skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
On the way into work I heard on the radio a quote from either a senator or congressman which was "Do you still think meltdowns are rare? we just had three at once." I realize that plays well to the scared crowd, it would be helpful if we could help change it to "It is difficult to operate a nuclear plant safely in the presence of magnitude 9 earthquakes, fortunately that level earthquake is very
rare."
Radiation Dosage Visualization
Have Jawa and Jason Hope Stolen  $100 Million?
The Japanese have a cultural fascination with humanoid robots. Unfortunately, most useful robots at the moment are rather unimpressive looking and decidedly not humanoid. Ergo, much of Japanese robotics research is closer to toy design and production than to any other branch of engineering.
this reminds of an app that i saw a while back except it was really simple and only worked for two people.

this is pretty cool though
That's what a Monty Python sketch of a phone screen would be like.
You bring up a good counterpoint.

But scientific fraud is extremely common, more than half of peer reviewed journal published research results are wrong, and many if not most professional scientists do research to support a corporate or political agenda. Saying that scientists are liars is not inaccurate, as a general statement, because many scientists are indeed liars, particularly that they claim things which are not true, which is certainly true per Ioannidis (http://www.plosmedicine.org/article/info:doi/10.1371/journal...).

As applied to specific scientists it is not necessarily true, but the lyricist does use a collective addressing form. In the loose poetic form of a song "y'all" is not generally interpreted to mean all in a strict mathematical sense, but is a plural second person pronoun that addresses those it addresses.
The current events angle is nice to have, but I'm at least as interested in the new-to-me way Randall organizes the information in the chart.
Mega-Banks and the Next Financial Crisis
Note: I'm a jQuery Mobile team member

Most of the functionality that the author has highlighted (footers, page animations, intelligent click handling) is handled in a much more comprehensive/robust fashion by jQuery Mobile despite its alpha state.

I would encourage readers to look into the phonegap/jqm combination when building mobile applications with html and javascript if only because there are a large number of problem areas with this approach that jqm will handle for you.

[UPDATE]

Just thought I'd highlight that the click/tap support is extremely difficult to get right. Kin Blas, the developer who's working on this in jqm has taken a lot of pains to make sure that the click handling is fast and flexible in all cases.
Click to Flash is the ideal middle ground for mobile devices. Only play the Flash when the user explicitly requests. 90% of the time, the user won't notice the Flash missing, the other 10% it is available on request.
That solves the battery issues and the annoying advertisement issues.
I think he is making a different point. It's not about one's willingness to bet on big ideas. It's recognizing that the path to the big ideas that win often start off by looking like something much smaller.

That said, I do agree the title would indicate a different take on the article.
Radiation Chart
That's why I bough one of these:

http://www.harborfreight.com/7-inch-x-10-inch-precision-mini...

Now lets be clear, this is a horrible little heap of Chinese junk. Its about as rigid as wet toast, the gears are plastic and the motor is about as strong as a cordless drill. But it was $500 and I can pick it up and stash it under my workbench when I'm not using it. In short its not as bad as it was cheap.

The upside is that I get super powers.

I've made everything from car parts to pluming fixtures. I no longer even bother going in to the auto parts store or hardware store to be laughed at by the $7/hour flunky as they incredulously ask why I'd even want a part like the one I'm looking for. I just grab some round-stock and whip one up.
[High-end PC GPUs are ten times better than console GPUs, so why don't PC games look ten times better?

Game companies can't optimize games primarily for the best possible PCs. Hardcore gamers who build their own high-end gaming systems pay the same $50 for a game as do casual gamers who run them on laptops[0]. There's a point of diminishing returns when trying to make a game look spectacular on the best hardware but able to degrade to run on what the majority of the market actually has. Compounding the effect is the fact that it's no longer necessary to constantly upgrade a computer to keep it useful, so casual gamers aren't upgrading hardware for non-gaming purposes the way they used to.

[0] Game companies try to get a bit more money out of hardcore gamers through special editions, but that's limited.
Tinychat definitely does the social video watching thing
I agree with your point; but there is a big practical difference between paying 2% of your house's value per year in taxes, versus the 10-to-20% that landlords usually charge.
Should You Work For Free?
Ask HN: Is cold calling ever an acceptable marketing practice?
My company launched a product a couple of weeks that, quite simply, is amazing. However, very few people know about it!

I know with absolute certainty that its target users would want to use it if they (a) knew it was out there and, (b) were able to learn more about it and/or see it in action.

I've tried AdWords for years and never had much success, and there's not much of a community that (like HN) which would create a real "buzz" about it. It needs to be actively sold to get the ball rolling.

