skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
While I'm also actually a fan of nuclear power, I'd like to point out that the land use profile of wind turbines doesn't actually preclude the land still producing crops. You lose a couple of percent of the actual acreage where the turbine is actually standing, but the rest of the acreage needs to stay clear for obvious reasons, and is still every bit as fertile.

Longer-term, you'd also have to factor in the benefit of being able to use electric tractors. (I don't think anybody actually does yet, mind you, but there's a clear advantage.)
This issue has been resolved now as per internal sources :-). The functionality has been returned to previous state.
I disagree that fatalities are the most relevant thing to measure.

How about a nice simple metric of dollars/kWh, including an accurate accounting for externalities?

(I'd also like a pony.)
how long until spent fuel rods are safe?
This issue has been resolved now as per internal sources :-). The functionality has been returned to previous state, regret any inconvinience
(former MySpace and former .NET team @MSFT)
Let's just say the Microsoft stack probably didn't kill the beast… ASP.NET certainly didn't help though.

It's too bad that all the tech built around .NET will be lost to the annals of MySpace, MSFT should acquire the company just to open source the whole thing for the benefit of .NET.

Regardless, it's fair to say starting a company on "the Microsoft Stack" today would reflect questionable judgement. Are there any recent ex-MSFT founders on it?
I don't understand what you're saying. I am skeptical that the conclusion drawn from the previous stats follows logically from the stats themselves.
This doesn't really make me feel a lot better. I'm glad they backtracked, but doing so quietly once they got caught does not inspire much faith in their passion to make technology that makes the world a better place.
I'm pretty sure Heroku doesn't want autoscale. I know it's been proposed many times, i asked myself many times. They think it encourages people to write bad code which isn't optimized.
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The font color and background used in this article makes for a difficult read.
That's a fair critique. I probably am polarizing this discussion, and I'm sorry for that. But the points you're making are straightforward to knock down: fossil fuel power generation, which has a worse track record than nuclear, is also deployed and maintained by commercial interests; and, "front loaded" or not, fossil fuels are doing more damage to the planet. Those aren't random things I brought up; they're responses to arguments you've made.
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"or filenames, meta-data, facial recognition dataming data, geo-data etc'

Yeah there sure is nothing there that 'marketers' could use right?
Hi,

I've been in NYC and I'm hacking obsessively and around the clock. My biggest problem has been finding a place where I can seriously plunk down and work without distraction.

Would LOVE to be in a space with like minded people trying to hack and would also love an excuse to go out to SF.

I've been largely very impressed with the NYC tech scene and would love the chance to hack out there for a while too.

ftlogrtmfb@gmail.com
I agree that social search hasn't proven to be inherently better. Social is probably a good signal for certain things, but it's one among many. Honestly, even for product searches, I don't think my friends and family are necessarily the first ones I would go to. It certainly depends on the product, and even then it only applies to certain friends/family members.

There also doesn't appear to be that much information in social. Likes and purchase histories are the only ones I can think of. Those are both binary, and purchase histories aren't even necessarily endorsements.
I've been wondering about that for a while. The application is vulnerable to GPS spoofing (you can get your phone to tell it that you are somewhere you aren't), and while all the stuff it does to identify location (amount of light, listening to sound) is nifty, it can surely be defeated. How long will it be until hardcore pornography fills the feed at some major event? Or spam images, asking the reader to visit a site?
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I think if nothing else this is proof that if you have a clear way to generate value (evil or not), there is large investment to be had for tech start-ups.
How about rewarding them with a coupon? Only half joking.
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Occam's Razor: was in the corrupt construction or the power interruption caused by the ten meter high wave hitting their diesel generators? Here, let's try an experiment: take a reactor not maintained by TEPCO. Turn it off. Interrupt power to cooling systems. Wait.

Result: bad shit happens, in a fairly predictable sequence. The French nuclear agency actually did this with a containment pool to study disaster effects. Water heats? Check. Water boils? Check. Zirconium slags off? Check. Spent fuel rods begin to melt as heat rises? Check. (The video of the control room during this experiment was broadcast on Japanese TV.)

They then, of course, turned the power back on and restored cooling. TEPCO didn't have a button they could push to do that. Not because they're evil bastards who left that button out to save a buck, no, it's because they got hit with a ten meter tsunami.

Forgive me if I keep coming back to that detail, but it is fairly important to understanding the failure.
To be fair, the android simulator once running performs OK for the crucial Run to test-Modify-Run to test cycle. We rarely use 'Debug', usually use 'Run'.

