skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Facebook allows you to export your pictures and most of your interaction, except for the contacts. It would be interesting if Google has a way to import this into its network.
Thank you, patio11. I saw this on Twitter and read half of it with my mouth hanging open. (Somewhat related: this great post by Makiko Itoh http://makikoitoh.com/journal/memorable-tweet-japan-earthqua...)

I can't help but think what a disaster of this scale would look like in almost any other country but Japan. Checklists at almost every level of response is unimaginable in most countries I know (though maybe Singapore ...). If this were a 3rd world nation things would have been very, very different.
Facebook does have this capability - just click the padlock next to your status. Just no-one seems to use it.
The light from the Sun that strikes this planet, (the largest fusion based nuclear reactor in the Solar System) produces more energy in one day than all the nuclear, oil, or coal based power plants on the planet.

One has to wonder why governments insist on building poisonous, fragile, radioactive generators on earth, when we can safely harness solar, wind, and wave energies without such horrifying risk.

Will it be the lack of common sense that is cited as the primary downfall of civilization when we are long gone, due to our less than intelligent decisions about energy? Who among us wishes to have children play along the Gulf coast of the United States this summer? Oil illness anyone? Or along the coast of Northern Japan for the next 25,000 years or so...

Does anyone seriously believe that a "shoot for the moon" style campaign like the one we held to create nuclear power plants, would not result in workable alternative energy programs?

One point is certain. Earthquakes WILL continue to happen.

One other point is certain. Nuclear energy is inherently dangerous. You can only minimize the chance of catastrophic failure. Not eliminate it. And once the genie is out of the containment vessel, the penalty last 25,000+ years.

No amount of carefully considered analysis changes the science of this issue. It's time to give alternative energy solutions the same level of serious treatment we have lent to coal and nuclear systems or prepare for a future where meltdowns and frantic efforts to prevent them are more common place.

A future where more than a few locations become permanent exclusion zones for thousands of years. A future for your children where the increased incidence of cancer and mutation is part of every day living.

Or not if we come to our senses and throw every effort into fully developing alternate energy systems. We have a fusion reactor handy just 93 million miles away with billions of years of energy to come. Lets use it.
I'd have thought that the incentive would be not to trash the machines as doing so makes them look like extrajudicial thugs when they claim to be on the side of the law.
i agree; that's why i wondered if these examples (google, dropbox etc) would convince the blog poster that 'lean works'
The new startup is really got into them
ZenHabits: The Little Habits
IPad 2 Lines Were Longer This Year
It means there are isotopes, including tritium, whose half-lives are long enough that they pose a risk to the health of anyone who happens to inhale or ingest them. The OP's dismissal of such risks is a bit facile.
Unfortunately good will isn't the strongest driving factor in all this, it's a whole lot of paychecks, and solar energy is still behind.
In the US if the authorities use civil forfeiture they can keep your property even when you aren't even charged with a crime and there is little you can do to get it back.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asset_forfeiture

It is generally used in organized crime and drug cases but has expanded greatly in recent years. It is now routinely used to seize cars in DUI cases. They can and do legally keep the property without even charging the driver with DUI or any other crime.
http://www.slate.com/id/2243428/

I don't know about the UK but I am surprised any property was returned.
"* If the systems are turned on, record the datetime and shut them down."

Strange, I thought the best way was the keep them running and extract private key or password from memory using some DMA-interfaced buses. For more information: http://www.hermann-uwe.de/blog/physical-memory-attacks-via-f...
You can already do that on Facebook easily.
Kumph, congrats, but what's your plan for when Apple clones your features and look-n-feel to be included inside their own App Store app?
Actually pretty much all versions of NetBSD run on CloudSigma as well as most BSD distributions. Not sure what the case is for EC2 but at CloudSigma you just FTP in a RAW ISO drive image. I found it pretty straightforward. I'm using FreeBSD primarily. See www.cloudsigma.com .
Not only do they not have a patent, but they have stated that other vendors are welcome to make use of the magnets. They probably include them in the specs they make available to vendors.
> * If the systems are turned on, record the datetime and shut them down.

