skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I think this topic is a lot deeper than you realize. For example, consider the theory that a working time machine is required on the receiving end; it follows that no one could travel back before the invention of the first time machine.

http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/time-machine/
http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/time-travel-phys/
Heh, yeah. I believe Chris Lomonts paper talks about how it was derived (at least, he derives a new one, so I guess he must have figured it out - it went over my head though)
It looks like Appsumo asks for an email now before letting you into the site :s (EDIT: now removed, go App Sumo)

But for those not wanting to enter one; Appsumo are running a competition to win hundreds of thousands of dollars of funding for a startup when you buy the lean startup bundle. Plus some mentoring prizes as runner up.

Pretty cool :)
I feel sorry for Pluto :(
I'm certainly willing to consider all of that, is there any authoritative documentation from an unbiased source I could read on comprehensive deaths from Chernobyl?
FTC wins largest civil penalty on nasty debt collector: $2.8M
The physical principles behind criticality calculations are not fiendishly complicated. The computations are computationally intensive, yes (Slotin was around in a time where experiments were cheaper and easier than simulations), and (maybe -- I don't know) the exact nature of physical materials involved was not well known, and needed to be measured.

Prove it.

Why don't you prove it? It's not other people's job to do all the work for you. It is provable that a sphere is the optimal shape. If somebody on the internet suggests that you're wrong, you don't win the argument by saying it's their responsibility to do all the hard work of convincing you you're right. You're still the one who is wrong.
>> READ: Hacker News is a reasonable starting point these days.

In my experience, almost the opposite order is best. I find reading Hacker News very enjoyable, but by far not the best use of time early on. An hour spent programming is 10-100x more valuable than an hour spent reading Hacker News, until you have enough experience to put the information in context. I would suggest:

optional Read "Teach Yourself Programming in Ten Years"(http://norvig.com/21-days.html)

1) Learn basic HMTL/CSS

2) Learn Python or Ruby fundamentals (http://learnpythonthehardway.org/index or http://mislav.uniqpath.com/poignant-guide/)

3) Learn Django or Rails

4) Learn jQuery

5) Build a few Django (or Rails) projects

6) Find someone to pay you to build things

7) Use Stack Overflow to help you solve customer problems

8) Spend time you are not busy with customers reading Hacker News, attending local meetings, learning whatever catches your interest.
Oakland could has so much going for it, yet the city continues to nosedive. Oakland is:

* centrally located to SF, SJ, and the rest of the Easy Bay.
* cheaper than SF or SJ (unless you live in the Hills)
* an international airport.
* an international shipping port.
* convenient BART access from SF and the East Bay
* not far from UC Berkeley.
* (somewhat) cleaner than SF.

Full disclosure: I live in Oakland, but plan to move. I was bullish on Oakland, but not its city government.
التسجيل في حافز
Often smart people coming from mathematics start programming this way. In math it's traditional to give everything what programmers would consider cryptic one-letter names, partially because you tend to write them on paper a lot while thinking, and partially because you have fewer entities so it's less bothersome to remember their meaning.

Of course it's a bad idea while programming, I just find it helpful to remember the reasons that smart people can make seemingly terribly unaesthetic decisions.
Certainly better than their previous attempts:
http://www.thedailyshow.com/watch/mon-february-28-2011/the-b...
Original Quora thread: http://www.quora.com/Is-Qato-a-Quora-clone-attempt-or-a-simi...
OK, I could see a corporation with a lot of money to splash around covering the cost as a way to motivate a developer...
Doesn't virtualization make this sort of thing obsolete? If your performance requirements are modest enough to work on a micro server, wouldn't they work in a virtualized environment? It seems like it'd be cheaper (software does the work hardware is doing here), easier on maintenance and provide high availability in a virtualized environment as well. I'm not talking big iron, I'm talking $3-$5k boxes which seem to be the sweet spot.
Fukushima and the Banana Equivalent Dose
Lesson about arrays in C++
They weren't just released yesterday...
Fallout from the WWII bombings was much greater than the fallout expected from the Daiichi plant. We'll have to wait until data come in to say how much.
My mom did the same, except she called using Skype :)
Good god, that's the biggest non-point I've heard in my life.

