skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The earthquake + tsunami killed something like 5,000 people and counting. How many have died from radiation poisoning or even the hydrogen explosions so far? I'm counting two people missing and some radiation poisoning.

We're looking at a substantial risk of further hydrogen explosions until the cooling is stable and a risk of radiation leakage to those nearby. There is a slight risk of radiation further out, but it's unlikely to cause significant harm. So the primary danger is to plant employees and those trying to cool it down or fight fires. It's unlikely to be able to kill large numbers of people, though it's likely that someone will calculate x% increase of cancer * 128M people (all of Japan) and publish that number.

But let's count the casualties and weigh them against the 5,000 or so who have died from the earthquake already:

http://www.tepco.co.jp/en/press/corp-com/release/11031710-e....

Casualty

- 2 workers of cooperative firm were injured at the occurrence of the earthquake, and were transported to the hospital.

- 1 TEPCO employee who was not able to stand by his own with his hand holding left chest was transported to the hospital by an ambulance.

- 1 subcontract worker at important earthquake-proof building was unconscious and transported to the hospital by an ambulance.

- The radiation exposure of 1 TEPCO employee, who was working inside the reactor building, exceeded 100mSv and was transported to the hospital.

- 2 TEPCO employees felt bad during their operation in the central control rooms of Unit 1 and 2 while wearing full masks, and were transferred to Fukushima Daini Power Station for consultation with a medical advisor.

- 4 workers were injured and transported to the hospital after explosive sound and white smoke were confirmed around the Unit 1.

- 11 workers were injured and transported to Fukushima Daini Nuclear Power Station after explosive sound and white smoke were confirmed around the Unit 3.One of the injured workers got medical treatment on March 16th, but the worker reported a flank pain. We required to the offsite center that the worker should be transported to the hospital. After that, the helicopter of JSDF arrived and transported the worker to the FUKUSHIMA Medical University Hospital at 10:56AM

- Presence of 2 TEPCO employees at the site is not confirmed.
Thanks - that is actually my next post which is queued to go :)
I just went back really quickly and checked. The only scientific statement I made is that there's no particular scientific evidence that cough syrup in normal doses is bad, which is true to the best of my knowledge. It was shut down due to a lack of scientific evidence of safety, but I'm perfectly satisfied with the decades of safe use (at correct doses) prior to that decision. Had the Feds stopped usage because at normal doses they encountered some problems in some children, I'd have come to different conclusions, but to the best of my problems this case has not occurred (beyond possibly low allergy levels, which you just can't paralyze yourself over, just about everything has someone allergic/reactive to it). And an encouragement to find out what the real reasons are behind the opaque advice and think for yourself. I never claimed that the fact that it worked once (or, actually, twice, but I didn't mention that; we actually do not reach straight for the medicine in general but when the child is on their third day of sleep deprivation the balances change, and again note that when I say the child here I mean it; we were trading off and actually we were well-rested overall) proved anything "scientifically".

(Incidentally, the same appears to be true of Benedryl, for what it's worth.)

I think your detectors for anti-scientific crackpot triggered, which I understand because someone who actually deeply understands science and its limits can accidentally trigger them sometimes where the science is particularly iffy or thinner than advertised.
I'd like to see more people trying to do something like reddit.tv. My first feeling when seeing this site was "I'm gonna do a bunch of work rating movies to get uninteresting results". reddit.tv almost always has interesting results and I don't have to much work to get them.
I was about to say the same thing with different words. But yeah, you pretty much have put it in perspective.
Seriously? I think those are the types of people that get taken the least seriously by anyone that matters.
Exactly. Kids "back in Bon Jovi's day" missed the whole experience of plugging your headphones into your iPod, sliding the volume all the way up, and having your entire record collection in your palm.
That is usually best. Some people you can also just reach out to directly, e.g. on Quora. Or you can go to an event and talk to e.g. a panelist, and then follow up afterwards.
Yup, it won't be Chernobyl. It will always be Fukushima Daiichi.

