skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I think you are vastly underestimating the amount of damage coal power generation causes.

If nothing new and catastrophic happens in the near future (it looks like the worst is being contained, but if another earthquake and/or tsunami hits the plant right now, the damage will be massive), the most casualties caused by the Daichi nuclear plant will be in Germany.

This is because Angela Merkel caved to political pressure and ordered the seven oldest nuclear reactors in Germany shut down for at least 3 months. During those 3 months, the plants would have generated 17 TWh, which will now need to be supplied from other sources. The most likely candidate for most of it is coal, because there is currently plenty of underutilized capacity. Coal power releases lots of SO2 and NO2 to the atmosphere, which directly kills people. By current data, 1 TWh of coal power produced in the western world kills roughly 15 people -- so when Merkel signed that moratorium, she signed death warrants for 250 people. (This estimate is probably seriously low -- notably, the coal plants currently running are the newer and cleaner ones, and the capacity that will be brought up to replace them will be dirtier. Also, I have not counted CO2 emissions in any way.)

If every nuclear reactor in the world operated constantly at the level of leakage and operator casualties that are happening at Daichi, nuclear would still be preferable to coal. If there was a Chernobyl every year, nuclear would still be preferable to coal. The normal operation of a coal plant over it's lifetime is more costly in human lives than the worst case nuclear accident of a modern nuclear plant.

The problem is that people are not afraid of dying -- they are afraid of dying in disasters. Nuclear accidents are concentrated. The casualties and the environmental damage caused by coal are diffuse.
I basically don't read anything online except through RSS feeds. My strategy for dealing with high-update sites is twofold. First off, I don't subscribe to redundant feeds (since many sites offer highly-overlapping content), and I am very trigger-happy on the unsubscribe button.

Secondly, I make use of this highly customized neural network-esque technology I use which gets a finely-grained history of everything I do and uses it to build a model of importance by which it can filter out irrelevant content. It's a bit processing intensive--it can only filter through 30-50 items per minute--but it's not a big deal since my RSS feeds only produce less than 500 items a day, so that's only 10 to 20 minutes of processing per day. It produces (on average) only a couple of false positives (items I don't actually care about) per day, and (although of course it's hard to empirically confirm) it seems to produce similarly few false negatives. This is a huge gain over every other system I've tried (especially populist voting-based systems).
I have to admit that after reading that over, I find myself wondering why we teach students C as their first language...
Socratic - as in seriously concerned with a logical journey of discovering the essence of what is important - dismissing irrelevance and having little patience for straggling or argument.
I started playing with Mirah last weekend, and I'm probably going to use it in my next project. Native Java speed, Ruby syntax, and JRuby interop are a hard feature list to beat.
You could change the settings to a location at the equator, and maybe one or two timezones to your west. (I understand that having more customizable settings would be a better alternative, but I thought I would offer up my hack).
Ever heard of notice of receipt? Built into public mail clients since like ever.
Any explanation of why this happened?
While I don't disagree with the premise that shared hosting isn't reliable, your assertion that "if the slow performance times aren't constant, it's probably the host" is incorrect.

Further, there are a VERY wide range of shared hosts, from very reliable, to very unreliable, to variable or unreliable depending on which machine/region/network your account is attached to.
I got caught up a month or two ago in the JSON parser and just kind of dropped it for other projects. It's unfortunate, because I feel like I was learning a lot, but some of the exercises in the chapter can be a bit unclear, and altogether it just wasn't all that terribly interesting.
Digg got slow and started to loose people to reddit. This caused them to rebuild from scratch with a new strategy which ultimately failed. Yahoo was also slow.

Funnily enough, now I think about it, performance may be much more critical than periods of downtime.
I'm confused. So I have to pay $249 for a sensor, then pay $9/month to have any real access to the data? Biggest ripoff ever.