I've been thinking about cold calling web development firms and offering them a free license for the software as well as free consultation about how it would work for one of their web development projects. But I HATE spam.

Is cold calling ever an option or is this is a black-and-white case of spam? Any tips or suggestions on how to make these calls, if you think they are OK?

Thanks!
Tools, Resources, and Guides for Web Developers - ReadWriteHack
Thanks for this additional information. Now I finally see what geuis is talking about.

This is a great puzzle but IMHO a terrible interview question, even if you're looking for C programmers. Interviews are about talking. I might be able to solve this puzzle (though not necessarily under pressure) but I'm quite sure this isn't a puzzle I could talk my way through out loud. At best, I'd sit around for minutes muttering under my breath and staring at the walls and pacing, and then state something approximating the answer. A waste of good interviewing time.

Remove the time limit and the puzzle isn't so bad. There's a nice stupid answer (the "99 bottles of wine on the wall" algorithm) and a progressive series of potential improvements (the "10-bottles-of-wine-on-the-wall played in parallel ten times" algorithm; the "mix the first N/2 together, mix the second N/2 together, feed the first batch to a mouse, iterate" algorithm, and finally you kind of parallelize that and get the ultimate answer). But you shouldn't expect to get all the way through that discussion in an interview -- and, if you state the time limit up front, you just scare the wits out of the candidate.
Haha very true.

They have both posted on their news, however, under the root. However I'd like to see the claim backed up.
I agree about the other two, but the utility companies one seems hyperbolic; if I actually wanted to live in a place without electricity, running water, Internet access, etc. supplied by someone else's infrastructure - which I do not own - I think I could very easily cancel all of those and be fine.
Huh? As far as "native" goes, the Android browser is just as fast as, or faster than, the iPhone's. And Adobe has already confirmed Flash for Windows Phone 7.
Oops Thank you!!!!
yep, also thank "mrbabyman" for ruining it too!

I left for Reddit years ago.
RIP techcrunch
just because
You should notice that it's the author mostly linking to his own site.
Define your own "change the world"
I have almost never met a "lifestyle business founder" who fits this description:

"The thing that is wrong with the lifestyle business though is that at some point the founders intend on stopping their value creation beyond what they need to survive."

And I run in circles with lots and lots and lots of people who have the "lifestyle business" label applied to them. As a slur. Including me! Everyone I interact with -- whether they make software or write ebooks on how to market and launch products -- cares about their customers, and their total impact on the world.

"Lifestyle business" is used against any business which does not seem suitably ambitious for the labeler's prejudice du jour -- whether that means they don't want to revolutionize banking, take funding, or they don't want to grow big and go public or get bought. "Lifestyle business" is just nasty, petty shorthand for "I'm serious and YOU'RE NOT, because you don't look like me."

We're not talking people who resell white label "nutritional supplements" or sailor shirts, here.

I, for instance, create tools and educational material. My software, Freckle, that Alex Payne [who wrote the essay] slammed so nastily, explains right on the front page how it creates value: http://letsfreckle.com/ -- it helps thousands of people every day run their businesses, & earn more money, with less pain and more joy. On top of that, I teach JavaScript programming in a way that reaches people who otherwise have trouble learning, and I teach entrepreneurship.

But Alex singled me out for criticism because he deems my efforts inadequate by his standards.

The whole point of Alex's original essay is that helping 1,000 customers isn't enough for "the world." And he thinks it's wrong to prioritize your own personal happiness if you have the unbelievably rare gifts of being able to program effectively or design nice things.

He actually told me in a tweet that he was disappointed in me, because in his eyes I should be doing something so much "bigger." That I was wasting my talent.

The whole thing is absolutely ridiculous. And pompous beyond belief!

Now, all that said, I ask you:

Even if somebody was just selling white label vitamins or sailor shirts, where do you get off thinking you have the right to tell them that they aren't allowed to make themselves happy? To pursue their own goals in life? Why do you think that they owe you?

So I don't fit the "lifestyle business" description as you put it, but I'm damned sure that nobody is going to tell me that the way I live my life isn't good enough for them. Remove the plank from your own eye first.
I don't really need Xobni either, for the same reasons as you. But recently my fiance and I went to check out a wedding venue, after just emailing with the manager. She recognized us immediately from my fiance's gchat picture, and was able to make the welcoming a little more pleasant because of it.
I only wish that I had an on/off button for Flash on all browsers like I do with the useful "QuickJava" addon to Firefox.
Lucid's Virtu Software Pairs Sandy Bridge with GPUs
#16 Blogger Being Free

The author suggests charging a token amount (eg $1) in order to discourage junk. This would certainly have discouraged me from using my (Blogger) blog to send pictures and news home to family and friends when I go travelling. Not that paying a nominal fee would be a problem in itself. Rather, the administrative overhead of making the payment would have driven me to Wordpress or something else. The cost of making a small payment is not just the value of the payment, it is the cost in terms of time of making the payment and the time spent checking my credit card statement. I certainly can't agree with this suggestion, especially when Blogger has so much competition.
They could make their app completely open source then ; in that way they'd probably have a better quality assurance process than "suffer, apologize & fix".
Natural Languages, Formal Languages and Javascript
Building an Online Community: Just Add Water
A pronoun in a comparison is nominative if it is the subject of a stated or understood verb.

