skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I hope the pro-nuclear power people are right when they claim everything went according to plan. But forgive me if I am not used to "everything is under control" looking like this on TV (explosions, people in protection suits and gas masks, mass exodus).
Interesting, yes. Agreed that there are too many variables which we tweaked. But this was a two stage A/B test so if you remove this popup box and move back to traditional signup form, we saw conversions drop back to normal.

May be it was the arrow icon that did the trick but I am not complaining since we saw such good increase in conversions! ;)
Yes there was exposure, certainly those 4000 children recieved high enough levels. However this is a far cry of hundreds of thousands of dangerous exposures, massive increases of cancer rates and birth defects that are still happening that most people think of.

I myself thought just that until recently after investigating it.
> Speaking of jumping to conclusions: Germany just started to shut down 7 nuclear power plants because of Fukushima...

Not because of Fukushima, but pending elections..
I'm the developer behind Jooplicate. If you have any questions please let me know. Thanks!
Armchair expert urges people on other side of world not to worry, it’ll be fine
If Steve Jobs was such a bad boss why did so many people work with him?
VouChaCha, a location based coupon start-up is hiring PHP developers in the UK with commercial Zend experience. hr@vouchacha.com | www.vouchacha.com
Thanks for the reference. I have also recently released my own JavaScript hyphenation engine:

https://github.com/bramstein/Hypher

It is quite small and fast, and mostly aimed at integration with other libraries, unlike Hyphenator.js (which comes with a partial DOM library.) An example integration can be seen in the Treesaver library (https://github.com/bramstein/treesaver/tree/hyphenation) where it is used to hyphenate magazine columns.
Stop write -o -moz -webkit in yours, too.
Because you have some sort of substantiative criticism, or because it challenges your preconceptions and you have no rational response to make to it?
If you're saying that mob rule has the power to irrationally stop nuclear power production, I agree with you.

If you're saying this is the way things ought to be, I'm not sure if I agree but I think you have a valid point about the democratic form of government.

If you're saying a dumb herd of people's panicky reactions to a scary situation actually mean nuclear power is more dangerous than other forms, you're dead wrong.

I don't think other people here understand which of these arguments you're making, either.
Brushing Up on Computer Science Part 2, Object Oriented Programming (OOP)
Installing ASSP (Anti-Spam SMTP Proxy) On Ubuntu Server 10.04 / Debian 5.0
I'm going to risk sounding like a dunce here, but IIRC some frequencies are more prone to bouncing off glass - for example in metropolitan cities with lots of high-rise buildings. While this is a detriment in the city, it could also be acting as a "satellite dish" making it easier to collect stay signals while also directing most of the transmission upward. Considering the antenna is supposed to be at the bottom of the phone the effect should be more pronounced as more of the glass can be used to direct the signal.

Am I crazy?
How many decades do nuclear plants need to run before you're willing to make a call?

It's stupidly irrational how people require hundreds and hundreds of time more proof for a power source that has OMGRadiation!!1! but require no evidence of the safety of other much much more dangerous sources of power.
How well would privately operated nuclear power sources work out?
Yes, I am. Sure, I'm up for it :)
>Sadly within a few weeks, armies of anti-nuclear campainers, writers, and politicians will have jumped on this and pumped it so through the roof that, even if everything in this article is correct most people won't listen.

NYT, Guardian, Spiegel, Mother Jones, The Atlantic (every online publication there is), every news TV channel (except Al Jazeera). Greenpeace are all over the place with their campaigning.

The hysteria isn't imminent - it's happening right now. If people don't fight the campaign to stop nuclear energy, the factoids are going to dominate the discourse in many years to come.
Black Swans, 100 Year Floods
Net-A-Porter is hiring; it's a very well-funded and very profitable company in central(ish) London, and is a Perl shop, although willing to consider non-Perl programmers who are willing to learn Perl instead!

http://london.pm.org/pipermail/jobs/2011-February/000281.htm...
I think if more people would operate nuclear power plants in their backyard (as they do with solar panels), we would see a different kind of statistic to emerge.