I know HN is all about monthly billing, but it seems like these guys are really reaching on this product. The amount of 'work' this company is doing for that $9/month plan is almost nill.
Max still made about $40M personally on Slide. The real loser in that acquisition is Google. I think the VC scene in the Silicon Valley is becoming more and more screwed up (becoming more resume/track record, rather than innovative product focused), and the Silicon Valley will pay dearly for this.
I'm experiencing "node anxiety", let me explain:

There really are two kinds of functions in a node program.

Synchronous functions and asynchronous functions.

This has major consequences during refactoring when what used to be a synchronous function now needs to become an asynchronous function => all synchronous functions that used to call the synchronous function needs to be turned into asynchronous functions themselves.

Sometimes the ramifications go way beyond first expected.

Sometimes the ramifications turned to be massive.

This becomes worse when one realizes that synchronous function are much more readable, half the code and about 5 times faster than asynchronous ones (see http://jsperf.com/asynch-cost)

Eventually the idea of refactoring a synchronous function into an asynchronous function becomes a source of worries.

And that, my friends, is not something easy to figure out and is what I call "node anxiety"
> Libya is a glaring omission, and there's a war there.

Maybe not all governments are Microsoft-friendly...
Just wait till the oil goes back to $150+/barrel- the value of data mining will diminish again rather soon.
His passion is user experience. This requires top-notch hardware, software, retail stores, support, distribution, packaging, research, legal work...

The question is a false quad-chotomy.
Actually, Larry Page does review every single Google hire, according to a recent article in Wired;
http://www.wired.com/magazine/2011/03/mf_larrypage/all/1

"One way Page tries to keep his finger on Google’s pulse is his insistence on signing off on every new hire—so far he’s vetted well over 30,000. For every candidate, he is given a compressed version of the lengthy packet created by the company’s hiring council, generated by custom software that allows Page to quickly scan the salient data. He gets a set every week and usually returns them with his approvals—or in some cases bounces—in three or four days. “It helps me to know what’s really going on,” he says"
http://www.usertesting.com
The article in question is a snide, short remark. I don't know why anyone would come to this thread expecting reasoned discourse.
"Then there are salaries. Google is paying computer science majors just out of college $90,000 to $105,000, as much as $20,000 more than it was paying a few months ago."

That's a pretty remarkable stat.
> Do you think that MS has links to the governments

Governments buy truckloads of licenses and get to determine how much tax you pay. I'd say it would be completely unlike Microsoft not to have them. Their sales force is not the kind of people who would leave money on the table.

I've seen how government sales are made. There is a lot in common with sausages.
RSA and SCADA: two ends of the disclosure spectrum
Yeah, I've noticed. But one way or the other they're going to have to get people to download and use the app. "We'll sell your personal data" isn't much of a selling point, so what exactly does the app do? Even color.com is vague about it. I sure as hell don't understand it.
> Even if these countries said to Microsoft "turn off HTTPS or we're blocking Hotmail"

What if they said "drop HTTPS and, as soon as this turmoil ends, we will modernize our government IT"?
More on color
Microsoft & the Chinese Government’s Deal
Perhaps the "troublemakers" were successfully identified. No need to continue with this extremely unpopular (among users) thing.

Even if not all of them could be identified, the ones who were will certainly cooperate with authorities.
Throw nginx in front :-)

http://blog.rassemblr.com/2011/01/wordpress-need-for-speed-o...
Site is down for me. Here is cached page:
http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:http://...
HP EliteBook 8530p Battery
He could have used Mechanical Turk to solve them. ;)

Growing up, we had a favorite game. That is until my sister solved it in that going first you could always win. It wasn't as fun after that.
It's like spamming, but with slightly more effort.
Everyone got a fairly substantial raise in response to heavy poaching by Facebook and others.
They removed it in 4. It was there before but it was the number from iTunes activation, which wasn't necessarily worth anything (or filled in). Apple wouldn't approve you if you touched it, either, and it was undocumented.

Device ID they don't seem to care about; I send it in my app's User-Agent and I've survived several approvals. That's uniquely identifiable, but at least you can't call the user. As you suggest, most apps pop up contacts and have you pick yourself, it seems.
I don’t think HN should aspire to have comments of merely equal quality to the source material.