Did this ever lock you out of any machines configured to use Whole Disk Encryption or out of encrypted, mounted volumes? You could have dumped the keys out of ram, etc.

> we used EnCase

Did you ever come across any exotic filesystems that EnCase can't read, like XFS?
Agreed. After living in Japan for a while, european point of view on this earthquake makes me smile.

Anyway, prayers and best wishes to Japan.

On nuclear reactors: I bet Japan will restart them soon. Give them a month, max 3. For the fcks sake, they still hunt whales. IMHO Japan is one of those countries that still don't give a damn about loud-screamos. Although they'll upgrade their plants to prevent failure like this one. Kudos to them.
Not value - understanding.

Microsoft gets Office for example. It's never been entirely comfortable with the Internet, of which search is a part - it's how the company as an entity thinks. Search is baked into everything Google does, it's in their corporate DNA. But they think about social the way MS thinks about search.
You're the only prolific HNer in Japan, though. You have also lived in the West, I believe, so that informs your perspective.
I'll always consider people who are currently under 30 Internet noobs :) leave the real innovation to people who know what they're doing.
I am having a hard time coming up with a harder place to apply "fake it 'till you make it", because the way that will actually turn out is "fake it until your first big design project crashes and burns and possibly takes the company with it".

Fake it 'till you make it is for social skills, not engineering, and while social skills factor into being a great software designer it isn't even close to the whole story. The computer does not care whether you are faking it, it cares whether you've got it.
"In titles, please don't describe things by their relation to YC unless they're actually associated with YC."

http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
For the experience and connections. There is more to YC than money.
As far as the steam is concerned this puts my mind at a rest.
Quote from http://allthingsnuclear.org/post/3792741638/containment-at-f...
"In this situation, the vented air would be routed through a high-efficiency particulate air (HEPA) filter, charcoal beds, and another HEPA filter to remove as much radioactivity as possible before being released from a very tall stack to dilute the flow as much as possible."

When you say the contaminated water can be kept in the containment, does that mean that they are basically flooding the containment with seawater? My impression was that the there is still a need for cooling (i.e. cool water in, hot water out) in case of a total melt down.
The earthquake was big, but in building a reactor on the PACIFIC RIM you set up your worst case scenario to cover a 1000-year event centered underneath the structure, and with handsome margins.

This was a contingency that was planned for, but for some reason the systems are failing. The measures being taken now are clearly ad hoc, rather than part of an orderly contingency plan.
A handshake is to a hug, what a signature on a form is to a personal note.

There, fixed that for you. ;)
This. I was also there most of the day, but felt less than inspired. There was so much hype in that room, building throughout the day, that by the end of it I was starting to feel like I was being sold something. Sure, some of the ideas seem to have some merit, but then why all the selling?

For those not there, somebody was pitching a book on "The Lean Way" pretty much every 45 minutes or so. It had a very Tim-Ferriss like feel.
It's not playable on my Nexus One. When a bunch of monsters are on the screen it gets down to ~10 FPS. So close!
Bet on the jockey, not the horse.

My professor used to drill this saying into us in my Intro to Entrepreneurship class 2 years ago. I still use that quote most when giving advice to other students who have an idea but are hesitant to share it.

My freshmen year in college, I met two students who had just received VC funding, and they told me one tip that had helped them most: they shared their idea with anybody who would listen, because they never knew how somebody might be able to help them along.

If you truly have a good idea, somebody else is working on it too. You might as well talk about it and get all the help you can.
Have you considered the cookie implications of every Google product living on a separate domain? We'd have to login so many times.
I'm at pycon and really enjoyed this keynote yesterday. The numbers he gave were amazing. More files shared per day than tweets on Twitter! 1 million files every 15 minutes.
"An earlier draft of this post said 'lucky.' I have since reworded because, honestly, screw luck. Luck had absolutely nothing to do with it. Decades of good engineering, planning, and following the bloody checklist are why this was a serious disaster and not a nation-ending catastrophe like it would have been in many, many other places."

