skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
All is not well, but Patio11 is writing a contrarian article -- an article that goes against conventional wisdom.

I am at loss to explain this in a way that does not sound callous. Just be assured that these things are perceived in a cyclic manner by the public. Right now, and for the next few months, the MSM and the mob has decided that it is time to panic, rant and rave.

That's fine. It's a terrible disaster, and our minds are ill-suited to deal with anything of this scale. My heart goes out to the Japanese and I'll do anything I can do to help. At the same time, however, it's not a very productive attitude to sit around moaning and talking about how terrible things are. Everybody doesn't have to follow the mob and feel exactly the "right" way that you or I think that they should. Conforming to some black-and-white, over-the-top view of the world is an indulgence that we can have because we are so far away. The Japanese have work to do, and that involves taking an honest look around and reminding themselves that there is a huge amount of stuff that is not broken.

I enjoy contrarian articles - both writing them and reading them -- because it reminds me how easy it is to cut corners and go from "horrible disaster" to "all is lost!" Crowds always overreact, and the media tries their damnedest to make money off of this phenomenon. Quite frankly it's digusting. I don't know what's worse, watching this disaster slowly unfold or watching the news outlets "break" news every few minutes and do their best to rehash old stories with a sense of forboding and panic. blech.

So until you live 300 miles from a disaster like that, you might want to cut Patio11 a bit of slack. Hell, even if you live in the middle of it, you might want to cut him some slack, because getting along with each other is the right thing to do. Let people deal with things in the way that they are best suited. A little more understanding and a little less attitude.
I did a writeup, for what it's worth, on the new MapReduce output options:

http://blog.evilmonkeylabs.com/2011/01/27/MongoDB-1_8-MapRed...

(Disclaimer, I work for 10gen / MongoDB)
Interesting I was planning to toy with location data, do you know how it compares with Postgresql extension PostGIS?
His point has little to do with bananas and much to do with the danger of radiation and how it is commonly attributed to nuclear power plants rather than coal.

Here is an example of someone else making the same point:

http://www.ornl.gov/info/ornlreview/rev26-34/text/colmain.ht...
http://chomsky.info/books/counter-revolutionary-violence.htm like this?

or this: http://books.zcommunications.org/chomsky/year/year-overview....

or this: http://books.zcommunications.org/chomsky/sld/sld-contents.ht...

or this: http://books.zcommunications.org/chomsky/rab/rab-contents.ht...

or this: http://books.zcommunications.org/chomsky/ni/ni-contents.html

or this: http://books.zcommunications.org/chomsky/dd/dd-overview.html

or this: http://books.zcommunications.org/chomsky/rc/rc-contents.html
I always give a standard answer to every secret question that has nothing to do with the question being asked.
If you are going to do that then a single cigarette ad on a formula 1 car kills more people than Hiroshima.

Maybe not a single ad, but certainly cigarettes do, and it is a valid way to count.
I'd like to see K-MAX unmanned helicopters dropping boric acid and seawater on the reactors - or whatever is best.

"Japan nuclear crisis: radiation levels stop helicopter from dumping water."
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/asia/japan/8385559...

Unmanned K-MAX helicopter achieves airdrop milestones
http://www.gizmag.com/k-max-unmanned-helicopter-milestones/1...
great read about how the speed of information can greatly affect the rate of change in countries.
Yea, makes sense. That limit almost seems to fall along the lines of "Nobody should need more than 16MB for inline map/reduce results." ;)
RTFM'ing myself in public. While it's a great step forward, the whole thing sounds pretty immature at this point. It'll be a good day when this stuff matures and MongoDB has fsync:true and --journal by default, much to the chagrin of sensationalists everywhere.

They'll really need to add some major smarts into the journaling and group commit if they're going to be able to stack up concurrent I/Os to help feed big disk arrays and even to get the best use out of SSDs which make back-and-forth latency on the I/O pipes even more significant.
How  for Entrepreneurs to Get Investors to Say “We’ll Pass”
That's the thing - Apple and Microsoft have both had somewhat similar offerings, but in some way they were not as user-friendly, or were not presented to users properly (Apple has iDisk, or something like that).

