skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_X._Cringely

Robert X. Cringely is the pen name of both technology journalist Mark Stephens and a string of writers for a column in InfoWorld, the one-time weekly computer trade newspaper published by IDG.
Ask HN: Is there an online community for Hackers (in the YC sense)?
First, my definition for "hack" is something like this:

A method or process that allows people to navigate a system more efficiently.

So, "hacker" would be a person who makes a habit of thinking about and implementing those hacks.

Is anyone aware of a community, specifically geared toward that kind of hacker, anywhere on the interwebz? The actual content of the hacking could be anything (tech, cars, bikes, writing papers, whatever).

If there isn't really, can anyone think of a cool name for one? If it doesn't exist, I think it would be cool to set up.
The thing I find interesting is the FDA's blatant hostility towards electronic cigarettes despite their demonstrated health benefits over ordinary cigarettes (light or otherwise). [1] [2] Electronic cigarettes simply vaporize nicotine and deliver the nicotine straight to the user with at most trace amounts of tar and carcinogens. A number of studies and at least one meta-study [3] have all found that electronic cigarettes are much safer (for real humans, not smoking machines), and that smokers can quit more easily using electronic cigarettes than with nicotine patches or gum. Why this agency, which is entrusted with protecting the public health, is hell-bent on keeping smokers on regular cigarettes rather than their safer alternative is beyond me.

[1] http://articles.latimes.com/2010/sep/10/science/la-sci-e-cig...

[2] www.hsph.harvard.edu/centers-institutes/population-development/files/article.jphp.pdf

[3] http://www.biomedcentral.com/1741-7015/7/36/abstract
The world's most typical person - great little video
I tend to agree...but would you apply that statement to the Bill and Melinda Gates foundation as well?
Structure and Interpretation of Music Concepts
Best Practices: Annual CEO Expense Audit
You are on the right track. As far as I understand, if you're long for one delivery (e.g. for March) and then "roll over" you're selling the delivery for March to somebody else and that one has to actually take over the oil scheduled for March delivery. The commodity can't just disappear. The only ones who wouldn't have to receive the contracted goods would be the original sellers. If the price raises, that means that the sellers would lose the money by buying the contracts back near the expiration of the contract. As far as I understand, the oil is constantly delivered even when the prices rise and the article author is just confused, so his conclusions are invalid.
Thanks! And sorry for the high pitch squeal, our web dev/hacker extraordinaire is working on it as we speak.
The question is also, and I didn't make it clear enough in my original post:

"Wait, they need boron?"

Boron is a neutron absorber, and is therefore used to control the fission rate. You add boron when you're afraid of the fission rate getting out of control (e.g. Chernobyl). This is a legitimate concern here for two reasons:

1) A BWR is significantly more reactive (conducive to a high fission rate) at cold zero power than at hot full power, because cold water is a better neutron moderator than steam.

2) Xenon-135 and Samarium-149 are by-products of nuclear fission that have an effect on reactivity similar to boron. Their half-lives are on the order of hours, so when you crank down the fission rate, a couple hours later you also crank down the concentrations of Xe-135 and Sm-149, which, if you're not careful, can cause the reactor to go supercritical (and possibly prompt supercritical - a form of criticality in which everything happens approximately a thousand times faster - pretty much the worst-case reactivity excursion scenario) again a few hours after shutdown.

So, basically, you need enough negative reactivity from somewhere, either control rods or borated water, to counteract these two reactivity insertions. The Japanese reactor is almost certainly designed so that inserting all of the control rods into the core will kill any and all reactivity increases after shutdown.

What is most likely occurring is that there is very little nuclear fission inside the reactor right now. All the power inside the reactor is coming from decaying fission products, and it's probably on the order of kilowatts, it's just that the when the flow rate through the core drops from gallons per second to essentially nothing, a few kilowatts per cubic foot will get you pretty damn hot pretty damn quick. At this point some of the fuel rods have probably failed as well (if not melted), so the water in the reactor may be nastier than usual.

