skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Japan is the third largest economy in the world.

Uganda and Cambodia don't even make it into the top hundred.

Most of those 'development dollars' never even make their way remotely close to the people in third-world countries; the graft and corruption sees to that.

I live in Tokyo, and it's pretty insulting to hear this kind of shit.

Japan can certainly use the short-term help, especially from trained rescue workers, as well as helicopter pilots (as long as they come with their own helicopter). Help is definitely appreciated.

But with or without 'our' help, Japan will recover.

The real problems here are the disruption in the supply chains. The oil refineries and stores along the east coast are all offline, and in the three hardest-hit areas, many roads are unusable. This makes it really hard to get supplies in, even though there's plenty flowing in from the rest of the country.

On the social side, Japan is a group-oriented culture, with deep ties stretching all over the country. The refugees have the entire nation behind them in rebuilding their lives, homes, and communities.

Speaking of communities, people here don't go to church. Shinto-buddhism doesn't really work that way. While there are Christians here, they're a small, and very tough, minority.

I'm probably going to eat a bunch of downvotes for this, but it's irritating as hell that everybody overseas thinks that we're either all dead, or that I'm living in a tent.
I've been using Zite recently on my new iPad and I must say I love it! I've easily spent more time on Zite than on any other app since i've bought my iPad. Great work and congratulations!
Interesting. What was your motivation?
Funny that no one has mentioned E2V. It's the only one that hit the 'I wanted to do that' criteria for me. I think the lesson is that you need to work hard to educate your user to get it to catch on. Think of specific killer use cases. I would recommend going to the nearest business school during interview season and posting a bunch of flyers that say something like "We'll call you when you get the email that's going to change your life". Maybe target med school applicants similarly, anyone who's checking their email every 5 minutes waiting for the big one. Don't target developers, they already know how to forward emails to text message. This is also the easiest to monetize without charging. If people give you 5 email addresses, the domains may well give you insight into what they care about most. Targeting advertising rocket fuel (applying to Goldman, are we?).
What would you prefer? Thousands of apps approved by "a small team in California", which are generally spyware free.

OR a handful of apps specifically designed for your platform.
You can't accurately assess the total impact of the Chernobyl accident yet because the damage is still on-going and the exclusion zone will still be hazardous to human health long after you and I are in our graves. The presumption that knowledge of the nature of the danger and the geographical boundaries of the exclusion zone will be preserved and passed on to future generations for the entire duration that the area remains a danger to human health is rather dubious. History is riddled with examples of ancient civilizations whose secrets are lost to us. As members of the technical elite of our society, we tend to implicitly assume that knowledge will be preserved and technological progress will continue in an unbroken chain, but that doesn't necessarily make it so. Technological "dark ages" have happened before in which much that was known was lost. How can we be certain that anyone will still know the location of the exclusion zones and be aware of the radiation risk 500, 1000, 2000 years from now? If we're honest with ourselves, we will admit that we have saddled future generations with the burden of a booby trap that will likely still be causing much suffering and death when our present civilization is as ancient as the Parthenon is now.
RIM issues PSA following Pwn2Own exploit: turn off JavaScript on your BlackBerry
This is where TrueCrypt comes in. If you are being extorted to reveal a password, you supply one that loads a "clean" OS/filesystem.
Or myspace. I wish the person who made the "autoplay my music whenever someone visits my page" setting would get shot.
'If you think you need YC to succeed, then you won't (and shouldn't) be accepted'. This is very well put.
I think to improve the chances of successfully creating something, keeping these in mind may help:
1. You should not believe that your circumstances are different even when it really is. Otherwise it becomes an excuse while the converse will help you push the limits.
2. You try to create something not because you want to be well-known or rich but rather you want to improve something (for yourself, etc.) or you believe there is no other better way to spend you time. You'll be less disappointed and more driven.
Here's an explanation of the quake's inverse square rule describing the relationship of the force experienced to the distance away from it: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2332793
This service doesn't seem to be at all like a "Heroku" of PHP" as it was marketed at one time. It seems that each app is simply running on one or more of it's own EC2 instances with the smallest plans (free tier and the smallest paid plan) running on micro instances. Those micro instances are horrible (generally slow, terrible I/O) and for the monthly fee they are charging, there are much better options. That probably explains why they only give one free app for the entire account, it would be too expensive to provide more than one free micro instance for everyone. Though I haven't been impressed by the AWS micro instances, PHP Fog apparently has an option to run on Rackspace cloud which is much better for the low end IMO.