For LAN use, cloud (external) storage isn't even needed though.
It is good at web scale.
I also think that's a big part of it -- especially since so many HN'ers look at StackOverflow and see something much farther along than Quora.
I got excited and looked it up.

> We don't currently handle wrapping at the poles or at the transition from -180° to +180° longitude, however we detect when a search would wrap and raise an error.

generalized grumble

Why does everyone always seem to punt on doing geospatial right? It's not _that_ hard.
Is there any way to get a best of both worlds in this scenario? Quicker to-market times for drugs for rare and dangerous diseases, and the safe route for the more common drugs?

Of course there is. Regulations can be changed, freeing drug companies to research and develop these drugs. In fact, I'm sure that this change - this partial deregulation compromise - is going to happen, someday.

But on what principle should we stop there? Where do you draw the line, and why? If the regulations say "freedom only for drug developers that treat diseases that affect 15,000 people with five years," on what principle do you cut freedom short for the 15,001th patient, or the one who is expected to live five years and a day?
> What you mean to say 30,000 people a year die some amount of time earlier than if we had no coal burning at all.

That's the same way people get to tens or hundreds of thousands of deaths from Chernobyl, isn't it? There were a few thousand direct deaths and a great deal more lives shortened to whatever degree.

Maybe, just like there's a "banana equivalent dose" for radiation we need some kind of "cigarette equivalent risk" to measure increased cancer risk & shortened life spans?
consolidation of adjacent btree nodes after key deletions when appropriate. arguably should have already done this, but it's there now!
>I think they still aren't accelerating the HD videos in the beta or are doing it sub optimally but I am very hopeful it will work at least as well as it does on a desktop!

That's a very low bar. If I wanted an improvement, I'd be looking at something like Netflix's Silverlight implementation, which doesn't consume full CPU to render HD video.
This was my first thought, as well, and not just Iraq. There have been numerous wars for oil throughout the past century.
>Japan has a population of ~ 300 million

127 million according to Wikipedia.
Wasn't natural gas among the safest? Third after nuclear and hydro. (I couldn't see any figure for solar, I guess because it's currently negligible?)
Actually, the population of Japan is about 127 million.

http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=population+of+japan
Interesting. I'd heard of this happening and it made you sound strangely clueless (and a bit of a jerk). Thanks for the explanation.
Try running a startup without Linux and the entire open source ecosystem.
flawed observation. true, nuclear accidents don't happen often but when they do you have to deal with immediate and long term effects. as far as I know, coal power plant accidents don't cause deformities for the next 2/3 generations. also I don't see the numbers on solar and wind.
To be fair, Dropbox has had a few issues with stability as well.

But I agree, Twitter hasn't exactly been rock-solid lately.
These are great! Specifically Cash Flow. I've often wished I had an app on had to see what my cash flow will look like in 20 days, or 30.
I have great respect for Patrick, and usually agree with him, but in this case I think his conclusion is far off-mark.

Japanese citizens need our help, on a massive scale.

The government may not need any assistance, but the families and communities ravaged by the disaster have an unbounded need for aid.

I've lived in Uganda and Cambodia, two countries which get a disproportionate share of Western aid. Yet still, even with all those development dollars, a $50 gift can completely transform an individual's life. I've seen it happen.

If your house, your church, your community, and much of your extended family has been annihilated, and you're rebuilding your life from scratch, then you need our help, no matter how well-equipped your government is.

Please give, and give generously.
Growl and Sparkle are the defacto standards for notifications and program updates on Mac. They are very nice because I can control how I am notified through Growl settings (no notifications) and apps tell me there is a new update when launching (or polling while use). A recent version of Sparkle has a new option that I think is genius, update on quit. This allows me to tell the app that when I quit it, install the update. That way I don't have to wait for the app to update and restart when I just want use the app for 5 minutes.

