skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Well that is definitely a minority viewpoint. Chernobyl is widely considered to be a ridiculously bad design by modern standards. For one thing, it had no containment dome at all. For another, the design caused the reaction to speed up as the fuel got hotter. All modern designs do the opposite: as fuel gets hotter, the reaction slows.

For current production reactors, that's enough to buy time but not enough to completely prevent meltdown. Some more advanced reactors can't melt down, due to this effect. Pebble beds are one. Another is the Integral Fast Breeder, which we had working at the Argonne national laboratory back in the 90s. It was so safe, they shut down the cooling system entirely, twice, and each time the reaction just quietly stopped. The reactor was also designed to be proliferation-resistant.

If you're concerned about nuclear waste, fast breeders are the way to go. Instead of using one percent of the potential of the fuel, like current reactors do, they use it all. They eat nuclear waste and depleted uranium. Clinton was anti-nuclear and shut the project down, so now instead of using depleted uranium for fuel, we shoot it at people to secure oil supplies.

Personally, I'm not that concerned about the waste. From the book Physics for Future Presidents, page 176:

"Colorado, where much of the uranium is obtained, is a geologically active region, full of faults and fissures and mountains rising out of the prairie, and its surface rock contains about a billion tons of uranium. The radioactivity in this uranium is 20 times greater than the legal limit for Yucca Mountain, and it will take more than 13 billion years--not just a few hundred--for the radioactivity to drop by a factor of 10. Yet water that runs through, around, and over this radioactive rock is the source of the Colorado River, which is used for drinking water in much of the Wst, including Los Angeles and San Diego. And unlike the glass pellets that store the waste in Yucca Mountain, most of the uranium in the Colorado ground is water-soluble. Here is the absurd-sounding conclusion: if the Yucca Mountain facility were at full capacity and all the waste leaked out of its glass containment immediately and managed to reach groundwater, the danger would still be 20 times less than that currently posed by natural uranium leaching into the Colorado River."

Of course we're actually storing wastes on site. I'm not sure why the anti-nuclear people who shut down Yucca thought that was better. But it does have the advantage of leaving the fuel available for fast breeders.
SXSW Trade Show displays latest technologies
Larry Page already cracking the whip at Google, a week before he takes the reins
How was swoopo "outright lying" about their product? Did you ever actually visit or use Swoopo? They explained the rules clearly on the site and with a dozen or more auctions running on the front page of the site, I think this qualifies as showing how it works right on the front of the bottle.

I think you're also misunderstanding what qualifies as gambling, at least in the U.S. (international law I'm not as familiar with) Look no further than bigdeal.com, a site that operates exactly like Swoopo and is based in the U.S. It is venture backed with a few million dollars. I suspect before making that investment there was some due diligence in this auction mechanism and it was found to be legal. People in this thread are throwing around "gambling" and "scam" but I'd still challenge anyone to cite any portion of the law which specifically makes a penny auction "gambling."

Do people lose money if they don't win, yes. Does that piss people off? Of course. But that still doesn't mean it's gambling or a scam.

If it's not for you, don't play it. Simple as that.
I said there is no good way to get better, by which I mean a way that you can objectively measure whether what you are doing today is better than what you were doing yesterday and most crucially of all: what you need to improve.

You can do that with programming since each choice you make gives a tradeof in terms of speed, complexity, etc. I haven't seen a book with a similar set of concerns with regards to writing.
My guess is the RIAA/rest of the biz just wouldn't allow it on favorable terms.
Glossy Candy Text Effect
The take-home point for me was not "spend more money on a mattress" but to make sure I had a "good" one. For me a "good" mattress is one comfortable for me (my preferences happen to be similar to yours rather than the answerer).
the moron who wrote the article doesn't know what he's talking about:

>Nuclear technology cures countless cancer patients every day - and a radiation dose given for radiotherapy in hospital is no different in principle to a similar dose received in the environment.

