skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Not the best comparison; California is fairly sparsely populated, with concentrations in the SF and LA/SD areas. Being an island nation (well, a several-island nation), you'd expect Japan to be a bit more dense.

Consider that the population density of Japan is less than a third that of a somewhat average-density city like Austin, TX, and is even less dense than that of the state of New Jersey.

There is no evidence to suggest that Dai-ichi is actually a "disaster," let alone one anywhere near the scale of Chernobyl. Do you even know anything about the design of the plant at Chernobyl? Orders of magnitude less safe than even these pretty-old Dai-ichi reactors.
Toyota is listed on the Nikkei. The thing at the NYSE is called an American Depository Receipt (ADR). Basically, it is a coupon that says "Entitles the bearer to two shares of Toyota common stock in Japan."

In principle, the two do not necessarily have to move in lockstep. However, because of the massive size, prominence, and stability of Toyota, one would ordinarily expect them to correlate extraordinarily heavily as anything else is an exploitable arbitrage opportunity.
The first 10 things you have listed there are entirely predictable. Indeed, the emergency procedures were designed to handle them and simply haven't coped.

They were unlucky that the tsunami was slightly worse than they had planned for, which washed away the diesel backup generators. Backups for those generators were quickly brought in, though.

OTOH, they have been very lucky that no aftershocks have caused any tsunamis (yet). If that happened right now then they are screwed.

I haven't seen any evidence of the last two occurring.
Not valid at all, except that I know some people in that situation like to purposely ask jarring questions to see how one will respond to pressure. It may or may not have been condescending.
For the record that's not really true. By the time Windows ME came out windows development had been split into two pieces. There was the Shell group that was consolidated under Brad Silverberg. And then there was the core operating system group that was under Jim Allchin. So Windows ME actually was the work of the shell group being grafted onto what was still Windows 98. So the reason it sucks so much was because it really wasn't designed by anyone. Microsoft realized they needed a consumer OS so they put together the pieces they had as quickly as possible. Boxed them up and shoved them out the door.
Argentina is incredibly racist, although it was not immediately obvious to me as a white guy. I don't know how racist Chile is. Brazil is the least racist place I've ever been.
One of the things that Indian law got right was its older patent law on drugs. The way it used to work was this: you could patent the process of making a particular drug, not the chemical composition of the drug itself. If you could build the same or a better product for cheap using a different process, good for you, and good for everybody else. In most other fields that would be called innovation and good entrepreneurship. I think the main if not the principal point of IP laws is to encourage innovation, technological advance and entrepreneurship.

Unfortunately the older market leveling laws rub a significantly large class of free-market proponents the wrong way, at least the most vocal and politically relevant ones.

But back to the laws, a popular counterargument has been that the existing laws encourage research whereas the older ones did not. I used to be sold on that line of reasoning till my exposure to the conduct of drug development and research. In US they are almost always always government funded.
That's going to be tricky - they would have to get nearly all IE6/7/8 users updated, and reverse Chrome's growth and convert back a number of Firefox and Chrome users, if they want to IE9 to outnumber Firefox+Chrome. See http://gs.statcounter.com/
I know I'm just one data point, but I've been quite happy with OpenBSD as my primary OS for over 7 years.

I'm running Debian on a spare laptop for "common Linux distro" testing purposes, but am continually annoyed by it.
Why bother [pressing on with her pitch]?

It might well have seemed like the most diplomatic path out of the room.

One might also make allowance for shock. When you're stunned, a natural reaction is to fall back on the script.

If I might dare to speculate further... One wonders how easy it is to know just when to walk out. I'm a man, a straight man, a clueless straight man, so I have no real first-hand idea of what it's like to be hit on all the time. But my understanding is that women get hit on a lot. Like, really a lot. Depending on the woman and the circumstances, one might even use the word "constantly". So one imagines that few women in tech can afford to have a hard-and-fast "if you hit on me I'll walk out in a huff" rule. Instead, one imagines that at one time or another every woman has felt that "nauseous" feeling of being hit on against her wishes. And that "at one time or another" can sometimes mean "several times per day".

And I'll bet it wears you down. Or toughens you up. Actually, I'll bet it does both, at exactly the same time. My guess is that the poor woman in that story was pressing forward, rolling her eyes inwardly, and feeling nauseous and miserable all at once. She kept going because she had trained herself to suppress that desire to retch, even though her nausea was her subconscious trying to tell her to flee the room.

But all I can really do is guess, of course.
it drives me nuts that I still have to write IE specific CSS.
The cool thing about building on the internet, is that you can build from anywhere!
ZFS on root using the guides on the FreeBSD wiki is deceptively easy to set up, and functions extremely well!
They had a kill switch and used it (the stopped the reactors as soon as the tsunami warning occurred).