Also, what goes into this statistic? Maybe a lot of people die in chinese coal mines (don't know), or somewhere where they don't use up to date technology? People die from pollution, but could better filters be installed? And so on...

In the end, no power source will be free of side effects. Best to reduce power consumption.
As other replies have stated, I'm not saying anything about the relative merits of copyright protection of music versus any other IP.

Copyright exists because it is intended to create social utility, a temporary monopoly guaranteed the creator and enforced by the government. I don't think social utility is served by Disney lobbying to get copyright terms extended every few decades so that nothing ever falls into the public domain. I don't think social utility is served by laws (e.g., DMCA) that disallow hackers from modifying their own hardware and showing others how to modify theirs.

I'm just saying that when rich musicians protest that something must be done to prevent the death of the music industry, we should consider whether the music industry needs special protection.
Off-topic, but the closing of interesting open-ended discussion points is one of the reasons I avoid stack overflow.
Apple’s manufactured scarcity, free publicity, playing for the analysts
If we had more Pigovian taxes in the US (i.e. a carbon tax), the cost of coal would more accurately include all of negative effects (or externalities) it has.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pigovian_tax
There are list abstractions in libraries.

See the Linux kernel's list.h for a very nice and generic linked-list implementation.
I must say, I've been using WP7 for a little while now, and the browser is the only place I really have no serious complaints. While I'd love to be able to use canvas and the like, the browser is really smooth as it stands. I hope the IE9 update only makes it better.
What exactly are your complaints against LyX? I've found it to be very stable for the past 3 or so years, and it's decidedly not WYSIWYG.
Writing a PC Operating System
I don't know if shorting is allowed in Nihon, but maybe someone's doing that more pervasively than those buying stocks.
Yes, they absolutely must fix it. Though coming from Apple it wouldn't surprise me if they drag their feet, or if they already knew and did nothing. All they care about is their 30% app store cut and making sure developers 1) have to buy a Mac to develop for the App store 2) have to write Objective-C, so that significant resources have to be deployed to write native apps for other platforms
They are also rapidly losing their nuclear power plants permanently.
"Investors should remember that excitement and expenses are their enemies. And if they insist on trying to time their participation in equities, they should try to be fearful when others are greedy and greedy when others are fearful."

-- Warren Buffett
Microsoft doesn't provide any mechanism for the user to extend codec support (with the notable exception of WebM) either. Try to add WMV or Theora to IE9's HTML video support and see what happens. Their original announcement said no extra codecs would be supported, but they later made a special allowance for WebM. I'm interested in the technical details of how that actually happens since apparently it involved Google engineers being on site at Microsoft to get it working rather than just plugging into an existing extension point.

This seems more like a way for Microsoft to avoid (perceived) patent liability than a technical decision about the best way to add codecs to a browser.
An advertisement on AU TV featured a layman (not a surgeon) who attempted his own appendectomy. He didn't complete it himself (rushed to hospital) but an interview clip with a surgeon said he had performed other operations before, and "his technique was pretty good". I really enjoyed hearing his appreciation. I have no idea if this is online somewhere, but it was an ad. for medical insurance.
Hydro works well here in Sweden: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Electricity_production_in_...
Statistics disagree with you.
This reminds me of the draw of the "next article" dialogue that slides in on the bottom right of NYTimes articles - it makes for a very compelling click.

The (not so simple) key to these UX tricks is to do them in a way that they are a service to the user which also happens to be one of the points of Jakob Nielson's latest alertbox: http://www.useit.com/alertbox/hated-design.html.

It would be interesting to see how much of the value of this you could get without an overlay and by adding eye-catching dynamism to the signup dialogue - sliding the middle of the page away to reveal it for instance.