One problem with Growl is that if you don't have it installed, some apps provide their own notifications. Then when you don't want any notifications like me, you have to configure that in each app. So it is best to install Growl and disable notifications.

Now with the app store on Mac, Sparkle might not be used as much in the future because the app store will handle updates.

Overall, I think the OS X developer community has worked this out fairly well on their own.
What Profile/Privacy Settings Should Your Kids Have?
I poked around ZetaBee Text for the last 5 minutes and am getting excited. I liked the concept, but not the keyboard shortcut style of workflowy.com. This is way closer.

The "How This Works" section is great. I got moving fast.

One gripe (or perhaps an oversight). I can ctrl + select a lot of lines, but I can't delete them. I think the concept here is that I can just collapse things, which mostly I'd do, but there are times when only delete will do and I don't see a way to accomplish this task.

Specifically, I renamed the first sheet "HowItWorks" in an attempt to keep the instructions in case I forget. I went to delete the two example sections below and could not.
Pretty cheap downvotes you're getting here. Wish I could upvote you more than once.
I think YC is more about connections and press and experience you can't get on your own.
Putting the legal issues aside? It doesn't matter either way: security vulnerabilities trump copycats (in my opinion).

Publicly releasing details of an XSS vulnerability on a third party's site has much bigger ramifications than a copycat site. Plenty of websites deal with copycats all the time: they're frustrating, but they're not necessarily overly threatening. On the other hand, a 0 day could compromise the security of user information. In certain fields, that could completely destroy your business.
This is quite relevant all on its own, even if slightly off-topic:

[the WTO Uruguay agreement is] called a "free trade agreement". It's in fact a highly protectionist agreement. The US is strongly opposed to free trade, just as business leaders are, just as they're opposed to a market economy.
Or exposes you to a group of individuals who will want to make you regret showing off.
Airplanes are the safest way to travel by far

Yes and no. That depends on how you measure. The typical statistic used (deaths per man-kilometer) favors flying a bit.

For example, the space shuttle is safe, according to that metric (guesstimate: 60 shuttle flights for every crash => over a year in space for every crash, 16 times round earth a day => 60000 revolutions * 40k km => 2*10^9 man km per death)

According to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Air_safety#Statistics making one plane ride is riskier than taking a bus once.

Moreover, taking of and landing are the high-risk parts of flying. So, I would expect that flying would score worse than that when people starte making shorter flights.
The computational complexity of linear optics
> Relativity theory isn't patentable as there is no business model which could commercialize it.

1. Make Nukes
2. Threaten other countries
3. ???
4. PROFIT
I listen and tend to agree with a large swathes of what he says, though not everything.

I've yet to come across a reason to doubt his credibility, but I'd be interested in reading a counter point to his arguments if you have some sources.
Judy Arrays
6 beloved scientists who were actually total jerks | Blastr
I have no idea what he's talking about here. The British did do a number of horrible things in India and did use force to crush, for example, the Indian shipbuilding industry. They also could have learned a lot from Indian metallurgy if they were a bit less arrogant. But textiles? I guess they did "steal" cotton, but that wasn't really an invention in the sense he's talking about.
I'm a BSD fan myself, but startups are possible without open source. Stack Overflow runs on Windows, for example.

The one thing that startups need is freedom to make what people want so that those people will freely choose to pay the startup (how many startups existed in the USSR in 1970?). OSS is just a nice-to-have once you look at it that way. If it was a necessity, you'd have to explain how there were startups before anything was open source.

Edit: OSS would still exist in some form even if there were no government funding for it. You know how some people say they do it just for fun? I think that's true.
heh i still smoke. im less interested in finding out all the ways i could die, and much more interested in finding all the ways to live.
There is less radiation risk from normally operating German nuclear power stations than there is from all the radionuclides the extra coal burning stations will emit.