Heroku doesn't put your applications on their own instances. I imagine they are also getting around the problem of crap low end EC2 instances by distributing all apps across clusters of the largest instances.

Not to bag on PHP Fog, they have created a lot of excitement in the PHP space. Personally, I prefer Heroku's model and for PHP I would rather just cut out the middle man and run my own VPS. It's nice not to have to deal with administration, but that's just one benefit of using Heroku, and not the most important for me.
Any published work is copyrighted by default. Are you aware of Chomsky making any effort to keep his books out of people's hands? Has he sued anyone for copying or distributing his books?
I agree with the point that secret questions suck, but the entire idea that any sort of second password as high-security is flawed. Daily WTF did a great write-up (http://thedailywtf.com/Articles/WishItWas-TwoFactor-.aspx) on how real two-factor authentication requires two distinct forms - one based on what you know, and one based on what you have. Historically the "what you have" has been one of those RSA tokens but now Google is doing some two-factor using phones and it's easy to do this using text messaging as well (as someone mentioned). With this availibility of cheap RSA devices and cell phones, I see no reason why institutions such as banks - where I really care about the security of my data - can't implement the same measures that Blizzard does for World of Warcraft.
Ask HN: Do you have an aversion to Silverlight web apps?
I'm very proficient with WPF and somewhat proficient with GWT (more with Ext GWT). I'm considering leveraging my skills in WPF to build some Silverlight web apps. I'm not a big fan of HTML/JS/CSS, as in, I don't feel that productive. I like GWT, but I still don't feel as productive as I would with Silverlight.

These apps may target the HN community, so I'm curious, do you have an aversion to using a Silverlight based app? If you do, would you reconsider if the app solves a problem that you have in a novel way?

Thanks in advance.
You're absolutely right. Setting up email filters or even realizing why someone would need E2V is not easy to grasp for most typical end-users. I love coding and designing but sales & marketing is something I haven't spent much time on. ZetaBee isn't a startup for me at this point (http://ktype.net is my full-time project) so I haven't even thought of how I'd monetize/market ZetaBee. Only reason I even added a PayPal purchase option to E2V is so I don't go broke when someone gets 10000 emails sent to their phone.
Aside from the lolstealth and the email harvesting, that logo is sweet!
I'm big on systems and testing and generally more interested in people than the technical nature of technology. I just wanted to see if it would work. I did this off and on from the time I was 14 to 17 or so. I lived literally in the middle of nowhere, where the nearest town had about 27 people. It was an interesting way to spend time in high school.

To me it was a big experiment to maximize conversion and minimize detectability.

The biggest take away from this is that I realized that social interactions have formulas and you can take advantage of those formulas. You can also find shortcuts to the formula or make certain parts of the formula more important or less important based on context.
Same thing happened to me when I went to India for 3 weeks. before I went, I had ordered the "unlimited" international data plan from AT&T for $200 per month. After i came back, I got a $1,800 bill from AT&T. When I called, they said that the unlimited plan was not really unlimited....they just called it unlimited.

So I told them that they had 2 options. Either to cancel the entire $1,800 and accept the $200 unlimited plan as unlimited or I would pay nothing and they could take me to court.

They called 2 hours later and cancelled the entire $1,800 bill. Basically AT&T is nothing but a bunch of crooks trying to cheat as many people as they can.

Here's my gripe about the whole industry http://bit.ly/f2WEq5
This. This this this.