This is fantastic and worth repeating. Thank you.
work:
- Do the hardest/ugliest/most boring things first. The rest of your day will get better and better

health:
- Remove sugar. Not consuming sugar will make you feel less sleepy/lazy and healthier. If you can't live without it, try to replace it with fruits or dark chocolate

general:
- Ride a bicycle. It will help you save money, be healthy, feel cool, and even save time

finance/money:
- Put money aside for buying various stuff (I have "tech fund" and "travel fund" for example). When you want to buy something big, use money from the fund

- Never get into consumer debt
Still not good when it ends up in your body.
Also, http://www.androidqrgenerator.com allows you to easily create QR-codes for Android apps

*Disclaimer: I wrote this service (and yes, it uses the aforementioned Google Chart API which was a pleasure working with)
its likely fake. homepage.mac.com was for public content, kinda like geocities.
Call an Ambulance for Political Correctness
The problem statement: "How does one detect when two strings overlap?" is inadequate. If "overlap" means "at least one substring in common", a trivial test for overlap would be to determine whether they have a character in common.
A better way than teachers? Isn't that saying teachers aren't important? Also, it seems wrong to come to that conclusion based on some tiny fraction of kids.
Just for people that don't know, Johann Hari is a very, very left-wing radical journalist. When he does his research (as in the dark side of Dubai) and tries to keep his bias out, the story tells itself and he's a good writer. This report is actually very good. But be careful if you read his other stuff, when he can't be bothered researching some of his work is quite hateful.
English-language reporting on the matter has been so bad that my mother is worried for my safety.

I can believe it.

So, on the one hand, it often seems like HN spends way too much time absorbed with inside-baseball conversations on the design of social news. How do we keep social-media communities intelligent and informative? How do we prevent them from being constantly trolled, dominated by sugar-coated memetic fluff (e.g. "things on fire"), spammed by marketers, or deliberately hijacked by paid sockpuppets, fanatical propagandists, and well-funded PR campaigns? We go on and on about this stuff, routinely.

But on the other hand, we worry about these things because they are important, and because we still haven't done enough. Especially in the USA, our failed media infrastructure is a very big problem. It creates an environment where everyone is either perpetually ignorant or perpetually afraid, or both, and it fuels random acts of sabotage and irrationality, and it serves as a constant drag on our civilization's energy. So when, as an engineer, I think about ways to advance my favorite design and engineering projects - smart civic design, renewable energy, robotic exploration of space, cheap and widespread applied genetics, popular appreciation of science, promotion of the creative arts - it always seems to come down to education and information. Here we have an example: Why, in a world where we can build a global information system like this one, must patio11, with obvious reluctance, spend so much time restating the obvious? (And, indeed, he must spend this time, because the alternative is that many of our friends, and relatives, and especially our parents run around like Chicken Little.)
How quake prediction works-Japanese 1 Million quake prediction systeme
...battery powered nail gun, which if you tape up the guard you'd be able to use as a make-shift rifle.

I don't think you were being serious, but just in case anybody thinks you were: that wouldn't be accurate enough to hunt small game, nor would it be powerful enough to reliably take down large animals, humans or zombies.
If I could vote this up high enough to reach the pages of the NYT, then I would. It gives so much perspective on the kinds of things other governments and societies could actually be doing right.
Not happening - http://twitter.com/googlesxsw/status/46986827206361088
I hate to be -that- Greek, but the word typhoon in English is arguably either Greek or Arabic in origin. http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?term=typhoon

May the mocking commence.
> We speak to our "friends" all at once, no matter what we might want to say to one group of people or another. And thus we often feel less comfortable than we might saying anything at all.

