skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
the hard part of it

This is absolutely false. I agree that discovery isn't easy, but you know what's even harder? The other 90% of the work needed to finish it and make it a reliable product. Chomsky trivializes the work of synthetic organic chemists, the engineers that set up and keep production lines going, researchers that test the drugs, and so on.

In software terms, this is like saying that all the hard work is done because someone banged out a prototype over the weekend. It's full of bugs and doesn't have the features people want yet.

If you believe that Chomsky's right, try running a startup while holding his idea. You'll fail, or you'll discover that it's not easy and reject his idea.
The Strange Case of Josef Oehmen
Yeah, I was planning on writing something more about NAPI and GRO at the beginning of the next part, though I'm not sure there is terribly much to GRO. I hadn't thought about zero-copy yet though, but it is certainly important so I'll probably try to fit something like that in.

Thanks!
Pants Required - Make a Great Impression on Webcam Job Interviews
"Her background meanders ... art, history, education, and massage therapy"

Male or female, a person who describes themselves as such will not be taken seriously in today's micro-biz scene. If you can't write code, you don't get a seat at the table unless you're a [very] good and successful sales person who sells and doesn't fancy themselves as a CEO-in-waiting.

I've never met this person and have only read half of that one post, but it sounds like she's more enamored with the aspect of being a founder and blogging about it than anything else. No serious person would take offense at the jibes from other entrepreneurs, let along post an eleven-paragraph self-justification on their blog.
Having a woman as co-founder is one of the best things a startup can do. It gives you much better insight into half your customer base. I like the article, but I find that too many articles fail to highlight the benefits of having a woman on your founding team. In 2011 if you're starting up I think it's absolutely essential to have a woman on your founding team.

In the tech startup scene the needs of women are definitely under served, it's a virtually untapped customer base. Ignore women founders at your own peril.
If anything, what blows my mind is that Microsoft has failed that significantly on connecting systems which share a LAN. There should have been something as easy as Dropbox built into Windows, and made known to users, at least 10 years ago.
I dual boot most of my machines, so I find anything that is 100% windows only to be less than optimal.

But the tech is interesting.
My son has to see this
Yes, that's it. My wording is terrible. I'm saying there's an argument. I'm not saying which side of the argument is right or wrong. As time goes on, it becomes more and more difficult to know the extent. Only in the fullness of time could the extent possibly be known due to the delay in related deaths. It won't be known because it hasn't been monitored, and there are conflicting statistics.
What is fascinating to me is how quickly dropbox spread outside the HN demographic. My 70 year old mother, who was as far from a techical user as one could be, asked me in early 2009 if I used dropbox so she could share some photos with me. That's when I realized they were really on to something. It was just that easy to use, and it was spreading very rapidly in non-technical communities - they had reached a user like my mother within 6 months of public release. Unbelievable, and a real testament to the simplicity and elegance of the product.
What Happens To Your Online Data When You Die?
1. You are mostly right, but in genuine US style, the other events surrounding the convention have sort of grown to become larger than the convention itself. It's likely they were selling these at some kind of event or area not directly affiliated with the convention.

2. I'm sure this is the case, but they were likely able to circumvent this rule by not selling in an area directly controlled by the convention.

3. You don't need some kind of license for selling most goods, but food is basically a controlled substance. If it's pre-packaged, the packager is regulated, not the retailer.

4. Non-perishable food is regulated mostly at the packaging & handling level.

EDIT: They could have also claimed that it was art and not for consumption, which is a way to skirt the labeling requirements.
Don't condone it, but understand their motivation. Knockoff's are kinda out of hand of late.
In other news : Twitter / Error
Why 'Secret Questions' Suck as a Security Measure
no I am saying that "2 hours flying is more dangerous than 2 hours driving."
For the estimate of the risks in my live I am asking what is the safer mode of living. Therefore the risk of an activity hast to be related to spent livetime.
Are they counting Iraq War deaths?
I think there is a [citation needed] there, but I also think he's willfully ignoring that productizing stuff is difficult.

Here's a great example of "public goods" that's near and dear to my heart: I love Linux, and there's no way in hell I'd use anything else. However, it's hard to argue that it sets the pace in terms of usability. Commercial operations produced easier systems for the end user well before Linux got there.

Why? Because they got paid for their results, and they got paid because of intellectual property. And as they got paid, they sunk part of that money back into research and development into improving the experience. There is a comparatively tiny amount of money going into the Linux Desktop.
On Chrome Dev 11.0.696.12 and I'm experiencing the same thing. Seems like a minor complaint though as the rest of the site works flawlessly.
Yeah Rigo...I was wondering how long it was going to take you to speak up.
massive stinking pile ... shit

Observation +1. You've got 4 out of 4 correct there. I claim that any person who has not only smelled but also tasted, not to mention mucked, the abovequoted part could feed The Daily WTF for years. Hopefully Adobe's HTML5 conversion tool could turn out to be a decent face-saving way out for Flash.

