skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I appreciated the CEO of your life analogy - with the knowledge that you are ultimately responsible for your own success and the allocation of your own assets.
It was just announced in a press conference that I caught live on NHK that they were planning on resuming operations shortly.

The AP article seems to have been written prior to this conference.
There was some looting during the 2008 earthquake, but not really that much upon doing more research. They did have significant issues with price gouging on essential goods like food/water/blanknets etc. The way the NPR worded it, and the chinese nationals they got sounds bites from made it easy to jump to the wrong conclusions...
Because the guy made an incorrect assumption before he had the proper data, or something else? Most people did that, it's obviously not an unfixable problem. Also, can't we just ask some guy who was working at the plant if there is a third stage? How does this guy know that it hasn't been upgraded?
EDIT2: from the comments and buzz around HN, i feel like the focus this year has been much around the 150k. ppl should keep in mind the great projects that came out of YC, when there was no "easy 150k"
I agree the word "abandon" sounds too final. It sounds like they've given up on it which is not true. I think a non-sensationalist headline would say workers have "pulled away".
I believe the hydrogen that accumulates contains some radition (although mostly harmless) itself: http://mitnse.com/2011/03/15/explanation-of-hydrogen-explosi... (sixth paragraph)
My co-founder left my project about 2 weeks as well. It would be great to connect. Connect with me at gsawhney at vt dot edu.
How critical is it to have a technical founder? and what constitutes technical? I've applied this year with a team but none of us are competent programmers.

Thats not to say we're incompetent. Two of us have the beginner knowledge of university intro courses, but not the level of knowledge we would need to actually create our project.

Is our current ignorance the kind of thing that will get us ignored or overlooked?

And while you were there did you hear of any other teams with non-technical founders?

This is my biggest worry so I'd be interested to get more info.
What should a developer know before building a public website?
They ruled out using helicopters as anything but a last resort in the press conference. They said it was too risky to dump lots of water on the already fragile reactors.
"Run" is a somewhat subjective term. I used to work on implementing EMR/EHR systems for radiology groups within hospitals. Twice (separate states, separate hospital systems) I arrived onsite to find that all of the radiologists had quite en masse over the implementation of one of our systems.
Kyodo News reported that staff had vacated the control room due to high levels of radioactivity. If that is not "abandoning" then it is pretty close to it.

http://news.blogs.cnn.com/2011/03/15/japan-quake-live-blog-f... (scroll down or search for "control" in the postings)
Your explanation below does not support the claim you make here.

Politely disregarding an unintentional exposure is rather different from being perved at repeatedly by a sexual predator.
Which is exactly what I refered to in my post. sigh
Here you go:

Original: http://pastebin.com/UnCYDKbu

Modified: http://pastebin.com/1BAV3A4s

Good online tool to compare both: http://text-compare.com/

Sorry, the tool above doesn't offer a direct link to the diff, so you'll have to do the copy/paste by yourself. Or you could use pastebin's own diff, but it's less clear, in my opinion: http://pastebin.com/diff.php?i=1BAV3A4s
"Practice makes permanent."
(Sorry in advance if this is a stupid question or I didn't pick up on a major point) Can anyone explain how they're going to stop whatever is going wrong without any workers there?
Headline is false (possibly mistranslation).

According to http://thelede.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/03/15/latest-updates-o...:

11:13 P.M. (EST) Core Group of Workers Remain at Plant
The Times’s Hiroko Tabuchi reports that a small group of workers remains at the Fukushima Daiichi plant, contrary to what an English translation of the chief cabinet secretary’s remarks had implied.

Edit: http://live.reuters.com/Event/Japan_earthquake2 is also reporting that workers are (back) in. Also NHK is clearly reporting that the chief secretary misspoke radiation levels and used milli instead of micro.
via @W7VOA

"S. Korea to ship boric acid to help Japan stabilize nuclear reactors."
You could have complained to me. I put up some simple examples in the github:

https://github.com/luispedro/milk

The main documentation for the package is actually at:

http://packages.python.org/milk/
Project Lambda is about adding closures to the Java language. Method handles are part of the Da Vinci Machine Project (http://wikis.sun.com/display/mlvm/Home) which is at least partially supported in JDK 7.
They earlier raised the legal radiation limit that workers can be exposed to from 100mSv to 250mSv.

