skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Boron has a high neutron cross-section, it therefore absorbs neutrons and slows down the fission process.

In a PWR you add it into the water as a way to moderate the reaction, but in a BWR (like the reactor 1 in Fukushima Daiichi) you only add it as a last resort, since it is incredibly hard to clean out of the system.
Is there some mechanism where by a startup, or any company for that matter, might provide some guarantee with their API that they will not change it? Some kind of legal contract that isn't so onerous that it must involve expensive lawyers for every single developer sign up? What amount of time for API support would be satisfactory?

Seems to me that Twitter sort of did this via a simple terms of use and that now they are making changes for new developers not existing ones. APIs are never going to last forever. I agree Twitter's new stance is bad for developers and users but the way they went about it seems reasonable to me. The why doesn't seem reasonable but it doesn't really matter. This isn't the great API apocalypse of 2011 though. I do not feel less discouraged to make use of APIs today than I did yesterday.
Only if they are very good trolls :)
yeah that is pretty gay.
that is one gay headphone jack
The iPad 1 has them too. I don't think this is anything new.
I don't really think the methods are important, what's important is whether students decide to learn more advanced math later (say at least up to Calculus), and more importantly whether they like doing so. Too many people say "I hate math", learning multiplication one way or another shouldn't affect that strongly.

The article has a few nice quotes I like: "Computers do arithmetic for us, Devlin says, but making computers do the things we want them to do requires algebraic thinking."

'"You cannot become good at algebra without a mastery of arithmetic," Devlin says, "but arithmetic itself is no longer the ultimate goal." Thus the emphasis in teaching mathematics today is on getting people to be sophisticated, algebraic thinkers.'

While I can do multi-digit multiplications just fine and have a high confidence in my answer, I'd much rather a calculator do it for me, allowing me a higher confidence in the answer and just being done faster to use the result for some other purpose.
yeah that's kind of gay
thats gay
laissez faire beloved by neoliberals

I thought it was the (American) neoconservatives who love laissez-faire? Or at least claim to.
I think you've nailed it by considering the carry-overs.

With the new method there's less opportunity for error. The old way, there are two sets of carry digits: those arising in the initial multiplying, then more in the final adding up (though not in the example given). Sometimes I would try to remember them; sometimes I would write them down in various places; frequently I forgot or muddled them up somehow.

Another benefit is: the new way gives you a sense of the magnitude of the final answer more quickly. Approximations are useful. Contrast with the old method which begins by multiplying the least significant digits.
Boron absorbs neutrons. This stops nuclear reactions in progress.
The article didn't mention either the FDA or electronic cigarettes.
> The thing I find interesting is the FDA's blatant hostility towards electronic cigarettes despite their demonstrated health benefits

It is only surprising if you assume that FDA is a consumer-friendly agency, which exists to protect consumers and keep them safe. In reality I think they are heavily lobbied and influenced otherwise (via a revolving personnel door for ex.) by large drug companies, agro-businesses and big tobacco.
I live in Florida, and I'll take the risk of hurricanes and tornadoes any day over earthquakes. Just the sudden and unavoidable nature of earthquakes makes them seem orders of magnitude worse to me.
I thought it was the biogenic theory that had no science behind it. Please give a source.
Increasing ISP liabilities could lead to a situation where people cannot run server hardware from their home, in the style of FreedomBox. This might be one of the ultimate intentions/outcomes of this sort of legislation - i.e. that you're forced to live inside someone else's legally approved and insured cloud platform.
Japanese Nuclear Cover-ups: Fukushima featured prominently in probe
Some of us in Finland use http://www.qaiku.com/

This service was built when Jaiku was being run down by Google, and features microblogging with threaded comments, embedded media and language filters
How do you feel about the risk that most of Florida will be underwater in a few decades?
Some would argue that when it's your God, it's also not opt-in. Not disagreeing with you, just pointing this out.
Mother of 3 Arrested for Taking Pictures of Tourist Attraction at Airport
Ironic, the only official client developed by Twitter is the web, all the other clients were bought or contracted out.
Slides from the Pycon 2011 Dropbox Talk
Did I already say I love this series? Great stuff. Crash is one of my favorites and I read a lot about how it was made already. Of course the LISP part is what makes it really cool. This article is a fantastic read about that. If you think tools/languages are inadequate; just roll your own.

Shame we don't all get paid to do that... (Or even consider that option)
Where do I add it in WordPress and BuddyPress?
Don't have a source for this picture, but it probably depicts the worst-case scenario:

http://img405.imageshack.us/img405/3245/8m6k8n7f8q7z7.jpg

US West Coast gets the fallout cloud in 10 days.
this is a great series of articles.