You know who's fleeing the 'impending nuclear holocaust'? The foreigners who get all of their news from English-language media.

One of my coworkers flew back to NYC because he was so worried about radiation exposure. You get exposed to more radiation by taking a twelve-hour flight than you would by camping in a pup tent in the mountains overlooking the reactor complex.

The Japanese news is full of experts, explanations, and zero panic. The foreign news is full of propaganda. Makes me sick.
Are you awake?
The EU's energy chief, Guenther Oettinger, told the European parliament the situation was out of control. "We are somewhere between a disaster and a major disaster," he said. "There could be further catastrophic events, which could pose a threat to the lives of people on the island." He said it was impossible to "exclude the worst", adding: "There is talk of an apocalypse and I think the word is particularly well chosen."

Apocalypse? Seriously?

Does the EU energy chief have some motive to exaggerate about this?
I think you're missing my point... these are very occasionally used passphrases that really aren't as easy to remember as one might think. At the same time as the article points out, they're easier than an random password to hack.

So worst of all worlds: harder to remember, easier to break.
"Cardio" may cause heart disease - Part I
I redo the space shuttle risk using the data from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_space_shuttle_missions#...

Total Orbits: ~20K
Orbits Length: ~40K Km
Crashes: 2
(Assuming same number of crew in each flight.)
Risk: 20K * 40K Km / 2 = 4*10^8 man Km per death
Or: 2.5 deaths / billon Km

So using the Risk/Km criteria the space shuttle is as safe as (water)ships, safer than cars and riskier than trains.
Please don't send any Real American Heroes to Tokyo. We're fine. Send them up north where they're needed.
Hacker Factor: Gender Guesser
That accident was safely contained.
Why no mention of jplayer.org? 37kb minified, flash fallback, works great (http://mixest.com).

Maybe because he's not trying to play music.
What's the difference? I have a pair of designers/devs that I've spent a lot of money with, they're in the Ukraine. I've never met them. We skype, use basecamp and email to get the work done. They invoice, I pay through paypal. We've done several projects together and I plan to work with them as long as they're available.
Dang - you're an app churning machine! I just looked at your profile and checked out all your projects....WOW! Talk about some achievements.

GREAT JOB with these apps! I especially like Text and CashFlow. Very, very usable.
I am pretty sure people in Japan had nevertheless been told those reactors are safe. They will be told new reactors are safe. Why should they believe it now? If you don't count it as a data point about safety of reactors, count it as a data point about the reliability of engineers and governments.
copy & pasted what?

can you point out any of our code from about.me?
Definitely better than adding a real bank account. I can't use Mint because it's not in my country. (I am in Ireland).
Previous comment here related to multiple down votes I received. I jumped the gun and lesson learned.
Apple could really help indie TV flourish
I work on my project using all my spare time (no games, no tv, etc.) while I was doing my Ph.D. and even now that I'm gainfully employed.
I think if you want to keep your significant income while working on some ideas, time is something you have to allocate with lots of discipline and persistence to ensure project time is strictly adhered to.
Considering the limited time you may have, it may be a good idea to consider a really obscure and good idea because the pace at which things are evolving can easily render your wonderful idea into a history within months.
..they also linked directly to /b/ . I thought they were supposed to be businessey and respectable and such?
Residents of what, the world? How did they measure that?
What an amazingly accurate and succinct synthesis of the nature of design. I'm writing this down somewhere: "In essence, design is not a chaotic expression, it’s a measured approach to creation."
Startup/Bootstrapped Marketing Recap | Tactical Steps
By 'exploit' I mean bending the rules, or skirting restrictions. Information disclosure, not code execution. They are taking advantage of flaws in browsers in order to gather information which is not supposed to be available.

I assume this same method could be used by people with less savory goals, but this company isn't reporting the security flaws in browsers that let them do this as it would make things more difficult for their business.