Readings at the gates were 800uSv 30 or so minutes ago when the suspension was announced.
I'm having a hard time reconciling patio11's article with more recent reports of people walking 60km to get home, all food being gone from all stores, people living in Apple stores, and the government ordering a 30km evacuation zone around nuclear power plants.

Maybe his point was "it could have been a lot worse", but I read it more like "everything went as planned and life went on without missing more than a few beats". The latter certainly doesn't seem to be the case.
I completely agree with this. I don't understand how an email from a Moviefone employee (just trying to do his/her job the way it works in their industry) asking for help from a sister site gets blown into AOL censoring TC.

It seems like a more appropriate response would have been to email the Moviefone person back with a, "sorry, that's not how we do things here."
Whats their reasoning for the shares that were not vested transferring to the other remaining players. Wouldn't they just be unvested and thus irrelevant.

If not I'd like to hear their reasoning on this.

I think the three of you would have a higher percentage of the available shares (since some would have been unvested when others left) but still the same number you were originally granted.

Simple example each of you got 10 shares of a possible 70.
Since 4 of the people left without vesting you should now have 10 of 30 possible.
Well just take the battery out then, lol
Algorithms for text/string searching
I'd be more interested to see "Here's Why Developers Are Scaling Twitter".
I think you'll find that vending machines in the United States can be unlocked with a key just as easily as vending machines in Japan. The distinction in the inventorspot.com article is that in Japan the keys are made available to the landords/administrators of the property.

In the US, I imagine folks would just reuse the axe provided with the fire extinguisher, and not hassle over a key in a time of emergency.
Can you imagine a less inflammatory "tone it down" e-mail from AOL? If I'm AOL here, and I want to make it clear to all the Techcrunch readers that TC is going to keep its own voice, I set up exactly this kind of scenario, or high-five the TC employee that does. Either that or this is just another horseshit TC post that has no business on HN.
And immediately following that quote: "so if you have good reasons not to change anything that’s fine"

It sounds like they expected nothing and this was a CYA email, knowing TechCrunch would not comply, but allowing them to say, "We tried."
The point that crime like theft is lower in Japan is totally valid, but I can promise you people do lock their bikes---bike theft is very common. You might not have noticed it because most bike locks come built into the bikes themselves. I don't think I've ever seen those kinds of locks in North America.

Furthermore, anyone who has a mountain bike or crossbike does chain them to posts with 1/2" steel chains. The far more common "mama-chari" type bikes are the ones with the built-in locks.
(sigh) I guess I need to move to Wilmington (or back to CA.)

A fellow HNer/friend mentioned this: https://epbfi.com/internet/

Chattanooga TN offering 1gbps service for $350/mo.
Well, you have to admit that story is quite different from Feynman's, and has nothing to do with "the times" changing.
Unfortunately, this version is not as entertaining to read. It does seem much more accurate, though.
Open Source Cocoa Controls for your iOS/Mac apps
I think it is high level of "human capital" plus an understanding that your society is a cooperative venture. I am not sure, but I would hazard that most Japanese are highly literate, brought up to behave well, and that there is actually a social contract in force. I am willing to bet just a little bit of money that your average high school grad (i.e. "working class") Japanese person would rival our state college educated class for both high levels of good behavior and knowledge. I bet there would be similar behavior in the Scandinavian countries.

And, interestingly, everyone would expect the students at a state college or better to behave just like the Japanese.

Really, the fact that there is such widespread poverty, thuggery, and low educational levels in the US is just plain embarrassing. That you can't trust the people you live around is the weird thing, not that you can.
You don't need a helicopter to deliver boric acid into the reactors.
"Filed under: Hot Topic"

heh heh
This is so last year's question for the TSA.