Sandy writes better than I. (Than I write.)

-- Strunk & White, 4th Edition, section 10.

I realize that grammar discussions are as boring as they come, but this is a case of someone learning English so it's important to be accurate.
Thanks for the thorough reply. The min. age is actually 16 -- I updated the post to reflect that.

1) 16 was advised by our counsel (we're US-based) to attempt to keep us out of issues that may arise state to state w/r/t minors and privacy laws

2) The goal is (hopefully) to help curb the issues that we've noticed stem from underage users. Perhaps then, banning would be most effective, but that comes back around to "how do we retroactively ban users now that should have been banned X months ago"

3) My guess is scale. I think generally speaking we need to be more aggressive about banning when the situation warrants that.

4) Great advice here.

Thanks again for the thoughtful and insightful reply.
This is the mind of a brilliant educator at work. It would have been very easy for Feynman to give a scientifically literate answer but he realizes that there is no way to give an accessible explanation that doesn't fluff the details.

The following 'meta-answer' that Feynman provides is fascinating.
I'm no machinist, but I think you can cut a pretty wide variety of shapes from a simple round steel or brass bar on a lathe.

Specialized raw materials are a problem, but I have the impression that a remarkably large fraction of everyday items could be cut out of a sort of general-use steel or brass with only a marginal increase in size. There are lots of different steels and brasses (and of course a huge variety of other materials) but you don't really need them for most things.
Lean Products and Second-Order Sales: Startup Software in the Enterprise
Would you elaborate on Android not having any other options?
RIP Techcrunch http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2344635
Hear hear.

If I can give 1,000 people an additional 15 minutes of pleasure a day -- or 15 minutes less of stress & self-recrimination -- then that is 250 hours of additional happiness added to the world. Or 3,800 days of additional happiness per year.

That's a lot of extra happiness.
That sounds really interesting! Do you have photos of some of the things you've done with it? I'd love to have more details.
We are more vocal because we are in a tiny minority, constantly trashed (e.g. "lifestyle business"), and most of the people who are "living the life" are too busy running their own businesses to blog. Or they don't see it as a movement, like I do.
One of the problems with this project is that it has too many names. Open Source Ecology, Openfarmtech, the Global Village Construction Set, RepLab, Open Source Micro-Factory...
Anyone who takes advice from or goes into business with someone who could write "EXCEPT - you don't have to pay extra taxes - no maintenance - you can sell any second you want" is an idiot and deserves anything bad that happens as a result.
Nice story, bad title. Unlike the US and UK legal systems, in the Netherlands, court rulings don't define new legislation. Some court may rule different in another case; judges are to only consider the law, not other rulings.
And Hollywood is founded on piracy (Edison's first presentation was a pirate copy of the lumiere's voyage to the moon) and IP crime (movie makers moved to Hollywood form NY because they were violating Edison's patents on the cameras)
The State and Future of the Social Media Management System Space
I think the article hit the nail on an important element - Vision.

Yes, Larry and Sergey created something simple. But they had a vision what they want to do with it and the potential of what they were working on.
Same thing with Zuckerberg. Yes, he created a simple networking site for Harvard and but he also had a vision. Most of them were recorded in his diary, i.e photo sharing etc.

If you create a small product without a vision, it will remain a small product and may not go anywhere.
But a small product with a great vision have the potential to take you to the next level.
Now a huge clunky product with an enormous vision? That is a recipe for disappointment.
I think it's a good MVP, I signed up :)
"Then the researchers calculated an estimate of how much money the spammer grossed per day: about $7,000."