I don't understand. We can do that on Facebook already. In fact, I already do that... I have friend lists, and different people see different statuses depending on context.

I don't see the problem Google is trying to solve. I'd be happy to be enlightened though.
Same reason you might want to host your own web server instead of using Geocities.

And if you don't host your own, the competitive eco-system that's created by federation means you can move your profile between nodes, without losing access to your social network.
Bingo.

When you have google execs making fun of social on the record from few years ago, it sounds a lot like Gates saying "The Internet? We are not interested in it".

No ones talking about value because value isn't static. At the end of the day, the good big cos realize they f'd up and what they were once making fun of does indeed have tremendous value.
If you click on the lock icon on Facebook to set privacy, you can type in names of lists to explicitly hide or specifically limit content (blacklist or whitelist). This would allow posting some piece of content controlled via a named list of people you've created.
I see that my title has been edited by one of the admins at HN.

Just so you know, the original title was:

YC W11 Reject Now Pulling In Over $100k in Monthly Revenues

I like that much better, but it conflicted with the submission guidelines, per emmett's comment.
Good to hear you are safe Patrick! And thanks for educating us on Japan's Geography etc
Hacker News March 1st Edition
The really interesting technical bits start at 18:17. "We use Python everywhere. 99.99% of the code at Dropbox is in Python ... People talk to each other in Python, express ideas in Python ... and it works."
as financial people continue to invent securities and investment instruments that have no basis directly relating to the demand and supply curve of physical items and than use that to directly bet against their very own customers putting firms and countries at huge risk will see an increase on whistle blower reports on all layers of the financial con games..

While some of Anon methods are certainly illegal. Which is the greater good Anon in jail or the fraudsters with the title financier..

There are unfortunately for this Financier Business Women and Man class far more people that got harmed than helped which should not weigh in on this debate but does explain the motivations ...

We are taking workers future earnings to 'bail out these bastards' so maybe the slightly illegal stuff has no point for debate here until we start seeing financiers in jail..

If you think that is harsh..

In the US laws on books that banks cannot be directly involved in liar loans.. ...all loans have to have verifiable collateral either assets or combo of income and credit ratings...its covered by Uniform Commercial Code, FDIC, Federal Reserve requirements, etc..

This is not the only area..remember when banks recently refused to revalue and write off loans? They had US Congress, etc pass new accounting laws that make it no longer illegal to continue with those very bad valuations..
> "Facebook in contrast seems desperate to retain users. ..."

As well they should be. Born by, and live by, the social network, die by the social network. "You still using the old Facebook?" said with derision by the cool kids is probably what echos in their nightmares. Not the name Diaspora.
As far as just the name, Etsy just released a 'follow me' type feature called 'Circles' a couple of months ago. http://www.etsy.com/storque/etsy-news/shop-together-circles-...

It's actually kind of confusing. Saying you 'circled' someone sounds odd, since it's not quite accurate. 'in your circle' vs 'in my circle' is kind of clunky compared to 'following me' or 'I follow'.

They don't offer anything related to groups of friends, though. It's a generic implementation of the usual 'following' set up.
I use granular settings for messages I post to Facebook. I also use the new "private groups" on Facebook a lot.

(I just tried to show a link to the "private groups" feature on Facebook, and that proved to be very frustrating. It took me a while of thrashing around with Facebook's help feature--after first trying Google, ahem--to find the main page about Facebook groups

https://www.facebook.com/groups

to show those of you who haven't tried them before. The private groups posting interface differs in some weird ways from the usual posting interface on wall posts and private messages, as typing "Enter" instantly posts the message, and the only way to form paragraphs in text is to type Shift-Enter, which is especially confusing for Mac users.)

It will be interesting to make the comparison between a new Google offering and Facebook. Any product or service that offers social interaction has to help each user build a network among the user's friends. Buzz was a big fail that way, as most of my friends immediately decided not to use it, but perhaps something new from Google will be more successful. My friends are all smart enough to know how to bail out of the second-best network if something better than Facebook comes along.
" but the environment and the reactor core are still both fine."

