skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Is anyone else starting to think that Zed is an elaborate Borat-style practical joke?
Here's why: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2356480
Cool. We'll keep an eye on it at HackCollege :)
The #1 route that populations get exposed to I-131 is through the food supply. Grass plants soak up I-131 from the soil, and cows concentrate the I-131 in milk. Drink the milk, and you can get a very high concentration of I-131.

The half-life of I-131 is 9 days, so you don't even need to throw the milk away. Just make cheese out of it and let it sit for a few months.

Because I-131 is the most immediate radiological threat, the 1410 mSv/y number is incredibly pessimistic... That exposure is definitely going to go down. Note the I-131 is decaying in both the environment and in the fuel rods, so the danger of any kind of further releases is dropping over time.

Note that parts of the area have been devastated by the Tsunami... Some people might not have any shelter for "shelter in place" to work.

Over longer periods of time, radio-cesium is going to be more of a concern, but the first point of order is to protect people from I-131.

Another interesting thing about her story, BTW, is the mention of cardiovascular problems. Based on anecdotal accounts I've seen of people who get large radiation doses, the danger of cardiovascular damage may be worse than the danger of cancer.
Hey AT&T customers: Your Facebook data went to China and S. Korea this morning…
Disneyfication
This situation is different from ffmpeg. Kernels do not link to your program in the way that libraries do. When using a library, even a dynamically linked one, the memory image of your program is a combined work. As the CPU is evaluating your program, it does not see the library or treat it differently than any other functions in your program.

System calls can be thought of like RPC. The two programs (yours and the kernel) communicate but do not link together in a single memory image.
What Firefox has:

1) the Awesomebar, which I love, although some people hate, plus more advanced functionality -- like in Chrome you can't search your history and delete items in the search results, which I think is retarded as your only option is to purge your entire history

It also seems pretty clear that Chrome is built to use the Google Search Engine whenever possible. For example if you search for something in the location bar, Firefox can redirect you to the very first result on Google for that search if it has a high degree of certainty. The Awesomebar is also designed such that you'll do less searching on Google.

However, the ties of Chrome to Google can be seen by the way the browser makes you search on Google, even in cases where a local search in your history would make much more sense.

2) Firefox plugins can do pretty much anything -- Chrome plugins are basically useless. I.e. Firebug can be a Firefox plugin, while on Chrome this had to be baked in. It means Firefox can have things like proper ad-blocking and Delicious integration on the push of a button

3) a non-profit organization behind it -- when dealing with companies and organizations the concept of "trust" applies heavily, and personally I trust that Mozilla looks after my interests much more than I trust Google
This effort by the NYTimes just seems misguided. Why don't media companies understand that the Internet is ubiquitous? There isn't a separate Internet on your iPad or your laptop or if you're going through a search engine or Twitter. It's all the same Internet from a user's perspective...why don't the media guys get that?

I don't mean this in a passive aggressive way. I genuinely want to know if someone can explain why they behave this way. There are lots of smart people at these organizations...Why are they using a strategy that so fundamentally misunderstands how people use the Internet?
The Manifesto Manifesto
Is software good at amplifying or replacing people?

The idea that a system (software or whatever) of any complexity could lose every person involved in it, exist without problems by itself, and then new people could easily pick it up solely with the help of documentation is laughable.
My proposal: stop using the word "hustler". While many people in the startup community have gotten used to the "aggressively active or enterprising person" definition, for most people, the first definition that comes to mind is "a person who lives by stealing or other dishonest means; a thief, pimp, etc."

http://www.answers.com/topic/hustler-slang-term
This is probably not much help to you, but I pay yearly for Yahoo Mail Plus -- mainly because it allows me to use POP3.
The article ignores an even bigger problem with bad server password encryption (ie, not salted) - rainbow tables.

No expensive compute time required; cracker can easily decrypt most passwords without even blinking an eye (the tradeoff is storage space vs. compute time).
http://ophcrack.sourceforge.net/tables.php

HBGary was cracked using rainbow tables... which then led to the rootkit.com social engineering crack.

