poorly Executed Scam
This was my conclusion as well. It was somewhat true at Chernobyl, definitely true at Three Mile Island and it's going to be exponentially more true at Fukushima.
RIP Rumelhart.

His 1986 book got me into programming neural networks.
Long-term ATT'll have better coverage, but for now, not so much. Basically they (that is, existing ATT customers) get T-Mo's 2G/EDGE network, but that's about it. 3G is still on two different channels, so ATT/T-Mo customers are still split there. ATT's 4G network is nonexistent, while T-Mo's is brand-new and tiny. Moving forward, as they build out 4G, this is a net win, but the merger doesn't help anyone's 3G coverage.

Ugh... I hate this. I really don't want to be an ATT customer.
"Make the check out to my name."

I was being sarcastic.
I think some of the issue is 'pleasing the public' vs 'giving the public what they need.' There are a lot of poor political choices that are made in order to put on a dog-and-pony-show for portions of the public that don't like to think too much (e.g. prosecuting sexting teenagers as child pornographers just so that they can claim to be 'tough on crime' or 'of strong morals' or 'pro-family').
Libertarian socialism
I can see this acquisition facing some serious regulatory and legislative scrutiny.

I would imagine AT&T has a certain number of favors to cash in at this point.

https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/AT%26T#Privac...
It annoys me that he keeps saying 'Stockholm' when he means parlement.

The general gist, whilst he makes his bias clear, is fairly well put and supported.

What worries me is the trajectory he wants to launch on:

"Stockholm has also introduced a law that empowers Swedes to chose their providers for health care and other public services. This has led to a robust surge in entrepreneurship within the health-care sector, where more competition is bound to improve services."

Hmm. Right. That works really well elsewhere in the world, right?

We need to get more for our money in healthcare, but I think that comes from effectivness at the regional level and not from inviting private companies to run healthcare for profit.

The school system with 'free schools' - schools run by companies and for a profit - has been, in my direct experience, despicable.

By all means privatise the various misc things that the country still has a stake in. But run healthcare and education on a non-profit basis.

I would go off on a thing about pensions but that's a big ponzi scheme whichever way you look at it. Its not like I or anyone else has an honest answer.

/Swede.
This is a bit like saying cows rule the dairy industry.
If the investor hasn't learned these things before now, there are good reasons to suspect he won't change overnight.
Even if he thinks it over, he may do a cost-benefit analysis and come to the conclusion that for him, personally, it works out better to shout at the waitress. Possibly because the coffee really is that important to him. Possibly because it weeds out business partners who don't like his style.
Skeptics StackExchange Q&A site - [citation needed]
Trying to dig up the source for this quote leads to quite an array of people it's been attributed to! So far I've turned up variants sourced to: Abigail van Buren (the old name of "Dear Abby"), Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, a Reader's Digest letter-writer named James D. Miles, and Malcolm S. Forbes. Most of the attributions are questionable, though (e.g. I haven't found anybody actually pointing to where in Goethe's works such a quote can be found).
..and the brilliantly insightful but ironic quote:

I don’t hire people who have to be told to be nice. I hire nice people.--Leona Helmsley
I'm a bit confused by the loggly pricing page, who is their target audience?

The plans are too expensive for hobbyists but at the same time too limiting for even a smallish site (2G/day is tiny, and that's for $399/mo!).

I'm especially wary of the latter part, as that means you'd probably have to migrate away from loggly once your site becomes successful. For a medium-sized site it's not uncommon to push upwards of 1G of logs per hour, and that's just 3-4 webservers doing their duty.

My feeling is they should tech-pivot asap here and turn this into an appliance or software-download (like splunk and most of the other competitors).
Britain resumes missile attacks on Libyan targets
I think the point that is trying to be made is that the $500 price tag is influenced by the fact that most people buy the phone subsidized, and never see that price tag. I.e. if there was no phone subsidization, then there would be more competition on the actual price of the phone rather than just on the subsidized price of the phone.
To use those interesting statistics and come to the authors ridiculous conclusion further reiterates my personal opinion that if women in tech had an issue with how they were perceived, they'd start companies rather than roll of the eyes blog posts and step out the room conference panels.
In fact, that's why I was careful to call it a variant; my sentiments are the same as yours. I'm actually happy that you've articulated the distinction.
Is there a Startup in my Project?
I have a project that I've been weekend working since the start of the year. And while I think it's a fine project (IMHO) to scratch an itch, I've always doubted its startup potential.

However, as they say with many eyeballs all startup ideas are shallow, I mean obvious.

The goal is simple, "Provide an alternate means of finding a good Kindle book to read." The competition is limited to Amazon itself, Google Books, Apple iBooks, Barns and Noble, Borders et al. I mean, heck I've never even heard of these guys. Just a bunch of lumbering behemoth dot-com has beens. Practically shooting fish in a barrel here.

My "trick" is to facilitate fast, fast, fast, easy as pie browsing. In essence, allow the customer to disposition as many books as possible in the shortest time. Way too much endless clicking around on Amazon to just browse for books (product). Try browsing deeper than say 100 books on Amazon in the Scifi genre for example. Then transition the customer onto Amazon for the affiliate fee.

My edge is they have (thanks a bunch MS) to deal with IE 6+ while I can basically keep iterating on what would eventually be a decent alternative interface in HTML5 (Chrome/FF/Opera and god willing a maybe IE9). At the end of the day it just needs to be a better front-end to Amazon than Amazon's for a decent minority of people.

My "secret" is a kind of math-y means for product classification and navigation, though the current project doesn't do it justice at all. 80% of effort to date is below the surface of the basic UI effort so far.

FWIW, I'm not limited to books, I could for example do the same for gluten free foods or some such.

Given the dearth of quality competition in the online book retail space I thought I'd give it shot first.

All feedback welcome. Requires Chrome.

http://goo.gl/tPPJz
Swift: the multiparty transport protocol
High-tech apps help drivers evade police
Coherence & Groupthink
I really wish I could see the deleted comments.
I like the idea of SAAS logging - it's a great differentiator. Competing against Splunk seems to be a tough road.

For folk pushing 1G of logs an hour, it'd be nice to have logic built into a local syslog proxy that filtered/dedup'd the log in some intelligent way.
Video: Google Analytics 101
How Lean Startup Forced Me To Leave My Country
Was AWS a standard before T-Mobile started using it, or was it standardized retroactively?
Is there something similar that works with Blueprint (or such) ?

This is very _cool_, but Blueprint style col/row instead of absolute positions will be a bit better.
I discovered these admin templates about a month and a half ago when I was redesigning my site. I did the original design for my MVP but I wanted a more polished, compliant design. I considered hiring a freelancer and even looked into 99designs for a full site template before I found an amazing admin template for $20. It took some customization on m part but I'm extremely happy with the result and the savings.
yup, there are way to many biases that will impact you data.

Expect at least 1000 applications. However, with all the popular press YCombinator and PG himself have received over the last 6 months, I expect this to be by far the largest applicant pool so far.

I image that the applicant pool with be bimodal. Apparently every year the applicant pool has become much more competitive, however I also expect a lot of people that are naive about what it takes to apply because startups are the hot new thing. I'm curious to know if in the end this is both the strongest and weakest YC pool so far.

Yesterday, PG said that each partner reads about 800 applications each, so expect at least that many.
It's not just the dickbar that's offensive - it's the fact that its release along with the announcement that Twitter is going to try to limit the development of other clients against their API that really makes it distasteful.

I understand that they have a need to monetize - I get it, but to do so in such a ham-handed way really bothers me.
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