EDIT It would actually be interesting to see how much of this benefit would come from simply having the signup form itself on the frontpage - all previous designs required a click to reach it
I thought that effect was really interesting until I read that the median age of the building's inhabitants was like 1/3 that of the control group, and that simply by adjusting for age the average cancer rates went up significantly.
but.. but... isn't microsoft dying?
Criteo in Paris, is hiring dozens of engineers
I hope the author turns this into a series, introducing additional theory. When I was first learning basic music theory, it was either all text or text along with notation. I took lesson on snare drum when I was younger, so I can read rhythms fine but never bothered to learn to read the pitches correctly. When I started playing guitar and piano, having something with embedded content and "piano roll" images would have helped immensely.
very cool, worked exactly as expected.

great landing page and demo, value proposition is very clear and the demo works exactly as expected.

thoughts:

1. that title bar takes up a LOT of valuable screen real estate, pushing some of informative content below the fold -- don't need quite as much title space

2. draw more attention to the "demo" links. Its easy to miss the link as is. The demo is great, takes 2 seconds only, and was very convincing. You should want EVERYONE who makes it to the landing page to convert to a demo.
Skype has a horrible interface.

It's Galaxy S Android client doesn't work and the problem hasn't been addressed in many months.

I'll be one of the first to jump ship.
Define Web 3.0 Contest - Winners of Web 2.0 Expo Tickets
The worst case scenario of a nuclear reactor going wrong is much worse than any other alternative, however slim the chances of that happening may be. This fact is enough to be concerned about the safety of nuclear reactors.
is it only me? Since Flickr has been bought by yahoo, it clearly has lost usability and appeal.

It was a really great site, as long as the original founders were still on board.

Anyone?
It does not have a spell checker. The Microsoft Connect issue for this (with 40+ duplicate suggestions) that's closed as "By Design" is: https://connect.microsoft.com/IE/feedback/details/598257/spe...
The 20 strangest celebrity tech endorsements
Well, is this turning into a HN Zurich meetup thingie?

Could be interesting.
Nice and all, but I have started to wonder if the A/B-Testing mania is just the new SEO mania, resulting in just as much snake oil in the end.
Raising funds outside of the US -- NOT
I live in Israel and my experience over the past year is that the angel and venture markets are almost dead in the water. No Israeli VC raised money in 2010. Of course, both angels and VC's will talk to you about your idea, but when push comes to shove, there is no investment money available.

On the other hand, Ycombinator, techstars and others in the US are creating 20-60 companies each year, raising between $0.5M and $1.5M per company. So what gives?

My theory is that the relatively recent wealth generation from google, twitter, facebook, ebay, etc. are all located in the US and that it is these young newly-millionaire engineers who are driving Internet investments. There is just no comparable group of wealthy investors outside of the US.

Does this problem exist in other countries? Is there some other variable contributing to the success of US startups?
Also, for game developers, Cocos2D iphone is pretty good too. It's reasonably lightweight, fast, and completely free. Pair that up with Box2D or chipmunk, which it comes with, and you have a complete game engine at no cost, with a good amount of community support.

edit -- link: http://www.cocos2d-iphone.org/
asciidoc is nice, but the tag set in DocBook is far broader. Also, DocBook makes it easy to add new elements. But if you need just the basic functionality of DocBook, it is great.
Have you approached companies you are interested in which are not advertising an internship and asked them if they would be interested in having one? Create your opportunity. Best of luck.
I recommend deviantart (unless you're going to upload personal photos)
Keep in mind that if you have an automatic renewal, it will renew at the full list price.
Perfect use of the medium - Great work.
But other than using wind for moving your boat, why is your quality of life affected by the `colour' of electrons?
Why not go a step further and have the signup right there on the homepage? :-) Tumblr does it and I've been getting killer conversion rates on Ruby Weekly and JavaScript Weekly doing it too.

If your form is too big, I like Focus.com's approach of having the simplest part of the form on the homepage which then leads you into the full deal. I'd love to know how that's performing for them.
Internet Explorer 9 to be Available to Download March 14
I'm confused as to why holding, say, Bayer responsible in criminal court instead of merely civil court for knowingly infecting thousands of people with HIV[1] would stop all medical innovation.

[1] http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2003/06/03/health/main556653....
Yeap, you're right on the first 2 points I was trying to make.

Reguarding this

> If you're saying a dumb herd of people's panicky reactions to a scary situation actually mean nuclear power is more dangerous than other forms, you're dead wrong.

