skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I have used Haskell for research problems in the past and I have found it to result in a net improvement in development speed for me, even over Python. Part of this is that the way I think about problems maps well onto Haskell's feature set, but partly this is because I honestly do feel that Haskell lets me experiment with changes with a lot of agility.

Here's my general approach for Haskell development. I try to separate everything I do into a number of fairly small modules, each structured around a core idea. I try to keep the coupling between the modules where the work happens to a minimum; instead I have certain tiny modules that only exist as glue to provide any coupling that isn't unavoidable and inherent. All of this means that, when I'm experimenting with a big change, I usually only need to initially change one or two modules. (The whole project won't compile, of course, but those modules will.) I can then verify that things are to my liking by loading just those modules in the REPL and playing around with them; sometimes I'll write mock versions of some of the other modules directly in the REPL, just enough to experiment with. The static typing doesn't get in my way when I work this way, and it's a positive boon when I decide I like the changes and want to update the whole project to work with them; then it's very easy to see what's impacted and make the necessary changes.

The REPL, modules, and the type system work well for me to let me experiment with agility AND confidence. I fully recognize that some problem domains might make the sort of separations I do more difficult, but for my work, at least, Haskell has been a really good fit.
Dot Obits: Supercomputer Scientist & Residential T1 Pioneer
'When something is commoditized, an adjacent thing becomes valuable' is an old truism that O'Reilly seems to be repeating in the video.

However, imo when he says that he 'realized that software was becoming a commodity', he is over-generalizing and his bias may be due to the fact that his focus is on the "adjacent things"

My bias is that I'm a product developer and don't see software as a commodity. The bias of developers who provide software for free and charge for "support" is likely to be that software is a commodity and that support is valuable. O'Reilly's belief in free software, belief in charging for e-books etc. seems to be leading to his bias.

imo there is value in all these models. Software is not going become a no/low value commodity anytime soon.
My 2011 March Madness Predictions using Probabilistic Matrix Factorization
Just because I haven't seen it mentioned yet, here's a solution using gcc's computed goto feature:

#include <cstdio>
int main(int argc, char** argv) {
void* labels[2] = { &&doing, &&done };
int i = 1;
doing:
printf("%d\n", i++);
goto *labels[i / 1001];
done:
return 0;
}

Still consider goto harmful? (Well yeah, so do I generally. But hey...)
in Chernobyl it was burning graphite, in this case we have water being separated into hydrogen and oxygen and later explosively recombining back - the 2 reactors have exploded so far.

The differences:

- burning graphite was adding energy, in the current water case - the energy is provided only by the core.

- containment structure.

So, while there is obvious similarity to Chernobyl, there is very significant quantitative difference as to the intensity of the process. As long as the core temperature going down, it should be fine. Is it going down?
Well, they'll just have to up their game. And hopefully, they will.
The man playing drums looks very much like Conan O'brien to me. Just saying.
Ask HN: Pandora - Silence When I go underground on subway
I know everyone here is always hacking up cool stuff. Does anyone have a solution to the terrible 1/2 hour long silence I face because I lose my connection.
Aren't MS developers infamous for thinking that if it doesn't come out of Redmond, it doesn't exist? (Yes, I know that not everyone is this way, but stereotypes usually exist for a reason...)
"Everybody" doesn't hate anything, perhaps all you hear are the people complaining. These projects are being accepted by various Linux users reasonably well. Any type of change is going to inspire some ire among longtime users.

And I'm afraid these types of conflicts happen in the non-free-software world, too, the most easy examples being recent stories about internal projects in Nokia and Microsoft. Things get messier when you want standards and interop.
I've never had it crash, just odd bugs where this or that wouldn't work or wouldn't load. You know, the irritating stuff... ;-)
Ya uh huh no, the whole not actually valuing other peoples time thing comes off badly and will build up resentment to you quickly just having the attitude that brings this up you may as well write the software yourself.. if you can't then see the "die in a fire" response
Ok, I misremembered and my comment was wrong. For about 40 minutes all the cooling pumps were turned off, and during the following 7 hours cooling was ineffective due to hydrogen bubbles. (http://www.threemileisland.org/downloads//195.pdf). The core partially melted. Sorry.