From http://www.cancer.gov/cancertopics/coping/radiation-therapy-... :

"Late side effects may first occur 6 or more months after radiation therapy is over. They vary by the part of your body that was treated and the dose of radiation you received. Late side effects may include infertility, joint problems, lymphedema, mouth problems, and secondary cancer."
href='' will reload the current page in most browsers if the JS code hasn't loaded yet (waiting for $(function(){}) to fire) or has an error for some reason. href='#' will at least prevent that. Returning false form jQuery works.
Uninformed idiots downplaying the issue just to stand out from the crowd, it's sickening.
How dare you criticize the interventionist market!
Says the company which previously hacked the drivers to be higher in benchmarks... Well that was ATI on its own back then, but still - not such a good idea for people who remember that.
If you have long-term dreams and can visualize them, they tend to work out, but the path of how you get there is often surprising and unexpected.
On the other hand there is a lot of gunk out there which everyone "knows to be right" which in fact isn't. Quite often a scientific test with documented results is not a bad thing to have.
I don't think that the security model would let you do this.
This is definitely a bubble
This is a valid question and you raise an intresting point, but I really think that is is more suited to a differant website, like Stack Overflow.
Both are bad, but I prefer Linus's up-front aggression to the passive aggressive tone of the person he is replying to.
I just wrote NodeMock to be very easy to use and create Mock objects and test them out on Node.
And should work on the Browser too.
Coz it's wrote from the ground up.
And need some comments to improve
If you define "good" as "can be objectively measured", you've cut out most of the interesting problems. Data is a tool, not a crutch.

If you write UI software, how do you know that you're getting better? You can use A/B testing, sure; but how do you decide which metrics to use? Ultimately, it comes down to taste: you look at one possible approach, you look at the other, you give them both an honest appraisal, and then you say "I like the first version better."

It's the same thing with writing. Write a sentence. Now rewrite it, removing superfluous words or changing the phrasing or breaking it in two. Which one did you like better? What's different about it? That's how you improve.

As for their being no books - pish posh, there're plenty of books on improving your writing skills. The Elements of Fiction Writing is one such series. I've heard Steven King's On Writing is also quite good. The best way, however, is to sit down with an experienced writer and have them critique your work.

Failing that, you could always go look at Paul Graham's Etherpad recordings of his writing process and see what he does.
How's your Spanish? Build Spanish into your product or else
Latest Census data shows a booming Hispanic population in the US with 43% growth over 10 years. I think that building Spanish into your product is necessary to be successful in the 10 years to come!
Sapir-Whorf with Programming Languages
It is easier to use iOS devices untethered once you stop using Apple's rather poor cloud services. I unsubscribed to MobileMe a while back and no longer use iTunes except for software updates.

I use Spotify for music now, use Google calendar synced via the exchange integration, Plaintext for dropbox synced notes, etc.

A few months after that I didnt buy another Mac and switched to Ubuntu...

Apple are so far behind on cloud services and still charge $99 for mobile me. Switched that spend to spotify instead... They need to come up with some very compelling services to compete.
Like General Motors?
Also, don't expect any creativity or initiative to fill in gaps in your requirements... you will have to be very specific and explain every minor detail of functionality and behavior in order to get the project done right.

Completely agree with this.

But here's another way to look at it: why would the outsourced team show any creativity or initiative? They're basically being treated as a commodity, because typically the projects that go to such places do so because these projects are 'cost centres' - some business guy decided to get the 'i have an idea, the rest is implementation' part done as cheap (or "cost-efficient") as possible.

When the programming team has no engagement with the idea or the organisation or even the product they're contracted to build, why would they expend any creativity or initiative for it? Not everyone is personally driven by a sense of excellence, sometimes people just want to get the job done. And my experience in such places is that a lot of the programmers there aren't in it for the love of software/IT/tech, and more focussed on just getting a job done.
Check out http://piwik.org/. It's a self hosted stats package.
Now there is an interesting project! That's going to be the next OS on my netbook.