There's alot of great technical detail about how they forged their own path rather than using the typical PS1 libraries.
Twitter is really concerned about monetizing the 10% that don't use the official Twitter clients? That seems very corporate. I was happy when Twitter broke into the mainstream (Tweets from celebrities and/or Tweets quoted/shown on major news networks), and this latest development seems to show that they effectively want a scrolling CNN News type ticker (eventually) in their UI of promoted "trends" (how can it be a trend if it is promoted)?

Are they going to block anonymous API usage as well?
I would be really annoyed as I don't like morassing through OAuth to get a Tweet.

e.g.

http://api.twitter.com/1/statuses/user_timeline.json?user_id...

(428333=Cnn Breaking News)
Transparency: Three Basic Considerations
Very cool stuff!

I'd love to see an example as to how you'd integrate that into a Python/Django project.
I have repeatedly seen such communities become places where folks ask totally unrelated questions because the community itself is such a good source of awesome ideas and info that they prefer to ask there, where it is "off topic", rather than asking some other board they belong to where it is "on topic" because the quality of answers is generally so superior. So I think that it depends in part on how it is moderated. I think it is really difficult to intentionally create a community with the kind of goal you describe. There are lots of challenges in terms of trying to find a common theme to bring like-minded individuals together without so narrowly defining it as to put a straight-jacket on the conversation. Quite a lot of the forums I have belonged to wrestle with such issues.

An example I can think of, which might not make sense to you, is that "gifted homeschooling" groups tend to be ripe, when handled right, for the kind of atmosphere you describe. But then you cannot discuss "just anything" -- some folks will be very sensitive about what topics get brought up and parents are inherently more conservative than other groups. I think this is true because "gifted homeschoolers" are frequently dealing with 2xE kids -- kids who have issues and just don't fit in -- yet the emphasis is on two positives rather than on the handicaps and other negatives. It's tough to package a community for dealing with serious issues without it becoming a place that reinforces the negative self-image that is typically bound up in such problems. I think the idea itself of "gifted homeschooling" forums is a neat hack that gets around that issue. So far, I feel I have failed to adequately replicate it in trying to reach out to others in a positive way for various serious problems. :-/
I read his comment and I can't say that I disagree with his assessment given the amount of information that we have. I spent some time on a US nuclear warship and he's probably got some nuclear engineering background.

Right now, my main concern is the release of Caesium-137. If that has been detected, then there is a solid chance that the core has been at least partially exposed. Caesium-137 has a half-life of 30 years and is a gamma emitter. It's also water-soluble. Not a good combination.
Somehow I doubt that the packaging really influences what someone smokes and how much they smoke of it. People make decisions based on taste, strength and habit more than they do on marketing and especially pack design.

If someone's smoking, they've already made the decision to do it, health consequences be damned. I doubt that warning labels, gross pictures or any other kind of package manipulation has a significant effect.
Just launched and looking for feedback on http://BEGFOR.iT
> "From each according..." is not a tenet shared by all socialists.

Yes, of course. Something that is shared by all socialists is redistribution. If you're not redistributing something, then you're doing nothing. To redistribute something, you must infringe upon the liberties of the individual for the sake of another or a group of others. The more you do this, the faster you accelerate the march toward totalitarianism.

For example, a minimal state that only provides a police force to enforce the laws and taxes individuals accordingly may take hundreds or even a thousand years to collapse into a totalitarian state. On the other hand, when you throw individual protections out the window, it may only take a few years. For example, contrary to popular belief, the period between the Russian revolution and Stalin's takeover was really interesting. It would take too long to go into it, but they tried some really exciting stuff and some of it worked. Unfortunately, when you discard individual liberty, it creates an opportunity for totalitarianism to step through the door.
Planely—Join the flying revolution
The iPhone 3G (and I assume the 3GS) as well
It has N different kinds of "stealth" scans that all produce the same kernel of valuable information, it has an elaborate (and, against most corporate networks from external vantage points, not particularly accurate or helpful) OS detection scheme, it runs scripts, it produces stdout and file output in a variety of complicated formats (it really just wants to be a service hooked up to a database), it runs scripts, IT RUNS SCRIPTS, come on. This isn't a serious argument. You just like nmap. That's fine; I think nmap is impressive too.

Oh, and it takes _for_ _ever_ to run. I'll pastie the 50 line EventMachine scripts I race it with when people on my team get stuck waiting for 12-hour nmap runs.
Subcritical is "killed completely" from a nuclear standpoint - lowering the reactivity of an already subcritical reactor (e.g. adding neutron absorbers) does nothing but make the fission rate decrease faster. The fission rate already changes on short time scales, (e.g. orders of magnitude in minutes/hours during a scram). If the fission rate is already essentially zero, which it is in the Japanese reactor by now, it does nothing at all.

The heat inside the core is being produced by the decay of fission products, and there's absolutely nothing you can do to stop that except wait for enough half-lives that the activity slows down a bit.