Unless the control rods have failed or are in the process of failing, I doubt that boron is even necessary for reactivity control, except as insurance. My educated guess is that their problems are entirely thermal- and containment-related, and that there is no danger of a reactivity accident, since a xenon transient or a condensation transient would have run its course by now, so the control rods probably have enough reactivity worth to keep the reactor subcritical indefinitely.
Someone's under the impression that the US Navy is capable of doing whatever they want, whenever they want. In actuality, it took a very long time for US-Japanese relations to get to the point where the Navy would be able to station a nuclear-powered aircraft carrier, the USS George Washington, at the fleet activities base in Yokosuka. Prior to that, only the conventional carriers Midway, Independence and Kitty Hawk were allowed, and nuclear-powered carriers making a port of call were sometimes diverted due to tensions with the civilian population. Nuclear weapons themselves were banned and the forward carriers were weaponized at sea, in secret, from other vessels.

So, no, given the state of relations between the countries and the general lack of experience in civilian application, not to mention the improbability of possessing the resources, I'd highly doubt that the US Navy would be instrumental in assisting the qualified and experienced staff at a nuclear power plant located in a highly developed country such as Japan. I think the author was just throwing that in there to add some ominous weight to his argument.
> Well what's the point of letting large numbers of people in if it fails to make those already here better off?

So in your view, it doesn't matter if the immigrants themselves are better off?

> Also, considering issues like fresh water and food security, the country is in fact full.

No it isn't. The EU has 820,000 km2 of arable land and 1,900 km3 of renewable water resources, and is self-sufficient in terms of food and water for a population of 490 million.

The US, on the other hand, has 1,650,000 km2 of arable land and 3,000 km3 of renewable water, and only has a population of 310 million. The US could easily support a population of 500 million or more without needing to import water or food.
I've just listened to the mp3 linked from the page (http://kmkeen.com/tmp/awkbient.mp3) and I've heard the sounds I've described. I hear it like "(loud:) dong (quieter:) brrr-brrr-bbrrr (loud:) dong (quieter:) brrr-brrr-brrr (loud:) dong"
The brr-brr sounds are the unpleasant ones. I hear them also when listening to wav made by lame --decode of mp3.
All sorts of things like this were tried 70-100 years ago. The results were murderous.
A meltdown is also not a doomsday event - the main bad things that happen are that the reactor goes out of service and that you have to somehow scrape a bunch of nuclear reactor slag off the bottom of the containment vessel.
How to Care for a Standard Poodle
That Poodle is hypoallergenic. This canine, especially the standard size, has the most expensive grooming requirements of almost all breeds, whether the dog is actually shown professionally or not. Their hair is different than other breed a
Oreo/Chocochip Cookies, YouTube Creators & The Democratization of Innovation
Standard Poodle Breed Information
Standard Poodle profile Other names Pudle Caniche Barbone Breed Group: Non-Sporting Weight: male:20-32 kg;female:20-27 kg Height: 15-21 inches Color(s): any solid color Life expectancy 10-13 years Litter size 3-8 Standard Poodle History The
European startups helping you make the most of SXSW
Thanks, turns out its just a few blocks away.
fuck everything about shitty government monopolies on dangerous aging infrastructure. not politically popular = not getting renovated this year! (ad infinitum)
I think any community of sufficiently bright folks with a common interest will tend to fit your description. I've belonged to a few such forums over the years. However, I'm more into the 'overthrow the existing system' form of hacking. Not exactly the way to win friends and all that (which has led to me leaving some of those communities, not always, er, voluntarily).
Whew, I almost got a heart attack reading the headline. As long as it's compatible with my Shure EC2 headphones, I don't care what the headphone jack looks like. Still remember the iPhone 1 headphone jack fiasco ...
Google 404 page with a typo in the title
Using disasters as an opportunity for marketing/promoting doesn't feel right to me (given swipegood is a for profit business)
How to always be right.
Three Mile Island
Interactive Shadow Art Using Browser Shadow Techniques
The term is associated in public mind with the 2 most notorious accidents in recent memory - 3 Mile Island, in the United States, in 1979, and Chernobyl, in Ukraine, 7 years later.