We find that running on the hardware is not as necessary during feature development - as it slows down the iterative cycle. Running on hardware is critical, of course, for testing layouts, how the app handles incoming calls, being killed etc.

As a plus, the emergency-break-is-on-like performance of the simulator is pretty slow - in contrast to the iOS simulator which runs as fast as your development machine will let it.

It encourages unit tests - as a way of avoiding the simulator.

./adb uninstall com.yourcompany.package is a good shortcut to remove an app

When we do release an APK, we usually use Dropbox to make it look more professional when we send it out to client's beta testers (but nowhere as good as http://testflightapp.com for iOS)
The web is only 200TB? That seems wrong by orders of magnitude to me. Maybe you mean Google's publicly indexed web?
It sounds like you are suggesting that flyt thinks that Color's funding has nothing to do with the potential for user data mining, and thus disagrees with Gruber and much of the Hacker News community. I think you are wrong.
Ask PG: Is there a bubble now?
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2232436
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2367132
Flux is great, but it isn't persistent. Every time I restart, I have to manually start flux. This seems to be a rather serious oversight.

Edit: apologies to anyone who read the unedited version of my post. The iPhone keyboard and detection algo is...imprecise.
This is the 'rabid' I'm talking about. I have never once said that fossil fuels are safer than nuclear. You however insist on projecting that view onto me, and arguing with a strawman. Why? Because I've asked some questions and pointed out one flaw I think exist in a commonly used argument for nuclear power.

If someone like me is trying to make sense of this stuff by participating in a discussion and asking questions, someone like you comes along and decides that I'm on the opposite side of some fight from you. Despite the fact that I'm not. I'm on neither side, and am trying to reason about these issues, and I found one argument unconvincing. Now I'm your enemy apparently, and you're "knocking down" my points, which I don't even have.
Data mining at Slide was top tier but there was an unfortunate mis-timing with the economy tanking (read: advertisers had no money) ... and hence the eventual shift towards virtual goods.

I don't think many people understand how advertisers eat this stuff up. When they start throwing money around again (probably soon), you bet the big guys (like Color?) will repeat the benefits.
I have been using the pomodoro method for the past year for school work. (I am in college for engineering) I teach people how to use it regularly. It really does work.
I highly recommend the sepia setting in iBooks and the Kindle reader, which brings the color temperature closer to paper. Just like f.lux, it looks strange at first, but soon the screen looks harsh without it.

However, I'm guessing you're not using one of those apps, because they also have custom full-range brightness controls. The standard control starts at bright and just gets brighter.
If its going to sound like he's reading, I'd rather just read the it.

Delivering a fully written out speech word for word in a compelling manner is really hard, so I don't mean that as a criticism, but it was a little hard to listen to.
Called this one a long time ago. It doesn't even have to be "social" search; just plain-old search should make Google take notice. It's been said that Google is the homepage of the internet. Well, facebook is quickly becoming that to a growing number of people. If facebook has a web search box on it, and reasonably decent results, why would an average computer user bother going to Google for the same service? I wouldn't.
hanging out here right now, discussing backbone.js and getting work done! the opzi guys rock! :)
That's wonderful! The syntax is beautifully simple too.
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You can buy orange safety glasses that are kind of like flux for the whole world...

http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B000USRG90

I bought them because I had forgotten about flux and I also tend to use my iPhone late at night. I had no idea how much blue light affected my sleep patterns until I started wearing these while I was winding down for the night.
Apple Charting New Future for iOS Maps — Without Google?
Ask HN: What exactly does the Color app do?
Okay, so Color is a photo sharing app - but it's not?... I get that they mine users' data extensively, but can someone give me a detailed example of how the app would actually be used?

I don't have a smart phone, so I can't just download the app.

Review quotes from http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/color/id427763573?mt=8&ls=1# :

"Three buttons - and no explanation of what they do and how to make them do what I want. No tutorial, no nothing."

"It's not usable. It's not attractive. Using it doesn't help you understand what it's for."

So apparently even people who download the app don't understand what it's for.
I feel so prescient now: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2366765

Seriously, I think people are seriously overthinking the photo sharing aspect. That's just the first thing they could think of that seemed like it would have mass appeal, but I imagine the company has little to no interest in private photos or in tracking individual users.

Here's how I see the possible future applications. You go somewhere and use your phone en route. Your phone knows approximately where you are and have been recently with a fair degree of detail. Rather than uploading that information to a server and scaring people away from using it, it listens to a stream of numbers from a server, which represent various different location and/or environmental criteria. The phone matches these with what it knows about itself based on where you've taken it, as if it were playing bingo. Every so often it gets a good match, and then uses that as a hash to look up a particular commercial message - one that has a high probability of being relevant to the owner of the phone based on where they are, where they're going, or where they have an established trail.