I probably wouldn't go around telling everyone if it was me.
It's just not clear to me how more cash will help. It seems that the major problems involve the logistics of getting rescuers and supplies to people who need them, and money isn't the limiting factor there. GiveWell seems to agree: http://blog.givewell.org/2011/03/15/update-on-how-to-help-ja...
Appreciate the feedback...actually started in on it about 4 years ago but had to focus on the consulting practice to continue the cash flow. Every so often I reflect back and think that if I would have only stuck with it is would be a huge success now and tell myself that even with all the evidence telling me the idea was solid that it is now too late because of other market entries. Then I have that talk with myself all over again 6 months later thinking if I had even took action last time things would be different.

Ahh to be 20 again...
Automatic memoization in C++0x
.. and one that everyone wants to be real.
Thanks for the explanation. I suspect most people downvoted you because they didn't understand your motivation.

I particularly liked your comment about finding formulas for social interactions. Have you tried looking for work at a social startup? From what I have heard of Facebook's culture, you would fit right in.
Oh MySpace: Why I Hate Thee / Shady Reengagement Tactics
I went to MySpace.com today to update my profile (I have pictures / messages on there from the college days that are not so appropriate…don’t ask). Having not used it for years, I had to reset my password. The captcha was so terrible (took at least 10 tries to get it right; I’m convinced I was entering the right letters), that it reminded me why I never got on in the first place for so long and triggered me to cancel my account.<p>The cancellation process seemed pretty straightforward. Go to your account settings, hit cancel account, tell them why your canceling, and they would send a confirmation email to verify your cancelation. I followed all of the steps, then MySpace told me it would take 48 hours to cancel the account (wtf??). Okay fine. Two minutes later, I open up my inbox, and I start receiving messages from women wanting me to go to MySpace to talk to them. I’m certain if I click and try to login to my account, I’ll have to go through cancelation process again. No matter how hard I want to see what Chelsy or Mariska want to tell me, I will resist.<p>Coincidence or shady reengagement techniques? Oh MySpace, you’re falling on your own sword. Hopefully in 48 hours, my account will be no more.<p>Click link to see image proof.
No, no there isn't. There is just awesomeness.
Verifone's CEO Defends Actions Against Square: "It’s a Competitive World."
You're at +6 right now, so the number of people (including me) who think that your comment was interesting and useful to the conversation outweigh the number of people who objected to it. HN is generally self-correcting; I would say that not asking about downvotes for at least two hours or until you get down to -4 or below is probably a good rule of thumb, as I expect that HN's tendency to self-correct is lessened past either of those points (because of fewer people reading the thread or because people won't bother reading the comment), assuming that you can't see why it's been downvoted. That's just my advice, though, as I most often see comments asking about downvotes following comments which have a positive votecount.
I was hit by lighting, and I was vary happy that my personal lighting shield worked.

PS: Car
Generating sounds is rather straightforward with HTML5. On the other hand, manipulating sound bytes (which would enable both synthesizer-like web apps and audio streaming) really ain't that easy to do.
Forbes is being trolled.
Java solved a number of problems, but introduced some of its own.

The work I do in C++ I could do in Java, but the extra memory and compute overhead would cost us on the order of another engineer. Go interests me because it might let me escape C++ without the cost of Java. (Go may still prove too expensive, my experiments aren't done yet.)

Also: Go developers have the Python ethos of short names and simple interfaces. Take a look at the Go standard library[1]. I may get the safety of Java and the productivity of Python in one go.

[1] http://golang.org/pkg/
Should be similar in Germany.
IBM Startup SmartCamp - Part of Global Entrepreneur Initiative
Feature, Product, Company
I think many people feel the same.

My advice: if you think you lack in some areas of the application, you need to make up for it in others. For example, if you didn't go to a top-tier school, you might make up for that by having some projects that have traction.
These are really awesome, thanks for sharing. Expecially liking Cash Flow, though I have two feature requests:

* I'd like to plan multiple scenarios at once, so the ability to save, create new and duplicate different cash flows would be useful.