You can think of the core of a Boiling Water Reactor (BWR), such as the ones at Fukushima Daiichi, as a massive version of the electrical element you may have in your kettle.
Twitters secret business case
15.000$ for a verified account
+ 50c for each follower (of such a verified account)
Creating Retro Photo Effects Tutorial by Anthony Pillos
The term is associated in public mind with the 2 most notorious accidents in recent memory - 3 Mile Island, in the United States, in 1979, and Chernobyl, in Ukraine, 7 years later.
I'm not sure why you think this lattice method does not teach place value. The page you linked to doesn't explain (at all) why it works, sure, but the method is just a clever way of notating place. I would expect any good teacher to get his or her students to understand that, and not just mindlessly fill in numbers.
Corporate-Funded Online 'Astroturfing'
Thanks for this - this is good advice. Using a port over 1023 doesn't make sense and isn't necessary - the idea is to just change the port from the normal 22. Thanks!
Why the iPad 3 will be buttonless (VIDEO)
I need a great programmer in Los Angeles for a startup
I need a great programmer in Los Angeles for a startup. Would anybody be interested?? I need help think its going to be huge.... Please contact me @ malachi409@gmail.com thanks
I've once heard that a typical barrel of oil trades hands (ownership) 30 times before it makes it into your gas tank.

20 of those times nothing is transported, refined, added... Meaning it was pure speculation buy/sells.

And when you remove that speculation, prices go down 50%.
I think the point wasn't that a 4.5gb installation should be quick. It was that it shouldn't require a 4.5gb installation if all you want is gcc. More like a 50MB installation.
Read my comment here:

http://news.ycombinator.org/item?id=2316851

It's going to take a couple days for any nuclear reactor to burn off decay heat.
"teach them to estimate"

I suspect that the 'calculator age' has caused kids (and kids that have now grown up to be parents) and maybe educators to over-value an increase in significant digits in calculations. It's interesting that the method of multiplication illustrated in the article is referred to as 'new' since when you use a slide rule, you operate in this way anyway. And to echo Hans Bethe, this is often "good enough".
Chernobyl also was a _bona fide_ reactivity excursion - a nuclear-driven steam explosion literally blew the core apart and spewed radioactive particulates into the atmosphere.

This is just built-up decay heat and chemical reactions.
I don't think renovating a nuclear power is difficult to stir up popular support for if the experts want it renovated badly. I doubt private industry would have had any more foresight.
It doesn't have a concrete containment dome. It's got a steel containment vessel surrounding the main reactor vessel, though.
Why it won't: requires two fully functional hands to operate.
Why do you call gas that which is not gas?
My Life As a Juvenile Delinquent
All those looking for information on Japanese Plant might want to look here
Mapping the Nation’s Well-Being
Thoughts on Amazon’s Android App Store
> Has it's origins in the Christian Bible - Acts 4:34-35.

If you're suggesting that we should accept something because it is in the Christian Bible, you're suggesting that we should accept anything in said bible. (Why? Because your argument for that thing applies to everything in said bible.) Moreover, surely you accept everything in said bible.
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Wicked! I may try to embed your work inside my JRuby/Mirah/Java VST bridge [1] when I'll have more time.

Would be amazing to reuse your syntax inside a VST plugin, to write arpeggiators, drum patterns or other similar things.

Thanks for sharing!

[1] https://github.com/thbar/opaz-plugdk
RateMySpeaker seems like a great idea ! That could be really useful to detect great underrated speakers as well as a good way to call out overrated speakers . That data must be precious for event organizers IMO
I went to the page and was confused. I may not be as chat savvy as some but I didn't know what I was meant to enter in that box on the front page.

Then I assume we are chatting based on Twitter hashtags?

I know it seems trivial but stating that in a short sentence somewhere on the page would make all the difference.