That hasn't helped, though, because a nuclear reactor takes months/years to become "safe" (depending on exactly what you measure and consider safe)
Break Away From Anxiety And Fear
I like the idea of algorithmic logos/identities - concepts that aren't specific logos per se but instead provide a set of guidelines through which one's generated.
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I'm not sure where you get this number from. Given that Windows XP users aren't able to migrate to IE9 without upgrading their OS, I think we'll see the transition from IE<9 -> IE9 to be as slow as IE<7 -> IE7.
and Fukushima is the result of an earthquake 7 times more powerful than it was designed to survive

Actually the reactors came out of the earthquake quite well! It was that pesky tsunami taking out the backup generators to power the cooling systems that's really causing all these problems. And even then, new generators were brought in to fix the problem caused by the tsunami, but somehow nobody thought to check to make sure the new generators were compatible with the plant's power system before trucking them in. Oops.
Wikipedia has a table: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radiation_poisoning#Exposure_le...

According to that, fatal poisoning starts at around 2 Sv. According to the BBC, levels in the surrounding area are 8 mSv per hour, so not enough for acute poisoning given the timings, though not at all good for you. For comparison, a chest x-ray is 60 µSv.
It seems like everybody in this thread is saying "No duh, invest in Japan right now!"

The assumption is that the market will turn around, and anybody who buys into Japanese companies stands to make a lot of money. If this is the case, then why are the prices going down at all? Are other investors really that ignorant?
You should read both, "Getting Real" is more focus on starting
the project and getting the project done, Rework has some of that but it's more about efficiently running your business and marketing it. These book and the one by http://www.softwarebyrob.com/ are the best business books for startups, after that just get to work on code and design.
Earthquakes and the Bay
Without making a judgment one way or the other in regards to the people at Microsoft I'd make one point about what you said. The problem with looking at Microsoft through the lens of Windows NT to Windows 7 is that Microsoft consists of completely different people in those two eras. The people who spearheaded windows in the time of Windows NT and Windows 2000 were worth tens of millions of dollars by the time Vista went out to door. So most had long moved on to personal ventures.
Try compiling it on Windows using cygwin with x264 enabled... I literally spent an entire workday on it. It was not fun.
I have a right to choose what I put in my body.^ Companies that make drugs have a right to sell what they make, as long as they don't lie or defraud me. Simply by doing what it was created to do, the FDA is violating my rights as a patient, as well as the rights of all of those whose rights give rise to the drug companies (i.e., employees and shareholders).

Suppose that a new regulation passed that eliminated off-label prescriptions. Many will agree that the suffering and death that would result would be immense. (Just ask anyone who has a friend or relative that's benefited from an off-label drug.) Yet off-label prescriptions fly in the face of what the FDA does. What's going on here?

What we choose to do when we're sick ultimately rests on each of us, individually. We all need to be free to do the research ourselves or to delegate this responsibility to whomever each of us has trust in (a particular doctor, for example). The inevitable consequence of losing this freedom is that far more of us suffer and die today than would otherwise.

The valid function of the FDA (valid insofar as it is a source of scientific information) should be performed by a private organization like Consumer Reports, which has a great deal of authority, but is completely independent of both companies and the government. Consumer Reports doesn't use violence or the threat of violence to back itself up: the one thing that keeps it in business is trust.

Certainly, Consumer Reports doesn't offer its products or services for gratis. But many people find the service valuable enough to pay, and with our bodies, the stakes are much higher. Most people will pay for such a drug-vetting service, either directly or through the professional they delegate health decisions to.

We all want safe drugs, and the market is capable of producing and selling safe drugs to us. All we need is to be left free (meaning that the government does one thing only: prevent force and fraud), and verification organizations that pride themselves on true independence will arise.

^This right over your own body really is absolute (so long as you're not hurting someone else). I don't use or advocate for the use of illegal drugs, but it really is no one's business but your own. Yaron Brook recently summed it up best when he said, "You know you're in trouble when you declare war on inanimate objects."
Many Japanese investors will be pulling out of other countries' markets, by necessity. Of course this is too complex to be summed up in a few sentences, but obviously demand patterns will undergo a major shift.
Sigh. Usenet wasn't a chat room. Message board is a better analogy.
It was a perfect storm. The plant shut down, as it should have, and the batteries operated properly. However, the tsunami submerged the diesel backups, and the rest of the power grid had been knocked out by the earthquake, so they couldn't use external power.

The mobile generators deal was a fuckup, plain and simple. I think, had they known what the price of failure was, they would have found a way to make it work. I think they were overconfident in the safety systems they had in place.
I find myself torn between the "assholes are assholes, deal with it" and "woman have to deal with a lot of bullshit in tech" viewpoints.