You could've worked in something about potassium content of bananas while you were at it.
Thanks for this post, misstatiana. There's always been a bit of a tension between my startup aspirations and my wife's vision of our life. Your post has put into words some of the motivations and reasons for my wanting to do a startup.
If there is any prejudice against women in technology, I am very disappointed. I have met some very hard working and smart tech entrepreneurs who were also women. I notice that they fly under the radar because they'd rather their business be judged on its merits, not because they are women.

Anyone who still has a prejudice against women in tech is just insecure imo.
Naming computers using a linguistic convention unrelated to their function is a good idea, because there's a good chance you switch what your hardware is doing. The worst outcome is when you have computers named things like "webserver1", "webserver2" and then you get some new hardware so webserver1 is no longer your webserver, it's your test server.
31 days, 120,000 hits, and $462 in revenue. The Startup Foundry’s story.
I can understand her anger to a degree, provided the person she was talking to knew she was married (or anything about her home life, for that matter). It would be on another level entirely if it was an assumption based on sexism, but without knowing the full context of the conversation I suppose we'll never know.

As for "people judge, get over it", that is a sorry state of pragmatism. Not saying it isn't true, just a bit sad.
I'm taking it slow with her so I don't totally put her off it. She's starting to ask what I'm doing while I'm at my computer, and she was shocked that I actually made a website that she could access and use from a different computer. "You made this? Wow!"
Probably because they were safer on the trains than they would have been in cars? You'd still have people in transit, and I'm not a mechanical engineer or physicist but I'd think it was obvious that trains hold up a little better to giant waves than the typical japanese car.
Security on Facebook - How to actually achieve it
and the ton of other ice dwarfs in the far end of the solar system? Let it rest. Pluto is the first of a new class.
It is no longer the most powerful tablet. A5 chip in the iPad 2 offers similar CPU performance and much better graphics performance than Tegra 2 according to Anandtech's tests.
Heterosexual couples have a stereotype of the husband as driver and wife as supporter. Given that stereotype, I think she made a reasonable assumption.
I find it surprising that irc hasn't been mentioned in the comments and the post, since ordering my first Rails books I have found the support and advice I have received in irc terrific.
I like to think of the states as "regulatory laboratories". In an ideal world, states would learn from their neighbors' regulatory successes and failures.
7 Ways To Upgrade Your Brain
Facebook Engineering: Building Realtime Insights
It may make nuclear look better comparably, but it will make all of these (oil, coal, nuclear) look worse.

When all you factor into the cost is human life and money, you miss the bigger picture of how we're affecting what doesn't have a voice.
So then are you making an assertion ("Some would argue that 50,000 have already died from a nuclear incident") which you also argue can never be proven true?
Totally fun way to window shop for new cool stuff startups are doing that I haven't heard about before.

LaunchRock is killing it.
It depends on how much there is, doesn't it?...
Photos from the first-ever US automobile race.
It would be incredibly interesting if your dropbox machines all ran a bitorrent client that auto shared the syncing between them all.

With logic to determine which machines are closest (in bandwidth)

So that if I have my 5+ machines at home (desktops, laptops and phones, which all have the client on them) - they all see that they are on the same subnet and sync very fast between each other.

Then update the cloud at the same time - in the same fashion... chop all the changes up amongst the machines. (sure, I still have a single pipe via my cable modem - but this would be helpful when I am on work lan too...)

EDIT: it would be great to see an added layer of service on Dropbox such as the old Hamachi personal VPN services...

