skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Not necessarily a new idea. Just an old idea repurposed to fit a legal loophole instead of a technical need.

From Wired Sept 1994, Fran-On-Demand:
http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/2.09/cable.labs.html

"When an order for, say, Coneheads, comes in, she rushes to the giant videotape library on the far wall, retrieves the correct title, and hurries to insert it into the appropriate place in a gleaming bank of VCRs. During prime-time hours, two people share this job. But right now, on a Wednesday afternoon, it's all Fran.

Fran may or may not realize that her job category will soon be phased out. Her employer, cable colossus Tele-Communications Inc. (TCI), is conducting this market test with AT&T and US West. But all the other interactive television trials just getting underway are powered by computers, not by people like her."

The article ends in a chowderish claim:

"Watching any movie, any time - video-on-demand - is supposed to be the killer app that propels dozens of new interactive TV services into American homes by the end of the century. The home shopping, the custom news programs, the play-along game shows, the dozen or so simultaneous football games, the home banking, the on-demand Roseanne, the whole 500-channel scenario that cable companies have been hyping - all of this is supposed to piggyback on the raging success of movies-on-demand. But there's one glitch: there's not much demand for movies-on-demand"

TV's problem has ended up not being lack of demand, but disaggregation. People want movies on demand, and they can get them better and cheaper from companies that aren't in the traditional "TV business".

The same is happening all around. Newspapers' incomes are not down due to lack of demand for classifieds. It just happens that people who used to pay newspapers to print classifieds now post them somewhere else.
> Even if they were all in the public domain, he's basically "set", being a university professor with tenure.

> He is `set' because he continuously fulfills the expectation of the employer: he publishes (and teaches etc.). And expectations of the wide public: he provides information to us.

I don't think you understand what "tenure" means. Think of it like having your stock options fully vested and exercised, except that the company pays dividends every year, and you had so many options that you can live on the dividends.
Isn't his point that sending food isn't going to help Japan rebuild the roads that are needed to deliver the food any faster?
Their site appears to be down at the moment; it occasionally gives MySQL "too many connections" errors.

I received some information about their idea via the Tokyo Linux Users Group mailing list. You can read the email here:
http://lists.tlug.jp/ML/1103/msg00288.html

EDIT: Uh, the page is not rendering well... Here is the relevant info: "Tokyo hackerspace has now come up with a plan for how we are going to help the earthquake victims. In the short term we will be focusing on three areas: light, communications and the mental health of children. Here are three practical examples; we will be making solar-power lanterns and chargers, as well as creating communications networks and providing coloring books for kids. We need donations, publicity and expertise."
"satisfying desire to help is a very different thing from actually helping"

..reminds me of the Israel/Territories human disaster where any help is actually a hindrance because one side basically doesn't accept the other side's existence to begin with. Thus, (to me) the apparent problems are not the real problems.

Natural disaster relief is straightforward: you're helping or you're not. Unlike the Israel/Territories disaster, the end points are agreeable with a fairly clear path apparent: evacuation, medical, life-support, clearance, reconstruction, learning/prevention. Humans can do this, but also trying to win or avert a war at the same time is a lot harder. Any tips?
Chomsky is just one man, and thus subject to the same intellectual failings as other individuals, but his integrity is well beyond the vast majority of people with a pulpit. You should definitely read and consider what he has to say, because otherwise you may be hearing only lobbyists' perspectives.
Show HN my afternoon project: How to disable IE9's font smoothing
Sony Steps It Up - Subpoena's 2 years of PS3 Hacker Geohots Paypal Records
I like "Practical Django Projects" a lot and "Dive into Python" is a classic. You can also watch the PyCon 2011 (and 2010) presentations on pycon.blip.tv and the DjangoCon 2010 ones at djangocon.blip.tv. Both groups are available as podcasts. I have been watching them at the gym.
Couchbase Introduces Board of Advisors
#define wolfnipplechips gets

If you wanted to fuck it up proper, you should leave out this line. You don't want to dampen the horror people will have when they see you actually using gets.
<i>On one side of the creative spectrum are people like Thomas Edison who are disciplined and consistently create. Edison would simply experiment and iterate as much as necessary before coming up with an invention. On the other side of the creative spectrum are artists and musicians that are more emotional in their creativity. There is no knowledge necessary. They just have a skill like music and they use that to spontaneously create.</i>

Evidently anatomy, the history of visual art, color theory, music theory, the history of music, and a basic knowledge of the physics of vibrations are not knowledge. And no musician or artist has ever made studies to explore the possibilities of an idea before sitting down and making their huge statement of it.
My Son's elementary school principal sends the PTA newsletter out via email with a link to it in his Dropbox. He couldn't figure out how to attach it to the email. I think Dropbox may be a bit more well known outside of the "techie" crowd more than you think.
"The trick is to get a world where one doesn't need to earn money."