This doesn't make the original article any more correct though. During most of the TMI accident the core was being actively cooled, and in fact it never got uncovered enough to even completely melt. So this still does not tell us anything about how containment would work in the absence of cooling.
mp3s. More specifically podcasts of indie stuff and underground mixes.

Here is a start from Noise Pop:

http://www.kqed.org/arts/programs/noisepop/episode.jsp?essid...
Russia Hikes Price of Rocket Rides for U.S. Astronauts to $63 Million
[2]http://care.diabetesjournals.org/content/17/2/152.abstract
Well, not really 10 or 20 or 30 years ago. More like 400 years ago.
There is a tradition in Ubuntu community that Mark Shuttleworth will nickname the upcoming release. Remember that Ubuntu releases come out every 6 months and the numbers are YEAR.MONTH of the release.

Ubuntu 10.04 was Lucid Lynx , released in April 2010
Ubuntu 10.10 was Maverick Meerkat , released in October 2010
Ubuntu 11.04 is Natty Narwhal, will be released April, 2011
Ubuntu 11.10 will be Oneiric Ocelot, will be released October, 2011

We tend to refer to the releases by number (the 10.10 release) or nickname (the Lucid release, the Natty release). Helps distinguish between various versions.

See Mark's blog post: http://www.markshuttleworth.com/archives/646
Thanks :) Though there aren't any websites focusing on the availability of the providers at the moment, the traditional service directories and service search websites like yell.com, citysearch.com etc. could be our nearest competitors.
Truth or Consequences, New Mexico
How Knowledge Changes Us
SXSW: Mistakes Made Building Netflix for iPhone
Scaling White Hat Link Building - Scaling Content
"...strongly favors social harmony over individual expression."

I like how you put that. It describes my experience with Switzerland as well. I remember the pros and cons of being an American ex-pat there -- it could be quite rigid at times. As I get older, however, my frustration with this dichotomy appears to be growing. Individual expression can get off my lawn.
it works. To make this even faster., Try to memcatch frequently searched domain names and flush it for every 24 hours(Incase someone registered one).

Good luck.
looking for validation.

In a way. I'm not here to fish for compliments or reassurances, and if my post conveyed that, that wasn't what I intended to do.

I'm looking for ways other HNers have internalized that they're (at least partially) responsible for their successes; how to "self-validate" rather than trust and rely on external validation.
Yes you are right. Apologies for snarkiness.

One observation though, even the aborigines in Papua would cover up their privates in little tubes or bits of hide. I thought this surprising.
Really? I didn't know that. Shows how much I have still to learn about C.

A program I'm writing now uses void* as a generic function pointer, which I cast to different function signatures as required depending on usage. I'm guessing that's considered harmful, is there a better or more idiomatic way to do this?
More or less strict definition of O() requires limits first which isn't exactly an easy topic in high school.
HP CEO: We will build a cloud
That is too bad. As a consumer, I want as much competition as possible.

I predicted that Microsoft would turn Zune into a phone like Apple did with the iPod. This was before the Nokia mess.
yep it is a bit of a niche, but if you poke into an awful lot of rdf files you'll see foaf:
Given the pressure to the WinTel dominance by ARM, Apple, Google and the web in general, it's clear that it's fish-or-cut-bait time at Microsoft.

Zune is being cut as it was never profitable and executed poorly. I imagine MS is looking at a whole lot of other departments that aren't pulling their weight.

This is yet another sign of the end of the PC(1) era.

1: PC's aren't going away, but it is no longer king.
I was interested until I found that "IP Release" is apparently code for "there's not actually any download link on our site, and you have to follow a complex application process to even look at it."