How the nuclear accident will turn out to be is anyones guess right now though.
I'm getting pretty tired of this meme.

Chernobyl was horrific! It happened at a time and in place that did not care much about safety or human lives. The technology was primitive. Safety mechanisms had been turned off. The response to the accident was to send people on a suicide mission while telling everyone else everything was hunky dory. It was a a horrific disaster.

How the hell could Fukushima be as bad?

And what is the point of all of this anyway?

Look, I think we should use a lot more nuclear power, yes despite the fact that I grew up down wind of Chernobyl and with Fukushima still happening, I STILL think we should all drive electric cars that get their electricity from nuclear power.

But I want those nuclear plants to as safe as technology can make them. And I welcome higher per kilowatt prices to make this happen. What I don't want is nukes on the cheap, as this particular GE model of reactor appears to have been marketed.

And I am really getting sick of the chorus of the last couple of days which I can summarize as:

1. Fukushima is totally under control you guys!
2. Fukushima is not going to melt down you guys!
3. Fukushima is not going to have a total melt down, OK!
4. Chernobyl didn't kill THAT many people.
5. Chernobyl wasn't that bad.
6. The area around Chernobyl is going to be peachy in like another 50 years!
7. Well at least Fukushima can't be as bad Chernobyl!

For the love of God, if you want to promote nuclear power do it in a smart way! Explain just how bad and radioactive coal is. Explain all the ways in which modern nuclear can be made safer. And call for more oversight and investment in safety.

But please stop trying to downplay Fukushima! Not only does this not help anything, but it actively discredits advocacy for nuclear power!
pg seemed a bit direct in terms of what he wanted in his email, which I found refreshing. On the other hand, Fred seemed to 'beat around the bush' as when he said 'we are in data gathering phase'.

Just curious what the norm is around the vc/angel circles. Are most people pretty direct/candid? or do they mostly hide behind business speak?
Why should anyone have to imagine? Why should they have to pay for a whole album when only one song is worth paying for? That's the problem with Bon Jovi, most albums weren't worth crap and he wants us to pay for crap. That's stupid.
I think we're way past TMI by now right?
I held out on purchasing MP3s for a long time because of this very thing. The packaging was important to me--the art, the lyrics, and, in some cases, the color of vinyl. That said, I've kinda gotten over that, and happily purchase MP3s. I don't blame Steve Jobs for that transition, though.

Also, comparing old timey farm work (which, btw, still happens today) to purchasing actual albums is a bit overstated, methinks.
The answer is to push for greater regulations, decommissioning of outdated plants (as this reactor was), and a push for better and safer designs.

Ultimately, we need to move to solar and wind power, but for the time being, even with this worst case scenario, I think Nuclear is a much safer option than coal or oil. Definitely better than coal, which results in 30,000 deaths a year.
"You know who never complains about the shift to digital music? People who buy and listen to music.": http://betterelevation.com/2011/03/15/jon-bon-jovi-is-functi...
Just start fixing things that you think are broken and charge for them. Eventually it will add up to enough to pay the bills.
This just in, everyone under 40 says Bon Jovi killed the music business. :P

ok, snark aside- noone is powerful enough to single handedly kill an industry. Its the culmination of bad practices/changing technology/ and many other things that few have the power to completely understand.
The whole point of this type of model is that you make you $10k/mo by selling something that people actually pay money for, which means you don't care what TechCrunch/VCs are excited about. They're irrelevant for you.

$10k is your "fuck you money", provided you can rely on making it every month. This might be easier said than done, though.
Premium Themes - What's Wrong with Pricing?
previous: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2328952
I'm old enough to remember deciding to buy music based on what's on the album cover, and I have to say, I prefer being able to sample the music ahead of time. Not only do I not buy crap I'll never listen to, I buy stuff that I never would've considered if I hadn't heard it first.