Although since Germany hit on the idea of exporting it's dirty coal to Poland, burning it there and importing the power they will be east europeans getting the cancer.
Very nice apps. I like the simplicity and focus. I can definitely see myself using these, especially the cash flow app.
What investment % do you give up for those 2 "cash" awards?
Ask HN: How do I know in an interview if someone can handle startup-life?
So I'll freely admit I work stupidly long hours- I live on Redbull, and get off on making things that I can look back at, and say "Yeah, I'm proud of that."

My primary job is in IT, but I'll jump in on and spend two hours creating user stories or writing marketing copy.
There's been times that I added code which is still in production years later.

Things are hectic, but challenging, rewarding, and if you put in the effort, you can make a real difference.

One of the things I've found is that when you work with people for a while, you get a feeling for who'd you want to steal for your next company. The sort of people you know are perfect for this sort of environment, and really thrive in it.

Basically, as Joel says- People who are Smart, and Get Things Done.

Here's the tough part- How do I find those people BEFORE the Hire/NoHire decision is made?

Are there any tricks to finding people in the interview or phone interview, and get a sense of how well they'll work in such a weird world?
Also, it turns out that "What is your usual password?" is a bad secret question.
Same thing happened in my friend's company and they fired the engineer who identified and exploited the permanent XSS in their competitor's website. Personally I would do the very same thing.

1. It's against the law
2. Extremely unprofessional and childish
3. There are better ways to report security vulnerabilities
You can cut multiple lines using Control+Shift+X or press Control+Del multiple times. I'll add "delete multiple lines" to my todos.
Uncovering an advertising fraud scheme
Putting work into the Public Domain is ironically not the best way to serve the public good. It's much safer to have a permissive license. Chomsky's answer here might have unintentionally passed the wrong idea in that sense.
Well, I was talking about being hit by tsunamis, not radiation.

I prefer nuclear power to coal myself but I must clarify that "normally operating nuclear power stations" aren't what people worry about with nuclear power.
I'd rather someone with as much experience as pg was a jerk to me and helped us win than smiling in my face as we lost
People still live near three mile island.
FixSSL.com - HTTPS for any URL
Excellent.

Interested in what you think is the next level for these apps.

EDIT: I should have said "next step" instead of "next level"
> Basically, they are from a nuclear lobby site

Really? You may well know something I don't, but it doesn't seem that way to me: http://www.reddit.com/domain/nextbigfuture.com/
Very nice - worth the reading. I'm particularly interested in seeing how you've implemented 'merge' and 'reduce' output.

You guys do seem to be headed in the right direction technically... I just can't bring myself to say "mongo" out loud.
HTML5 Video Update—WebM for IE9
Where are you located? You want books, I have books. You could also find more value than programming in being plugged in to your high school social activities. By being in touch with what the cool kids and upcoming hipsters are doing you may have insight into a market that lots of companies would pay good money for.

BTW, if you had a server and a domain name do you even know what you would do with it? Not in a technical manner but what problems are you going to solve with the software you write. Learn how to recognize problems in a market and offer valuable solutions.
I love the CashFlow app myself as a user. I originally made a non-VBA-code Excel file ( http://dl.dropbox.com/u/111770/CashFlow.xls ) to do the same thing and used it for a while before turning it into a web-app. The web-app is faster but the Excel was a lot more fun to make.
It can't be true than this. I will follow your advise and have a feel for him. Thank you very much!
My semi-humorous response: http://glassocean.net/riyad-mammadov-enterprise-architect-sa...
Have you used AirBnB yet? I just did a few weeks ago for the first time, and am about to again when I move up to the Bay Area.

It's amazing. Not only do they identify unused physical assets (extra space in people's homes/apts.) and create a market for it that undercuts an entire industry, they've created this amazing karmic serendipity of meeting new and interesting people from the very first moment you touch down.

Travel isn't just about seeing landmarks and whatnot, it's about immersing yourself in the local culture, and AirBnB provides that much better than most hotels can.