I didn't say that people's reaction to nuclear power changes it into something "dangerous", I was only saying that if people decide not to fund nuclear development anymore (say, by not allowing their Governments to subsidize said industry) then its voice should be listened to, even if to some it may sound "dumb" or "panicky". This is why I said that if the voice of the majority isn't listened to we're back to Technocracy, i.e. a small group of informed elite taking vital decisions for the rest of us.
If your sin function is calibrated to take radians, then yes. If it's calibrated to take cycles, sin(1/4) = 1.
>Tell him to do it for the iphone and ipad

in Flash?? Can't be done, you know that.
Bear in mind though, that BT is a terrible terrible company that you should go well out of your way to avoid contact with if at all possible. Every dealing I've ever had with them has involved them screwing it up in unimaginable ways involving multi-week disruptions in service and hours on the phone to rectify.

There are alternatives to every service that BT offers. They cost more on paper, but they are much much cheaper if you value your time at even one dollar an hour.
The LeanLaunch Pad at Stanford class 2
Everyone thinks these things are hot stuff lately. I hate them because I'm there to read the content I was linked to. I won't have an opinion of if I'm even interested in subscribing/donating/etc until AFTER I've finished reading it so I don't even read them. I just hit close.

Essentially, they piss off first-time visitors to increase repeat visitor signups.
Yep, that's exactly what we are planning to test next. There are SO many things to test. Exciting times..
Does it matter? Nobody's proposing nuclear power plants in your backyard. If central installation and professional operation are better, than we should go for it.
Thank you for the feedback. I'm glad you like the site.
I'll chat with my designer about alternative header designers. Drawing much more attention to the demo is a great idea. I'll see what I can do :)
Although I also think it is kind of frightening that some of the old reactors are not safe with regard to a plane crash (or terrorist attack).
Before we jump up and down shouting the slogan of the mass un-informed... can we please qualify that standard nuclear reactors are our best option?

http://gigaom.com/cleantech/terrapower-how-the-travelling-wa...
The linked notes on particle filtering are very interesting, thanks for sharing. You've just piqued my interest in Haskell.
Training a competent developer across from another technology certainly seems to be popular in the UK nowadays, especially outside of London. I can't see why it wouldn't work. The equity point is interesting and does tip it in your favor somewhat.. Most of the comedy "senior" Rails developer ads offering 28K or whatever are at consultancies or agencies where the chance of any riches is extremely low ;-) Good luck!
People will just jailbreak the self-destruct code attached to the books and make copies of them anyway, legal or not.
"nice to see some inventive torturing of C"

What ever happened to the IOCCC? (International Obfuscated C Coding Contest, ioccc.org)
Netflix In The Clouds: Complexity and Freedom
It pains me that I have to hack for IE f'n 9 -- their best browser to date.

Text-shadow and gradients would move design ahead in a good way. At least there are hacks, ms-filter cruft for text shadow and svg for gradients
It's dollars that would have been spent increasing the capacity of your local coal plant to handle peaks when evreybody's running an air conditioner. Solar electric isn't a substitute for large-scale power generation, but in many areas it's a great substitute.

In China rooftop solar is used for water heating. I imagine this use is more economical: http://ourdoings.com/davidsky/2010-08-08
That's great--how do you do the snapshotting in pure Javascript? (If that's your secret sauce, fair 'nuff, but any hints would be appreciated.)

Edit: Oh, wait, it's just HTML you're sending--I see. You're not capturing a screenshot.
I personally use FL Studio/Sibelius (FLS trial won't let you save your song in an editable format, but you can export in ogg/wav/midi/mp3). It depends on what you want to do, for music production Pro Tools/Logic Pro are a must (though it's more about the instrument library and external hardware quality).

Consider looking at the See also section for a list of DAWs: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_Audio_Workstation#See_a...
At least now IE supports border-radius.
> surely cost of electricity in Japan didn't account for nuclear meltdown possibility, thus far.