Eventually - Ill be able to have a completely distributed, virtualized personal network across any machine I have an account...
Might want to rethink the "sell ice to Eskimos" part. That's the furthest thing from what's expected from any startup.
> The hottest startup you've never heard of

I wish this were true; unfortunately I hear lots and lots about them when they run a "spam your friends for more free space" promotional.
The CEO should not be the CFO. Delegate that work as soon as you can afford to
It would be really interesting to know the specific statute which implies this.
Right... Renewables + energy savings. It is not that hard to save 15% energy. And it is such a magic field for startups currently. I don't understand why the startup crowd here isn't already working on making nuclear energy unneeded.
Now is maybe the really scary time for Dropbox - here come the "me too's" including corporates who will say "Hey looks like people are starting to want this file storage and sharing thingy" - we can do that too and offer it to our own customers.

Should be interesting.
Well, I imagine when people are dying. The quake and resulting waves killed a lot of people. This hasn't, yet. Excuse me for thinking the most about those.
That's including 0.01% lifetime extra cancer risk * 100M people

If you are going to do that then a single cigarette ad on a formula 1 car kills more people than Hiroshima.
How to install LAMP on Ubuntu 10 server on AWS ebs t1.micro for free
"Why don't you prove it?"

Because I'm not the one making extraordinary claims. I'm also arguing that you can't 'prove' anything in this situation; there are too many unknowns.
My friend's sole trading business has an 0845 number which goes straight to voicemail.

On day, he started to receive truly heartbreaking messages of financial hardship, people unable to pay medical bills for their parents, that kind of thing. People were literally crying on his voicemail.

It turned out that his number was just a few digits different from the new Wonga customer service line, and he had to change the number.
Towns like Picher, Oklahoma, will still be toxic when the sun goes out.

Radioactive Ceasium and Strontium are a pain for a few decades - lead, mercury and cadmium are for ever.
Go becomes more stable
Zen - A hackable X server in 5.5KLOC of CL
Very impressive (the recording/song). I actually have a Boss Micro BR, and while it's superb in many ways - lots of great effects, good built-in microphone, much capacity for layering and fiddling - it sadly does not see much use. It's just to much hassle to prat about with the interface when you're used to iPhones and the like. In fact I have a simple 8-track recorder app for the iPad called Mini Studio or something that sees more use. I suppose it helps that I've always got the iPad out for other purposes, though.
Not really. The prefixes allow vendors to do experimental stuff without creating (as much) of a backwards compatiblity problem before things standardize. If you don't like it, use a preprocessor:

* http://sass-lang.com/
* http://lesscss.org/
* http://learnboost.github.com/stylus/

The last one is the most promising since it can be made to look exactly like standard css, but it's really rough right now.
It does, and the answer is "trace amounts".

Your body has trace amounts of uranium as well. What's everyone so worried about?! Obviously the substance is perfectly safe.
Yes, Airbnb is eating VRBO's lunch. They and Dropbox are at this point the most successful of all the 253 startups we've funded.

Fred Wilson knows some of the details. That's why he wrote this unprecedented post about missing them.

If you don't understand the details of a situation, why not default to being nice instead of mean? Just look at the contrast in tone between Fred's blog post and your comment.
If someone defaults, you keep charging 4000% interest, and three months later "cut a deal" to have them only repay half of what they now owe, you've still received 125% of the amount they borrowed. I'm not sure about the exact numbers, but you can see how even defaults could be profitable.
Windows Live Mesh, an equivalent Microsoft product, has the p2p sync functionality in addition to cloud sync.

http://www.winsupersite.com/article/product-review/how-to-li...
"I mean, Einstein didn't have any intellectual property rights
on relativity theory."

I'm fine with scientific facts not being patented, but something like Photoshop or Microsoft windows isn't scientific fact.
Most of the serious research and
development, the hard part of it, is funded by the public. In fact most of
the economy comes out of public expenditures through the state system, which
is the source of most innovation and development. I mean computers, the
internet. Just go through the range, it's all coming out of the state
system primarily. There is research and development in the corporate
system, some, but it's mostly at the marketing end. And the same is true of
drugs.
Not really. The official report used the numbers self reported by the USSR (not known for its bureaucratic honesty) and TORCH (The Other Report on CHernobyl) was funded by the environmental movement. So we can lower bound the deaths by 4,000 and upper bound them by 1,000,000, but after that you are on your own.

