skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The U.S. military is planning an excursion and training exercise later this year on the Madrid Fault. My company is planning on demoing some new tech there. http://pubs.usgs.gov/fs/2003/fs017-03/images/madrid.jpg.

Last time it hit, the bells range in Massachusetts around 1890. If one were to hit today expected loss of life is in the 1000's. They would expect a total loss of infrastructure for stuff that has been built over 100 years ago. They have no earthquake building codes so imagine something that would destroy buildings just like the one did in Japan. Happily only several hundred were lost compared to what is expect of the Madrid fault.
For those interested in the history of Lemonade Stand, I interviewed one of the founders before he announced what it was (it was previously announced as "Startup X"): http://suratl.tumblr.com/post/3701358675/startup-x-startupbu...
The telco analogy is gold. Hopefully twitter and telcos have the same dead future in store.
Last year, sometime around April if I remember correctly... let me check my Facebook backup. (Yay for searching a big huge HTML document)

April 4, 2010 is when it happened, sometime late in the morning, afternoon. I just remember just waking up and trying to decide if I should go take a shower or not, and thus lying in bed.

http://earthquake.usgs.gov/earthquakes/eqarchives/poster/201...

http://www.examiner.com/supernatural-christianity-in-phoenix...
Honestly this kind of drivel needs to be kicked out of hn. Start-ups create value and what companies do with these start-ups once they have been acquired is their own problem. Big companies a constantly screwing up left and right, but that is not our fault.

Yes we lust for new things, which is why the author can afford a computer to write his article on; yes we lust for profit, that is why joining a start-up and taking up the huge risk is something one is willing to do; yes we make old businesses obsolete, but that just frees people to join other companies which are capable of creating stuff, not sucking up resources.

The only thing start-ups forces people to do is to think and adapt. And if they aren't willing to do so, they have nobody but them-self to complain about.

And no start-up can create a bubble, those bubbles come from the insane recklessness of the FEDs dollar printing and the resulting super low interest rates because there is too few productive places to invest ones money.

We need more start-ups, not fewer; We need more economic activity, not less and we need more people with ability, not clones who will never amount to anything.
If you want any sort of physics in your 3d, you pretty much gotta know some calculus. You need calculus to understand acceleration, gravity, etc. Statistics also uses calculus. For example, the normal distribution, is \integral{e^(x^2)}. If you want to do any A/B testing, regressions, machine learning, etc. you will need it.

Map/reduce comes out of algebra. Is your operator associative? If not, you better be careful how you map-reduce algorithm executes. If you don't understand, associativity and your operator isn't associative, it can cause problems.

Finite state machines are important too. It can be really hard to write a parser, if you don't understand FSM. I suppose that ties in with design patterns.

If you can write a good proof, I don't see how can be that terrible of a programmer. How many CS graduates do you know, who can write a good proof, and aren't good programmers?
IMHO, not even in the same universe of playability, and if they insist on using the same music as they used in the trailer, I would actually grin while deleting it.
Gates, Buffet & the Art of Giving
Betting on green: Is Vinod Khosla's approach too risky?
It's currently offered "for free" to many people. That's one of the big arguments people always make in the H.264 vs. Google debate — H.264 is just as free for most users, and surely the MPEG-LA would never turn around and change that.
They both have there good reasons for existence. For example, when I was taking Biology and Calculus those specific questions could always be answered with Yahoo. As far as technical questions I think Yahoo has a poor community to answer them while Stack has a very technical community.
I definitely love the concept and ease of use. Quick and to the point!
He is saying that "higher prices -> lower demand"
You say that, "no higher demand -> higher prices"

Both are true
Exactly, what I was trying to get at is OpenGL ES is winning on mobile. DirectX really has no answer and even Windows Devices right now are pretty much XNA/.NET/Silverlight locked as you say no native. Android has the NDK now (year or so ago) because iOS SDK was native and allowed for the performance needed.