So you're traveling up the escalator in a shopping mall, when suddenly your phone shrugs (tm). What is it? That obscure thing you like and searched for last week is in a store 2 minutes walk away. Hardly anyone buys those, so if you go there in the next hour they'll give you 20% off; otherwise it goes back to the wholesaler.
I click through for comments, and find the front-page ordering pretty awful (people tend to vote up the less technical articles more, probably since there's a lower barrier to entry; also, articles in the same genre as the recent influx of stories about Color/etc., which I couldn't care less about, tend to get voted up a lot). And as someone else mentioned, it doesn't mark stories as read, which is a Big Deal for me.
Steve's passion is for the experience — not only does that include everything that goes into the product, but even the content of the commercials and the layout of the store, and even what music is available on iTunes.
They pretty much do, it's just that women aren't the only target demographic that you can do this with. Think comic book movies, etc. They're all aiming at a very specific subset of the population and tailoring films to that group.

http://www.cracked.com/article_19012_5-hollywood-secrets-tha...
Yeah, these kind of things can "trick" you into working, but eventually the part of your brain that procrastinates beats it. I'd like some genuine ways to beat procrastination long term, even if it takes a lot of time and dedication to achieve.
There's also an online companion version with narrated slides and 'graded' exercises.

http://icampustutor.csail.mit.edu/6.001-public/
There is a better chance that people are using Google products (like Mail and Docs) for tad more critical stuff than Facebook. So the comparison may not be completely correct.
I've seen that scheme REPL before. I used to be a programming tutor, and I'd use it to demonstrate functional programming to my tutees if we had extra time after I finished helping them with their assignments--typically by writing a function that would find the solutions to a quadratic equation with around half the usual number of tokens. (In case you forgot, there's a ± in the quadratic formula.)
Fun fact: The first use of those RFID tags was for a Stanford CS210 project. (I've had one on my keychain for nearly a year now.)
Try Readability (http://www.readability.com), though it actually failed on this article.
I see a few HNers are saying Masterlocks are easy to pick. Are there any recommendations for more secure locks?
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How is that convenience? Scribd doesn't work (for me) at all because I don't have Flash installed. On other machines, it takes forever to load a page with a whole pile of static Flash embeds, each of which is a sand-trap for my scroll wheel.
I think we should always be skeptical when something appears to be 'free', especially when it comes from a company that is likely to monetize it in the future.
Android was probably started to unseat Apple's dominance and touting it as open was the best strategy to attract developers.
There are probably many of such cases, e.g., Amazon, Twitter changing their stance, leading to products depending on them to suffer. Companies are selfish so they'll do what is best for them.
However, developers mainly have themselves to blame for wanting to believe that such 'free' platforms exist in their own pursuit to monetize it.
Unless something is endorsed by Free Software Foundation, then you should take it as not entirely 'free'.
At the first startup school, there was some grizzled old lawyer or venture capitalist, basically somebody who's been involved in Silicon Valley startups since the 80s. He summed up the history of technology startups in 4 words:

"Boom. Bust. Boom. Bust"

The point is, there's always a bubble, right up until there's a panic and depression. Greenspan's "irrational exuberance" speech was December of 1996 - was there a bubble then? The NASDAQ was at 1200 then; if you rode it all the way to the top, before the bubble burst, you would have quadrupled your money in 4 years. And then even after that, the NASDAQ never went below its December 1996 levels.
There's always Scala/Java with Akka as a way to get both the actor model and a "more c-style" language. (http://akka.io/)
Pretty sure this was posted here before. Also pretty sure it's not remotely close to being a real product.
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How difficult would it be to code something like this for iOS (through Cydia, of course)?
Steve Jobs certainly understands the competitive advantage that making both hardware and software gives Apple.

If I had to distinguish between the two in Apple products I would say his passion lays more with hardware because:

a) It's what you actually hold in your hand

b) It's a lot easier for most customers to understand and identify good hardware than software, so if you have the ability to make good hardware it's a big competitive advantage.
Thanks, smartass. The real question would be, what are the examples of software freedom that are understood by the average user. There are plenty of those.
Much like the fact that my resume lists a $150,000 piece of paper means you can skip seeing if I can solve "3x + 4 = 19" at a hypothetical job interview, the YC label means that you can confidently say "If they were bozos at product they would not be here, so let's focus on the more important questions."
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I've been working on it (prof. Erlang programmer) via Racket. I'm only on section 2.3 and I've gone through section 1's exercises several times. You really gain an appreciation for math to controlling flow as opposed to something being "null" or matching a certain condition. It's good stuff once it starts to click. Painful, but I think it will pay off in the long run. I've only been at it part-time for 5 weeks!
Thanks a lot @bootload for your tips and resources! You have brought me one step closer!
F.lux is great, and seemed to be very effective for me. However, it appears that you still can't postpone color change until a specific time I want my monitor staying at 6500K until around 8 or 9pm, year-round. F.lux leaves me sleepy by 6pm during the winter months.
First, thanks for your detailed replay (and to all others too).