At the very least we need to move towards a place where money is not the final arbiter of 'Good'.

"Intellectual property rights has very little to do with individual initiative. I mean, Einstein didn't have any intellectual property rights on relativity theory. Science and innovation is carried out by people that are interested in it. That's the way science works. There's an effort in very recent years to commercialize it, like they commercialize everything else. "
Well, this makes that lock of Justin Beiber's hair I bought on eBay even more valuable - it's Royalty Free!

I don't really own that... but seeing as bits of ephemeral DNA-containing material from famous people tend to be collectible, it's a plausible future possibility.
Being myself a summer applicant sans co-founder, it's important to differentiate between having a co-founder and wanting a co-founder. If you didn't want a co-founder, that would probably be an issue (it's way too risky to put the entire load of a start-up on one person). But not being able to find a suitable co-founder is another story. It's not something to rush into just so you can say you have one.
Fixed in FF. Still working on a fix for IE.
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Thanks chime7, I really like your Text app and will have to go give CashFlow a try! Great work!
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Mostly JS/JQuery on front-end and PHP/MySQL back-end. Nothing out of the ordinary.
Chomsky's other problem is he's not an "intellectual". He's just a popular college prof who babbles a lot.
I can't find the crude death numbers in the article. It seems like there's a small chance that the number of deaths due to nuclear power in all of history could increase by a factor of 10 or more due to events in the next week or two, which would push it past rooftop solar energy, although it would still be nowhere near coal.
What we know, and don't know, about Japan's reactors
I'd contrast that with this chart:http://www.usgovernmentrevenue.com/downchart_gr.php?chart=10...

If you look at Federal Tax Revenue from income taxes you see the pct of GDP stayed remarkably consistent even in times where taxes were much higher. To me that says people will find ways to hide their revenue when taxes are high enough to tip the risk/reward equation in that direction.
I never said that the people up north don't need help; I have family and friends up there, and will be spending April and May helping people to rebuild.

What they don't need is a patronizing attitude. These people are tough, and they will overcome.

The reason that supplies aren't getting up to Sendai is not that there aren't any. The transportation network is broken, and fuel is in short supply.

Fukushima's got the double-problem of panic; there are hospitals 30km away from the plant that can't get supplies because the truck drivers are terrified that they'll get exposed to radiation, even though the equivalent dose of half a dental X-ray... if they spend the entire day.

Panic is the real problem here, and the rest of the world acting like the entire country has just been leveled by the fist of God is part of the problem.

I wouldn't be so frustrated if I didn't have to deal with daily phone calls from people back home asking whether or not I've grown a third head.

On the second bit, no. Religion works very differently here.

The temples and shrines play a vastly smaller role than churches do for Western religious groups, even in the countryside. There are no weekly gatherings, and most people don't identify with specific temples or shrines, at least not in any of the countryside I've spent time in.

Religion in Japan is national, not local.

You go to your local shrine for local festivals, and that's pretty much it. If you move, you go to a different one.

You've got a small shrine in your house for talking with your ancestors (called a kami-dana, or god-shelf), and people keep these to varying degrees, no matter where in the country they live.

Otherwise, social gatherings are defined by your school or work, or by whatever other organizations you might belong to. Youth groups, church football leagues, and all the other stuff you have in the US doesn't exist here.

So, no, they're not like agnostic christians. They're like Shinto-Buddhists, which refers not to the biggest sect (Jodo Shinshu), but to the religious blend that is most common in Japan (the Nichiren are also shinto-buddhists, for example).
Thanks, that's pretty accurate.
I'm gonna call "citation needed" on this one. The clean coal part, specifically. Reasons:

Technically, it should be possible to filter out uranium. Thorium, too. Both are heavy enough, it should be possible to centrifuge them out of just about any mixture, unless the compounds they're in are too tightly bound with lighter molecules by intermolecular forces. Even then, I would expect them to find their way "down", even if they had to drag some of the nonradioactive portion with them.

The amount of energy you get out of the coal or the uranium is a function of not only the amount of energy in each, but their relative quantity, as well. If there's not enough uranium present to extract a significant portion, I'd have to wonder if there's really enough to put out as much energy as the coal's total output.

Taking it a little further, if there isn't enough to extract, is there really enough to pose a significant health risk? We're exposed to a certain amount of background radiation on a daily basis already. How much more does the uranium in coal add to this? Again, I'm tempted to doubt it's significant, if there's not enough to be extracted.