Combine the feel-good nature of the service with its recession/depression/financial-crisis/money-saving friendly, disruptive undercutting of a huge industry and I have no doubt they'll eventually be among the biggest incubator successes or exits.

And yes, they are growing:

http://blog.airbnb.com/airbnb-celebrates-1000000-nights-book...

I do wonder if they'll compete with Couchsurfing.com. The latter could pivot a little and offer the same kind of for-pay service AirBnB does, and already has a huge clientel.

Edit: just to elaborate on the recession-friendly bit. I've gotten very interested lately in companies like AirBnB and Groupon that enable people to continue spending despite adverse financial conditions, be it deflationary or inflationary. In the former, cash and credit becomes scarce, and in the latter cash loses its value and prices increase.

In either case, AirBnB has found an asset that has historically been priced at $0, and can hence undercut competitors all the way down to 0$. No established hotel can compete on price, only amenities, but in times of financial distress, customers tend to sacrifice amenities for lower prices. And what AirBnB can't offer in amenities, it compensates for with the social aspect that hotels can't offer.

Same with Groupon, they've created a win-win-win for the most part. Customers save money if the Groupon was something they wanted anyway, companies make money (assuming they did the math right on their deal), and Groupon makes money. Only the companies that people would have spent money on, but spent on a Groupon instead, lose, which is extremely difficult to quantify.

I don't know how much of this the AirBnB and Groupon founders foresaw, but I think both are brilliant. They've really got me trying to think up something similar now.
cheers to that.
I really like your text implementation. I've done something similar at http://www.mindwallet.com . I've added a social layer on top. You can post directly to facebook/twitter and keep the posts in context. People can reply in line by adding sub items to your lists. I'm trying to put an api together that lets users create all kinds of apps. I think there is a opportunity for this kind of interface. Maybe we should put our heads together.

Here's my 'how to use page': http://www.mindwallet.com/?ItemKey=787541c7-0860-41ea-a21a-2...

You obviously have a much better eye for design than I do.

Here is an example of how I used some of the social features to live-blog/document the SxSW startup bus stuff:

http://www.mindwallet.com/?ItemKey=787541c7-0860-41ea-a21a-2...

Here is where you can see all the public nodes that are going through the stream(so far it is just me):

http://www.mindwallet.com/home/public

Let me know what you think!
"... but my wife and kids are somewhat persistent about a stable income."

I completely get this, I've got 2 kids in college, ouch! The 'joke' is that if you have to ask the question 'Should I keep my day job?' then the answer is always 'yes'. The reasoning behind this is pretty straight forward, the difference between practitioner and artist is that the practitioner does it because it interests them and an artist does it because they can't conceive of any better use for their time.

One way you would know you were passionate about writing books would be that you had moved back into your parents house with your family. That is an action where your passion is expressed by what you do, you sacrifice things that you might buy, or comforts you might enjoy, with a stable income because you are so passionate about your writing that doing it is all you can think of.

People with this kind of passion that try to get "day jobs" often get fired because they are constantly 'not present' at work, instead they are thinking about their next novel, researching it, creating characters, exploring viewpoints, "Oh wait, we had a staff meeting at 10, I'm sorry it totally left my mind!" Happens a lot to people who can't help but be what they are.

I also get the whole self confidence thing too, the need for some external validation that you're making the right choice, Etc. But there is only one real measure, and its not opinion, its how widely you are read. How many people relate to your stories? Does it change their life? Does it give them an insight they didn't have? Does it entertain them? I worked as an intern for Jerry Pournelle for a while, not name dropping, just citing the source, he called this understanding of how your writing affected your readers "finding your voice." He helped me understand I was a programmer, not a science fiction writer :-)

My experience is that nobody can tell you what you should be doing, only your heart can tell you what you should be doing. And by listening to it, and doing it, you will be happy. And of course you will not be wondering if you should be doing something else :-)