I believe this will really help lower the barrier for entry.
OpenSUSE thinking about naming change
Everyone thinks their idea will be huge. You will be better served by this community if you do the following:

1. Explain your idea. Give enough info so a person can determine if they have any interest at all in helping you from reading the post alone. You won't find decent resources the way it's written now.

2. Participate in the community a bit and establish some credibility. This account created less than an hour ago, combined with the very generic request, harms more than helps your credibility. The only way to overcome this is to provide the necessary info so you don't come across as completely naive.

3. Assuming you're going to say something like "this is totally hot and unique and it's impossible for me to share it with the world..." --- well, good luck! Maybe give some background info on YOU and YOUR successes.

4. Recognize that right now developers and designers are in very high demand and most of the good developers and designers are either fully utilized on their own projects or someone else's project that was able to sell them convincingly. If you expect to draw in these limited resources, you'll need to do the same.

This response is meant to help you, please take it as such. Good luck.
> On the other hand, by some definitions Norway is socialist and things seem to have worked out pretty good there.

Anything works with a small population of Scandanavians.
Whoever downvotes this also believes that 9/11 incident was an accident. It was cleverly crafted as well.
Making of Crash Bandicoot - GOOL
In economics, this is called a Pareto improvement: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pareto_efficiency

The idea is that if there are inefficiencies in a system (or market), we can create win-win situations by reducing the inefficiencies.

A classic and useful example of this is comparative advantage and opportunity cost (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparative_advantage). Both parties can gain if they have different relative efficiencies, even if one party has an overall production advantage. (This is why countries will import goods and services they could produce domestically - it frees up resources to produce other stuff that they can produce more of.)

This is because it is inefficient to be good at everything you are good at all at once - the opportunity cost is too high relative to importing from someone else.

For instance, you may be better at coding (for instance, in Ruby or Python) and creating HTML/CSS from PSDs than anyone else, but since creating HTML/CSS from PSDs takes away time from coding, you can outsource the HTML/CSS creation to someone who may be slightly slower than you, but that's OK, since the opportunity cost for you is worth it: more time to code.

So - if you want to create a long-term win-win situation with another party - you should find out what you can produce for a relatively lower opportunity cost than they can, and then sell it to them. You will win, and they will win.
Stack Exchange CEO: "Nobody Wants To Find Yahoo Answers In Their Search Results"
I would expect any good teacher to get his or her students to understand that

That's not how I've seen it used. I've seen it used as a procedure for getting the answer. Compare that to the method shown in the npr link, first line: the numerals are 2 and 3, but the numbers multiplied 20 and 30. That's what I mean by teaching place value.

In the the old-school method I learned, we respected place-value by indenting (from the right), optionally writing the zeros.
StumbleUpon founder Garrett Camp about SXSW and new SU app coming "soon."
The Japan quake (8.9) was over 900 times more powerful than Northridge (6.7).

Each point on the Richter scale is a 30x increase in energy.
Everyone, hear the post above.

Damn little arrows and imprecise HTC touchscreens... downvoted you by mistake
Edward Tenner describes the nerve-wracking experience of becoming a TED speaker
The dollar, the RMB and the euro?
Don't forget about the other the excellent live music programming environment written in Clojure - Overtone http://project-overtone.org/
All the Aggregation That’s Fit to Aggregate
It's not really focal to the discussion at hand, but yes, I would like for everything everybody says in a public forum attached to them.

I'm an AVID defender of free speech, and have run a number of 'safe haven' forums in the past which naturally drew a number of trolls. I don't have a problem with trolling, even when it gets sadistic, personal and crosses every line that it can -- most people do.

The general cure for that is the lack of anonymity. It won't happen to the roguish young in many cases, but for many people, knowing that it CAN be tracked back to them eventually is enough to keep the really bad attacks out of play.
Dispatch from SXSW: Have Startups Become a Fetish?
They don't want to control reactivity anymore, they likely want to kill the reactor core completely in order to not take any risks (not just to keep the core subcritical, but to avoid it simply melting as well, if the pumps did not work they don't have the waterflow they need, so the next option is to end the core fast). And for that, boron is the best tool.
where the builders think up the name first and then try to find a reason it should be called that

How about federal legislation?
"In situations like this you have to help people figure out for themselves where their own internal model is flaky. Sometimes that takes a while."