1Password and it's like can move us closer to eventually just doing PKI since once the passwords become unrecognizable they are quite effective.

btw, I love and promote 1Password and KeepassX (1pwd has better usability and security since it's autofill will stop phished logins by matching the domain exactly not visually... KeepassX's autofill is experimental right now).
Flagged because it's just a link without context.
Mahipal, thank you very much for setting this up. You have been such a great help to me as I'm also working on an educational game company. This resource is going to be really huge for all of us trying to revolutionize the field of education!
With this in mind, (price) scalable-CDNs are a good idea. Don't spend a lot of money up-front when you're not sure you'll get the traffic to merit it. I'm glad I didn't, because my site got all of five hits from HN... though, granted, it's not tech.
Are you suggesting that the final product won't be that thin?

This isn't Duke Nukem Forever -- doesn't Samsung have a pretty good reputation for shipping?
Google launches Y Combinator-like Umbono in South Africa
Judge Rejects Google’s Deal to Digitize Books
The Nintendo They've Tried to Forget: Gambling, Gangsters, and Love Hotels
Japan and the Cliché of Stoicism
Foursquare has way more places in their database, based on my usage of both Yelp's and Foursquare's iPhone apps.

Yelp is based on reviews of businesses. Whereas Foursquare is based checking into places. Therefore, Foursquare's domain is much larger.

I'm not sure if Foursquare or Yelp add places to their database or if it's 100% user-driven. In Yelp's case, it takes more effort to add a place becuase you need to (or at least you feel like you should) also write a review. Whereas for Foursquare, you can just add your home. Or "RainApocolypse 2011," of which I am two days away from becoming the mayor.
You say "tomato", I say "fetch the trebuchet"
You may be right about why, but I don't agree on what. Good names for functions/methods can tell a lot.
I feel like I am getting spoiled by Objective-C and Cocoa Touch APIs.
Free Angry Birds for Android
It depends on how the company is set up.

If the total stock was allocated then it may be a tax issue to change.

The best option may be to have vesting periods that can then be accelerted based upon workload/responsibilities.

The other option may be to "contribute" stock into new corp or LLC, but again, looking at tax issues. I did this and it was not easy...

Or contribute assets (code etc) only (not stock) into new entity and close down the old company.

Or issue more shares enabling a vesting period (may be simplest thing).

Definitely consult with a qualified business accountant to avoid what could be major headaches and possible tax penalties.
If I were the RIAA or MPAA, this seems to leak enough information to confirm that my copyrighted material is stored on dropbox, which might be enough to get a subpeona issued.

If dropbox client were to still force the upload to happen, and only discard the object afterwards, this "duplicate file exists" information wouldn't be leaked. Presumably, they want to detect duplicates within an account and avoid the transfer in that case in the interest of user experience, but if I've told dropbox to upload avatar, I'm presumably OK with the transfer happening, even if it's not strictly needed because someone else has already uploaded it.
I'll honestly say I'm not hugely familiar with YCombinator, but this project Google just announced in South Africa sounds quite similar. What do fellow hacker news readers think about this initiative? Would you apply?
Hey, it's That Guy in the video from all the other iphone apps. Strange?
How else would you suggest visually laying out the patterns? Would you like it in a flash file instead? :D
or happier.
Introducing the Startup Guild: A Community for Entrepreneurs
Actually, the US Supreme Court decided in Sony vs. Universal (in 1984) that when someone sends a movie to your home, you do have the right to record it for subsequent (non-commercial) viewings.

Merely reading a news article is certainly non-commercial, so by the analogy you proposed I believe this JavaScript workaround is entirely legal.
Kudos on this. Great to see a good place to find this type of data, specially since other sources like Nature are very expensive.
How customer development prevented another failure
I've posted this before but this is where I use my reference for a hustler. http://joeyroth.com/charlatan-martyr-hustler/

It's all semantics at the end of the day but I personally embrace the word hustler and would like to consider myself fairly ethical in life and business. If you're looking for that right person don't discount them because they call themselves a hustler, search for why they are who they say they are.