Why exactly do you think that subpar articles must automatically lead to bad discussions? That’s far from a given for me. The topic – users as products – is certainly interesting and touches on a whole host of issues that are traditional HN lore, from Google’s business model to startup monetization.

As I said, eloquent 1,000 word essays that emphatically disagree with Gruber’s position are certainly possible. Instead there’s spam.
The industry worker casualties are flatly insignificant compared to the deaths caused by release of SO2 and NO2.

In the whole world, roughly a million people die every year due to the direct effects of coal power production. Most of that is because of the very dirty plants in use outside of the western world -- but even here, more than 50,000 people die every year because of coal.
I am now an entreporn star
I think you're grossly underestimating the size of the Web. Flickr alone were storing 15TB of new photos a month back in 2006: http://blog.forret.com/2006/10/a-picture-a-day-flickrs-stora...
Java without ceremony (I don't know, code casual?)

But last time I tried it, there was massive compile time overhead (30 seconds for hello world, on a eee PC). Has that changed? I'm possibly getting it confused with a bunch of JVM languages that I tried out at the same time.
What are you doing for restaurants in Russia? I'm working on a small side project at : http://onebigmenu.com/ aka http://dish.io/ and I'm interested in hearing other perspectives from the space. :)
> which means that high latency would hurt performance significantly

Then the users could choose not to use it if they found it annoying.

I can't come up with any explanation for this other than a ridiculous level of incompetence or malice.
Wow, thanks for using the 'Aristo' jQuery UI theme for the Butter creation tool :)
Dwolla’s FiSync Lets You Instantly Access Cash, Eliminates ACH Wait Times
Your Emails are Too Long
That's what they say. My money is on it encouraging people to leave more dynos running than necessary, thus yielding more income for Heroku.
that's funny. i was just using that and thinking how good the dialog windows looked :D
Does anybody know if coal and uranium/plutonium miners are included in those death-per-Kwh stats?
Presumably Google has published the Honeycomb kernel (I didn't bother to verify this), but that's not interesting. The other 90% of Android is non-GPL userspace code.
Miramax in talks with Netflix, Google, Hulu for digital distribution deal
A minimalistic image to data uri generator
Well, I'd say it was reasonable to say Google sacrificed openness when

* They made sure that many of the most compelling -- to end users -- built-in bits were proprietary (i.e., those sweet Google-branded apps that you can get C&D'd for distributing)

* They began imposing requirements above and beyond software license compliance if you wanted full access

* They made sure their default (and thus, to most users, only) marketplace had the same sort of remote kill switch people complained about in Apple's ecosystem

* etc., etc.

Android is a mobile platform that you can sometimes get source for, sometimes hack on, and sometimes do what you like with. Which, um, isn't any idea of "openness" I'm familiar with.
And the best thing about Mirah? It's written in JRuby.

Charles Nutter is insane. I've got to find a way to use this myself. Maybe for his encore he'll rewrite JRuby in Mirah, just to show Mirah is everything Java is and more. Or maybe the world will explode, who knows.
Yeah, the plan is to do SlideShare and PDF viewers (scribd, crocodoc) soon enough, before launch.
Design By Contract Assertions Vs Unit Tests Vs Types
Don't forget about chartbeat.
http://www.chartbeat.com
I see they've shaved a second off of startup time. The slow startup is a problem for me because I want to learn Scala by writing little utility scripts, instead of using Perl. I don't want replace Perl but it's more fun to learn something by using it to solve real problems.
Jersey Shore Season 4
technical co-founder should get >50%, he can build product without you

And? What good is a product if there aren't any paying customers willing to buy it? "Build it and they will come" has not proven to be a 100% effective strategy... in fact, history is littered with long lists of products that got built, some at great expense, but failed as businesses.

