skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> Someone else should write the best possible port scanner

Best Possible Port Scanner... BEST... sorry, it doesn't fit. We could give you say the Best Egregious Scanning Tool, would that work?
It's funny how when a company actually makes profit, TC writes a short facts-only news story with no commentary or excitement. If it were a story of LinkedIn getting another round of funding, they would be gushing over how it was going to take over the world.
At least the information about 512MB RAM is news to me. I don't think this has been announced by Apple.
At risk to be downvoted to death, I have to say that the new way of multiplication is actually _better_ than the old one, at least for kids starting to learn how to multiply.

All the new multiplication algorithm does is makes implicit additions explicit, so that you do not have to keep carry-over digit in memory. 144 is 120+24 and 720 is 600+120. Sure it trains your short memory, but we are talking about 7yr olds here. Once kid feels comfortable s/he will naturally move to the "old" way of multiplication.

And anyway... It is easy to nitpick on something we understand very well, but how about the topic? What would you do to make math more enjoyable in the classroom? I know what worked for me personally and that was not classroom drilling of multiplication, divisions, and stupid problems with two pipes filling the pool at different speeds.

What made me love math are Marin Gardner's books and other fun math books. It was much more interesting to solve crimes with what I later came to know as propositional logic, or cutting tori in different ways.
Cooper, Amanpour among TV journalists to Japan
The websockets speck is still in draft. Nothing is impossible and there is no reason a browser could not implement their own extension of websockets to enable p2p. Have some imagination.
Well, there are plenty of studies that show high contrast makes for readability issues. For example, I get faint after-images that flick around the page when reading black text on white. It's very distracting.

I get your point about different perspectives, but for web pages we want everyone to read, we should be designing for the lowest common denominator.
Yes, certainly, the event is open to everyone who's interested in Racket. There's no need to have built something substantial in Racket to come, but obviously you'll get more out of it the more you've worked with Racket.
So would I. I'd love to know what percentage of the iPad 2's weight is the battery and glass.
Not really. BWRs need larger pressure vessels, PWRs need thicker ones.

I believe that JSW is the only place (also I think there's one in Germany, too) where you can forge a reactor pressure vessel in one piece, but that if you're willing to bolt two pieces together there are a few more options. It may be that this is more feasible for a BWR than a PWR, but I actually think that BWR pressure vessels are usually more expensive.

Where BWRs really save all the money is that you don't need to buy, maintain and replace pressurizers, steam generators, and a ton of piping and pumps that need to be rated for 2500 PSI, as well as a whole bunch of instrumentation for measuring and controlling boron dilution levels. You'll be paying more for engineering services, since all the calculations will take longer, but I can only imagine it's worth it, since, high-margin as engineering services are, they're chump change compared to how much the reactor costs.
I think it's also that more people trust the (openjdk/sunjdk) as a high performance vm with tons of money spent on developing an excellent gc and jit with a ton compared to mono. Although on the other hand its true that many people use an interpreter/vm like ruby 1.8 without much trouble.
Not necessarily a story about earthquakes sneaking up on you, but a funny one. I work in Shenzhen right now in China. One day in the office, 11th floor, everyone suddenly feels the floor shake for a few seconds. We're all thinking earthquake. So what do you do when there's an earthquake? Well, I remember being taught in grade school that if you're outside, you make for an open field or area where things can't fall on you. If you're inside, you crawl under a desk, table, anything that can protect you from falling stuff.

What does everyone do? Stand up, look at each other, and dash to the window to look outside. I felt kinda stupid being the only one just sitting there, so I went to look out the windows as well. Even more funny? We had an rehearsal later that afternoon for the entire building, to practice what to do in the case of an emergency disaster.
Tweeters: I want a witness tag
Ah. I thought that you were talking about what you could do with the websocket spec as it exists, but you actually seem to be talking about what you could do with some hypothetical future websocket spec.

Yes, it might be possible to extend the websocket spec to handle peer-to-peer applications. But that would be difficult, and would not fit well with the purpose it is designed for, which is creating a persistent, bidirectional communication channel between the browser and the server, securely, in such a way that it can't be used to subvert the user's browser to do malicious things.

The big issue is that when you browse to a web page, the assumption is generally that any scripts on the page should be able to communicate back to the server it came from, or possibly other servers that explicitly opt in, but not to arbitrary other machines on the internet. And even connecting back to the same server, you need to be careful not to allow the script to talk to services that don't expect a (possibly malicious) third-party script to be communicating with them from the user's machine.