So, do we have reliable numbers on this?
~300 million is the population of the US

We have 2.5x the population but 25x the landmass.
That's an order of magnitude difference in population density. Now imagine a natural disaster.
Exactly. Japan needs the Army Corps of Engineers, not a mountain of blankets.
I couldn't agree more. But I think 8 belongs near the top. I am currently helping re-condition experienced mainframe developers into web developers, and I can't stress enough the importance of tools. Understanding the browser, HTTP request and response, cookies, web security, and the OSI model is crucial.
Its pretty established that the financial firms doubled down on leverage and then blew up. A free market would have made things worse, faster and earlier. Nothing could save you from people who are lying to you, and have begun to believe their own horse. No amount of informational accuracy will help.
I like this one better:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2334641
I don't really understand how to read this chart, even after reading the explanation. Can someone explain how it works? How is "burden" (color) calculated?
I think whether you agree with the specific technical points or not, this is a great article. I don't know if "best practices" exist, but consistent practices do, and they make it a lot easier understand other people's code. (and impose a minimum quality standard on people not familiar with the tech yet).

For example, Adobe never really bothered with specifying best practices for Flex, so now every Flex developer's code looks different, and there is a lot of unnecessary trial and error. (Although I like Flex as a framework)
Don't distract new programmers with OOP
What I see is a slightly high burden by historical standards for most everyone from part-time-minimum-wagers (~$10k/year) to mid-level professionals (~$100k/year) and a slightly-to-significantly low burden for everyone else.
Lots of the content (and most of the styling) was adapted from here: http://developer.fellowshipone.com/patterns/code.php

I'm fond of the original because it also includes some great UI design patterns.
To your first point, at least libmysqlclient blocks and any wrapper around it does too. To your second point, my most recent experience is with sqlalchemy, which is really pretty powerful, but also produces some hideous SQL when using the ORM layer. It does not hide the query logic from you, but conceals it just enough that I have to check every time that it is not lazy-loading 10,000 rows or not returning 10,000 rows when I only need 10.
Hey, don't worry about it, that's just how it came through to me, most likely because of my own experience in thinking about these things. I often noticed how extremely excited my brother gets about traveling and how he tends to evaluate people predominantly on criteria related to it. From there I noticed how other travelers have a tendency to overdo the traveling thing as well. When I read your examples and how quickly and carelessly you labeled these people, you came across as someone like that too. Maybe it was a you-had-to-be-there kind of thing, but when you dismiss people like the first 2 japanese guys as not awake simply because of their attitude to traveling... well, I don't grok that.
I just plain like Josh Berkus. Well done.
Online REPLs
Does the Japan government know more than it's saying?
Please post this as a reply on the blog too! This has much more detail & sense than the original blog post.

And even in India, after the Tsunami, the problem was not so much as having aid/materials, as having the transport to get the materials to the right place, and building temporary accommodation fast enough for the displaced people.
Interestingly unenforceable :P
I think you saw humor where there was none. I'm saying selling stuff to people that they don't need has never been what been important for a startup.
On reflection I just think the toolbar is a bit ugly. And the old colour scheme was more interesting.
On Education & Why Finding Your Passion Is The Most Important Thing You Can Do
Thank you for the endorsement.
What Happens When the President Dines Out
Or you could use a language that uses object orientation in a more natural way, such as Ruby and Scala, which both are fundamentally OO languages.

You can do procedural-y things with both languages, much to their credit, but packaging up functionality is both natural and intuitive.

Over building APIs is not a hallmark that Objects are bad. They're a hallmark of bad design.

So, yeah, i agree, prototype a minimal solution and iterate, and teach others to do this. This is an issue that is orthogonal to object orientation. At least, it is in languages that don't make you jump through weird hoops (C++ & Java, i'm looking in your general direction).
Absolutely agree. Reading Hacker News may be interesting but it rarely adds something to your skills.
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Anatomy of a Twitter Screw-up: My Own - Jay Rosen: Public Notebook
True streaming solutions could equally easily offer day-and-date streaming of new DVD releases. It's not a technical problem, but it is a real problem that needs solving.
Raldi last day at reddit.
couldn't agree more. i started with java in high school and was too caught up in "public static void main" to realize that it was up to me to define methods that made sense and that things generally ran top to bottom. switching to php for a while made everything "click" before heading back to java

getting rid of CS terms and data types allows you to learn how to think in program flow and "what am i actually doing here". failing to capture the attention in this first step is lethal to most people that otherwise would be good at programming if they hadn't run quickly at their first try
Randomly jumping on a flight into Japan to wander around asking people in English if they need help is obviously stupid. But that's not just stupid for Japan, that's stupid for pretty much everywhere. Pointing out its stupidity isn't useful - people who would do that aren't listening to you anyways - so why conflate that sort of behavior with simple, non-disruptive, non-panic-inducing actions like donating money to the Red Cross? Or why contrast it with requests like "send nuclear expertise and helicopters", which everyone who meaningfully could and would is already doing?

After Katrina, Japan donated $200k to the US Red Cross, made $1m worth of supplies available, and private donations from Japanese companies and individuals went over $13m. The US certainly wasn't short of food or money, so why did they bother?