A: WebM RTL source code (VHDL or Verilog) is available at no charge. Please contact us for licensing details.

If it's available at no charge, why do we have to "license it"? Why not just post the source under a BSD license, like the C equivalent?

Is there some reason why "free hardware" seems to be so much more difficult to get moving than "free software", even though both of them are represented by source code in a human-readable language?
Meta nit: Bloomberg broke this story. Seems to me like we should be linking to them instead of a 1-paragraph rewrite on TC

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2011-03-14/microsoft-said-to-s...
Yes, configuration in general is an area we want to tackle in much greater depth. For the 11.04 release we are looking to integrate Gnome Control Panel into the power menu...we are testing during the alpha/beta period right now!

See this link from the OMG!Ubuntu! folks (who are generally very good at covering latest and greatest features of Ubuntu...even during the devel period).

http://www.omgubuntu.co.uk/2011/03/ubuntu-natty-adds-control...
The Scariest Earthquake Is Yet to Come
>it is an opinion piece written by someone who has a very specific viewpoint.

whether a core melts through the containment vessel or not depends on specific temperature that pool of melted uranium on the floor will develop. That in itself depends on the geometrical shape of the pool, uranium enrichment degree and presence of the neutron moderator material in the pool. That in itself depends on a bunch of other things ...

Nowhere it depends on the opinion or a viewpoint.
Well, politely, those people are missing the issue entirely.
Thanks. I am caching domain results for a small period of time, so this does help with some of the speed/load.

The site may be a little slower than normal right now because of HN traffic, but I'm working on keeping it going.

Thanks for your feedback.
Learning iOS Development for Free
1 to 1000 in PHP With No Conditionals or Loops
Why is that anything close to "the same"?

Example: a 3-person $400k-revenue business a year and a half old would normally be able negotiate with investors from a position of great strength, because they can painlessly walk away from a deal -- if they're talking to investors at all!

Same situation, only with founder(s) on a startup visa? They'll be going hat-in-hand for 6mo from VC to VC with no choice but to close a deal. The only competition will be between the VCs to find the one who screws them over the least.

Further: There's a great deal less "competition among investors" written into the bill. Foreign capital does not count, nor does friend/family money, nor do strategic partnerships that include capital investments -- the only investment that will keep you in the country is US VC investment.
Early in my career I did myself a rather large amount of damage; I got myself on a very good team, but I thought I was holding the team back (I was obviously the least experienced person there) and I thought that everyone else was just being nice to me. I ended up quitting because I thought the boss was unwilling to fire me. Worst career decision ever. Going back and reexamining the situation and talking to some of the people involved, I now believe I was performing better than expected. I mean, they knew my experience level when I was hired, and they judged that experience level to be appropriate for the job at hand.

If you might have low self-esteem, I believe it's best to assume that other people act in their own best interest, to assume that other people will fire you if you are getting in the way of the team. If you get into a good team an they don't fire you, you should see that as evidence that this good team believes you are worth keeping around.

Every good team has a mechanism for ejecting people who hold them back, and if your team lacks that mechanism, your team has much bigger problems than just one person who isn't up to the level of the rest of the team. So get yourself on the best team you can, work as hard as you can, and don't dial back your ambition until you get fired.

Let other people decide that you are not good enough.
Thank you for posting that. It's very interesting.
Clickety ... http://www.skillendar.com

I speak from zero experience of selling, but a great deal of experience of public speaking ...

What really, really matters is seeing something interesting early. Really early. First 3 seconds maximum. And not generically interesting - interesting specifically to a person who will give you money.

If they won't give you money, you don't care.

So who will give you money? Figure out who they are, and make sure they see something they want within 3 seconds.

Beter yet - 1 second. Hard to achieve. Be creative.
The counter points don't hold up.

1) The 'core catcher' is the bottom of the containment building. This reactor was built by GE.

There is a diagram of the reactor in Google Books:
http://books.google.com/books?id=y20F8Yt6UcMC&pg=PA34...