I think you underestimate - severely underestimate - the value the "business guy" brings to the table... IF said "business guy" is really a top-notch "business guy" and not just "some guy with an idea." Doing market research, identifying potential markets, interviewing customers and identifying pain-points and needs, determining pricing, determining market positioning, determining market type theory, cold calling to get leads, closing sales, raising funds, doing PR, determining channel strategy, generating demand and driving it into your chosen channels, arranging partnerships, etc., etc... these are the things that a good "business person" brings to the table, and they are essential.
I'm taking it pretty slow, but I'm also posting solutions with explanations to the SICP exercises on my blog. See the ones I've done so far by starting at http://www.billthelizard.com/2009/10/sicp-challenge.html
Yeah makes sense. It doesn't bother you, clicking back and forth?
Scott Adams compares women to the mentally handicapped
Looking at the product there is definitely real IP in the hardware, and paying for a service shouldn't be a surprise. They're a real company.

You couldn't argue you aren't interested in the value they provide, but questioning the fact that running a service costs money is ridiculous.
I don't get it. Erlang is a language, Node is not. By necessity then, isn't your Node code as spaghetti or as structured as you write it? The great (and bad) thing about JavaScript is that you can write in any style, object-oriented, functional, "imperative"/spaghetti or Python-style/intendation-driven with CoffeeScript. You can mess it up easily, you can stay disciplined.

I think Node is coming from / targeting a situation where a web developer may write a lot of client script with jQuery. That's callbacks all over the place for your flow of code. But if it gets too much you need to get organized and rearrange things. So it brings the same paradigm to the server that on the client side is a necessity devs have to deal with. Event-driven callbacks, timers, web workers -- you already have that mess in your code base and will have found / to find a way to stay organized there, so whatever you do towards that end on the client side, you can do on the server side too.

"Of course with massive amounts of discipline you can function anyhow."

In any meaningful project, you will need to have that discipline, anyhow.
wow that is pretty genius
if you find a good technical co-founder, you're going to actually be close to worthless (considering you get a really good tech co-founder, not just a programmer). Business is easy for smart people.

I'm sorry, but I have to "call bullshit" on this (as a generalization anyway. I don't think we know enough about the specifics here to really say if the OP - specifically - is going to "be close to worthless" or not).

There are particular skills and talents that good people on the "business side of the house" have, and they're not necessarily things that come easily to just any smart person. I mean, sure, most reasonably smart people could probably teach themselves to make cold calls, generate leads, go on sales calls and close sales... but not to any greater degree than you could say "any reasonably smart person can learn to write code."

In the end, specialization and division of labor are a good thing, and a solid business needs people who have chosen to focus on, and develop skills in, different things... and the business side is no less important than the product side.

And if you really don't believe me, go round up 10 random engineers with no selling experience, give them a list of phone numbers and a stack of data-sheets and tell them to go sell a product, and see how that turns out.
No comment on the contents of the article, but (1) inaccurate article title (see below) and (2) incredible hard-to-read web design.

"I realize I might take some heat for lumping women, children and the mentally handicapped in the same group. So I want to be perfectly clear. I’m not saying women are similar to either group."
The fields in the profile page (name, address, city etc) are all out of order. Check out profile pages in some popular apps to see how this should flow. Glad to help.
Are the YC pitches so similar to each other as the article implies?
The compile times have definitely improved, but there's more to be done. At least now you can compile multiple files at once, which saves a lot of hassle :)
I'd actually love to get Mirah to a point where we could start to write (or rewrite) parts of JRuby in it. We're very close to that point; it can do almost everything we need for large subsections of code.
- Dunning-Kreuger Effect
> Maybe for his encore he'll rewrite JRuby in Mirah

Actually, that was part of the motivation behind Mirah; Rubyists don't want to contribute to the parts of JRuby that are implemented in Java.
Show HN: Push Notification Ads for Android
I want to love F.lux, but everytime it kicks in my machine slows to an absolute crawl until it's done doing its thing.
"I don't understand all the justifications for Google's behavior being posted."