But I guess when we're talking about the music industry, you have to remember that the general attitude has always been one of "we've got to hold on to what we've got; doesn't make a difference if we make it or not."
Note: I can only speak for my industry (penetration testing and antimalware) so YMMV

Last month at DC4420 (the London monthly DEF CON chapter meeting):

<dude from corporate security firm>: How many people do you have at Mandalorian?
<iuguy>: 6
<dude from corporate security firm>: Really? I always thought you guys were bigger? So it's more of a lifestyle firm?
<iuguy>: If by lifestyle firm you mean a company that treats it's people well for doing a good job - as well as they could do on their own - then yes. If you mean a firm that's focused on doing a good job doing work we enjoy instead of chasing cash and ticking boxes all day long, then yes.

Probably the most successful example of this I've seen in my industry are these guys: http://www.pentestpartners.co.uk/

I think http://www.fbtechies.co.uk/ was the first I knew of, but amongst us there's quite a few and it seems as though we're growing. I think the realisation of having a niche skillset combined with commercial ability makes for a compelling enough value proposition for people to go it alone outside the conventional areas.

We don't all need to be multibillionaires (although some do). For some of us it's the choice between working on yet another PCI box ticking exercise, or charming the pants off some cool experimental tech.

I would like to add though that the article really needs some data to back it up. While there's plenty of anecdata from patio11, peldi and (to some extent although I'm obviously not in the same league as those guys) me, a source of actual information would really blow the doors off.
"However, the company operating Fukushima Daiichi has now said that, for the fuel pond at reactor 4, 'the risk of recriticality is not zero', meaning a nuclear chain reaction could restart in the rods. Quite how this has come about is unclear."

Whoops, looks like you invalidated half of your article.
IndexedDB: The Store In Your Browser
The earthquake + tsunami killed something like 5,000 people and counting.

The absolutely horrific results of the earthquake and tsunami in no way make Fukushima a minor deal. Yes, it has killed MANY fewer people then the tsunami, but that does not make it a minor deal!
Successful rationalist community formed in New York City
I love how they have all of those quotes of people who use IE6... they all sound like idiots.
“...and the beauty of taking your allowance money and making a decision based on the jacket, not knowing what the record sounded like, and looking at a couple of still pictures and imagining it.”

I can't count the number of mistakes that I made in album purchases based on 1 song I sort of liked in my high school years. In this regard, I think the industry has been disrupted in a good way.

It's true that albums are losing ground to singles due to the choice that comes with having your music on a computer and the convenience of picking and choosing songs when buying or sharing, but don't give blame (or credit) to Apple for that.
As long as people are comparing it to Chernobyl, we can't have a sane, realistic conversation about nuclear power.
If you're in a male-dominated profession, where both the "employees" (VC's) and the "clients" (startups) are 90+% male, and the way people are to apply for your roles (primarily) is through an introduction, you should not possibly believe you will get >10% women - you will almost certainly get far less. In addition, if the women that others can see in the profession are concentrated near the "top" (i.e. they're already VC's or they're CEO's at successful or well-known companies), and you look at their stories and they didn't move up from the "bottom," then you don't even see anybody who looks _like_ you.

And saying that what you want from other candidates is "hustle" doesn't help matters much, though I won't pretend to be an expert on gender-dominated language - there are plenty of smart people out there (here?) who can comment.

(I thought there was a very cogent blog post from Anil Dash on this topic some years ago, but I can't find it.)

(Added: I saw Ivan's HN headline for this post and somehow missed the original. "Let's Try This Again Ladies"? Really? That certainly screams "comfortable work environment.")
Words are cheap. Go and help the cleanup crews on-site.
The old Bell Labs had this right: everyone had the title "Member of the Technical Staff". Including Ken Thompson, Dennis Richie, Brian Kernighan...
No, we just have a different idea of what's readable. APL was created to have a mathematical notation that made problem solving easier. Don't believe me? See Iverson's Turing Award lecture,"Notation as a Tool of Thought" (http://www.jsoftware.com/papers/tot.htm).

