skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Ask HN: What to think of the end of unlimited broadband internet?
In light of AT&T's recent announcement that they will cap their broadband internet offering (through U-Verse and regular DSL), as does COMCAST from what I understand, it really looks like this is the way future will be for broadband internet.

It seems to me the impact on existing business models such as Netflix' streaming service, iTunes, Amazon's new streaming service, Sling, etc... will be devastating. Caps may be high enough (for now) but people will definitely think twice before committing to multi-GB downloads. Also, I can't help but think that this may kill yet-to-be discovered business models that would have relied on unlimited broadband.

Am I being too gloomy or is the door slowly closing on many internet-related future opportunities?
It's never been 'inconceivable' that nuclear plants would fail. Nuclear energy was a risk nations were willing to take to keep you plugged in, making this post right now. You're faulting engineering that predates the microprocessor, at a power plant scheduled to be decommissioned soon, for failing in the two worst natural disasters (earthquake + tsunami) in Japan's modern history.

I just wanted to make that clear.
The vast majority of active musicians don't make any memorable original music whatsoever. Sure, we'll have lots of good performers always, that won't change, but what popular music needs is huge numbers of relatively unskilled 'musicians' taking a stab at songwriting. That happens because there's money in the game. Otherwise we'd just be left with a dull cottage industry.
Well, just cross your fingers and pray, it may get worse, if you are lucky. I get the distinct feeling that you want there to be a nuclear catastrophe....most detractors are content with imagining (and genuinely believing) that there have been several catastrophes in our past. But you seem drawn to want an actual catastrophe.

Am I wrong? If you could somehow magically snap your fingers and make nuclear power 100% safe, would you do it?
And a lot more people do not donate at all (the percentage of anonymous donations to most charities is miniscule). In the absence of evidence that he has donated, the reasonable assumption is that he has not.

That's not to say I believe he is obligated to do so. But, I seriously doubt Jobs generosity...he's always been kind of a jerk, especially in matters of money. I don't understand why anyone would bring up "some people donate anonymously!" as some sort of evidence that Jobs is a giving human being, when most evidence points to the contrary.
Same thing I thought. If a VC started hitting on me during the pitch I'd leave, and frankly I wouldn't deal with a VC that would treat any founder this way. If they will use power to exploit why even consider a partnership with them?
Pigs indeed — agree completely. No one should do business with such creeps.

At the same time, especially when you're starting out, you've got a lot of insecurity already, male or female, about your pitch, about your idea, your business, everything. It's fucked up to ladle on ever more confusion to the process by making the beginner wonder if a rebuke will foul other opportunities. The relationship should be reciprocal, yes, but let's be real, the investor has done this way more than the entrepreneur. The imbalance of power feels real and it's disgusting to see it abused so crassly.
I'm not sure whether it's that "HN seems to want a heavy dose of finality..." or if we're just naturally inclined to want good news in the face of overwhelmingly bad news.

I keep on thinking of Akira Kurosawa's "Dreams..." (One of the segments deals with just this kind of scenario. The protagonist finds himself in hell after a nuclear disaster.) A horror like this has been in the cultural subconscious of Japan for decades. They always knew that there was a possibility of something like this, but they chose to gamble against it happening.

They didn't do it because they were foolish, or naive. They did their best to avert that disaster. The people had faith in the talent and skills of those engineers responsible.

It's our nature to want to see the good... even in a horror like this. (Especially a bunch of people who are willing to risk everything to start a business.)
Jobfox Rolls Out Social Private Networks For Online Recruiting
Yes, see my comment above. We pushed a change this evening that removes seller feedback from your public profile. Since Etsy was founded you've always been able to see this information. However, upon considering the fact that we no longer have issues wrt buyers not paying due to our new checkout system, combined with the fact that it inadvertently reveals a buyer's purchase information based upon the action of a seller, we decided it made sense to remove this view from your public profile.

As far as the visibility of other feedback goes, such as the feedback you make on a seller, you can mark the feedback as 'private' when you make it to hide the item involved.
And your response indicates compelete ignorance of both the situation and nuclear reactions.