* I'd like the ability to move multiple rows at once quicker.

* I'd like you to monetise this so I don't feel guilty requesting things, I'd happily pay an upfront fee (pinboard.in style?).

Thanks!
Internet Explorer 9 downloaded 2.3 million times in first day
JT - Justin Timberlake, The Social Network. haha nice comment ;)
Silverlight, for me, has been buggy, slow, and required frequent obtrusive updates. Yes, I do have an aversion to using them.
Yes, and Chomsky also offered his view on Bell Labs. An off-the-cuff interview: (http://tech.mit.edu/V128/N51/chomsky.html). A bit more detail, if you search for the word "transistor": (http://www.chomsky.info/talks/199805--.htm).
I have an aversion to microsoft products...period.
I was expecting to hear about being paid to learn about the market through trying new things and likely failing, the usual stuff.

This wasn't very insightful. I've always been paid to learn, but I look at it as a two way street, which Cuban doesn't seem to allude to. I learned while being paid, but the companies I worked for benefited not only from my learning but also from the work which was done.

Cuban's article reads to me more like a one way street of 'how can I be paid to learn'.

Also, what is with the lack of spaces and poor grammer. Is his writing always so disjointed?
My bad, I assumed you were saying more than you were.

Nevertheless, the meat of my comment remains the same. Choosing a power generation source with a front-loaded death risk is gambling with other people's lives today. Choosing something with a back-loaded death risk is gambling with other people's lives tomorrow. I see no compelling reason to believe one is better than the other.
I am making an observation.

You seem very angry.
The gist of this article seems to be you should not worry, just apply, which I kind of agree.
If you are having second thoughts, here is a slight nudge. Even if you fail, I believe each time you apply for some funding, filling in the application forms pushes you to think more and challenges your ideas, which inevitable leads to improvement or even discovery of new areas to work on.
Been a fan of Text for a while now, although I'm not sure I prefer the new styling over the old bulletext one :)
If this is true lol, it makes me feel small haha. Kudos to omg@ Kayla (if she exists lol) = D lol hehe rofl omg
Chime, I admire and thank you for letting the HN community take a look at your creations. As a developer, I know I am sometimes reluctant to let my peers see what I'm working on. I really like the simplicity of TEXT and can't wait to try out Email to Voice. I'm about to launch a public application that I have been working on for about a year and will set up a filter to have Email to Voice call me when someone signs up! Here's to hoping my phone rings a lot, and to your continued hacking and success.
How ridiculously annoying - I just bought Parallels a few days ago, for more than the bundle costs lol.
Having to run in a VM is also seen as a drawback by some people, including me. The VM startup time makes using command line tools written in Java painful and Java apps often feel awkward on every platform since they don't use any platform specific features. So even though having a single binary work across all platforms is a killer feature for some people it's yet another disadvantage of java for others.
I'd rather ramp up renewables, ramp down coal, and let nuclear dwindle on its own. Renewables aren't just "potentially" green, they are green, and without the extremely obvious risks that can contaminate a region for decades and increase the entire planet's risk of cancer. Renewables (and the advanced power grid that would support it) have huge room for improvement in generation, nuclear does not have huge room for improvement.
Thank you! Those first two look very promising. I'd found the Crockford Files (!) before, and whilst they look interesting for historical reasons, much of it was lost on me at this stage.
How? What does it mean?

Any way I try to define it(other than how CNN puts it) I end up leaving out a huge chunk of cos that also claim to be into cloud computing. And I am not exCtly sure if anyone is in a position or authority to tell them "no you've got nothing to do with the cloud".
S/He's been hanging out with mostly male geeks, and would probably pick up their "accent". Also, raised by a single dad who's a programmer.

(Using a gender guesser is genius though)
iOS vs. android: opportunities and constraints has been an interesting game in heyzap for the last couple of months.
The Phantom Protocol implemented, plus a few links at reddit/r/coding
Huh. This comment has been deleted. Was it the admins or did Rick not enjoy the criticism?