Not sure if that will make it through the HN editor but its worth a look. Would love to get a scan of that diagram online. In 'flask type' reactors the re-inforced concrete pad under the reactor 'catches' the core (if necessary)

2) Its important to understand that since the reactor is shut down, its only source of heat is the decay products from when it was running, minus the heat they pulled off while running on battery power. Further the engineering design target (one assumes they test to that target) is that if you integrate over all the heat you generate from all the byproducts from a reactor that was running at 'full' and now has all of its control rods inserted, is less than the heat you would need to add to melt the containment vessel (the flask) You won't be able to restart it but you won't have the core melt through the vessel either.

His third point, he doesn't understand that long lived radionuclides aren't aerosols. Which is to say they stay in the containment vessel they don't exit with the steam. The impurities in the ocean water need understanding here but we're not talking a significant long term threat.

Number 4 he missed out on what radiation was measured, what the relative value of that radiation was and the how it won't persist. These are gamma rays that can make other things radioactive.

Anyway, if you have the book (I don't) it apparently describes the reactor in question in some detail.
Depends on what you mean by 'rich' - $1M, $10M, $1Bn ?

There have been classes of investment visa for people bringing $1M into the country. But then people simply used it to buy a house = $1M in some areas. So then there were requirements that it had to be invested in a business, so people formed a company, bought a house and leased it to themselves.

So the politicians upped the $$ requirement, but that leads to different problems. People with $100M in cash are often not very nice citizens - do you want to give Col Qaddafi, Kim Jung whoever, etc a US visa if they bring $100M of their people's money with them? How many of their family/ friends/ associates also get a visa?
Japanese earthquake rocks online games
Contractor brings seamless file sharing between apps to the Linux desktop
No, I believe from his bio that he does Not in fact learn to avoid self-harmful acts. That's why he's a tragic figure, instead of for instance an evil one.
Forwarding, voicemail & extensions (basically multiple forwards depending on what the caller hits)

Still, could be useful. Unfortunately I live in the middle of nowhere with no local numbers on any voip service basically :p
I have an iPod for that but I hear about rdio.com supporting download caches.
Awesome list.

My personal #1 pet peeve for 10.10 was the resize problem.

There are some updates for that including a new gripper as well as increasing to 3px invisible border for resizing. Not to mention that Unity also sports some snap functionality.

This OMG! article was from two months ago, but you can get an idea for some of the resizing behavior. http://www.omgubuntu.co.uk/2011/01/a-smattering-of-natty-upd...

The Skype menu is likely a bug w/ Skype detecting which system you are using. If you goto Skype->Options->General it might say 'Desktop settings' and that could get confused detecting what you are using. You can force it to use GTK+ and your issue should disappear.

I'll address the rest of the list in my general follow up to this thread around the EOD. Cheers!
My big problem with Google Reader is that I still can't use my Google Apps account with it on my Android device. WTF? This is a Google product on a Google phone accessing a Google service using a Google-based account and Google still can't make it happen?
If you have met the employment/revenue standards after 2 years, do you qualify for a startup visa renewal or a green card?
Yes, of course it is. You don't consistently rank at that top of surveys just for being nice.

I'm Canadian, so I'll give you a one off overview. I'm assuming you are American, so revise this if you are not.

If you are high on lifestyle and lean left in your politics and feel weird when there is no snow on Christmas, you'll more than likely love Canada. Nothing up here will compare to the startup scenes in the SV and such, but if you stick with the bigger cities (Toronto, Vancouver, and Montreal) you'll most likely find enough for you to live with. There are other tech centres like Ottawa, Waterloo and Calgary, but these would be smaller, albeit with the pluses of a smaller city as well.

In general, you need to accept snow and cold in the winter. Places like Toronto can be 50/50 and a lot like say, NYC or Chicago, but Montreal and god forbid the Parries are a guaranteed frozen for 4 months of the year at least. The only real respite from this is the BC coast, but instead of snow you will see 4 months of rain.