That's great, but gives me absolutely no context to answer the actual question, "How much do spammers rake in." Is 7K high, low or average for a spammer? What's the total revenue of all spammers? How many spammers are there? What is a spammer- an organization of 10, 20, 100 people, or is it one guy?
For me, this seems pretty simple: if it is shown that Adobe can create a version of Flash that alleviates problems with poor battery life and terrible performance, obviously it will be "better to have Flash". So long as those problems persist, Flash seems like a lot more of a liability than an asset.
I wholeheartedly agree. I'd be lucky to have been even close to as successful as someone like Kevin Rose. People make mistakes -- you never know how successful something will be until you put it in action. I remember years ago when I was watching Diggnation and reading Digg all the time. I've never had near that level of influence over that many people. For that, I have massive respect for Digg and its creator(s).

EDIT: Hell, Digg was probably what shifted my focus from just tech news to actually starting programming and learning to start my own company -- it was almost an inspiration. There's a lot more to its legacy that's unsung, unappreciated, and undervalued.
Stavros, this is beautiful. I think this might turn out to be one of those things which is so simple, yet so effective that once I start using it I wonder how I managed without it for so long.

Obvious feature request is to import my contacts list.

One little 'bug': I added my own email address through the 'Your contacts' page with the nickname 'me'. Then to test the bookmarklet, I shared a link with myself. The email I got said "Hello! me has sent you a link!". I guess you want to replace 'me' with my email address or name?

The link you email is not the original link I shared but a link to a page on your site, which then links to the original link. Please link straight to the site if possible. Presumably you are not looking for pageviews with this project ;-)

Good luck and keep us posted!
Well, it might help the battery issue, but it couldn't solve it unless the video playback was just as efficiently hardware-accelerated as the native implementation. You're also introducing a user experience cost of N additional taps for an afternoon watching N flash videos.

The ideal sweet spot is for proprietary plugins to vacate all browsers post haste.
That was taken out of context. We get developers whatever they want. We only posted it to be funny.
If anyone does get around to downloading it, and it's freely redistributable, I'd like a copy.
It's interesting how reminiscent that design is of Google Wave's much-criticized scrollbars: the position indicator following the thumb, the page-up/page-down buttons, and the minimalist appearance when not in use. I wonder if Wave's design was just ahead of its time.
I well remember being an employee at a hosting company in summer 2006 and pleading with my boss to get into Ruby hosting. We were early experimenters with xen at the time. He just didn't see Ruby ever amounting to anything for his enterprise clients.
and no door.
Anytime a recruiter mentions the word 'Rock Star', 'Ninja' etc.

Run or hang up.
> I don't believe PHP's ini_read caches anything.

I wasn't referring to straight PHP. There are multiple ways to cache the config file's contents so you don't have to hit the disk to read.

> This is a false comparison between interpreted and compiled languages. Not to mention that plenty of C programs use #defines for configuration.

Your misunderstanding me here. I'm not saying #defines are bad. However, they are a different level of configuration from vhosts. You aren't #defining your virtual hosts. Same with php. You have the C code with specific options being set, and then php.ini for the user facing stuff.

> In a dynamic language, and where you trust the person doing the configuration, there's no reason why your configuration shouldn't be in a source file.

Except we saw at least one reason today.
The thing I loved about the second solution is that it actually performs better at scale. I love the irony of the function with the higher growth rate being the better function as the number of wine bottles increases.
Problems like this are why I only try for 'outwardly' functional code.

Without knowing the full details, I'd speculate that they only care about the image before and after modification. So within the function, you have free reign. For example if you just destructively modify and return a copy of the source, to the outside caller it appears functional. And everything is blessedly simple.
The creators of Microsoft, Apple, Google were not daydreaming about it. They were busy doing stuff.
I literally thought this was going to be a post about phone screen quality or a comparison of smartphone screens.
It's a mix of things. For one, I'm kind of allergic to marketing-speak, and the relentlessly positive and enthusiastic tone typical of it grates after a while.

But the other is that I'm not currently the kind of engineer who would want to work at Quora. Right now, I'm more of a tools / low-level guy than a web guy, and I'm pretty close to the machine (at this very moment, I'm writing an x86-64 disassembler). Doing development (rather than testing or debugging) on an EC2 instance is not something I would like to do; nor would I like being more or less forced (via peer pressure if nothing else) to use a Mac (I run Windows almost exclusively on my 2nd gen Mac Air) and develop with vi, Emacs or TextMate. I far prefer a powerful desktop with multiple monitors to any laptop + external monitor, and I like and appreciate what an IDE with integrated debugger does for productivity (though that's much more the case in non-dynamic languages).
The Lolli-POP Project by Massimo Gammacurta
The Lolli-POP Project by Massimo Gammacurta
I think game companies can optimize for high-end PCs for the same reason that car companies can make high-end models: you don't get a reputation for being a kick-ass game for running ok on ok hardware, you get that by being kick-ass on hardware that most people wouldn't even dream of buying because the people that write reviews do run on such systems.