If Carmack only built in DirectX which is so much farther ahead, he wouldn't be on mobile. OpenGL is much different after 2006 when Khronos took over.
Ask HN: Offer to join a startup. Is this deal good?
Hi,

I am a regular HNer and this is a temporary account I made for this question.

I was recently approached by a guy who is starting up. His company has got funding to the tune of 1 mil with a valuation of close to 6 mil. I will be the first hire and will lead the tech efforts. The company is pretty much tech oriented, and when I join, the focus will be 100% on building the product (a web application).

The offer made to me is that of options worth 120k at a nominal price (i.e. Upon vesting, I can buy stocks which are worth 120k today for say 6k at the time of vesting), along with salary to cover my expenses of lodging and food plus some.

Please help me decide.
Thanks for the tips, very intresting
Also a taxi company, a love hotel chain, a TV network, a food company (selling instant rice, similar to instant noodles).

Source: Wikipedia.
For my part, I am an avid C programmer; it's my first language, and virtually the only one I used through the '90s. And I will say: you should avoid writing in C unless you need to. The cases I can come up with off the top of my head where it's necessary:

* When performance matters and can be gained through writing C code --- for instance, if you're compute-bound, or if you need fast access to data structures.

* When building incremental improvements to large C codebases --- ie, writing a loadable kernel module.

* When you're deploying in small-footprint environments.

What are the other cases where C makes sense?

I brought up the C thing not because I want to take potshots at what is probably my favorite language, but because a majority of the developers on HN don't write C, and you'd hate for them not to take a crack at competing with nmap because they had a faulty belief that they'd need to use C.
So use of lighter colours and white packaging a la Marlboro 'Lights', as they were known here until recently, is taken objectively to be a Bad Thing.

Why isn't anybody asking, then, on what grounds we think that replacing all cigarette packaging with plain white boxes wouldn't make things worse ?
Who is responding to this catastrophe? Is it the defense forces, state police, or is it just international agencies? I imagine a comprehensive aerial survey happening _immediately_, helicopters showing up with emergency supplies and defense troops or police within hours, and so on, but the government has produced ridiculously inaccurate casualty numbers and has blamed lack of contact with the affected area for their ignorance. It makes me think nobody is actually there. Can somebody fill us in on what is being done to help the people who are there?
I think that is part of the problem he was trying to point out.
I'd like to reiterate the 'probably' I mention in the OP. I don't know that this jack uses the new pogo pin design, but even if not, the tapered lip and exposed ground pin is something new.
I do maintain a website that still has 65% of IE users (this month statistics).
Yeah, I raised an eyebrow on that point as well. Funny how the doctor can state authoritatively that 64% of kids' ADHD symptoms can be traced to diet, but there are no specific details on what the relevant diet elements are. It's as if she wants to protect children by keeping parents ignorant.
I think our misunderstanding is that you're talking about what has happened and I'm talking about what is resulting from it. Higher prices mean that demand has been growing faster than supply. As a consequence, suppliers now want to supply more and consumers want to consume less. So higher prices incentivise more supply.
C is a bad choice for a new port scanner started in 2011. I've already written comments here justifying that statement. If you really think I'm wrong, it might be fun to hash out why. (I've got a fairly decent background in nmap's problem domain, for what it's worth.)
Let's definitely debate Greg Hoglund --- someone you admittedly don't know anything about, but are apparently happy to comment about --- rather than talking about the thing this comment thread is ostensibly about.
Speculation has had negative effects in practice: The tulip crisis. Sometimes speculation can turn into a pyramid game.
I'm not saying that this is always, or even often the case, but it is sometimes the case.
I want to reset this perennial argument into new terms for a moment. Apple has long branded itself not as a walled garden but instead as a "human focused technology design" company. From this perspective you might instead see Walled Garden as a symptom of a dominating human focus.