If you are any good at this, please write a book. I would pay a handsome some for even just incremental improvement in this skill.

My day is filled with people going around acting as if 2 + 2 = 5. Thus far my only strategy is to say, "Are you sure it's 5? I'm pretty sure it's 4." Repeat over and over for years until people adopt the new "2 + 2 = 4" mental model and forget I'd been saying it for years...
So twitter used developers to boost adoption (covering a UX deficiency) and market penetration, then when they got universally known (and powerful enough to build their own stuff now) they kicked devs in the ass?

Classy move, twitter.
What is the significance of boron in the seawater?

(It just reads like one of those understated but extremely important bits you find in these sorts of alerts :-| )
Why is this getting downvoted? It was the first thing that came to my mind too. Not only is the country prone to earthquakes, but as I understand, several of their power stations are built right on the east coast.

It's possible to make a building like a skyscraper fairly earthquake proof, but is it really possible to make things like nuclear power stations earthquake proof? Assuming the building is made to 'wobble', wouldn't that wreak havoc on the cooling systems and other gear inside?
I started building something similar a while back called music compojure. Anyone who is interested in algorithmic composition in Clojure may wish to look at the notation I came up with for comparison (see the examples directory on github). Though not perfect, it's very flexible and I'm quite pleased with some of the ideas in it. The code is perhaps maybe nearly useful. It produces midi files.

https://github.com/mhowlett/music-compojure
Thank you for replying!

I agree that any community of smart people with a common interest will have some hackers, but I would think that the goal of that community is to master the common interest, and not "hacking" itself. For example, I assume that the goal of a community based on road bicycles would be to become extremely knowledgeable and handy with those road bikes, and not necessarily to become proficient in the versatile art of "hacking."

I think you bring up a great point though! Clearly identifying the common interest around which a community is built is a prerequisite to getting the smart, motivated people to work hard to make the community successful.

Thanks!
Pixie Hairstyles
Pixie haircut is the very short hairstyle. Pixie haircut with spiky bangs is very great and cute hairstyle. Pixie hairstyle is very easy to manage.
More like when third-party apps get good enough, Twitter acquires one and boots the rest.
IPad 2 release spells a bleak 2011 for other tablet makers
No, quite literally and exactly, the exchange does not buy or sell and only connects buyers to sellers. If you buy a wheat contract, then that means that someone sold one. Maybe the Goldman Sachs fund is long only, but the exchange is not. Again, the number long contracts and short contracts are equal. Again, for all those long Goldman Sachs fund contracts, there has to be someone selling a short contract.
You know, I didn't even notice the new headphone jack design, but that's very clever. The iPad 2 is a very thin device; it's frankly amazing how they fit everything into this case. It might not be the most technically powerful device on the market but it's the feel of the device, not the specs, that are impressive. There is a bit of the headphone plug exposed when you have some plugged in, but touching it doesn't produce any sound issues, so I imagine this is a nonissue.
This comment struck me as a bit ugly. Here is why.

First, it includes the word "evangelical", but nothing in the HR requirements says, "You must also spread the Word to those you help." I understand that some sects of evangelical Christians have been getting into the news for the last 10 years in negative ways (and I understand the reaction), but I have not yet seen a relationship between those extremists and this group.

Second, it promotes hate against a group. Why did you think this statement was important or relevant? You pose it, and the question that comes to mind is, "Wait... should we care?"

If you are going to post about a charity's effectiveness, post something relevant, such as documentation about where the money is going, what actions the group has actually taken. What a sad world when it is acceptable -- an upvoted comment! -- to judge a group by their religious preference rather than by their actions.
But it is somewhat amusing to me that some of the people who argue rabidly against socialism are proud of the fact that they do accept everything in the Bible.
Japan Earthquake predicted