"I did pure mathematics in school, but later I was a teaching assistant for a graduate course in computer algorithms. I could see that the professor was getting killed by the notation. He was trying to express the idea of different kinds of matrix inner products, saying if you have a directed graph and you're looking at connections, then you write this triple nested loop in Fortran or Algol. It took him an hour to express it. What he really wanted to show was that for a connected graph it was an or-dot-and. If it's a graph of pipe capacities, then maybe it's a plus-dot-min. If he'd had APL or K as a notation, he could have covered that in a few seconds or maybe a minute, but because of the notation he couldn't do it." - "A Conversation with Arthur Whitney" (http://queue.acm.org/detail.cfm?id=1531242)
suitable for parents with an IQ of 90 (and I do not mean that as a joke in the slightest, they are real, and I don't really begrudge the official "advice givers" for the resulting advice).

In fact, some 25% of the population is 89 or below. No reason to treat that as a joke, really.
Separating the detailed comment from the pedantic comment: the word is flair. You put a flare in the road. You do things with flair. (And in Office Space, you wear pieces of flair. And if you're in the ring with the master of the figure four, you're with Ric Flair.)
Easy to view vector files quickly- with PSD/AI/EPS Viewers
Corruption in India: A rotten state
Indeed,

Most of $10K/months business that continue along that I know of are consulting. And a lot of consulting is essentially continuing your connections with a larger enterprise but from the outside.

I think there's a simple logic to this.

If anyone has duplicatable way of getting to a $10k/month from their labor, they also have a key to building a business; they could just recruit people, teach the recruits their methods and split the profits in any number of ways. Thus, they would almost certainly have a business that could expand to $10 million a year fairly quickly (if you have the kind of business where you could add servers or machine instead, so much the better).

Now reason that there are VCs is that the number of businesses which can bootstrap to $10 million/year are inherently a subset of businesses that can be financed to $10 million/year.

Now, we know that if A > B and B == C, then A > C. Thus the number of VC-financable opportunities to build a $10 million/year company are inherently larger than the number of easily duplicable schemes that could allow a single individual to make $10K/month.

That leaves the "totally unique" ways, that depend on each person's special qualities and can't duplicated. If you're working on the web, how many of those are there?
OMG! Zoinks!
He should add a deal so that whoever introduces the person who introduces him to his wife to the hookchasup site gets a small reward as well. So if I tell my friend about hookchasup and my friend then precedes to introduce him to his wife, I would get a small reward as well. This has been demonstrated successful by the MIT balloon experiment team (http://techcrunch.com/2009/12/05/how-to-find-those-red-ballo...)
This exact point occurred to me as I was listening to Reid Hoffman define 'entrepreneurship' at SXSW the other day. His definition restricted the term to 'industry-disruptive technology' and 'big ideas'. I thought it was a pretty self-serving definition coming from an angel investor who needs those kind of giant hits to cover bad bets. It's also a lot easier to start what Mark Cuban is calling the Ponzi-style investment process where every round at successively higher valuations leaves the next group of suckers holding the bag.
Not if you view a lifestyle business as a lilypad for something larger.

But even better, once you have the knowledge that comes along with building a succesful $10k/month business, you also posses the exact same knowledge that it takes to build a $100k/month business.
Congrats! I recall you guys asking HN to rate your app not too long ago: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1609205
i find it disturbing. ubisoft abuses people who actually pay for the games with their terrible DRM, as they try to fight 'piracy' while using pirated content for their deluxe edition.
Seems quite likely but a lot of things about this story end up surprising us.

Yes, things surprisingly just keep getting worse, despite optimistic predictions.
I have to say that people seem to take fewer risks on albums now and just download the songs they hear on the radio. But as soon as someone does decide they like something, the process is much, much faster. I think that will wear off as people realize how much more is out there than they hear every day.

I think Emusic had this problem solved by giving you expiring download credits that forced you to take a chance on something you likely never heard or lose your credits.
This is a really great article. Her experience mirrors mine in a lot of ways - not that I've ever been an executive of anything, just that I've had the experience of winning a battle at work, but winning in a way that alienated my team. A lot of technical people are like that - we know we are right, and we probably are, but when you shove the raw data and facts down your team's throat in the wrong way, people will resent you for it.