(Posting anonymously for a reason, feel free to draw your conclusions.)
At your discretion, how did you land this Patrick? Perhaps this can be better answered on your blog, but did the NYT contact you after coming across your article?

Original article submission: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2319629
He's talking about research. You're talking about development.

None of these things are exactly easy, but at least with development you're building toward something.
We need cheaper Android Honeycomb tablets: Something equivalent to the WiFi-only Xoom for $499, and lower-end devices in the $250–350 range.

Don't get me wrong, I really like my Xoom, and it's a fun device to hack on. But Android has historically thrived on two things: "Good enough" devices, and a huge range of form factors and price points. And we're just not there yet.

I suppose I'll have to wait a couple of months until the deluge starts. :-)
Microsoft had built in cloud storage, something like live space, or live disk, or something along those lines. It was very similar to dropbox, but for whatever reason it didn't catch on. I know a few people that still use it.
Well, the alternative to understanding a particular technology is blind faith in a particular technology.

The world's dictators show us only some of the problem with blind faith. The other problem with blind faith is that it tends to turn to blind hatred when disappointed, especially when a demagogue is close at hand to harness that blind faith in a different direction.

Choose whichever side of the political spectrum you consider ridiculously uninformed. Them in power is the alternative to a populace that encompass how the heck our society operates.
This is great! I've been seeing links from The Startup Foundry a lot here already and it's just been a month. Keep it up and you'll soon get even more traction.

In November 2010 I discovered Kinect hacking and created a blog with the latest hacks, http://KinectHacks.net, just for fun. Since it was the only blog about the topic at the time it grew quickly and the in the first month it reached 100 000 unique visitors and 300 000 pageviews. In the end of January it had gotten over a million pageviews.

I eventually got tired of running it, it took time away from my real business, so I sold it on Flippa.com for $12600 (http://bit.ly/hBcQQb , requires login).

One of the best tips I can give you is to invest in a realtime analytics service like Clicky, which I used. It's really helpful for immediately noticing when stuff go viral and take action on it.

Another cool thing is that the new owner spent just $200 on Facebook advertisements and got over 10000 likes for the group (https://www.facebook.com/KinectHacking) in a week because of it. I've always heard that Facebook ads don't work, but it surely worked in this case. Just goes to show that you should never take stuff as granted before you've tested it yourself.
If you're responsible but low on funds, payday loans can be a godsend. The interest is often lower than your checking account's overdraft charge, for example. If I was short between paychecks, I'd get charged $20 for each bill I have set on autopay.
I just realised I screwed up the second link - should have been:

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/8132547.stm
people unable to pay medical bills for their parents

Are you sure about that? I don't want to move the conversation anywhere near healthcare controversy, but the joy of the NHS is that "I can't pay medical bills!" problems never exist :)
On average, one `Banana equivalent dose' per banana: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Banana_equivalent_dose

And no, that's not a joke; it's a convenient measure of low radiation levels. Bananas are more naturally radioactive due to high potassium contents.
Make sure to read the comments.
My mom is using Dropbox. That says it all to me.
so she chose to assume that the guy was stereotyping while other interpretations were available. That exactly my point - she saw things she was inclined to see.
Scandinavia is mostly driven by nuclear and hydro power. So the point still stands.
Cars kill a lot more people than nuclear plants do, though.
"You are asserting that, despite the presence of 7 billion other people on the planet, and a US economy that produces $14 trillion in goods and services each year, and over 100 mm white collar workers in our country, that you, little old you, have come up with an idea, a business, a company that none of those other wonderful human beings have thought to invent yet."

Not really. Most entrepreneurial ventures are not based around ideas that nobody else has done yet. They usually involve a known business model or idea done better, in a different place, or at a more opportune time.
Starting to get excited once again about MongoDB. I was kind of down about it after having some issues with real world implementations. Considering journaling is something I would never have thought would have made it in, I wonder if they will come around on the memory mapped I/O like everyone else eventually does.

EDIT: Also... does the group commit mean that ALL write transactions will be un-acknowledged to the client until the group commit finishes?
How about file formats? Graphics manipulation algorithms? Where's the line between things like relativity theory and things like Photoshop?
This has been one of my frustrations (with a language I otherwise love). If you fail to update for a couple of months and then come back your code is broken. I understand and support why they chose to do it this way though.
The dose due to actinide particulates from coal is a non-negligible part of your annual exposure.
Rise of the machines: Will coaches cede control to data analysts?
Does anyone seriously still listen to Chomsky? This guy has zero credibility as far as I'm concerned.
Thank you for your reply! It's always good to be honest and straight up front and that's what I did. I told him about risks we have to take and rewards if the business takes off. I am sure he's aware of all that. The true is when I started this venture last June, day by day I realized that I can not do this by myself and I am feeling overwhelming already. This is an excellent advise to attract a potential partner/co-founder.
What I'm discussing is evidential weighting and critical source analysis, not logical inference (I do happen to research logic in my day job, so I'm familiar with what constitutes valid deduction).