I love that the package manager makes it trivial to have multiple versions of the same program. There are always some programs I like to have a stable distribution-maintained package of as well as the latest development version.

And this:

$ nixos-rebuild test

This builds and activates the new configuration, but doesn’t make it the boot default. Thus, rebooting the system will take you back to the previous, known-good configuration.

An even nicer way to test changes is the following:

$ nixos-rebuild build-vm
$ ./result/bin/run-*-vm

This builds and starts a virtual machine that contains the new system configuration (i.e. a clone of the configuration of the host machine, with any changes that you made to configuration.nix).
Warren Buffett: The U.S. is moving toward plutocracy
Dears at AMD,

From my own private perspective (hacker/developer !gamer) nvidia is providing a comprehensive toolkit and documentation for developing on top of the GPU platform (http://developer.nvidia.com/object/gpucomputing.html)

Do you have the same?
Why not ask around your marketing/market research departments?

If you must DIY, here are some suggestions:

* Find the (estimated) number of users of the general product category (I'm sure googling will lead you to authentic sources publishing such data for your segment) and then estimate what percentage of this could be the potential users.

* Make a landing page describing the product in general and collect leads (to drive traffic to this, email your contacts who could be interested, request them to invite others, announce/post it on a few relevant forums/blogs etc.). Track the conversion rate and extrapolate it against the total category user base.

-HTH
The fast breeders are dead. Nobody is building them anymore here. In Germany the attempt to build one cost several billions and it is now an amusement park.
Jobs4hunt.com has a blog and forum noq
jobs4hunt has added blogs (blogs.jobs4hunt.com) and forums (forums.jobs4hunt.com) to enable it to connect better with the job seekers
What is good diet? There is no common agreement (see: high carb/high protein/high fat discussions).

There's no consensus on what kind of diet is good for losing weight, but there's much more consistent evidence on what a healthy diet is: high in fruits and vegetables, unprocessed grains, low in saturated fat, salt, and refined carbohydrates.
Most importantly- if these products are useless and harmful, why do people keep buying them?

I could not tell if you were talking about finance or cigarettes.
Jobs4hunt.com has a blog and forum now
jobs4hunt has added blogs (blogs.jobs4hunt.com) and forums (forums.jobs4hunt.com) to enable it to connect better with the job seekers
Your argument falls apart at the predicate. CDOs (and other exotic financial instruments) do not provide real value, not in the long term, anyway. This argument is exactly how Wall Street bankers & traders justify their crappy activities.

"CDOs provide value! We're making people rich!"

> People forget that prices and money are ... information

No, prices and money are imaginary measurements of imaginary things that do not exist except in our collective consciousness[1]. Cars, computers, buildings, aircraft... these things are not imaginary and provide real value.

[1]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unidade_real_de_valor
The problem is that the "advice" might do more harm than good, even though good was intended.

Skin care is a prime example of this; people recommend what works for them, but these products will, de facto, not work for some.

This is something that goes against a lot of HN's start-up philosophy, so it might meet some more disagreement. A lot of the advice dispensed on HN are maxims - take them or leave them - and the same thing applies.
It's an accounting trick that artificially stimulates the economy by tricking people into thinking their imaginary dollars are worth more real goods than they actually are.
Don't forget the format. He had slides auto-advancing every 30 seconds.
I think you meant that bankers have dreams. They are the ones who invented the CDOs and other financial abstractions.
Star Wars as animated ascii
Nuclear engineers are technocrats powered by corrupt politicians and corporations.

The US does not need more energy. The US needs to start thinking about using less energy. About every country in the industrialized world uses MUCH MUCH less energy.

If you think the US lifestyle is sustainable, then you are dreaming.

Renewable will fully power us here in Germany in 40 years or less. We have started a decade ago working on that. Checkout the progress renewable energy has made here in the last decade. This is combined with energy saving based on more efficient industrial processes, higher standards, and so on.