There is no kill switch, if they had a "kill switch" and executed it right now, you'd be condemning all the reactors to meltdowns, and you'd be condemning the US Western Coast to dangerous levels of radiation.

The content of the fuel rods take DAYS to become non-radioactive enough for them to not need to be cooled constantly. The very problem that's occuring now is occuring because either the radioactive cesium and iodine is either at risk of not being cooled which will lead to a meltdown and release of them into the atmosphere, or a containment breach with largely the same impacts.
Oh please. Occasionally running into a rude man? THE HORROR! THE HORROR SPECIFIC TO TECH!

I found it interesting that the women didn't just walk out of these situations. Why were they willing to submit themselves to such indignities? Surely they weren't forced to continue pitching. But no... they wanted the money.

If you want the money more than you want respect, well, you're not going to get respect.

As a woman genuinely in tech -- which, coincidentally, means a lot more than "in search of VC" -- I can say that I've been treated ill by just as many women as men over the years. But when a woman is horrible to you, you don't cry sexism, because well, she's got the same equipment as you do. Also, nobody's interested, because "everyone knows" women are catty, shallow, and wield their social abilities like a weapon. Kind of like how "everyone knows" men are uncultured brutes, who look down on noble, long-suffering women, assume they are dumb, and hit on anything that moves.

Please.

Fact: some people are shitty. By "people" I mean "of any and all genders, equally." If a person is shitty to you in what seems like a gender-specific way, chances are s/he is shitty to people of a different gender but in a different way.

Take it personally and you're just telling yourself a story. But in reality, it's not about you. The way a person treats you is very rarely about you. It's about them. So ignore them and move on with your dignity intact, and stop telling yourself lies.

By the way, selling cosmetics -- but being in search of VC -- does not a "woman in tech" make. For the love of god, are your cosmetics web-enabled?
The article does a poor job of convincing me that any of these problems are unique to the tech industry.

Journalism: http://jezebel.com/#!5738019/where-are-the-women-at-highbrow...
Film: http://womenintvfilm.sdsu.edu/research.html
Music: http://www.billboard.biz/bbbiz/content_display/industry/news...

A more appropriate title would be 'Horror Stories from Women dealing with Wealthy Men in Powerful Positions"

Can anyone name an 'Industry' in which is this NOT the case? Otherwise, singling out the tech industry is counterproductive and unfair.
I'm still waiting for my "MAKE-IT-RAIN-CLOUD".
Twitter, tech bubbles, and the nostalgia of the technology press
ahh, I'm just ribbing ya.

You do have a point, which I agree with, learning about complexity theory is a tremendously useful skill to have as a developer.

Is it required to be a good one? You say yes (absolutely), I say no (but it doesn't hurt).

Fair enough?
> Apparently people don't want it to be a big deal, but it's
> slowly turning into a big deal.

I think that people's reactions here are because they view this as the new beachhead in the 'nuclear is evil and will destroy the world' argument.

I think that the reality probably boils down to:

It's possible to do nuclear in a safe way. It's even possible
for humans to build such a system (i.e. the complexity
is not out-of-reach), but it's possible that (like economics)
this fails to take into account how illogical humans are (e.g.
cutting corners on something that is *really* dangerous).
Tokyo's gripped with panic and the markets are essentially experiencing a flash crash (http://e.nikkei.com/e/app/fr/market/nikkeiindex.aspx) and the French Embassy is warning that radioactivity could reach Tokyo in 10 hours (https://twitter.com/#!/reuters/status/47485505813757952)
C was my second love after QBasic. I still admire its simplicity, yet also admire the abstraction, readability, and community of Python.

As anyone on Stack Overflow would tell you, it's a matter of using the right tool for the job. I like to imagine programming language selection as an optimization problem: given a job, over the set of tools, maximize the appropriateness of tools for the job while minimizing the number of tools. Without a tool number constraint, you could call from an infinite number of tools, and one would be best, but that incurs overhead, obviously. The tool number constraint keeps the problem feasible.

For numerical computing, {C, Python} solves my optimization problem.
Stupid question: what do you do when you're working in C and want OOP?
> Does the choice affect acquisition chances?