Since this isn't a scientific paper that presents data sufficient to support its conclusions, we can't judge it purely objectively. It presents itself as an engineering safety analysis. The first step in judging an engineering safety analysis is usually: was it performed by someone qualified to perform such an analysis? We typically want them to be performed by people who are both domain experts (in this case, nuclear engineers), and specifically people who are experts in assessing the risks in that domain, as well as in the general science of risk analysis. If a safety analysis is done by someone who isn't such an expert, it's quite rational to give it lower weight, because we aren't confident that they're familiar with all the relevant science and possible risks.

I mean, would you argue it's also a genetic fallacy that I take articles in Nature more seriously than I take articles in the Daily Mail? That I believe what Richard Feyman's lectures have to say about physics more than I believe what some random person on Geocities has to say? It just seems like good sense to me; considering the source of a claim is a good first step when deciding how much weight to give it. Bayesians would agree! It's possible that the Daily Mail will publish an insightful new analysis of global warming, but it's not very likely, and I would probably want to hear confirmation from a more reliable source before I believed it. Same here; this analysis is interesting, but I'd have more confidence in an analysis performed by someone who's actually an expert in the field, so until I hear one of them say that it's correct, I treat it with skepticism.
EFF serves up ~7500 pages of documents obtained via FOIA for Sunshine week
Where does one stop and the other begin?

Much of what we call research vs. what we call development is simply an artifact that stems from the way science is funded today. However, science can't (and won't) always be funded by giant government bodies. (To say that it will assumes that the way things are can go on forever, but history shows that civilizations have lifespans just like everything else.)
Show HN: My collection of web-apps that I'm finally comfortable in sharing
Are Facebook Comments the Death of Anonymity?
There's nothing to provide feedback on? Looks like it could be a fun concept but I have no idea how you plan to revolutionise my dating world?
So tell me again about the "laws of physics", and how they're not tested through pemutation.

Ok. You generally perform a sequence of experiments, construct a low entropy theory, and then apply that theory in the future. Kind of like what Louis Slotkin did.

He doesn't need to redo them on a train, a plane, in a car, at the bar. The fundamental principles discovered tend to be pretty solid.

Prove it.

Not that hard. Take a fixed volume, convolve it with the 1/r kernel of the neutron diffusion equation. If the volume of uranium is a sphere, you get the spot neutron density at the center is [(3V)^{2/3}]/2. If the volume is a disk of height dz, radius R, you find the the local density is 2(pi V dz)^{1/2}. The smaller dz gets, the smaller the local density of neutrons is, and the further from criticality you are.

(Computing the volume at someplace other than the center is left as an exercise for the reader. However, the maximum principle shows that it always goes down.)

Now plug this into the standard soliton machinery (i.e., use Duhamel's principle, L^p-L^q estimates, etc) and you'll always need a bigger source for a flat soliton than a spherical one.

Yes, I'm skipping a few steps. You can find them in Cazenave's book on solitons (that's where I learned it) and most likely any book on nuclear engineering (but with much less of a mathematical bent). No, it's not the "undergrad physics textbook" you seem to think I'm referring to.

It's pretty amazing how everyone wants to cite "physics" to prove that there's no problem with a meltdown (in the face of overwhelming empirical evidence to the contrary), but nobody is doing much more than hand-waving allusions toward their undergrad physics textbook in defense of their assertions.

What is the "overwhelming empirical evidence" that criticality will be achieved?
yay "Tab completion in the shell" and "B-tree index self-compaction" are great. So is --journal.
>most likely in the homophobic/sexist way that one is the wife, and their role is to support the "husband".

a guy would share his life with another guy. Based on that i see it is a natural to assign higher probability to the event that "the guy would also like to support his husband by sharing the business venture of the husband" - and you call this assignment of the higher probability as "homophobic/sexist"?
Thank you - I appreciate the answer. I'm not sure I will be able to apply it however as my scenario is not quite as clear cut (although it's a little more of #2 than #1).
I'm curious -- VRBO could easily pivot and handle transactions themselves, directly. Instead they've chosen to offer optional insurance:

http://guarantee.homeaway.com/vrbo/

Why is that? Intuitively, it seems like handling transactions directly would paint a target on their back in regards to the unlicensed hotel business, where regulatory and community concern appears to be a growing issue -- but I may not understand the details of the situation.
For what it's worth, the linked code on github appears to be specific to node.js. Last I checked, there was no native function to convert strings to and from base64, only buffers.