Once you're looking at human-driven innovation and technology-driven innovation, you can start to see some major differences. Human-driven pulls money whenever it brings high technology to people's lives in a more synchronized fashion. Technology-driven pulls money when it invents something so new it literally shifts the power structure into groups of those who have it and those who don't.

I find it pretty liberating that human-focused innovation is having such a renaissance right now. I don't feel so hurt if it's at a (possibly small, globally) cost to technological innovation since Apple clearly optimizes for psychology. I feel like real technological innovation can still happen as well, but a walled garden acts as a filter that separates those who just made the next poorly designed CRUD application from those who'll get bought.

I'll still add that it's a little scary since I have an engineering fear of big monolithic entities like Apple and Google over well-organized, loose-integrated, and smaller guys.
I'm not sure that grassroots corporate welfare through band-aiding a broken, crappy product with a sewer for a community and zero moderation is what Ghandi really had in mind, there.

Much more effective would be to advance the cause of workable communities or products while starving out the page views of ones beyond repair.
I think that, currently, Cringely is just Stephens.
'would-a-been nice' if they had suggested at least 1-food.
Young people about to become smokers are not likely to wake up one morning and say, "hey, I'm going to start smoking today. That display is nice, I'll get that kind." The ghoulish advertisement probably makes them think twice about starting, but that action happens far away from where the advertisement actually is.

I'm convinced it's much more complicated than simple advertising. There's "peer pressure" effects, to be certain. Not the kind of peer pressure that D.A.R.E. warns you about ("hey, smoke this, everybody's doing it. you want to be cool, right?").

If you're a teenager (or college student - I started in college), it's probably more of a network effect. Hang out with people who smoke, and you're more likely to smoke yourself. After a few beers (or other inebriant of their choice), maybe it won't be so bad. Have a cigarette. Huh, nice buzz. Don't worry, I'll only smoke when I'm drinking. Before you know it (I know this isn't everyone - some people can stay social smokers just fine), you're buying a pack in anticipation of a night out. School starts stressing you out, maybe cigarettes will help. And they do, for a short period of time: a few minutes outside clearing your head with a pleasant buzz.

Of course, eventually you don't get that buzz except for the first one of the day. And for heavy smokers, they don't even get that. But it's hell if you try to quit, even with patches, gum, chantix, whatever.

I've only smoked for five years, but I've tried to quit eight times. If people ask me for cigarettes, I don't give them out - I don't know if they're in the starting stages of the addiction or not. And I'm not about to help someone else get addicted to these damn things.
If sun.com is decommissioned then it will no longer be in service, i.e. it will not even redirect.
Well, my other coworkers (some are windows fans, linux fans, osx fans, and one is a total freeBSD nazi) all agree that out of all our workstations, the Windows machines fail the most. Even the Windows fans acknowledge this. All other operating systems almost every time recover from errors (be them our errors or random errors on the OS side) without much trouble, while the Windows machines generally just blow up and need to be re-started.

Don't get me wrong, I do almost all my programming these days in VS2010 and I think it's a pretty decent piece of software (as is Windows 7), but it crashes more than any IDE I've ever used and the UI is just totally subpar. Windows 7 is a huge step up from Vista an XP, but I find it's nowhere near as stable as XP was. Our situation is not a hardware or driver issue, everyone had their preferences on which machines to buy, so they're all different machines.
Fantastic idea. Added: http://www.bullyentertainment.com
Don't measure the stock in money, but in percent. Sounds like you're being offered 2%. That's lowish but not terrible.

The real question is whether you want to join this company. Is it founded by a single, nonhacker founder? I would steer clear of those. Empirically they don't do well.
What's inside Apple's iPad 2?
This site is too light on details for me to trust its conclusions.

Under “The evil eval”, it concludes that you should never use eval simply because it sometimes executes in global scope. That does not seem like an obvious conclusion to me. Yes, it’s a mistake to use it on user input, but that is easily avoided. I think the site should give an example of a situation where you think you need eval, the problems eval necessarily brings in that case, and how to write that without eval. Otherwise, I don’t trust that the site writer has actually explored why people use eval or what eval might be able to provide that nothing else can.