I'm already working on a kind of 9-5 doing only iOS. I'm in Argentina that right now have a lot of work inflow because our low cost and less culturally differences than asian countries and almost in the same time zone.

I failed in a couple of startups of my own and though there's virtually no support to start-ups here, I'm no sure I have an eye for marketable things. I don't really care for the AppStore lottery anymore.

So as I'm realizing I'm less an entrepreneur than I thought I was, it may be a good thing to start steering to safer waters.
After two years of J2ME and one of iOS, last week I had to think twice to make a query with a group by, and got kind of scared.

I'm not worried about being able to keep up with technology changes, but I don't want to get specialized in a market that has no depth.
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There isn't as much new features in this release compared to the 2.7.7 -> 2.8.0 upgrade, but this is still a notable release.

Not mentioned in the post but apparently included with this release it the new "Dynamic" trait, which enables runtime method dispatching. See http://squirrelsewer.blogspot.com/2011/02/scalas-upcoming-dy... for a better explanation and examples.
Get a lot of hype.
Too expensive to rent an auditorium, or too impersonal? Or something like not wanting to take away the founders' home field advantage?
I also couldn't get it working on Linux (I'm running a pretty standard Ubuntu 10.04 install on integrated graphics).

A shame, because it works great on my PC and Mac, and when I wake up the Linux PC to do server work at night it feels like my eyes are burning.
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I'm unable to access it now, at 7:10 PM Pacific time. Luckily, if I just prepend the URL of this Google-critical blog post with "cache:" in Google Chrome, it pulls up a copy on Google's cache.
Thanks for all the upvotes, comments, retweets and visits everyone. It's been a very exciting day on HN for me!
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That's extremely interesting, particularly the specific list of countries.

I bet it was not Microsoft who originated the decision to do this.
I still find the simulator way too slow to be useful but I guess I am just spoiled by the Apple development tools. I agree that adb is really really useful for uninstalling and for the all important test of your APK files right before you submit to the market. It's also very useful for testing on older android hardware that you might have difficulty installing to using the eclipse plugin for whatever reason or can't get to connect to the market place.

We are also using DropBox to distribute the APKs amongst the team for our own testing purposes and that's been a really great workflow for sure.
I'm sorry, but your blog post really and truly makes no sense whatsoever. You identify what you consider the "problems" with DRM (while omitting the actual problems) and your "solution" is just statement of the properties you'd like it to have, not any idea of how those properties could be achieved (they can't, at least not without draconian "trusted hardware" across the board)
crazy. i did something similar with a shopping cart type thing with youtube vids. http://haul.twitik.com/. Youtube's player API totally rules, right?
If you sync it with PowerPoint slides then you might have something. Could be a sales video with a slide deck moving along while the dude talks. Might be cool. A few companies do something similar but not quite that.
The site just hangs for me, so I'm guessing it got linked from somewhere else and is getting overloaded, not being killed for NDA. I'd think it would 404 if it was specifically pulled.
I don't think I buy the conspiracy theories being presented on this thread. What, Microsoft was bullied by the government of Myanmar? Even if these countries said to Microsoft "turn off HTTPS or we're blocking Hotmail", I think they would have opted for the latter. And Google is still serving GMail over SSL to these countries, right?

My guess: These are all countries that I would guess have pretty high latency from Microsoft's servers. The SSL handshake requires several roundtrips, as I understand it, which means that high latency would hurt performance significantly.
Yeah, they would help.
There are few that would help, right from the start.

E.g.: Show HN, Ask HN, etc.
I hope you don't take offense, but: I think you're being extremely naive.

Here's how the logic works:
MSFT does business in these countries.
These countries have a sudden desire to monitor some citizens' communications (which include Hotmail accounts). HTTPS prevents this monitoring, so these countries lean on MSFT. Ergo, MSFT shuts down HTTPS access to Hotmail.

For a lot of these regimes, it's a matter of survival to crush dissent. MSFT just made that a little bit easier.