The websocket API and protocol are carefully designed to prevent these sorts of problems without the user having to intervene and understand what's going on. If you tacked a peer to peer protocol on, that would add a lot of complexity (since you'd also need to add some sort of peer discovery, NAT traversal, firewall configuration, and the like), and make it even harder to guarantee these properties. Essentially, adding peer to peer support in the browser requires you to solve so many extra problems that it doesn't really make sense to think of it as an extension to websockets, but instead just do it as an entirely different standard.
Are you referring to the graphs in the article? The data presented by the article is fundamentally flawed because they show U.S. consumption and production, yet oil is traded on a world market. The U.S. is only a tiny part of world oil production (roughly 11% according to Wikipedia - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_oil_produc...). It's a somewhat larger part of world oil consumption (a little over 20% - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_oil-consuming_states), but still nowhere near the total world market.

The article's comparison of Chinese oil consumption with speculator purchases was also specious. Without knowing how much speculator oil was then sold back to consumers, we can't draw any conclusions. To see why, imagine a world that consumes 2.5B barrels of oil per month, and where it takes a month for oil to make it from field to refinery. Now imagine that someone invents a way for oil companies to lock in their price at the time they pump the oil, and not have to wait until they can sell it on the market. We'll call it a futures contract, but it's really exactly the same mechanism that your retail store works by. They buy the goods at one point in time, hold on to them as inventory for the time needed to bring them to market, and then sell them on the open market. At no point does the futures contract holder physically take possession of the oil (this is where financial markets differ from retail trade).

At any given time in this model, financial firms own all of the oil on earth - 2.5B barrels of it. As soon as it comes out of the ground, they buy it, and when it's refined, they sell it. Yet the physical industry - the amount of oil produced and consumed, the means of production, and the price of that oil - hasn't changed one bit. The only difference is that financial firms now bear the risk and reward for any change in the price of oil between when it is produced and when it is consumed.

This model isn't all that different from how the industry actually operates (including the numbers), but some details have been simplified.

Anyway, my point isn't that speculators aren't to blame for the price of oil. My personal opinion is that it's a combination of speculation, peak oil, a rise in consumption by China, geopolitical instability, and plain old price inelasticity, with speculation and peak oil being minor factors and the major ones being China and price inelasticity. But the article has presented no useful data - he quotes a bunch of articles and statistics, but the stats he quotes are not relevant to the actual dynamics of how the industry operates.
This makes no sense. How is it in any way tractable for Twitter to bucket a user into a brand, a person, a person who is also a brand, a person who is trying to build a brand, a person who is just really enthusiastic about a product, or a astroturf account pretending to be really enthusiastic about a product?

It's not. That's not easy, that's a fundamentally realignment of the product.

What if you're a normal guy and you get famous from some youtube video? Now you're a celebrity. Pay up - but oops, you're broke? Fuck it, you're off Twitter.

Not gonna work. :/
Since I can't use the app without signing in, you need to place the sign in links more prominently. When I click on a chat room, it says "Anonymous: Sign in to send messages". Please make that a link so that I can click and sign in right away, not look for the sign in links on my own.

It sounds trivial, but little annoyances like these will keep people from trying the app.

You also need to seed the chatrooms with some users and conversation. I don't see anyone in any room.
I thought you were talking about websockets as it exists today, not some hypothetical future extension. See my reply in the other thread about why that might not be a good idea.
the point is that charities are run for the benefit of people who control them.
OPEC members continuously cheat on each other. The reason oil prices collapsed in the early 1980s and stayed that way for two decades was because OPEC had no teeth. Somebody would always overproduce and reap the lion's share of the rewards, and then everyone had an incentive to overproduce.
Explosion at Japanese nuclear plant, fuel may be melting - Officials
I'm not sure I find his argument persuasive. Commodity ETFs actually lose money, most of them have lower returns than the underlying commodity performance or negative returns even when commodity performance is positive because they lose money when they roll over their futures contracts since none of these funds can take delivery. The only reason banks runs these ETFs is to take money on management fees, not on the value of the fund.

See:
http://www.usatoday.com/money/perfi/funds/2010-09-17-persona...

http://blogs.forbes.com/etfchannel/2010/11/12/are-your-commo...

https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Contango
StumbleUpon’s Garrett Camp: Stay in School, Fools
The house always wins because the house always has final say. If they want to put you out of business, they get to. The game is rigged.

The point is that in the end, you're never going to be in a better position than the guy who runs the show. You can often win alongside them, and that might be the bulk of developers, but if you're enjoying a better position than the platform operator, that's not going to last forever.
http://www3.nhk.or.jp/daily/english/12_40.html - nuclear medical teams dispatched

http://www3.nhk.or.jp/daily/english/12_38.html venting halted

http://www.ustream.tv/channel/tbstv civilians instructed on radiation protection procedures - seal buildings, do not consume food or water, emergency situation now exists
> Is your name available somewhere that we could verify?