The new question is why the mainstream press isn't repeatedly asking the TSA why they are suddenly appearing in train and bus stations as well as randomly shutting down bridges for car searches? It's happened often yet few know about it.
Indeed, I wouldn't expect to know about this wrinkle and I wouldn't expect an average person to know about it.

But I would expect a (supposed) expert in nuclear power who writes an article titled "why I am not worried" to know about this.

And while I am not an expert, I do know enough to know spent fuel has to be considered part of the system of a nuclear power plant and thus keeping it safe is part of keeping the entire plant safe.
As the parsing topic has been bouncing around the past couple of days and especially as it has turned to composability of grammars I've been waiting for someone to say "parser combinator", in the style of Parsec in Haskell. I'm not that experienced in parsing, but couldn't a parser combinator approach do this almost trivially? You might have to add a bit of a concept of an escaping layer in the general case (the specific case shown is OK because a bare } is never legal in SQL but you can't count on that in general) but that doesn't seem like a terrible addition. After all, the entire purpose of parser combinators is by definition to build a grammar/parser up from atomic parsing elements and combine them into larger ones. In this case it would be something like this fragment:

assignment = do
varname <- legal_variable_name -- defined elsewhere
_ <- char '='
exp <- expression
_ <- statementTerminator
return $ Assignment varname exp -- returns the corresponding AST node

-- a prioritized list of all possible expressions, each
-- thing in the oneOf is itself a parser expression,
-- obviously missing a lot
expression = oneOf [number, string, queryExpression, ...]

queryExpression = do
_ <- char '{'
sqlValue <- sqlLanguageSelectStatement -- defined elsewhere
_ <- char '}'
return $ QueryExpression sqlValue

although the details would vary wildly depending on the grammars in question, and as clean as this looks it's oversimplified, though parser combinators do seem to offer powerful tools for keeping your grammars clean if you use them properly and keep things well-factored just as you would any other code. (The use of the underscore is a clear way to express "I'm throwing away this value"; they are optional but I find they make my grammars more explicit. YMMV. Also if we were really going to do this there are some tweaks I'd at least consider, like explicitly terminating the sqlLanguageSelectStatement with a semicolon or something.)

This really should have come up before now, so I'm assuming there's some blinding flaw in this; could someone enlighten me? (One thing that leaps to mind is that they may not be powerful enough for many cases, I don't know. I've certainly used them to implement arithmetic precedence so I know that's not an intrinsic problem but I have not pushed them to their limits.)
Ask HN: Feedback on ShopSidekick, our app for in-store shopping
I and 'amattn' built ShopSidekick, an app that helps you shop in stores. It's the only app that can scan proprietary shelf barcodes at Best Buy and Walmart (we're working on more stores), which in turn enables a real-time-updating interface.

No need to hunt for the UPC; just point your phone at the shelf to get at-a-glance info. (Of course detailed info is a touch away.)

The goal is to help you shop smarter at stores. 94% of retail in the US is still at brick-and-mortar stores and an increasing number of people research online, then buy 'offline'. We want to make this process as easy as glancing at the shelf, which you already do.

Sorry, currently it's iPhone only, but an Android version is planned. I'm an Android user myself.

Would love your feedback. 3 years ago (wow, that long?) it was a similar Ask-HN that gave me tons of direction on where to go with my then-startup, Dabbleboard.

http://shopsidekick.com

Thanks!
Adobe caves in to Apple and Introduces Flash Converter
Here you go http://packages.python.org/milk/ The link was right there at the bottom of the Github page. Some of the links from doc to the src code does not work though, but one can always browse the Github repository directly.

@luispedro I did not see your reply, hence the duplication. I see that Milk isnt doing too well on pca (11 times slower than the best performer). From the code it seems you are importing numpy.linalg. I think if you import scipy.linalg your results will be better without any change to the algorithm (unless you have built numpy with ATLAS or MKL).