I did my own looking and came to the conclusions that "deaths" is the wrong metric, and "expected years of life lost" is the right metric. When someone dies at age 45 instead of age 60, is that a Chernobyl-caused death? What about at age 50 instead of 60? 59 instead of 75? 2 instead of 70? The answer gets more complicated the closer you look.

Ballpark: tens of thousands to even hundreds of thousands of "effective deaths" from Chernobyl, where an "effective death" is 45 years of life lost, collected from multiple affected people. Relatively few immediate deaths.
Wait, are you trying persuade us with facts?

Airplanes are the safest way to travel by far. That doesn't prevent people from stubbornly refusing to fly (taking very unsafe road trips instead), it doesn't prevent panic attacks in the air, and it doesn't stop governments wasting billions on security checkpoint theater.

God speed, my friend, I sincerely hope the facts will make a difference.
Microsoft already tried their hand at it with Windows Live Mesh. Technically Apple's MobileMe is the same thing. The 'corporates' are already on it :)
What is your 'bait' to attract funding?
My dad is using Dropbox to share his songs. He saves to Dropbox, and then shares links on Facebook. All his masters are backed up there as well.
But I really don't think you'd see it applied there, and if you did it would most likely in the homophobic/sexist way that one is the wife, and their role is to support the "husband". It's one of the underpinnings of what some (and thankfully fewer and fewer) people think of marriage - that it is a union of a man and his wife, rather than that of two equals.
It says Mt. Everest is 8848KM tall... I believe that should be Meters.
My dad uses Dropbox and I didn't even tell him about it. Such a badass company.
I was trying to find something and it seems to be the Passenger Vessel Services Act which is now part of the Jones Act. I think the travel agent understands the rules incorrectly though.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Passenger_Vessel_Services_Act_o...
I agree, but just wanted to point out that reading Hacker News and building something doesn't have to be mutually exclusive. I built Hacker Newsletter (http://www.hackernewsletter.com) so I could do both.
And half the RAM of the Xoom (at least according to Gruber), so it's not as clear cut as you make it sound.
And I guess also why they don't really use chord progressions like we do in the west no?
MMOWGLI: Naval Postgraduate School to use massive role-playing for wargaming
Something you can make in flash in like 10 minutes- and it works on everything ( not mobile ).
this goes the announcement I got. The website for the game is http://mmowgli.nps.edu
I've had a couple of my comments on Quora vandalized by engineers there as well, marking a few of them "unhelpful" even!

:P
Maybe it has to do with the amount of apps "open" (albeit dormant) at the same time?
On a related note; when you first talk to a group of founders, if you feel strongly that they should be pursuing a different idea than the one they are currently pursuing, do you usually say so right away? Or do you wait for them to struggle with the current idea and ask you for assistance / advice (if that happens) before saying anything?
Man, I'm in almost the exact opposite position. I'm a technical sole founder, working hard on building a product. I have no clue what to do from a business/funding/sales perspective. I could really use a strong, non bullshitting business guy who knows enough tech to at least listen patiently while I talk through technical issues/roadblocks/brain farts, and who can handle the rest of the "stuff" that doesn't sound like fun to me.
So when I read the title I tried to guess what the reason was going to be -- but it was really hard. All I could come up with that was reasonably plausible was: "To prove the people who say there are no women in tech wrong."

You can imagine my surprise upon reading the actual article... some guy thought you only wanted to be a founder to 'support your husband'? I can't even wrap my head around why that makes sense (or, well, why it made sense to the guy who said it anyway).