Does it matter? Sheesh, it's a comment on a forum. He's probably legit. If he's not, who cares? Are you a government leader needing to make a decision that will effect millions and it's all hinging on the veracity of some forum comment here on HN?! :-)
What time scale are we talking about? If we're asking why oil is more expensive than it was in 1999, I think that's at least partially due to Peak Oil (more due to China and India, though). If we're asking why oil is more expensive than it was in 2009, I'd say it's because of geopolitical instability, speculation, and price inelasticity.
Ask PG: Why does HN uses full width while paulgraham.com has limited width?
paulgraham.com is totally exemplary for text formatting. I like to mention it like an incredibly well constrained website design. The best feature is the text width which doesn't exceed 550 pixels. It makes the text extremely well readable, including on mobile devices. And it's actually a column width similar to the one used by paper newspapers.

So why is HN using the full screen width? With a relatively small font, it gets harder to read with a window larger than 1000 pixels. Have there been tests to constrain a bit the width of comments? How was the decision taken to make HN full width?
Luxury hotel One living room With collapsible sofa and Air conditioning rooms
America's untapped rare earth metals
Running a .org as a for-profit is fine. For-profit Craigslist is the best example that I can think of; CL is pulling in tens (hunreds?) of millions in revenue. The only real risk I see is possibly confusing your users.
Hey you found our video too! (We're the SpotHero one)
'Concrete wall of Reactor #1 blown away in explosion'
'Radiation level outside plant now 1015 micro Sieverts.' 'Huge probability of major event.'

- govt. press conference, next update in 20-30 minutes. Local time in Japan is 5:37pm / 1735.

Most recent reports from power company - several hours out of date right now but still informative:

http://www.tepco.co.jp/en/press/corp-com/release/11031219-e....

http://www.tepco.co.jp/en/press/corp-com/release/11031220-e....

http://www.tepco.co.jp/en/press/corp-com/release/index-e.htm...

Nuclear Industrial Safety Agency - English, also out of date

http://www.nisa.meti.go.jp/english/
Create a Facebook icon in photoshop
I think you're right but I give him credit for drawing attention to a big issue that everyone else is ignoring which is Japan's diminished production capacity (rather than focusing on the doomsday meltdown scenarios most of the media are fixated on).

Even if they return to service eventually there's going to be downtime. That's going to force Japan to use more fossil fuels which will drive up the price (even more). Add a spike in oil costs to the loss of japanese economic output and I think our modest economic recovery just hit a big snag.
I was a pretty solid supporter of nuclear power, but if Japan can't make it safe, I don't believe anyone can.
My inclination would be to be much less computer like about it. First start with some observations about the numbers. 24 is one less than 25. 4 * 25 is 100. 36 is 9 * 4. Therefor the answer is (9 * 100)-36=864. Numbers have properties. You can use these properties to do less mental work or at least take up less mental temp space. Not sure how you teach people to do that.
You know when you're writing a proposal, an executive summary, or pitching something it's a good idea to lead with the problem first, or lead with a question that gets the person you're engaging to try and think of a "solution" for what you are about to present to them? (http://blog.guykawasaki.com/2006/04/the_art_of_the_.html)

Getting them to try and think about the problem ahead of time will help them realize that may not have a solution for what you are about to present so they are in better position to understand the significance of what you are about to say.
I like to think i'm open minded enough to accept that... but, it turns out I'm not.

Massive speculation would be curtailed by increased production. Higher prices mean more exploration/drilling. Either we're being screwed over by a massive price fixing scheme, (which seems unlikely to me) or we've used up most of the easy to get oil.
Video of reactor 1 at Fukushima plant
48-hour forecast of jet stream over the Pacific:
http://squall.sfsu.edu/gif/jetstream_pac_h48_00.gif
Skype Founder To Students: Don’t Follow The Obvious Path
This is absolutely true. It will take time to online the other units at the other plants that automatically shut down too. These things don't come up and down on a whim.
I haven't had a car in roughly three years, so for me, I am thinking in a longer time frame, not a shorter one. Prices will inevitably go up and down some and be influenced by various factors on a day to day basis. But before my divorce forced me out of college, I was an environmental resource management major and went over peak oil in two classes, well before it was some kind of buzz word. One of those classes covered peak oil quite in depth. This is part of why I chose to give up my car when push came to shove for me financially: I believe in the long haul, things will have to change. We will have to walk more, use public transit more, live closer to work, shop closer to home, develop more fuel alternatives and so on. Not everyone will go to the extremes I have gone but the occasional extremist can help make more moderate adaptations look a lot more normal, sane, comfortable, and so on.