Your general thesis, namely that as soon as they decide the reactor can't be salvaged, they'll dump in a bunch of boron just to be safe on the nuclear front, is correct, but where you're wrong is in assuming that adding a bunch of boron will help cool the reactor at all - it won't. All it will do is ensure that the reactor never goes critical again.

This is why spent fuel needs to sit in a pool of water for 5 years before anyone even considers moving it. Decay heat is serious shit, and it's not related to neutron physics at all.

EDIT: Probably time to get more specific about the term "reactivity". Reactivity is related to the "multiplication factor", which tells you how much bigger each generation of neutrons is than the last. It's zero when each subsequent generation is the same size - this is the normal operating state of a reactor, positive when each subsequent generation of neutrons is larger, and negative ... you get the idea.

If you've ever touched population dynamics in a differential equations class, you'll realize that this is a recipe for exponential growth and decay. Basically the time scale on which nuclear reactions proceed is "reactivity / mean neutron lifetime", with the caveat that if your reactivity is just above zero, neutron population growth is constrained by the longest-lived neutrons (it's like if every family has 2 kids, except for a couple hundredths of a percent, who have three, but put their third kids in cryostasis for a thousand years). In practice, this is how reactors are operated, because the mean neutron lifetime is _very_ small, so the worst thing that can happen is if your reactivity moves outside of this regime (this happened at Chernobyl). If your reactivity is negative, you are _always_ constrained by the longest-lived neutrons, but that's okay, because even this time scale is pretty short.

The upshot here is that if each successive generation of neutrons is smaller than the last, the number of neutrons (and hence things like fission rate that depend linearly on the number of neutrons) decays exponentially with a pretty short time constant.

The definition of "subcritical" is "having negative reactivity", so if the reactor is subcritical for any length of time, the fission rate will have exponentially decayed down to a tiny number.
Planely is a Danish start up that I think is best described as "social flying" and networking. It looks really interesting, but I have no idea if anyone's using it.

If anyone'll be using it on their way to or from SXSW, I'd love to hear your experiences.
An excellent response to nearly any concern of disaster, terrorism, or other highly-visible but highly-unlikely danger. Fear is only natural, but it's amazing how quickly it can be allayed with a little perspective.
You can change the positing setting to cover page content. Here's an example: http://www.arookiemistake.com/
Some kind of legal contract...

Well, yes, it's called.. a contract. An API provider could put their obligations in writing, though they would probably have to charge at least a small fee to make the contract stand.

But providers are not going to do that unless developers make it worth their while, and vice-versa. The economics of open APIs just don't support that kind of commitment on either end.

If you want to build a business around someone's free API, you better have a quick exit planned.
Here's a simple WordPress plugin to install the code: http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/hellobar/
The hype around using mobile
Promoted trends are popular trends already (may not be the top 10 but they are popular trends). Twitter just places a promoted tweet from the advertiser when you click on a trend. You cannot be a promoted trend without reaching some popularity first.
I am saying something very simple that seems to have caused your head to explode. It is: you could write n+1map in Python using Twisted, or Ruby using EventMachine, or Erlang, and probably end up faster (not because of the language, but because you'd design for speed and the language doesn't matter) than nmap is in C.

This isn't a controversial statement. Nobody thinks nmap is the fastest possible scanner. To argue that n+1map should be written in C, you have to make a case for what aspect of a port scanner benefits from C. Which is why I pointed out: nmap doesn't even look I/O bound; it looks timer-bound. And in most cases, neither I/O-bound nor timer-bound programs benefit greatly from locality, cheaper copies, or (within reason) optimized memory allocation and layout.
Something to Ruin Your Weekend
Laser-cut noise maker resembles violin
Because you need power and nuclear is the best way? Consider the facts:

1. The reactors in question here are now two technological generations old; they are old, fragile designs compared to more modern designs.
2. Japan just experienced one of the biggest earthquakes in world history, followed by a tsunami of a scope that makes Kurosawa's war scenes look like moving Legos around.
3. Despite this, there have been no catastrophic reactor failures. Zero. We're not out of the woods yet, but the smart money is on there being a couple minor incidents and no major incidents as a result of all this.

I'd say the decision to build nuclear plants instead of, say, dozens and dozens of coal plants (which would have killed a lot of people by now with their pollution) is looking pretty smart.
http://www.world-nuclear-news.org/RS_Battle_to_stabilise_ear... was updated again, with news that the sea water injection was paused due to a new tsunami warning and that the event is now classified as a level 4 event on the INES (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Nuclear_Event_Sca...) scale, TMI was classified as 5 and Chernobyl 7.
Hmm, good point. Moderation would be super important, which means that it needs a very actionable definition of what classifies as a "hack" and what does not. It might also need a little of structure in the way the information is presented to act as a proactive guard against off-topic posts. I definitely agree with what you're saying about not defining it too narrowly, but of course it needs to be defined.