How confident are you in that statement?
Post-earthquake imagery of Japan
Madison Rally Bigger Than Biggest Tea Party Rally
One thing that could seed Google implementation of distinct friend circles is Gmail folder (label) inspection of who is on the same email lists. One of my largest and most active groups of friends is a group initially formed around common membership in an email list, an internal email list of a membership organization.
Your landing page could have been a lot more attractive, for example writing a list of game features or things players can do in the game.

It might have been worthwhile to show off some game graphics even though they don't exist yet, like a couple sprites or backgrounds. I've played Game Dev Story and its fun. People will pay as long as its enjoyable.
A chainsaw is more of a tool for long-term survival in the woods than for waiting out a brief disruption of civil infrastructure. It's a pretty important thing to have if you are going to be spending months in the woods though.
Looks very nice, and god knows it would be nice to have a next generation replacement for obj-c, but...

1. Obj-c may be verbose but XCode 4 does a lot of the heavy lifting with templates, snippets, and auto-completion, not to mention the continuous feedback on errors. It doesn't feel anywhere near as heavy as it looks. How much of that is available in LUA?

2. What does the picture look like when you want to access C api's and not just send messages? One of the most positive aspects of Obj-C is that you can use C libraries directly without either performance or code overhead - e.g. OpenGL, CoreGraphics, not to mention all manner of OSS C-libraries.
code_swarm: An experiment in organic software visualization
Why Pension Fund Managers Generate Negative Alphas
The funny thing is, I just asked. With the Nordstrom jacket, I had just graduated and didn't have much money. I told the salesman that I needed a nice blazer for a job interview (which I did), that I really liked one in particular, but it was over my budget. I asked if he would sell it to me for a discount. He pulled me off to the side - I don't think he wanted anyone to overhear - and told me OK. He didn't call a manager - he just did it. I've heard that Macy's gives their employees a lot of autonomy as well.

Flipping it around, I've had customers email asking for a discount. I've gotten to the point I don't even ask why. From my perspective, I'd rather just to give them one and secure the sale than try to haggle over price and possibly lose the sale.
Well, you learn something new every day. (The Japanese word, borrowed from Chinese, sounds like "taifuu.")
I do not understand any of what you just said.

I would want to host my own webserver instead of using Geocities because hosting my own webserver means that I can write my website in whatever language I want, and that there is no limitation on what I can use it for (like DB restrictions, or domain restrictions).

What is "the competitive ecosystem that's created by federation"? What reason would I ever have for moving my profile between "nodes"? What is a "node"?

I'm not trying to be harsh, sorry if it sounds like I am. I believe I signed up for appleseed a while ago when you linked it here, but I couldn't figure out what was special about it.
I've been hearing about Appleseed for at least 5+ years and it's still in obscurity. The problem is that it's just too complicated for the average, non-technically savvy user. Without being able to get the general public to use it, it won't go anywhere.
Very true! I hadn't read the comments.
Interesting. The OED suggests that the word may have been borrowed into English three times, with the forms then converging, and settling on a Greek-transliteration type spelling. The three lines they trace are: 'typhon' from Greek, circa 1550s; 'touffon' or 'tufan' from Portuguese circa 1580s, via Urdu, possibly originally from Greek or Arabic; and 'tuffoon' or 'tuffan', from Chinese 'tai fung', circa 1700. It's possible the spelling is mainly from Greek, while the usage and modern meaning is mainly via a separate borrowing.
HN changed the title of the post. That's not cool.
~22:23: To reduce the CPU time your app uses, make sure all your inner loops are in C

Also, "Optimizing CPU is easy, Optimizing Memory is Hard"
What does it feel like to be attractive and desired by many?
What does it feel like to be unattractive and desired by none?