Unfortunately, a lot of people are idiots, but you can't just call them that. This is something I'm struggling with, and I wonder if anyone has pointers for me. Not that I call people an idiot, but just that, if I know my facts are correct, and I disagree with them, it's basically the same thing - you're saying "I'm right and you're wrong," which might be true. How do you get someone to agree with you without making them feel like an idiot? Please, tell me, I'm dying to know...
Radical Culture in Ruby: The Gender, Fetish and Race of Programming
Massimo you're internet wise omni-present and python-wise omni-potent ! Thanks for web2py !
I quote from The Article(tm):

"What is the worst-case scenario for Fukushima Daiichi?
It's difficult to be definitive, because information is limited and often confused, and the outcome will depend on the decisions the plant's operators take."

They don't discard anything, and just because something is less serious than Chernobyl it does not make it "minor". Also, so-called experts have been consistently wrong in estimating things in the past days.

Seriously guys, just wait and see for a few days before shouting from the rooftops how amazingly reinforced nuclear power has come out of this. You are not helping anyone.

It honestly just seems that you already know that nuclear energy is a must-have, so you are reasoning backwards from there. If the accident was very serious it would call into question your ideas, so it must be minor, even if it's not over yet and some serious shit still could happen in the future. I just can't support this way of reasoning.
It's been 15 years since I took Calculus I and II, but looking over:
http://www.khanacademy.org/#Calculus

Is there _anything_ in Stewart that isn't covered as well by Khan? You also get advantage of the video tutorial on the topic.

I'm waiting for that point in time when we reach a tipping point and Higher Education Institutions don't just delegate everything to Khan for a lot of their topics.

My Calculus Course (151) at SFU took place in Images Theater at 8:30 in the morning and had 450 Students listening to a lecture on Calculus. The ratio was approximately: 1/8 of the students were bored. 1/8 of the students were lost, 1/8 of the students were attentive, 1/8 of the students were asleep, and 1/2 of the students didn't show up. (8:30 AM!)

I see little need for Stewart in the Face of Khan's Video Collection on Calculus + a bit of wikipedia (Seriously - check out their section on Derivatives and compare it to Stewart)

I will agree with you on the Problem Sets - and perhaps that's the missing ingredient in Khan - He needs to more fully flesh out his test bank - but http://www.khanacademy.org/exercisedashboard is moving ahead nicely. (And, in my mind, is far superior to any static test bank)
What would you like to see more of on the web this year?
In this interview I ask three people who spend their days working in and around the web what they would like to see before the close of 2011.
"...the beauty of taking your allowance money and making a decision based on the jacket, not knowing what the record sounded like, and looking at a couple of still pictures and imagining it."

I think he's saying kids today don't get to experience disappointment and strong feelings of buyers remorse.
Patent for[..]in-line viewing of files over a network such as the Internet
I run what would likely be classed as a lifestyle business (though I prefer to think of it as a large business in the process of bootstrapping). The more people there are running lifestyle businesses, the bigger the 'lillypad'.

With a sufficiently large lifestyle-driven economy, we could move away from the VC model where very few people have the majority of the capital necessary to fund big ideas.

We're already moving to a world where industrial costs continue to decrease, small businesses specialize in providing specific services (such as manufacturing), and computers and machines provide enormous leverage. Examples range from Amazon EC2 to affordable, low-scale manufacturing of injection molded plastics and cheap, on-demand PCB manufacturing.

On the subject of building "big things", it's worth reading this blog post on how the Glif (http://www.theglif.com/) was created by a small team of two, funded by Kickstarter, from design to manufacturing: http://www.therussiansusedapencil.com/post/2794775825/idea-t...

In comparison to pg's example of a router, it is a small thing, but it's a great demonstration of how the bar is being lowered, and what was only accessible to large, capital-rich entities is now available to two guys with limited initial capital.