They did, up to a point. All the safety measure that are build into the reactors have to be paid for.
Create Forms to Receive Files on Your Dropbox
What is the future of Ruby on Rails?
Trendiction in Luxembourg:

http://www.trendiction.com/
http://blog.trendiction.com/tag/joboffer

No remote.

Looking for 3-4 more java developers in the field of: - distributed large scale crawling, content extraction, data analysis - web applications

We crawl, analyze (extract article, author, date, theme, sentiment,...) and monitor websites (news, blogs, ...) for our clients.

You can contact me directly under t.britz@trendiction.com
I can't agree more with this. We've run A/B Testing on this kind of modal dialog and we did not see an increase in conversion. In the article too many variables changed at once.

Changing the "Watch the Video" button to a "Start Optimizing" button is a huge change in and of itself.
Dr.Evil is that you?
I think you didn't read the case study. We don't popup the signup form as soon as homepage loads, rather we popup when people click on Start Optimizing button on the homepage.
A HN Zurich meetup would be aweseome for sure. You're from Zurich, too?
I think in your listing you've alluded to two possibilities right there: 1) an app that combines free/social and pro, and 2) an app that allows for distributed photos rather than the centralized model. It looks to me like there's still room for more players.
Yes, for now it's HTML, which is better than nothing.
My plan for the future is to pass the HTML to a server-side browser renderer (using the user agent captured in the snapshot). So then you'll get a JPEG as well.
My email address is in my profile, just write me if you are interested in a meetup. I will then bundle those and start organizing. Inputs such as location etc. will be appreciated :-)
And geothermal works pretty well in Iceland, but we're not all in Sweden or Iceland.
Actually, I think this is an asset. DocBook is modular, and consists of DTDs/schemas and stylesheets to translate DocBook content to other XML documents (or plain text). Since TeX is so tightly-coupled to typesetting, it kinda sucks for producing non-typesetted formats.

Using TeX to do the final typesetting in a DocBook workflow is quite old-fashioned. For years, I have used the XSL-FO stylesheet to create XSL-FO output. You can pass this to an XSL-FO typesetter, such as Apache FOP or RenderX.

This workflow has several advantages:

* You can easily tweak output by overriding templates.

* Commonly-used FO renderers render SVG and MathML. You can use one vector graphics format to create XHTML, ePub, and PDF/print output.

* Each step and output, except for the rendering step is XML and can be validated and transformed easily.
Ask HN: if you could follow one person on Twitter who it would be?
In other words: who is the most inspiring / useful / interesting follow for you on Twitter?
I thought this was funny/sad too. I spend approx 2.5 hours a day commuting. Clearly, I have found something in my schedule that needs to be cut.
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Note that this form pops up only after the user clicks on a button:

"Implementation wise, here is what we did: on homepage, whenever a visitor clicks on Start Optimizing Now button, we show a “popup signup form” which has only two fields (username and password)"
>Changing the "Watch the Video" button to a "Start Optimizing" button is a huge change in and of itself.

As I wrote in case study, this change did not lead to a significant increase in signups. After we introduced popup signup box, signups increased by 50%.
How to Avoid Panicking When the World Seems Like its Falling Apart
The Nikkei is still higher than it was two year ago.
Global Personals, based in Windsor, UK, are looking for smart developers to join our engineering team, as well as Rails devs: http://globaldev.co.uk/jobs/
Out of interest, what compensation do you usually take on new hires?
All true. Also, the way indexes, table of contents, bibliographies and cross references work in LaTeX are unholy, fragile hacks. Foot- and endnotes could use some TLC. And on 2011-era hardware we really should have some approximation of globally optimal page breaking.

Ugh, and fonts and character sets. Do you still have to put in magic incantations like

\usepackage[T1]{fontenc}
\usepackage[latin1]{inputenc}

to get working hyphenation with wacky characters such as æ, ø, and å?

LuaTeX does seem to be experimenting with some improvements in these areas though.

About when I stopped paying attention to TeX and LaTeX many years ago (2002-ish?), there was some effort under way to rewrite all of TeX in Java. Did that go anywhere?
I am moving to Zug in May. Count me in.