I guess the reason for me is that I recognize that the best course of action for the individual woman is not to spend a lot of time complaining, but to recognize that tech is, for better or worse, a man's world, and the way to get ahead is to simply learn how the game works.

On the other hand I don't want to give assholes and their apologists a free pass. If it seems like some women are overly sensitive about this issue, it's important to realize it's because they are dealing with this shit all the time. It's similar to racism, and why reverse-racism claims by whites fall flat—because they already have every advantage, and they don't have the weight of that historical oppression on their shoulder. Does that mean that you have to be a little more sensitive to minorities and women? Sure, but with good reason. It's just basic interpersonal relations to understand that people may be sensitive about stereotypes that they deal with repeatedly.

That's where I think a lot of guys in tech go wrong—they want to believe in objective equality, so they trot out some examples of shit that guys have to deal with that women don't, which may be true, but it's irrelevant to the ultimate question of how common dynamics actually make people feel.
Thanks for the response!

> mostly due to "user error"

Can you elaborate on this? I'm aware of taking advantage of idiotic Firewire/USB drivers to inject code into a running system and the "evil maid" attack, but that's where my knowledge of WDE attacks stops.
Apple's wait time for bug fix approvals is annoying enough when it's a game for your phone. The fact that it can delay fixes for one's day-to-day working tools is completely unacceptable.
In the age of git and hg, why is a fork such a big deal? Code can still flow fluidly between multiple forks of a project with almost no friction. Some amount of forking is probably healthy in the long run, allowing a different part of the community to take the lead and head in their own direction.

In the extreme, if everyone works on an independent fork, and never merges, we lose the benefits of building "team-sized" projects. But that does not seem what is happening here.
"what appears to have happened is the tsunami flooded the basements where these emergency diesel generator connections are at. So, even though they brought in mobile units, new emergency diesel generators, to hook them up to run the safety systems, the basements were flooded, where they needed to do the hook-up."

http://www.democracynow.org/2011/3/14/japan_facing_biggest_c...
Are any of those things an actual standards? There is plenty of CSS that you need to write specifically for Chrome and Firefox.
"Unleashed" is probably a better word for what just happened.
I think the general belief is that they are being irrationally over-pessimistic due to panic over the daiichi situation, and that this can be exploited by people whose distance affords them a more cool-headed approach.

The market as a whole may be rational, but individuals in the middle of a tense situation probably won't be.
The problem is, Microsoft and the world don't particularly need an IE9 running on the latest and greatest OS, because there are many excellent, modern choices: Chrome, Firefox, Opera, Safari, etc. Microsoft is kind of wasting its time making an IE9 that focuses only on the latest platform.

On XP, Microsoft could add tons of value by supporting a solid IE9 update. This is where browser improvements are truly needed. Let that be where their engineering talent goes.

You're right that forward-looking IT groups are already well aware of how to deploy a modern browser. It's the other companies I'm wondering about.

Consider what would happen if Microsoft announced these plans, and basically said that in 6 months they would start deploying IE9 by default on XP "for security" (which would basically be legitimate). Once both IT managers and contractors alike can see Microsoft's plans, the writing would be on the wall, like a mini-Y2K; there would be plenty of people you could call to have your broken IE6-only web apps updated, probably enough to keep the prices reasonably low. Obviously I'm speculating on that, but my point is that Microsoft is in the best position to set this ball rolling. A lot of the problem could solve itself. Putting IE9 on another OS isn't really going to tempt anyone using these ancient PCs.
I don't think FF has 30% market share. I used these numbers.

http://marketshare.hitslink.com/report.aspx?qprid=0

Vista and Win7 have about 30%, and it will grow because you can't buy XP.
Okay, let's look at the donations that he has to disclose by law: "while Jobs gave $254,000. (His wife Laurene Powell Jobs, however, donated more than $502,915 federally" (Source: http://blogs.seattleweekly.com/dailyweekly/2011/01/bill_gate...).

What's more likely, that this person who intensely guards his personal life contributes only to politicians and supports no causes on his own or that he doesn't publicize anything about his personal life other than what he has to?

Everything I've read about Jobs points to him being very uncomfortable with having his life laid open for everyone to peer at and critique.
MIT researcher Deb Roy wanted to understand how his infant son learned language -- so he wired up his house with videocameras to catch every moment (with exceptions) of his son's life, then parsed 90,000 hours of home video to watch "gaaaa" slowly turn into "water." Astonishing, data-rich research with deep implications for how we learn.
I think part of the assumption is that people tend to trade less than perfectly when they think a radioactive cloud might be heading their way.