Also, under “Automatic semicolon insertion”, the site does not mention the alternative to using semicolons everywhere, which is not using semicolons but remembering to put a semicolon before each line starting with parentheses. That is a valid alternate practice, and the site ignores the possibility without even discussing its problems.

The fact that each of those two sections contain grammar mistakes (comma splices) also signals a lack of attention to detail.
Oooh, it's a bit of a slippery slope to try to argue that. A shift in political winds and/or attitude can cancel/limit alternative energy funding in a heartbeat.
2nd result:

http://www.google.com/search?q=where+to+go+to+watch+planes+t...

Google maps:

http://maps.google.com/maps?f=q&source=s_q&hl=en&...

BTW, if you like to watch planes take off and land, the Palo Alto airport is another good spot. It's all small prop-driven private planes, so the noise level is quite a bit less than at SFO. And there're some great marsh trails at the end of Embarcadero with benches that are right under the flight path, so planes fly straight over you at an altitude of maybe 50-100 feet:

http://maps.google.com/maps?f=q&source=s_q&hl=en&...
Apple bans iPhone 3G patch omission talk from forum
Nuclear power is about 35-40% of Japan's grid, according to the what appears to be a site operated by Japanese authorities.

"At present, there are 52 commercial nuclear reactors in operation in Japan with a total
generating capacity of 45,742 megawatts. Nuclear power supplies about 35% of Japan’s
total electricity demand. It is expected that nuclear energy’s share in electricity generation
will increase to more than 40% by around 2010."[1]

[1] http://www.japannuclear.com/files/Japan%20Nuclear%20Fuel%20C...
In my experience, if I have a question that I can't Google reasonably well, it will be rejected from S.O. anyway. If I'm able to sufficiently frame my question, I probably already know enough to guide myself toward an answer.

S.O. search results have been useful in refining my understanding of a problem set, but it's rarely been useful for a direct answer. When it does provide a direct answer, it's generally about simple stuff that I'm dabbling in, such as Python syntax questions.
Something like that.

The idea is to make things low-friction, mobile-centric, zero login.
There are certainly startups hoping to become redwoods, but there seem to be many with goals or target markets that would likely limit them to shrubs at best. Of course, there is also a large class of "startups" that are a lot more like Christmas tree farm seedlings.
That goes for the nuclear reactors and the oil refineries. There will definitely be a slow down and that will mean more external sources will be needed short-term, right during summer, where oil prices skyrocket.
Excellent point! We're planning on launching that feature today, and so the materials should be up shortly afterwards.
Stephen Wolfram: Computing a theory of everything (2010)
The truth now. The problem is that words on the Internet live forever, and most people don't bother to pay attention to date stamps. At some point in the future, StackExchange will be the hulking behemoth that nobody likes, and then people will dig up this post and say "turnabout's fair play".

(It just occurred to me that someday I may come to regret all my HN comments. Gulp. Ah well, it's been fun so far.)
I find it notable that you have mounting pressure that could risk the integrity of the pressure vessel, yet can't turn a turbine connected to a pump to drive cool water through heat exchangers... If a reactor self-destructs unless you can cool it down actively after an emergency shutdown, there must be some serious design issues there.

After you completely kill the fission, you still have some heat being generated from the decay of fission byproducts doesn't sound weird that the device has enough power to self destruct but not enough to cool itself down?
How do you supply/manage your client logo files?
I've never really liked Ambiance, mostly because of the garish orange default and huge fonts and icons that come default. This seems to be the default for all Linux desktops for some reason I can't understand...huge panels in GNOME and Xfce(I've never used KDE), huge icons, and large default texts.

Elegant Gnome[1] is a much, much saner and better theme IMO. Beautiful default font (Droid Sans+Droid Sans Mono), darker/more tastefully muted colors, Elegant-Aw0ken icons built off of Aw0ken[2] icons and the original Token[3] Icon Set by ~brsev. Also, it is a much more complete theme as compared to most themes for GTK. Full support for icons, GDM, and lots of edgecases. Really looks like the pinnacle of theming so far on Linux.