Can someone willing to play devil's advocate explain why this might come to someone's mind as a reason for starting a startup? How exactly does her having a company 'support' him? Unless it's in a financial sense, and then, well, that's a fairly valid reason for anyone to start a company (to support their family financially).
Russian floating nuclear power station
This part of the story defines the upside of Y Combinator for me. It isn't the cash or the inevitable writeup in TechCrunch nearly as much as the guidance.

There is no anger or disappointment expressed by PG in the story - just straightforward advice on what the group needed to do.

Thank you for sharing.
I did. Same job that drove the guy nuts.

Turns out most of the obscure errors were on the driver end. Go figure.

Arguably, at the exorbitant rate the company was paying these bozos to fix the problems with their own code (approx $200 per hour) there wasn't really much of an incentive for them to get it right the first time...
I don't understand why there isn't a comment RSS for individual threads at HN?
I certainly don't think the Quora Engineers were right to vandalize the clones website in this case.

I'm all about people making Q/A websites and releasing products that are clones of other products. Ideally this kind of competition can make the original product better.

That being said, I find making a clone of someones product and then releasing said product at least in this sense, distasteful. Seeing that it has such similarity to the original that if you weren't familiar with the original you probably couldn't tell the difference.
...you can just build it yourself
From the comment thread:

"So Qato was caught plagiarizing and now they're complaining about supposed "vandalism"? Reminds of those newspaper headlines where the robber hurts himself breaking into a home and tries to sue the family."

I have to agree. This is basic javascript injection. Can you say, "blown out of proportion"?
When we were trying to figure out if Dropbox would be a good sync tool for Leanpub, Peter went in to a local coffee shop and asked a bunch of people if they'd ever heard of Dropbox. All of the baristas and everyone else in their 20s had, and had accounts. About half of the people 30 or older had heard of it, and most of them had accounts.

We were pretty impressed with the numbers, and we ended up going with Dropbox, and we've never regretted it.
Competition != death.

Plenty of companies had the same basic idea as an existing company and still made it big. Sometimes execution really is the most important part ex: Dropbox.
If you want to know if you're succeeding or failing, you should know what the metrics of success look like for your product. Is it number of users? Amount of revenue? Revenue per user?

How do you measure against those goals?

If you know what success is supposed to look like for you, then it should be easy to tell if you're failing or succeeding.

"Released a product" isn't a metric for success. If you haven't released you can't start measuring.
The logos don't say much by themselves. How about putting the twitter description line within the logo?
I tried out the Xoom, and the browser still felt like an Android browser. It didn't have that super-smooth feeling you get from an iOS device. If it's not hardware acceleration, then just what is Apple doing that Android isn't?
It would really help if there was some kind of overview of the game, or at least some demo cards. I have no idea what any of this is, except that they want to charge me $5 to find out more about what they are talking about.
couldn't it be a lot of hypothetical deaths? I also fail to see how dumping our waste on generations to come for our own selfish desires is less bad. I think it's less responsible to expect someone else to bear the risks in the future for a reward I want now. Maybe I'm not looking at this like a banker ;)

My default position isn't anti-nuclear, but I find a lot of the arguments and reasoning on the pro-nuclear side to be less than convincing, and in some cases disingenuous. Nuclear seems safer than coal, but the knee jerk reaction on this site from pro-nuclear people isn't helping that cause. Go read the comments on the posts the day after the earthquake, most of them said "everything is fine, nothing bad can possibly happen". Turns out that wasn't true.
There's a lot more to "power" than just clock speed and graphics. For example, nobody has to ask permission to write and run apps on the Xoom whereas iPad can only (under normal circumstances) run apps that have the approval of a small team of people in California.

Being able to run whatever computer programs you want - on your computer - definitely factors into what it means to be powerful.

Also, it has more sensors and a newer operating system and UI. There are many ways Android 3.0 is more powerful that iOS, such as having real multitasking, more user-configurable settings, etc.
MongoDB 1.8 (stable) released
Gamer's Delight: Overclocked GeForce GTX 580s, Rounded-Up and Reviewed