Note: I'm not in the valley.
No doubt the 161 uSv/h figure will drop as the plant becomes more contained, and it's unlikely sticking around for a full year will net you the full 1400 mSv. That being said, right now we're looking at 3.86 mSv/d, which in and of itself is not a number to scoff at, and is well above dose limits, conservative as they are. This is considerably different than when people were panicking over 50 uSv/d.

When you are in an area that exceeds the yearly dose limit in a single day, it seems like evacuation is prudent. The fact that the government hasn't widened the evacuation area despite rising ambient radiation is concerning.
> AppKit and UIKit aren't at all similar. And they aren't related.

Actually, they're incredibly similar in terms of class hierarchy, design patterns (e.g., delegates, data sources, target/action for the most part), graphics principles (points vs pixels), use of various Foundation and CoreGraphics data structures, etc.

And yes, Core Animation works quite well with layer-backed views in AppKit, which is where it started.

It's easy to point out specific differences between these frameworks, but I think any developer who's already learned one would object to the underestimation of his/her intelligence that would be implied by comparing the subsequent difficulty in moving to the other with that of any other non-Apple platform SDK.

Perhaps you'd like to point out another SDK that is more similar to AppKit than UIKit?
Concurrency = managing shared resources. Things like mutual exclusion and transactions. Getting processors to get in line (serialization/composition) for a shared resource instead of just trampling over each other by just grabbing it when they want (non-determinism), so that actions that depend on being done in order and without interruption can be done.

Parallelism = splitting up subtasks that don't depend on each other. If the tasks don't depend on each other, the things doing them shouldn't need to talk. If you have enough processors, you can do almost everything at once, so the algorithm is only as slow as things that actually need to be done in order (asymptotic efficiency).

In imperative programming, we tell the computer what order to do things in, so it doesn't know what actions don't depend on each other - to parallelize, we have to worry about concurrency. In functional programming, the compiler knows what depends on what (what uses the result of something else), so it can parallelize things that don't depend on each other. It might be implemented with concurrency, but the programmer doesn't need to worry about it.
Firefox 4 Launch Day With Brendan Eich
Awesome idea -- very useful. Thank you!
"The winning formula is screencasts + code challenges + gamification."

This is also the formula the Khan Academy is using. I think they're both on to something pretty huge.
Yes, as I said the issue are slightly different. My question is: what legal basis does the developer of a GPL library have to sue somebody who released a program linked with that library. If the two only come together to form a combined work on the users machine, at the users command, then how does the GPL apply to me, the distributor of the the non-GPL program? I am not distributing a combined or derivative work. At most I am using the headers and distributing the symbol names, which are not covered by copyright. When I make no copies, how does copyright law affect me?

If the headers were covered by copyright, that would have provided a way for a developer to prevent use of their GPL library by non-GPL programs.
Shame on you Microsoft, for buying a Promoted Tweet for "Firefox".
The only people who meet Asshole Zed are assholes. Funny thing is, they never think they're being assholes when they call me an asshole.
We should also stop using the word hacker because most people think it's someone who lives by stealing or breaking into peoples computers; a thief, a criminal etc.

</probably unneccessary sarcasm>
Google releases snappy, the compression library used in Bigtable
Well... We all know what happed to admirals Ozzel and Mottie when they said "no repro" and "woops, missed that" in the daily scrum with Darth Vader.
We do use Zeus LBs. I am happy to report that one of the cogs that made this machine work much easier was the fact that we could have our zeus clusters send out remote syslog events for the site traffic in addition to the normal log files.
That made it easy for us to use rsyslog to filter the data and aggregate it to be consumed by the app.
>I'm not a lawyer of course.