ElementaryOS[4] is a fork of Ubuntu that has spawned a lot of projects like Dexter, Nautilus Elementary, and Postler. Good to see more effort being spent on better UX and polish in Linux. I agree that Ubuntu/Canonical has come a long way since the days I was using Dapper on the desktop, but the paper still has to be pushed.

I personally use a mixture of Elegant Gnome when I use Gnome and a custom Zenburn theme with Xmonad.

Great theme, I'll recommend to friends of mine who use the default theme.

[1]: http://gnome-look.org/content/show.php/Elegant+Gnome+Pack?co...

[2]: http://gnome-look.org/content/show.php/AwOken+-+Awesome+Toke...

[3]: http://brsev.deviantart.com/art/Token-128429570
Its in fact a single, non-hacker founder. The investors seem to be bullish though.
Doesn't sound like much of a deal to me. And the reason I say so is because my theory is this: There's no reason to join a startup except to get rich, or to change the world (or both.) If you wanted a "competitive salary" you could go work for Oracle or IBM or Cisco or somebody and get that. So why join the startup at all, unless you're going to make big bank, or unless you just really, really believe in their idea? So, that said, you're looking at options, and not an outright stock grant? As the first hire? IMO, f!@# that... If I were joining an early stage startup, I'd be thinking "forgo all salary except enough to eat Ramen noodles, and give me x% of stock up front (allowing for vesting periods, etc.)" Otherwise, it's just another job, with the possibility of a nice little bonus thrown in. But a "nice little bonus" isn't "FU Money" which is what I'd be looking for, if I were to join a startup.

But that's just me.... if your motivations are different, it may be more appealing to you.
From an anecdotal perspective, I can tell you that diet has the most significant effect (either in aggravating or helping) ADD, this is great advice. With children, it's even worse since any effect that food would have would be multiplied because they're smaller (just like drugs are dosed way less)
AMD needs 1000 Developers with Linux Skills
Post facto removal doesn't meet any reasonable definition of a walled garden though. If it did, then the monthly push of the windows malicious software removal tool would make windows a walled garden. Since Windows clearly doesn't fit the definition of a walled garden, you really can't use the same functionality as a reason to call Android one.

The only difference here is that it is harder to disable Android's remote push/remote kill. As is noted though it would be relatively easy for manufacturers or AOSP based projects to disable those market functionalities or provide an alternative market. Presumably if they are given a reason to want to some will.
Why not, it must be worth a small fortune.
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2280409
Pitch your startup to a Union Square Ventures VC at SXSW with The Next Web
منت
Right, I second that. Also, I used to "take breaks" by playing games or putzing around on the internet, until I realized that it doesn't actually help me feel relaxed and energized. But stretching, walking around, getting a cup of tea, and most other things in meatspace get me ready to go back to work.
منتديات غيمة شتاء
Great article and relatively well timed. While it kind of seems like there can only be "one" internet giant at a time, and with Facebook "catching up" to Google, they are fundamentally very, very different companies. Clearly there will be some overlap, like with Gmail and Facebook messages, but considering Google's focus is technology and Facebook's is the social graph there's plenty of room for both of them to continue to flourish.

I still hate Facebook though.
Tech Crunch (an AOL property) leading with yet another slam against Yahoo, a competitor? I'm shocked.

I think I'd probably add TC to a google site ban list if I used google search. The difference between the AOL way and a content farm seems to be about ~30 minutes of effort per piece.
I am sorry about that mistake, its not competitve, rather enough to cover my expenses (not as harsh as eating Ramen noodles though). So it would be, in my opinion, substantially less than what an IBM or and Oracle will offer me.
Goddammit, I just thought someone had found the perfect trouser length.

It would make everything so much easier.