Scipy.linalg links with underlying BLAS if its avaliable whereas the standard build of numpy implements linalg on its own (but it is possible to override that). Second point, I think for large data sets you are better of giving an api for computing an user specified number of principal components rather than all of them. Thirdly, if you find limiting yourself to gcc not too restrictive, you can stick with stl style algos in place of c++ looping. The advantage is that you will get parallelism for free http://gcc.gnu.org/onlinedocs/libstdc++/manual/parallel_mode...
This (ha! Always wanted to say that; always hated those who say it...).

The Unix philosophy breaks down where it should: where you aren't trying to get something done in a few keystrokes at the command line. Even when you aren't, the Unix philosophy works pretty well servicing low-level portions of a program. For example, any spell checker is Unix-y and many programs have a spell checker.
Inside Mac OS X 10.7 Lion: New WiFi Diagnostics tool
The problem people seem to have is that "abandon" implies "everyone has left and no-one will ever come back", and that the plant will be left, unattended, to its fate. While various articles seem to actually be saying "people left temporarily, but will be coming back" and that efforts will continue to deal with the problem.
While not a literal "pipe", the $EDITOR and $VISUAL shell conventions are pretty much the same concept applied to larger programs.

And of course, which I think you were saying with your comment on extensibility, vim and emacs are well-designed for sending content out to a shell for processing (spell-check is a common example) and retrieving the results. ("!!" in vim)
Clickable:

http://shopsidekick.com/learnmore

http://youtube.com/watch?v=r1pC1NtDAoU
Your last link unreadable.

I think one would need a side-by-side comparison.
Apparently discussing code on Hacker News is never off-topic ;)
That was yesterdays news. Those ~50 remaining all evacuated apparently.

Also, the Wikipedia "Timeline of Fukushima nuclear accidents" has been reliable for the latest updates - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_the_Fukushima_nucle...
I'd trust them a bit more if they said 'no' and spent their time posting newsworthy articles instead of feigning outrage to get a bit of attention.
Also, because there are fewer poor people, there are fewer people growing up without access to decent family and educational training and enculturation.
Union of Concerned Scientists daily Fukushima conference call March 15
If your job requires a lot of travel, then short of a radical career change (itself, a pretty unreasonable demand)airplanes are your only viable choice.

But are you "forced" at gunpoint? Obviously not, but this is a ridiculously high standard to use when establishing whether someone is being compelled to do something.

If your boss says "you need to be in Dallas on Monday morning", you need to be in Dallas on Monday morning.
Indian governments Internet kill switch
Any child that cannot get around parental control software shouldn't be trying to read TechCrunch.
It isn't a major incentive, for interoperation but the government is sponsoring a contest for a web app that provides value to patients, providers, or researchers using patient-level data delivered through the SMART API. See the SMART platform challenge:

http://www.smartplatforms.org/challenge/

The reference platform data model is pretty limited but is an interesting start.
=SUM(SWF1:SWFn)
2011 Ford Wallpapers Pictures Reviews
Colleges Discriminate Against the Blind With Google Apps, Advocates Say
I would like to say: awesome!

And yes most of my left recursion fetish would be covered by an operator precedence parser/left corner parser
To me, the way they "love" nature, is a bit different form the nature I'm used to. Nature means a weekend walk in the park -meanwhile many riparian areas have simply been paved over. So the love for nature is a little different. It's more "human tamed nature". It's kind of like when humans (yama girls) outnumber trees that you know it's not really nature.

Agree with the rest though.
mitnse.com was registered just two days ago? With no track record what is the credibility of this site?

From whois:

Registered through: Automattic
Domain Name: MITNSE.COM
Created on: 13-Mar-11
Expires on: 13-Mar-12
Last Updated on: 13-Mar-11
Putting aside the fancy words, I agree.

Given the power of any computer (even those 30 years old), it's enormously powerful to be able to drop one segment of a pipe-chain and look at the output. Funny that I'm facing a similar issue now that some of the server world is going Javascript: "console.log(X);" doesn't necessarily tell you the whole story about X. Exchanging objects is 14% too complicated and anything more than 0% too complicated is too complicated.
Now you seem to be attributing safety in Japan not to monoculture but to /Japanese/ culture. Fair enough.