If you're writing this for client side, it would indeed be preferable to use the native functions.
WikiLeaks: Japan Received Warnings About Nuclear Plant Safety
Why do you think the source looks good? It's from a nuclear lobby site.

The referenced data lists 0.04-0.23 deaths per TWh for coal fuel chain and 0.01-0.65.

The number 160 deaths/TWh for is made up from very rough estimates of WHO that 1 mio. people die due to coal air pollution. That's hardly a 'good source', IMHO.

Further, the effect of storing lethally radioactive material for very long time periods is completely neglected.
Good stuff. Github page is here: http://github.com/littleworkshop/planetarium
>"a large portion of the public do insist that a nuclear reactor never be built again."

...and the entire point of the OP is to point out that they are wrong to do so-- or at the very least, that this opinion is irrational.
We certainly wouldn't have had a textile industry. British textiles were way cheaper and better. Actually British textiles were cheaper and better because Britain had crushed Irish and Indian superior textile manufacturers and stolen their techniques. So they were now the preeminent textile manufacturer, by force of course.
It was designed to shut down during a quake, something it did. What bothers me is that something that generates so much heat as to require active cooling (something that already indicates less than ideal operating conditions) requires an external system to cool it. The first option should always be to use the reactor to generate power to operate the pumps that cool it. A small turbine mechanically connected to the pumps would be a better option. Operating the cooling system doesn't require more than a tiny fraction of the post-shutdown thermal output.

I am fine with having the independent generators to operate cooling pumps in an emergency shutdown, but I am not very enthusiastic as they being the first line of defense.
It's a novelty item. You aren't intended to open the box and eat the cereal, the popularity of the cereal wasn't what was important to the buyers.
Here's a sample card: http://captaincanuck.com/sample-addiction-and-subtraction-ga...
Why are there so many Quora haters?
Maybe im just reading into it but I sense a very negative vibe to Quora on HN. I've certainly seen worse startup ideas. What gives?
Even if reposted with fancy graphs, the data do not get better. Basically, they are from a nuclear lobby site.

The referenced data on the lobby site lists 0.04-0.23 deaths per TWh for the coal fuel chain and 0.01-0.65 for nuclear. I don't see that large a difference here between coal and nuclear.

The number of 160 deaths/TWh is made up from a very rough estimate of WHO that 1 mio. people die due to coal air pollution (without further reference). That's hardly a good source, IMHO.

Further, the effect of storing lethally radioactive material for very long time periods is completely neglected.

For me, this is a troll post and I bite.
I'm afraid I can't personally provide a detailed run down - I played the game for about 6 months near the end of university and after that I never really found enough free time to justify continuing the subscription.

The Wikipedia page seems to be comprehensive though: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eve_Online#Economy

I would take a look at the development section also. They use a Python variant called Stackless (http://www.stackless.com) which provides lightweight threads and message passing. I actually started using this as an alternative to regular CPython.
[edit: Troll answers have been deleted, but you can still read the trolling comment thread: http://www.quora.com/Is-Qato-a-serious-Quora-clone-attempt/a... and http://www.quora.com/Is-Qato-a-serious-Quora-clone-attempt/a... ]

On the Quora thread, http://www.quora.com/Is-Qato-a-Quora-clone-attempt-or-a-simi... there are some answers by trolls pretending to represent Qato.

"Sameul Codsaw" writes: 'Also, we are using Ruby on Rails, so we expect to have less trouble scaling and finding devs than Quora has.'

Rick Ross, president of DZone (developers of OSQA and Qato), replies in the comments: 'This imposter has no connection with Qato and does a disservice to both Quora and DZone by posting this nonsense.'

"Kevin McDougal" answers and comments, also trying to make DZone look bad. ("Rick, our plan to sabotage the Quora community is working. Did Hernani create the 100 fake Quora accounts yet?" ... "Hold on. Was that message private or public?") It's pretty juvenile and makes me question the quality of the Quora moderation system.

Why are there all these sock puppet accounts (http://www.quora.com/Kevin-McDougal and http://www.quora.com/Samuel-Codsaw) popping up and pretending to represent Qato? They have only one answer on the entire site, and its on this thread.

Are Quora engineers behind these trolls, or who? Regardless of who is behind it, the trolling reflects poorly on Quora, not Qato.

The comments by Ben Newman (Quora dev) honestly are quite juvenile, and do a disservice to Quora, regardless of any ethical considerations on the part of Quora or Qato. I would prefer to see him take the moral high road.