Yes, but not the way you think.

If you don't ship something that gets users, you won't be acquired.
I think a lot of the nuclear defensiveness attitude has to do with anti-leftist conspiracy bias. There are a lot of people that think that there are giant conspiracies run by environmentalists/hippies/peaceniks etc. that are blocking human progress, such as our ability to create nuclear power utopias. Forming your worldview around these types of ideologies can be uncomfortable when it clashes with reality.
I think it should be $10,000 in profit (to be comparable with $100k in investment).

It would be easy to fake (your mum buys a copy of your corporate edition product), but so is $100,000 in raw sales - just buy and sell lots of hardware for a tiny margin.

Unintended consequences ....

Still, at least it's low enough that many good startups won't have to fake it.
Time to start buying. Bet Buffet is taking a look at all those wonderful Japanese companies who moats are wide, have good fundamentals, and produce reasonable free-cash flow. Hope his "itchy trigger finger" found a few targets. My IRA could use a boost after the last few years.
Well, I hope they can vest soon.
No, paranoid means unreasonably anxious. If people had an appropriate level of concern that kept them alive, they were by definition not paranoid.
I had one male coworker ask a female coworker what bra size she was. (He was shopping for implants for his now ex-wife.) Awesome. She went into an empty office and cried.
You also need CVs and a business plan. I don't think the best candidates for a program like this would have either on hand.
A solution to the energy crisis is to unplug, but your anticipated response proves that's as viable as a solution as eliminating nuclear energy.
Does anybody else thinks this makes HP sound like they have no idea what they are talking about?

> what it calls an open cloud marketplace for the enterprise

and

> a strategy combining the cloud, connectivity and software that "enables and joins them together"

It's like every awful enterprisey whitepaper ever written.
Live geiger counter readings from Tokyo: http://www.ustream.tv/channel/geiger-counter-tokyo

Rough translation of the prime ministers speech on reddit: http://www.reddit.com/r/worldnews/comments/g3zel/breaking_ex...
Where are you getting the milli from? Kyodo reports 8000 micro sievert. So it's an ~5.5x increase from the previous high-water-mark of 1,500 microsievert.

http://english.kyodonews.jp/news/2011/03/78063.html
I'm not balking at the age and saying that the place is 'falling apart.' I'm saying that they were designed 40 years ago, and that it's possible that we've learned things since then and can build better plants (starting at the design phase). I'm no expert though, so I'm making no claims.
There's no better time to buy stocks than during a market panic. Japan is a wealthy country. The Japanese work ethic is unbeatable. Now is a great time to buy Japanese stocks.
Some context for the ongoing cost of Chernobyl:

In Ukraine, Chernobyl related benefits and programs are still funded by 5-7 percentage of government spending each year. In Belarus, government spending on Chernobyl reached 22.3 percent of the national budget in 1991, declining gradually to 6.1 percent in 2002. Total spending by Belarus on Chernobyl from 1991 through 2003 was more than US $13 billion. (Chernobyl Forum, 2006)
What is the point of this post? Do you somehow feel better after posting this?
HarperCollins sets 1-year expiration on library eBooks
When was the most recent titanic?
Microsoft's an interesting beast. Things that "should" matter to them, like Windows, somehow reach the point of almost falling apart (see Windows Me or Vista). Then, groups that are practically losing money build great things like the Xbox 360 and Kinect. Some products that stumble end up dead, like the Zune, while others are dragged back up to par (see IE9 and Windows 7). This current mess could mean anything from "WP7 is doomed, sell your stock" to "the Eye of Sauron just hasn't shone on that product group yet". We'll see. Personally, I'm thinking WP7 will pull a Vista or two and then become a cool phone OS, but the competition isn't standing still either.