You might feel taxed a little bit, but that should only last until you realize that those taxes include all those Health care expenses you no longer need to worry about.

You'll need to accept that Canada is very accepting of its immigrants - almost too much so - and it will be expected that you are as well. Strong Christian right views that compose half of the spectrum in the US will often just not be tolerated here. This is probably the biggest difference between the two countries - your religion and beliefs are personal matters. You will quickly learn about all other countries and cultures from Canada, as there are large communities from the East, Europe, and the Middle East that are encouraged to engage and build the country but to also retain their own differences.

Canada can be VERY different depending on what area you choose to live in, so I'd strongly suggest you look at a few areas and then visit first. Montreal and Vancouver may look similar in size and economy, but they are ridiculously different in many more important ways. Much more so than say Boston compared to Seattle. Pay a lot of attention to this.

I've lived in 4 provinces and visited all the provinces and territories spare the Maritimes. I'll reply if you need any more information about a particular area.

Good luck to you.
> Repeatedly we've seen commentators and outside observers saying "this can be no Chernobyl because...".

Yes, because this can't be a Chernobyl. I do understand that you don't exactly have time to train yourself on the ins and outs of nuclear energy. But if you're really interested in the topic, Wikipedia actually has good articles on Chernobyl and the Chernobyl disaster, including a lot of information on the design flaws that were present in the Chernobyl design, flaws which are not inherent to either nuclear plant design in general, or the Fukushima boiling water reactors in particular.

> But the situation at Fukushima-Daiichi is still very dynamic and many questions remain.

I agree. But that does not mean that any disaster conceivable is in the set of possible outcomes of the casualty. Although I know it may not seem like it, especially with all the confusing and contradictory information being put out, but what has occurred up to this point has occurred almost like clockwork from the initial conditions leading up to the casualty and the actions taken (and unable to be taken) thereafter.

A full nuclear fuel meltdown has been the final disaster since the start. The bad things that have happened since then have taken TEPCO progressively closer to that stage but as I said before, it's not like there's a multitude of different paths for the casualty to go down.

> These cores still have a lot of energy left to dissipate and thus each still seems to have a life of its own.

Yes, but the response is completely predictable. Everything that has gone and is currently going on (as far as the nuclear core response goes) is due just to the laws of nature. Decay heat is a well-understood concept (it is, after all, why so many redundant systems were part of the design in the first place), and the decay heat itself depends fully on things which can be figured out before shutdown, such as average power level, operating time, etc. It's not like some nuclear fuels have randomly different heat generation profiles and the Fukushima plant happened to pick up the super-reactive uranium.

The only variable so far has been how much cooling could they provide? So far it hasn't been enough, but that hasn't changed the underlying phenomena, and the worst case is completely predictable (i.e. no cooling could be provided whatsoever under any circumstances).

This is not like the weather where the phenomenon interact in such a chaotic way that it's effectively unpredictable: Decay heat production is easy to predict (to at least a general approximation) and even the decay of that residual decay heat over time is predictable. Even the hydrogen production from steam-zirconium reaction is a well-known and predictable effect, even during the time of Three Mile Island. The hydrogen explosions themselves were unpredictable, but even they were unsurprising.

If this is all surprising to you because it's the first you've been exposed to nuclear theory then don't feel bad, but that doesn't make what's happening at the Fukushima-Daiichi plants at all unpredictable or chaotic, or for that matter, philosophical.
Very sad news. As I've posted here before, I own a Zune and love it. The Zune software on Windows is terrific and I use it instead of Winamp/WMP/Foobar/etc by choice.

Hopefully they open-source it so the community can keep it alive.
I'll add this here as well: a diagram of how these reactors are built is in this book:
http://books.google.com/books?id=y20F8Yt6UcMC&pg=PA34...

Data folks, data.
Fairly sure the GP was being sarcastic. If only ASP.NET developers were making up the numbers then it would clearly be time to call it a day.