If you guys sit on your ass, it is not my problem.

I have for example no car. I use public transport. I live in a city where already experimental fully hydrogen powered busses are being tested in regular use. I'm also sitting in a winter garden right now which is 25 degrees celsius in March - powered by the sun...

not everybody is fucking lazy like you guys.
Often the argument about whether nuclear power represents an acceptable risk or not is then used to argue that nuclear power is a key solution to get rid of fossil fuel (a straw man argument?), as if there are no other parts of nuclear power which should be questioned.

This particular article doesn't say so explicitly, but has links in the margin to: "Nuclear power: Energy solution or evil curse?" http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-12730473

Key aspects of the discussion really is whether nuclear power is safe (for people and environment) and economical. A good discussion about the economic aspects can be found at: "Cost, not Japan crisis, should scrub nuclear power" http://www.grist.org/article/2011-03-17-cost-not-japan-crisi...
What benefit would they have with their own, incompatible with anything else, platform?

This way they can build differentiation full Android stack integrators can't. That, of course, if QNX proves a better environment than Linux.

This is, BTW, the same strategy Microsoft adopted eons ago, when the de-facto standard business OS was CP/M. It was very easy to port your programs from CP/M to MS-DOS (thanks, in no small part, to Intel making the 8086 asm-source compatible with the 8085) and that allowed them to have a reasonable software base from the start. Unfortunately, for CP/M, this was a one way road - it was not as easy to port back.

If Rim can manage a superset of Android, they may have a fighting chance to differentiate themselves.
IMobot creeps, crawls, cranes its way into our hearts (video)
Many of the uses of computers provide only "imaginary value" (to borrow your phrase).

Google and Facebook, for example, merely provide a convenient way of getting information quickly. Markets and price discovery do the exact same thing.
> From everything I've learned about startups, that's a growing and winning company

Well, except for the bit about having an actual business plan that makes money from something other than soaking investors.

But they'll have that any day now!
The Dark Side of the Moon - The 8-bit Album
Woow, I like it. I could actually use it as a simpler replacement for Stylebot.
However, I have a feature request: let me change the css styles _without_ changing the url.
ATI Stream SDK
OK, let me give this a shot...

In the past year or two, I have learned my greatest life lesson. As a lifelong high achiever, it was extremely counter-intuitive yet it was right in front of me all along. First, a little background...

In the past couple of years:

- My father died.
- My aunt (and best friend) died.
- My cousin (who was really like my brother) died.
- My 19 year old cat died.
- We had our first ever family reunion.
- My mother's dimentia has turned her back into a child.

Sure we all have great memories and are busy working at building even better futures, but ultimately it all boils down to:

All we have is now.

My pets have been trying to teach me this for years, if only I had listened. And now my mother is teaching me. They don't really remember yesterday. They don't care about tomorrow. But they really care about the moment. Intensely.

I have had to really slow down and let this sink in. When I visit my mother in her nursing home, we have a great time laughing, talking, visiting others, and of course, playing Jeopardy. We can't have the conversations we used to, so we just have new experiences, one time only, in the moment, and only for those who are there. We never talk about the past and she simply doesn't understand, "I'll see you tomorrow."

I haven't stopped building my future, but I no longer sacrifice the present in order to get there. I have learned that the process must be as enjoyable as the outcome. After all, the process is "now" and the outcome is just an instant in time.

It may sound cliche, but everyone should take inventory of all the good stuff in their lives (especially other people) and make the most of it now. You'll be surprised how quickly it'll be gone. Don't wait half your life to learn my most valuable counter-intuitive lesson.
If you don't derive value from them, why do you trade them?

You are absolutely right. ETFs are basically mutual funds, but with greater liquidity and lower fees. That's the reason for their existence - mutual funds, but better.
Then don't call them documents but objects (as in the OOP principle).
The old site is archived at the Internet Archive http://web.archive.org/web/20060816064646/http://hitmanforhi...