Neither is Linus, as people were quick to point out when those old comments of his were first quoted.
Here's the workflow:

1. Write out a list of shit to do, using software written with some programming, motherfucker.

2. Do some of the shit, again using programming, motherfucker.

3. Test if that shit's any good, and if not then go fix it with programming, motherfucker.

There ya go.
>TreeStyleTab add-on is compatible with FF4, I no longer use it

Does it work with your FF4? Mine doesn't!!!
Don't ask HN, most of us only wear things that we got free at trade fairs. Go ask the guys at Styleforum and AAAC.
Exactly! Get with an attorney quick.
Other option is to find funding and buy him out now. Sometimes investors like stepping in where there is a shakeup, they feel like a savior, get more equity and presumably, control. If you can do this, part of the deal will be the full release agreement along with ip assignment.
Every course requires an instructor. Unless you've envisioned every question that every student could possibly ask, which seems unlikely.
What would you consider the essential Cocoa design patterns? I would point at the items listed at http://developer.apple.com/library/ios/#documentation/Cocoa/... . Delegation, notification, target action, the responder chain - these are all shared.

The frameworks are not identical, but to say they're not related… they only look wildly different if you're focusing in incredibly closely. If you consider .Net, or Java, or Rails, or GTK, or almost anything else, the differences between AppKit and UIKit are miniscule.
There are different opinions on this, see:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GNU_General_Public_License#Link...
I pay for Skype. Almost paid for Grooveshark but in the end decided to stick with the free version.

Good question btw. There are too many ideas for B2C web apps out there where the only hope of making money is from being bought out.
> like in Chrome you can't search your history and delete items in the search results, which I think is retarded as your only option is to purge your entire history

Sure you can. Control-H or Menu->History.

> Firefox plugins can do pretty much anything -- Chrome plugins are basically useless.

It's worth noting that Firefox is working on adding Chrome-like 'useless' extensions to their browser.

https://jetpack.mozillalabs.com/index.html

> a non-profit organization behind it

Sure, but remember that they don't run on rainbows and dreams. Mozilla is basically funded by Google affiliate payments.

-

I do agree about AwesomeBar (miss it) and extension support (though I don't miss any from FF, myself) though.
Cops shouldn't use heat sensors without a warrant solely because of the privacy issue. They can certainly look at your house while passing by, which is also just a function of electromagnetic signals.

I would argue that since the NYT is willfully delivering you the content of an article and merely instructing your browser to conceal it, that's a far cry from "trying to 'lock' their door." If someone was distributing their username/password or an authorized cookie, or using a server-side exploit to access content, then I think that would constitute a breach of ethics if not law.

Basically, my point is that once the NYT willfully transmits data to your computer, you should be able to manipulate it any way you wish, obviously barring any sort of commercial use or redistribution that violates copyright laws. Anyway, it's not that hard to protect data from certain users and make it available to others. That's a design pattern as old as multi-user computer systems/networks.
Whose motorcycle is this?
Sorry i couldn't find the motherfucker.
Why is that shameful? Buying AdWords for competitor searches on Google is standard practice, why should Twitter be any different?
WPF on Mono? It is a matter of funding.
One big difference is that a password manager like 1Password (and I would presume others that integrate similarly with the browser) won't enter a password unless you are at the correct site. This provides some pretty good protection against most phishing attempts.
He doesn't understand very well.

(1) Progress. The progress in computing he is talking about is not very important and not much worth following in detail. Bluntly programming is still:

(a) for needed data, select data types and name and allocate space,

(b) manipulate the data with expressions, assignments, if-then, and do-while,

(c) have some too simplistic approaches to exceptional condition handling that risk allocated resources not freed.

(d) simplistic concurrency tools that are hard to debug and have poor means to detect and resolve deadlocks,

(e) get modularity as needed in 'divide and conquer' by calling functions, methods, APIs, etc., standard old call-return 'semantics'.