(Having given up my car, I do not expect to ever own a car again, having nothing whatsoever to do with peak oil. The short version is that some of the really scary infections that people with my medical condition sometimes get, which doctors don't know how to effectively treat and which 'normal' people don't typically get, are used by environmental scientists for bioremediation of petrochemical spills -- ie they eat petrochemicals. I have come to believe that people like me absorb petrochemicals more than average and that this fact contributes to our seriously negative health outcomes, including picking up infections that think petrochemicals are yummy. I have done much better, health-wise, without a car. Compared to what is supposed to happen to someone with my diagnosis, a little walking is a minor burden.)
One of the interesting things about disaster recovery planning for nuclear power plants is that you count on (X) number of things to go wrong and figure out how the plant recovers gracefully. In Japan they've effectively had three things go wrong: earthquake, tsunami, and general infrastructure damage. Most disaster scenarios only cover a single event and TEPCO has a lot to deal with.

In a disaster scenario the first reactions are generally passive (dropping of control rods, changing where water flows) and then "all" that remains is to cool the decay heat. Aye, here's the rub: the cooling system is not a passive system. It requires power to drive the water pumps for the cooling system that siphons the heat away from the reactor vessel. After initiating reactor shutdown the most critical time period is the first little while as that is when there is the most heat. Too much heat and it'll damage the fuel, vessel, and/or the cooling system and can effectively damage the reactor enough so to prevent it from ever recovering (thus, meltdown).

The questions left to ask are to what degree the cooling systems (primary and backup) are working, and whether they've been powered consistently. With that bit of information alone we'd be able to make a pretty accurate estimate as to the state of the reactors in question. What is scary is that it would be really simple to say that all of those systems are working as expected and that there is nothing to worry about. Since that hasn't been said I'm of the opinion that there is definitely something to worry about.
'Japanese people should be prepared for worst case scenario.' - officials

Helpful English translation feed, non-sensational: http://yokosonews.com/live
My two cents.

When you are searching for quality developers, we assume that you are a quality coder yourself, the developer you hire would sure grasp these things from you and your work environment quickly - if he/she is passionate enough to convince you that you should hire him/her for the job.

As far as i believe quality coding is achieved over time, this is a ongoing learning process. Those who mastered this art are not available - they already have figured their own way to go along. If you went on searching for coders and "quality coder" is your first priority, most probably all of your 3 points will always restrict you from hiring coders and there's where the paycheck flow as @kirpekar outlined applies. Whoever you hire, you as a manager should trust your developer in term of quality and give them a environment to grow not in terms of performance only but in terms of quality coding too.

I don't think i am a quality coder, manager, i am myself learning each days from discussion like this. It cost me 1 month (of my business) to build self learning and growing charisma in a coder i hired recently, he asks me only few question in a while these days - "i solved it, how would you have done this ?" we then discuss for improvements.

Try searching for basic qualities that matters to you and your work ethos and focus on skill set that you are searching for rather than "quality coder", this will ease hiring decisions i think.
Yes, but 8.0+ quakes near major cities are rare enough that there's limited experience to draw from.

There hasn't been anything over 7.3 affecting the lower-48 United States in over a hundred years; nothing over 7.9 in over 300 years. (There was a ~9 in the pacific northwest in 1700.)

Japan's building standards are said to be the best in the world. An 8.0+ near a US city could include some nasty surprises for buildings of all types.
I think the argument is based around getting kids to realize that numbers are not monolithic things to put where X goes. They can be broken up and dealt with in multiple ways.

FWIW, I routinely find people who can't do simple single-times-double digit multiplications in their head, simply because it never occurs to them that they can turn 7 * 12 into (7 * 10) + (7 * 2), or 7 * 3 (=21) * 4 (4x2=8,4x1=4, =84). I figured out how to do so myself, school never taught it to me, and I seriously doubt more than a 5% left my high school knowing how to do this, much less actually using it.
However the events unfold I wonder if this will cause more nations to investigate other reactor technologies like Thorium. The abundance of Thorium and its inherent safety mechanisms (as a liquid at least) make the technology very exciting.

Check out the Google Tech Talk
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AZR0UKxNPh8
Just wait another year when the oil cartels/speculators have us accepting $4 prices.

The only "good" thing this is making happen is it's slowly taking extra huge/heavy vehicles off the road as people stop replacing them with the same thing every few years. Low 20s mpg for the city isn't worth it anymore.

Oil is expensive because we'll pay that much and use even more.

Did you know the armed forces pay full top price for fuel in Iraq and Afghanistan?
Best of the Week - 12 marzo 2011
Ecco la mia lista delle letture per il fine settimana. Spero che la troviate interessante.

Un saluto e buona lettura a tutti!

@winsec Botnet, Trojan Activity Increased in February: Trojans were the most prolific malware threat in...
There are actually whole websites and news channels dedicated to this sort of news. We don't need to turn HN into a sort of live streaming play-by-play about what's happening in Japan.
Unless you buy everything from local producers who get all their components from local producers, you are indeed affected by oil prices, regardless if you own a car or not.
The tutorial is different from the article most people want. Most people just want something highlight the uniqueness of this language, not how to represent list and array. I like the kind of article explaining something (e.g. a particular parallel algorithm) used to be difficult in conventional languages but not in this new one.