Interesting example about gifted homeschooling. Serving the community and being mindful of their interests, for sure, can make or break a community.
Cheers for NoticiasHacker Dfectuoso!

I have some thoughts.
Its good to see there are a tool for Spanish-spoken hackers because you can meet some cool people near you place and build a community, which i believe the REASON HN exists. When i've discovered HN, i thought this was really awesome and came to be addicted to all this cool stuff. The biggest problem about this, is that much of the spanish-spoken HN users doesnt know each other. I can count with at much 10 hackers that i know in person and know they visit HN.

Communities are organized as cell. When you born you belong to the first cell called family. When you show some interests like Basketball or Videogames, you know people, get accepted and now belong now another cell. I can see Noticias Hacker would be some cell that will be grouping all the best hacks and news about LatinAmerican stuff, and eventually help to know about key players in the ecosystem.
Amazing when you need to catch up some attention from SV Angels and Press coverage.

And as Android Developer, i don't believe you need to forget English(if you want to develop stuff you need to learn English and build it. in English), but both languages aren't both exclusive mutually. And in some way, know two languages makes you more smart.
My money is on "not for a long time". I say this because HN is made by PG.

HN was made as a demo which has gone horribly viral. The original intent of HN was to show the world what can be done in terms of web tech. Thus this was made to "just work" (thus the most (in)famous design choice of using tables for layout). Also, PG is a very busy man and any time he gets to work on HN almost always goes into making it spam free and improving the ranking algo.
Tipperary Games Fleadh - Ireland's GDC
Hey Mz - good eye :) much appreciated.
Sun.com Will Disappear After June 1
Yes. It is possible:

http://www.world-nuclear.org/info/inf18.html

It's not like they don't think of this stuff ahead of time. This was planned for.
Can someone please build a user-css for youtube that makes it so I never accidentally see the comments posted there?
Which reminds me, a Twitter client is almost a standard programming tutorial example now. What will replace those?
Gas isn't expensive today. What's expensive today are almost all commodities. http://www.indexmundi.com/commodities/

This is a systemic problem. Any valid explanation of price increases in a commodity, e.g., oil (gas), has to explain why prices are rising almost across the board.

This is almost exactly the point the article is trying to explain: commodity prices are rising across the board in line with the commodities index, but why should there be an index at all? In the market you have the supplier, buyer, and consumer. The "speculator" was placed into the mix with a limited role for providing liquidity; this role was intentional and helpful since in the real world there could be a delay between the time a grower/supplier and buyer/cereal producer actually needed what the other had (raw material or cash); with the speculator there was always the opportunity to buy or sell. However, there were intentional, specific limits placed on the speculator. This was to ensure he couldn't corner the market and artificially skew prices. As long as these limits remained intact the market operated as designed, and the actual price of commodities reflected real world supply and demand (since the main players in the market were physical hedgers - people who actually had stake in/cared about the physical commodity). Goldman Sachs was able to get these "speculator handcuffs" removed. This means the actual market price for commodities doesn't necessarily reflect supply and demand. Rather, it also has the component of speculation priced into it. We can see this even within these last few days. The price of a barrel of oil was skyrocketing above $100; this seemed to make sense due to the unrest in the Middle East, then amazingly with the earthquake in Japan it quickly dropped below $100. In such as short time was there really an escalation then de-escalation in the demand for oil!? Of course not. The price was following speculation, people who are only in the market to make money. The end result is that ordinary consumers must pay at the pump what the whims of investors say, never mind progress made whether politically or technologically, or reductions by consumers in a recession to ease pressure on demand and oil prices. Natural gas is not as attractive to speculators as oil.
Bowel Express Speed Technology. Remember, it has to be FAST AS SHIT.
Sorry, that was just my tounge-tied way of expressing admiration for the tremendous skill of Japanese civil engineers. Surely those building were designed without expecting them to survive an 8.9 earthquake, yet survive they did. I am in awe.
I don't think that's true at all. Yahoo Answers has often proved useful for me. It also lacks the snootiness of SO. TechCrunch seems to have a serious vendetta against Yahoo. Or maybe Yahoo-bashing is just cool right now. But I remember when the Yahoo CEO mocked Arrington on stage during an interview. It seems personal.
It didn't have to for the parent's comment to be worthwhile.
Very nicely done! Clean and compelling UI. My feedback:

1. The hands have a sort of religious vibe to them - especially when I mouse over it. This might turn away potential users of your app.

2. The UI layout breaks down if I click the search box without supplying any search criteria.

3. Get some more items up there! Looks too sparse right now. It's like looking in a window of a restaurant with no patrons - not that compelling to enter.

Whoever did the design deserves some kudos. It's clean and simple.

Good luck!

EDIT: One more thing: Is a captcha really necessary at this point?