When Apple was launching the iPhone, they pulled engineers from their flagship Mac OS X to work on new phone software. They seemed to think it was pretty important to launch with a strong product and have all the details right; to them, even delaying a product from another part of their business was an acceptable risk. When was the last time Microsoft did anything like that? Instead of slapping together product groups to shove their way into every has-been market, they could stand to divert some developers, developers, developers to products that need a polished launch, such as WP7.
It's a valid question only if the investor commonly asks it both to men and women.
Why do you have to act? What impetus is making you do something, whether it be conclude about the crisis so you can put it out of mind or fly over and pump seawater yourself or something? What is preventing you from doing absolutely nothing and still not forming a conclusion?

This is the meat of the entire thing, I think, and those upvoting you are feeling the same way, so let's have a Robin Williams/Matt Damon moment, okay?

YOU CAN'T DO ANYTHING. RELAX AND WAIT.
YOU CAN'T DO ANYTHING. RELAX AND WAIT.
YOU CAN'T DO ANYTHING. RELAX AND WAIT.

This incessant urge to do something is making you draw conclusions early, too, and I worry that you're having a hard time seeing an alternate approach: do nothing, relax, go about your life, and wait for the big word on what's going on.

This isn't your fault, either. It's the media's, for setting an expectation of knowing about something before it's over and for moving on before the long-term ramifications are widely disseminated.
tl;dr: Guy keeps buying shitty MS mobile products, MS dutifully keeps making shitty mobile products.

Very reminiscent of Apple fans in the '90s, buying crap products because they've defined themselves to be on Team Apple.
IE9 has been released
I was speaking about disaster in an absolute sense, not a relative one. When you only have ten or so incidents to go by, then Chernobyl and three mile island are going to be called disasters, as far as nuclear disasters go. In terms of real disasters, when measured in human deaths, they are tiny footnotes in history, statistically irrelevant.

Hundreds of people die every year, just mining coal. How many people have died from nuclear power generators in their entire history? Disingenuous indeed.
I respectfully disagree and, if I may be frank, resent the parental tone. Except in egregious circumstances, I'd counter that the vote arrows beside each comment are a sufficient mechanism for expressing this view, just as it's frowned upon to post a comment that says nothing more than "I agree."

Sometimes irony is the only appropriate way to respond to the absurd. By carrying a remark like this to its logical conclusion, you can expose its absurdity with substantial economy. While I trust my fellow HNers to avoid outright name-calling and ad hominem, I also trust them (occasionally in error) to not have a stick-up-the-ass as we exchange ideas.
Einstein, then. I have heard no tails of the biggest physics brain being a jerk, in public or private. Have you?

If Einstein can be nice, some sadsack .Net developer (or Erlang developer) can be, too.
"the precipitating earthquake was still the strongest in 1200 years"

People keep mentioning this as if that matters. The fact is that it happened, and there's really no telling when future natural disasters will strike any given nuclear plant. All we know is that they can happen and that if disasters on this scale do happen, nuclear reactors are not up to surviving them.

"Reactor 4 is on fire, and is releasing radiation into the atmosphere, but on nowhere near the scale that Chernobyl did."

Yet.

But this disaster may be far from over.

"There's been a few people (~12) who suffered radiation exposure, I believe all plant workers."

That's not what I'm hearing. From a former nuclear industry executive and whistleblower interviewed recently on Democracy Now:

"they talk about 160 people that have been contaminated. That’s all they’ve tested. Basically, everything they’re testing is coming up contaminated in that inner couple of miles around the plant. You’ve got radiation being detected 60 miles to the north in a Navy helicopter, a hundred miles to the east on a Navy aircraft carrier. So, it’s not clear to me that that cloud is not looping around and affecting Japan."

http://www.democracynow.org/2011/3/14/japan_facing_biggest_c...
Microsoft Adds Do-Not-Track Tool to Browser
Did you offer them ~$20K (instead of full $30K you owed) in exchange for restructuring your debt?
If yes - what did they reply?
TL;DR: A very long cover letter for the guy's job application to the Microsoft Windows Phone team.
I'm confused by your statement -- in the quaternions, i, j, and k are all square roots of -1.
Can someone share the best way to enter the stock market for someone who is completely clueless on stocks in general yet wanted to dabble in them for quite some time?
Heh, I fail at the internet.
The Japanese reads "For comparison: data from December 2010."