A $50 donation to the Red Cross will potentially help. Earmark it for their general fund, and if they really don't need it for Japan, they'll spend it somewhere else. This is such a bizarre thing to have to defend.
Are Carbs More Addictive Than Cocaine?
Thirty days live
These are not necessarily contradictory. Fukushima can quite easily be lacking all of those things because they're stuck on the wrong side of Japan, where more people who don't know how to fix roads or speak Japanese won't help. Similarly, adding more supplies to the piles on the wrong side of the country won't help either.

The point here is that the bottleneck is distribution of things that already exist, not getting them to Japan in the first place.
Well yeah, it would seem to violate the 13th amendment..

Edit: I believe it's a form of debt bondage (peonage) that is prohibited by international law too. See: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Debt_bondage
Provocative.

The suggestion is that thinking in OO terms makes you think about architectures instead of programs, and the result is to move you away from thinking about the problem and the solution and towards thinking about the program's organization. This is always assumed to be a good thing, especially when accompanied by the usual examples of writing programs for teams of programmers with varying levels of skill.

But if we grant that non-OO is better for someone learning to program, why wouldn't it be better for someone reading a program for the first time?

EDIT:

Thinking further about this, I am not against the idea of design considerations that should be kept from the beginning programmer. But OO isn't really a design consideration, it's a metaphor.

If it really "worked," then new programmers would be looking all confused trying to write a Towers of Hanoi program, and you would explain, "Think of each tower as its own thing. What can it do? What does it have?" And slowly you could tease out a program by designing objects from the ground up.

But if it actually doesn't work to teach programming using objects, if you teach programming without objects and introduce them as an 'advanced' subject, then at some level you have to wonder if the metaphor is fundamentally broken. If the purpose of OO is design and organization rather than a fundamental way to think about programs, then really we shouldn't say things like "Everything's an object."

We should ask what we need to do to design well-factored programs that are cohesive without being coupled and then design language features that directly address those organization requirements rather than thinking that there is this obvious "metaphor" that naturally leads to well-organized programs.
Count your blessings that you work in a language that doesn't have ambiguity around indentation rules. These poor fellas obviously don't.
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Yes, I realize that Japan is the third largest economy in the world. But living in a wealthy nation doesn't mean that your home is magically rebuilt. (Just ask the residents of New Orleans' Ninth Ward.)

Thousands of residents of Minami Sanriku are homeless. The fact that you, in Tokyo, still have your home, is great for you, but totally irrelevant to those suffering in Minami Sanriku.

I'm very confused by posts which seem to suggest that the Japanese government can completely restore everything that was lost.

Until someone who has actually had their home and loved ones washed away tells me "please stop giving", I am going to continue. To each his own.
No sillier than warehouses of people stuffing DVD envelopes, and an army of postal workers delivering them.

Also: http://www.amazon.com/Sony-DVPCX995V-400-Disc-Changer-Player...
You can truck those in from Arkansas, right?
The point is that the consequences of a disaster like Chernobyl are so nasty and so long-lived that, if we are to continue building and operating nuclear power plants, we have a responsibility to ensure that such "outliers" never happen unless the earth sustains a direct hit from an asteroid or the Yellowstone supervolcano is erupting (in which case, we're screwed like the dinosaurs anyway). If we can't do that then we have no business being in the nuclear power business. Failure is unacceptable. The situation in Fukushima is not the same as Chernobyl, but that doesn't mean that what is happening there is acceptably safe. We shouldn't be seeing news articles stating that "primary containment feared breached" or that the water level in the spent fuel pools is low (source: http://online.wsj.com/article/SB1000142405274870389970457620...).

From the most pro-nuclear article I've seen thus far: "The earthquake which hit on Friday was terrifically powerful, shaking the entire planet on its axis and jolting the whole of Japan several feet sideways. At 8.9 on the Richter scale, it was some five times stronger than the older Fukushima plants had been designed to cope with." - excerpt from http://www.theregister.co.uk/2011/03/14/fukushiima_analysis/

The article spins this as though it is some magnificent testament to the quality of the engineering design. I read something like that and then look at this historical list of Japanese earthquakes (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_earthquakes_in_Japan) and the thought that comes to my mind is, "Why the fsck didn't they build it to withstand a 9.5 and a tsunami so they'd have some goddamn margin of safety?" Why is it considered sufficient to have a system where unavailability of power to run pumps is the single point of failure in all of the cooling systems except for the inadequate-to-do-the-whole-job 8-hour battery-powered system? Why haven't we come up with a completely passive system capable of cooling the reactor if all else fails? The bottom line is, if you want the public to put their trust in nuclear power, then build the reactor so that even a 9.5 earthquake + tsunami is a total non-event.