So, no wonder given a new flavor of the month of syntactic sugar, people learn it only when they have to.

(2) He recognizes that he is asking people to learn things that go out of date too quickly. Good. But he is too accepting of having people waste so much time.

(3) For knowledge that has usefulness longer than the life of a butterfly, he retreats to communications skills?

So, net, he doesn't know where the powerful, lasting knowledge is.

So, what might such knowledge be?

Okay, start with a problem to be solved where we need to write some software. Okay, from 40,000 feet up, this software will take in some data, manipulate it, and deliver results.

So, ask, do you understand well enough now how to do those manipulations at least in principle by hand?

If so, then likely can start designing and then coding. Some huge fraction of commercial computing has been like this.

Else, for a hint on what such knowledge might be, have to ask, how will we determine the needed data manipulations? A huge fraction of computing in science, engineering, and for US national security has needed and often found answers to this question.

If computing is going to move past the merely old, and manual, then the "else" above needs to be followed.

By analogy, in part he's thinking that the main issue in good cooking is the shape of the chef's knife and the material in the cutting board and ignoring what is between the ears of the chef. That is, he doesn't understand cooking past what is routine with a knife and cutting board.
Zed Shaw: great troll, or greatest troll?
I'm stunned by the rigor.
For me, my thinking on one time fees vs monthly fees comes down to this: Once I buy something, every time I use it decreases the amount of money I spent on it per time I used it. But with monthly payments, every time I don't use it makes it more expensive for every time I use it. The latter forces me to use it more, which is a burden if it is not something I need to have.

I think you'll find that most of the webapps people pay monthly for are those things that they can't get with a one time purchse: generally new content, updated on a regular basis (Newspapers, Music, Movies, Television Shows,etc)
Second time today I am quoting this from "Peopleware" by DeMarco and Lister:

Sharon knew what all good instinctive managers know:
The manager's function is not to make people work,
but to make it possible for people to work.

That actually comes after this anecdote:

One snowy day, I dragged myself out of a sickbed to pull
together our shaky sys- tem for a user demo.
Sharon came in and found me propped up at the console.
She disappeared and came back a few minutes later with a
container of soup. After she'd poured it into me and buoyed
up my spirits, I asked her how she found time for such
things with all the management work she had to do. She gave
me her patented grin and said, Tom, this is management.
Actually, that's kinda awesome. Talk about effective use of marketing.
It is what Nietzsche was talking about when he referred to "superfluous teleological principles" in Beyond Good and Evil, published in 1886.
I don't like any analogy involving actual property, because actual physical property has natural scarcity.

When you make a web request to the NYT servers, they are willfully distributing a copy of that content to you. Obviously, you're not allowed to do anything you want with the content (like sell or otherwise redistribute it), but I certainly think you can manipulate it and view it any way you want.
Why bother with porting a subsystem that even MS has second thoughts on.
I pay for DropBox, but that is almost like a "but once". I currently pay for Spotify but that is only because I am studying a lot at the moment and hate the adverts. I will cancel it for next month but reactivate next time I am studying. I also have money in my Skype account which I use occasionally. I don't think there's anything else I pay for as a consumer.
There's a certain concreteness in what you've describe as he's applied it to technology problems. Taking a step (or two) back and examining the system to notice commonalities or abstractions that can enable the current system. He did this with revision control and we have a general tool now embodied in git. He did this with fork and realized that all the attributes of processes could be selectively shared, not just the subset that fork provides, and now there's a much better, general tool, clone(2), that more constructs, forking and threading, can be implemented on top of without them being exceptions and special cases.
Based on the website landing page and the beautifully produced video, is this more than a glorified todo list?
Flickr, Smugmug, Netflix, Dropbox, Skype, eFax, Wordpress, Typepad, Hulu Plus.

In my experience some people can't imagine how willing other people are to pay for things. If you're one of the people that hasn't even bought a $0.99 iPhone app you're very out of touch with a huge segment of the population.