Right now a lot of the losses are due to uncertainty, people are factoring in risks of the unknown, potential worst case scenarios etc. If you buy in expecting the market to go back up, you are essentially betting the situation won't end up as bad as feared right now.
If you reason about functional code with appropriate assumptions: they don't lie. A big part of functional programming is making code easier to reason about in isolation.

If you want good procedural C code, read Lua. That shit is polished.
FWIW, there's no need to use a library.

perl -e '($pk=sub { print "$_[0]\n"; ($pk, sub{}) [$_[0]/1000] ($_[0]+1) }) -> (1)'
Or if the investor understands Bayes rule (and also knows that women are more likely to care for children than men, forming a prior).
This one deserves an upvote for at least citing a source.
People have been predicting the death of console gaming for decades. Console games were supposed to have been dead in the early 1980s, replaced by the explosive growth of affordable home computers. Then Nintendo released the NES.

Everything has its place and function. Specialized gaming hardware will likely outperform general mobile platforms for years to come. I think either our friends at Rovio expressed a simplistic view of gaming, or the nuances Vesterbacka and Co. expressed were lost in translation. Or, the author of the article removed any nuance that was expressed to make his job of writing an article with a clear theme easier.
too bad it doesn't support css3 gradients -- hopefully the IE6 gradient hacks will still work.
See firefox, inkscape as successful examples.

Firefox is a great alternative to a sucky dominant player (IE). Inkscape is a great alternative to expensive dominant players (graphic software). The problem with this case is that Skype is excellent, free and dominant. There is no incentive for users to switch, other than being open source (which appeals to people like you and me, but the masses don't care)
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Yeah I went down this route and lost a lot of time also. I ended up cross compiling it for windows on ubuntu and it has worked out well enough but even that took nearly 2 days to track down how to do it and then add the filters and plugins I needed (for doing things I took for granted as being easy like video rotations, overlays, etc).
Unsurprisingly, the guy who consistently dominates TopCoder is the champion.

http://www.topcoder.com/tc?module=MemberProfile&cr=10574...
I guess that was something that was pretty predicable too: a Tsunami floods basements - who would ever have thought of that!?

In their defense here though, I believe they got that pumped out pretty quickly.
Not offering an opinion one way or the other, but just noting that there really are some facts here that are motivating people.

The piece that rationalist engineers (I am one of them) tend to gloss over is that the public has historically been lied to, by experts about the dangers and difficulties of nuclear power -- all nuclear technology, really. X rays for shoe sizing. Atmospheric weapons tests. Ed Teller. The downside to accidents is large, and there's not much trust anymore. Some, but not much.

These are the facts that are perhaps engaging people's fears.

Given this history, for some people, the bank of "expert credibility" is overdrawn already. The classic nerd technique of argument from expertise is ineffective.
I went to one of their meetups about this but am just lost/uninspired as to what compelling story can be pulled from this data-set. It's just federal spending amounts broken down by very general categories and organizations which - without any other axes of data attached to them - make it hard to discern any kind of meaningful correlations.

You're also restricted to this and only this data set (and any data you can gather in the course of an interactive visualization's run).

http://whatwepayfor.com/
I think what we're saying maybe consistent with each other. Let me point to one of the records at the time:

http://www.winsupersite.com/article/reviews/the-road-to-gold...

A couple of key quotes:

"Previously, the Consumer Windows team had been lumped under Jim Allchin's Windows team, which was furiously working to complete Windows 2000, the company's enterprise OS product. But when it became obvious that a consumer version of Windows 2000 was out of the question, the stagnating Consumer Windows team finally got its wish: To create a final release in the Windows 9x product line"

and

"Just a year earlier, at the 1998 version of WinHEC, Bill Gates had announced that Windows 98 would be the end of the line."

There wasn't supposed to be a Win ME, and there shouldn't have been. Win 2000 was supposed to be the merge point of consumer and enterprise, but wasn't ready.

Maybe it was Silverberg that led the consumer team to create WinME, I don't know. What I do know is that most of the talent was working on the NT side by that point (not to say that the ME folks were hacks, but they weren't the strongest OS team MS had).
I don't see that as a giant conspiracy, I'm just convinced that most people do not have the knowledge necessary to have a useful opinion, don't think much, are easily swayed when people make them scared and running a political campaign using fear to galvanize the population into support is very effective.

So no, it's not a giant conspiracy, it's just normal human fear of the unknown...
Nikkei 300 is not widely used. Without qualification, "Nikkei" is taken to mean "Nikkei 225".
Here's a list of companies "from or based in Japan":
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_companies_of_Japan

Sony, Toyota, Honda, Nintendo, etc. Japanese companies like these that were a great investment a week ago are still a great investment. Only now the stock is less expensive because of a temporary panic. Smart money is buying up all the stock possible for these companies before they can rebound.