From the home page:

"Hitman is the perfect solution for your killing needs. We offer a variety of professional assassination services available worldwide. Whether you are trying to put an end to a domestic dispute or eliminate your business competitors, we have the solution for you."
You're proving the original point, since there are lots who argue that a healthy diet is high in naturally saturated fat and low in unprocessed grains.
There's a class of situations where the more you want something, the less likely you are to get it.

Desperation puts you at a disadvantage when you're looking for a mate or a job. People who can fake disinterest have the advantage over those with genuine neediness.

Yet, I would think that honesty and sincerity are key attributes of mates and employees.
Lets talk money.

I think it is only reasonable to ask that avoidable civilian technology be insured against harm done by it. So: how much would this insurance cost? Cleanup, health care costs, disability payments, loss of property?

Given just a slight increase in illness rate for the sheer number of people involved can give a hard to detect but significant cost. An insurer will have to set aside enough money for the expected amount of payout. What would Warren Buffett's premiums be? Some claims will be excluded by the insurer, and the rest of the population will probably be called to for economic assistance: how much will that be? What is the opportunity cost of having half a million people cleaning up the place instead of being productive?

Feel free to peruse the [IAEA report about Chernobyl](http://www.iaea.org/Publications/Booklets/Chernobyl/chernoby...). What is the total economic cost? Maybe "hundreds of billions of dollars"? See the report for estimates.

So yes, we shouldn't run away from radiation. We should clean it up safely, then come to our senses and stop dispersing any more of it. This technology is a dead-end for normal energy production.
I was serious, and I was wrong. Thanks and thanks to tvon for explaining how this works. I didn't read your initial comment that far down since I thought I knew how it worked. I was busy being annoyed at Apple and in a rush to write my response.

In any case, thanks for clearing this up for me.
AMD Accelerated Parallel Processing (APP) SDK (formerly ATI Stream)

http://developer.amd.com/gpu/AMDAPPSDK/Pages/default.aspx
No offense meant to the author, but he sounds like a bad client and personally I'd turn him down in a second.

The problem with being both penny-pinching and feature crazy is you will quickly scare away the people who know what they're doing and can actually get your project done. This leaves you the people desperate enough for work that they're willing to put up with you.

If you approach the collaboration as if you were haggling with a car salesman for a better model, it won't matter whether you outsource or go local, capable people (who are generally in demand and can afford to decline clients, regardless of where they're based), will sense that you aren't worth the hassle and wait for something better.

The way to get good work done is to pay well, give clear directions about what you want, and most importantly, limit the goal to a core set of features that are realistically achievable in the proposed budget and timeframe. This is actually the cheapest and most reliable way to obtain something decent that works well in a reasonable amount of time.

Underpaying is much worse than overpaying. When you overpay, you can be more confident in the estimates you get and that the quality will be there, and the developers will be more motivated to do a good job for you (which can be critically important). Underpaying gets poor quality, will make the project take much longer if it even survives, AND the people responsible for your entire system will rush through it and might even have a grudge against you due to previously mentioned penny-pinching and feature crazy habits.

Summing up: aggressively seeking the most features for the lowest rate will paradoxically net you a poor result with a large bill.
That moron who wrote the article is a nuclear and medical physicist at the University of Oxford.

From the HN comment guidelines:

When disagreeing, please reply to the argument instead of
calling names. E.g. "That is an idiotic thing to say;
1 + 1 is 2, not 3" can be shortened to "1 + 1 is 2, not 3."

Judging from your comment history, you seem to enjoy calling names more than you do providing arguments.
Really? So the police cannot be called as a witness in other countries and incriminate you by contradicting you with your own words?
Yes, people like you killed them.
If you'd like your code reviewed, post it on Stack Exchange Code Review[1].

[1] http://codereview.stackexchange.com/