Yes I wasn't careful enough in my writing. I mean to say that monoculture allows you to optimize around your values. Lowest common denominator sounds too judgmental but I mean it in the set-theory kind of way. I probably should just have said "common values".

what would happen if 10 million Japanese moved to Bangladesh, making it more multicultural? Would it be a less "efficient" culture?

Yes, I think there would be certain generalizations that you could no longer depend on being true. I don't know what they would be. Maybe it would be better, maybe worse. Maybe it would be you would have to order a wider variety of food at your wedding to make everyone happy. I don't know. I would say that's a reduction in efficiency.

I am aware of racism here and I don't think it's good. I don't think Japanese companies are economically efficient but they pretty good at reflecting Japanese values. I eat a restricted diet and it's an inconvenience that people assume that I just eat the standard issue Japanese cuisine. A lot of people complain about that but I understand why it is that way.

I don't see what is so controversial about what I'm trying to say. I'm saying that having to always be tolerant for the way other people do things trades something off compared to living where everyone already does things mostly the way you would.
I've worked at home for getting close to 1.5 years now. I sometimes want to kick people who say they are jealous. In the end I would have a tough time going back to an office setting unless forced to. It takes discipline to not grab one of the guitars behind me, or run to the living room and play some PS3 since no one is watching.

Two things that have helped me are my windows and dogs. I work in the front corner of my house, I've positioned my desk so that I look out the front windows. I live on a somewhat busy street so it helps to see things moving outside. Then my dogs, they are pretty routine with their breaks. I'll take them out in the backyard and throw the tennis ball with them, this keeps me from thinking about work for a little bit. I also make sure to grab lunch with my coworkers once a week, plus my wife can tell when I've been 'locked up' too long so she will take me out.

As danudey said you always have this feeling like you should be working all the time. I work a LOT more now that I work at home. It's very tough to sometimes just go to the computer and check out the news on the weekend without wanting to tinker on work. The guilty feeling comes and goes when you have really productive days.

It probably helps a lot that I am married to force me to stick to a schedule and it will keep work as work and home as home. I also have a kid on the way, but it will present the challenge of now working at home with a wife and kid. Depending on how well it works or not I might move to a co-working facility in town.
What are government student loans?
College education is not cheap. Therefore, without a good college loan, students will be unable to attend college and will not be able to get a college degree. Obtaining government student loans is an option that is available to students and is beneficial as the rates are cheaper.
Fukushima workers withdraw after radiation spikes
A WYSIWYG HTML editor (as in Writely/Gmail) isn't quote the same as a general WYSIWYG document editor, though.

Unix programs, even GUI ones, share a ton of code, as you can easily see if you try to install an interesting GUI application like Shotwell or Digikam.

Heck, I've never written an Instant Messenger application, but I know that "libpurple" is the name for the IM component that most Linux chat programs use.

And hey, that's exactly how it is advertised:

http://developer.pidgin.im/wiki/WhatIsLibpurple

What is libpurple?

libpurple is intended to be the core of an IM program.
When using libpurple, you'll basically be writing a UI for this core chunk of code. Pidgin is a GTK+ frontend to libpurple, Finch is an ncurses frontend, and Adium is a Cocoa frontend.
I updated the title of the submission, thanks.
EBay Announces More Moves to Aid Sellers
Thanks for the heads up on this.
Try this for a side-by-side diff: http://dl.dropbox.com/u/171026/japan-nuclear-diff.html

I produced this using a feature of WinMerge (graphical diff utility for Windows, not too shabby) which can produce an HTML report of a diff.

The revisions seem pretty significant.
Full Link: http://www.crunchgear.com/2011/03/15/netflix-gets-into-the-o...
They stayed behind because the Prime Minister screamed at the executives to make it happen.

Conjuring the language of war, Mr Kan is reported as saying: "Retreat is unthinkable."
The DOM has exactly eight words of content and no forms or links at all. I'm worried about this trend of tutorials from authors who fail to get the very basics like progressive enhancement right. We should be showing pages with better authoring than average to novices, because most of the web will eventually converge on the quality of the average tutorial today.