Other text: "100 CPM is equivalent to exposure of 1 micro-sievert per hour". Or, approximately one tenth your rate of exposure when flying commercial.
Hmm. I doubt that would work for me. Less than 8 hours sleep and I'll be s total wreck in no time. I also read somewhere (don't have references) that 7-8 hours sleep is optimal. Naps give me a headache. Can't sleep on a bus/train/airplane either.
If society considers the loss of life acceptable given the benefits, fine.

But I don't think it does.

It's not just engineers who are responsible, in any event.
Ditto. This article's so well written; so much meat and actual, rigourous dissection of a problem and it's landscape. Super applicable to the idea i'll be submitting to YC o:) This is spot on what I most needed to read right now. I've had experience with all these different ecosystems and personality types and really had no idea such a distinctive, robust pattern of relations was lurking therein.
You've got a good link there, but the wrong anchor. The anchor you are looking for was #Failure_hazard, and possibly a better link would be http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Banqiao_Dam#1975_Flood . 26,000 dead in the flooding and 145,000 dead due to subsequent epidemics.

If some of you anti-nuclear types get frustrated that I and others are not rushing out to forswear nuclear forever and ever amen, it's not because we don't understand the risks. It's because we don't ignore a death just because it happened in a non-radioactive flood or a non-radioactive coal mining accident and didn't involve any OMGRadiation!!1!. Nor are deaths caused by nuclear issues magically worse than being killed in a flood or a coal mining accident. Dead is dead. Someone who wants to be seen caring waves around their fashionable concerns and waits for congratulations from their peers; an engineer who wants to care considers the costs and benefits of the whole system, and doesn't simply assume either is zero without evidence. Regardless of how bad this particular crisis may become, it still nets out that people are dying every year because we're too cowardly to look at nuclear head on and use more of it and less of the even-more dangerous other technologies we are using, so that we can feel good about our irrational fear of OMGRadiation!!1!.
I use ubuntu and the last time I checked this, it wasn't so reliable (it seems to link to another similar system for unix now). So, I made a similar, but much more light weight based on php and a simple bookmarklet.

The idea is that I click the bookmarklet on the page on which I want the images and styles to watched for changes, and the page starts pinging a local php resource (running on apache) to check for changes. When the php detects a change, that particular resource (css or img or swf) is reloaded, instead of refreshing the entire page.

This setup didn't require an additional server running, neither a browser extension, but is limited to apache and php, which was good enough for me at the time.

PS. Now I moved on from apache+php, if anyone is interested in this, the code is at https://bitbucket.org/sharat87/pollfresh/src/tip/pollfresh.p... is just a php file, put it in your webroot and open it through apache. I don't know if it should still work, but one can easily get it to run.
API of the Week: Context.IO
Can you quote anything more credible than "The Environment News Service"?

Come on, do you expect to be taken seriously? Make a reasoned argument, I'm willing to listen. If you can quote any sort of a credible science agency that claims Chernobyl actually contributed to major death, I would consider it.
Sequelize - A MySQL Object-Relational-Mapper for NodeJS
Successful Entrepreneurs Survive Being Told "No"
While doubtless unintentional, this sounds so much like PR as to seem tasteless.
That's the thing I never understood about Microsoft. When they really focus, and spend more time on producing a product versus marketing a product, the seem to do some great things (SEE: Windows 2000/NT).

It seems like MS could really use from some user centric project managers or something to really get them on the course to consistent delivery, because that's what's lacking.

Vista was a bust, 7 was a phenom by MS standards. The 360 did OK, the Kinect was brilliant. By the logic that is the Windows development cycle, Windows 8 is going to be an abysmal failure. I'm an OS X user now, but I'll still say how great Win7 is, and the only thing I wish to see come from the company is some form in consistency with their products and marketing. These "To the cloud" commercials NEED to stop.
Actually, thermal solar plants can produce electricity 24/7 just fine. They can store heat in water or (more efficiently) molten salt up in a tower and use it to later generate power at a reliable rate.

Spain is known to be investing heavily on concentrating solar power.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_power_in_Spain
Geiger Counter Readings Rise in Tokyo