By catering to the emotional OSS crowd, Google has bred a flock of fanboys even more defensive than Apple's.
Not a bubble!
Have been using it for a while, definitely a convert. I just wish there were a few more controls - it doesn't adjust for seasons, and I can't make it change its change strength if the lights are on vs off in the room. But that's not enough to make me stop using it.
According to the Mozilla ticket on the issue, Mozilla did not disclose because Comodo asked them not to. While the stated motivation of a coordinated disclosure sounds decent enough, it's hard to believe it was really in either Mozilla's or their user's best interests. Microsoft was the last to patch, and I think if you're dealing with an attacker that would shut off microsoft.com (even selectively) or WU you're probably well beyond an RA compromise.

https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=643056#c20

It seems to me that there is a bit of a question (at least in a few people's minds) if there was going to be any kind of disclosure if Jacob didn't come along.
He didn't review mine, because he was out of town for Thanksgiving at the time and I had another offer that was getting antsy. OTOH, it took like 3 VPs to sign off on it in his absence.
You can still respect someone and not subscribe to all of their philosophies/ideologies. They aren't mutually exclusive.

I have enormous respect for Buffet. He clearly knows what he's doing. However, his investment style isn't compatible with my appetite for risk.
>> Working in the MIT REPL was such a pain ...

Racket is a pleasure to work with.

http://racket-lang.org/
Are you accusing Charles Nutter of being a nutter?
Ask HN: How do scrappy start-up founders get money fast?
For those of you like me that boot-strap your start-up, how do you come up with cash in a hurry? Is it craigslist? The local pawn shop? What?
Disagreement. It is hard, yes, but if you approach the game design from the ground up as a business model with potential for built in marketing hooks and virality - even if it isn't a "viral" or "blockbuster" game - the way in which a game can be made is actually straightforward.

What makes it hard is not the creation, so much as untangling your brain from all the nonsense about what makes a game "legitimate." If you go for legitimacy you'll fail off the bat because it is, as you say, a matter of competing with the big guys. But if you are adhering to lean principles throughout, you can get a game business going. It just may not be a "dream game," necessarily.
I wonder why it has taken so long for people to realize this. After all, Google's primary business--the search and advertising platform--is as closed source and proprietary as Windows.
Adult toy
Tsunami is a Japanese word, no? If the language has a particular word for giant seismic waves, and you have a nuclear nuclear plant sitting right on the Pacific coastline, a large tsunami seems like exactly the sort of thing you might expect to occur in combination with an earthquake.

Do you remember that 2004 earthquake in Indonesia, the on followed by a huge tsunami that killed a quarter of a million people? It swamped a coastal reactor in India, ~1000 miles away. Statistical evidence suggests that Japan gets hit with tsunamis every 8 years on average; this is the 3rd in the last 30 years with waves >10m. Fukishima Daiichi is 6m above sea level. I know they're not psychic, but it was rather predictable.

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2011-03-25/tsunami-risk-well-k...
"With the other guys, whenever something doesn't work they all point fingers at each other -- it's the software, it's the hardware, it's the network. With us, we make the whole widget." Steve Jobs
Free Semi-automatic Directory Submission Tool
Free video movie online
Jersey Shore free video movie online cast-mate Angelina Pivarnick was driven by a Florida nightclub last night after getting has learned jersey shore,season,episode,online,megavideo online,megavideo,season,episode,watch,video
"But even with a glut of engineers on the job market, few have the skills that tech companies look for, said Cadir Lee, chief technology officer at Zynga. Colleges rarely teach the newer programming languages like PHP, Ruby and Python, which have become more popular at young Web companies than older ones like Java, he said."

That seems a little demeaning to portray a computer science education as one of languages and syntax. It's not about learning PHP or Ruby; it's about learning programming paradigms, concepts, algorithms, etc to make better software.

Perhaps the author of the article isn't particularly versed on how the CS => Software jobs process works. But to suggest that many engineers can't find jobs because they weren't taught PHP in school is grossly incorrect.

Does anyone actually know of academic programs that teach PHP?