skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I just went to the Wiki page of the Santa Susana Field Lab and it is scary! Most people think of Three Mile Island or maybe Nevada Test Site as examples of the worst nuclear accidents in US history but I had no idea:

>The Hot Lab suffered a number of fires involving radioactive materials. For example, in 1957, a fire in the Hot Cell "got out of control and ... massive contamination" resulted. In July, 1959, the site suffered a partial nuclear meltdown that has been named "the worst in U.S. history", releasing an undisclosed amount of radiation, but thought to be much more than the Three Mile Island disaster in 1979.

> At least four of the ten nuclear reactors suffered accidents. The AE6 reactor experienced a release of fission gases in March 1959, the SRE experienced a power excursion and partial meltdown in July 1959; the SNAP8ER in 1964 experienced damage to 80% of its fuel; and the SNAP8DR in 1969 experienced similar damage to one-third of its fuel.

> The reactors located on the grounds of SSFL were considered experimental, and therefore had no containment structures.

> Throughout the years, approximately ten low-power nuclear reactors operated at SSFL, in addition to several "critical facilities": a sodium burn pit in which sodium-coated objects were burned in an open pit; a plutonium fuel fabrication facility; a uranium carbide fuel fabrication facility; and the purportedly largest "Hot Lab" facility in the United States at the time.
Bandwidth is so cheap that data/IP are effectively non-scarce. We've never before written laws governing the exchange of non-scarce goods. So the old laws often seem not to fit.
Techcrunch visitors halve in 12 months
In terms of market, Android is like China while iOS is USA/Japan.

The Chinese market is huge but they do not have the spending power of the Americans or Japanese yet.

Companies will probably not make a lot of money in China right now but it is wise for them to try to penetrate the Chinese market sooner than later so they'll be in good position when things pick up.

This is similar to Android's position. Not a lot of money to be made yet but it would be a foolish move not position yourself in the market.
Look, you can be a smartass and try to criticize other's beliefs. But at least know what the beliefs of others are.

Criticizing a group of people based on your own naivety of their beliefs is both ignorant and arrogant.

Read this:

http://www.all-creatures.org/articles/an-tpr-are-10.html

Many passages in the Bible explain that humans are stewards of nature.
I am using Stickies to write down my to-do. I have them on my desktop at all time. This way I know what to do at what time.
yeah, there's been a huge shift from everybody being a producer to most just consuming art. The minority that still produce probably understand what a loss this is better than most.
Med student threatened in Facebook link
I think any victory in courts is going to be a pyrrhic one. Ive said it before on earlier threads and I will say it again here - Tesla is alienating a large section of auto enthusiasts by going after Top Gear. It might be that some marketing guru has figured out that suing Top Gear is a cheaper way to get headlines than running a campaign. But they have picked the wrong target - Top Gear is at the heart and centre of Auto culture worldwide. Also not a good sign when a tech company starts using the courts instead of the market and their product to win points.
Just look how it turned out for Morris Marina fans.
I actually went through this recently. Here's what took me from zero-to-functional-prototype in 6 weeks.

Note: I had a bit* of Python scripting experience, and knew my way around HTML and CSS.*

1. A friend recommended SitePoint's Simply Rails 2. I went through that cover-to-cover, googling for where Rails 3 commands differ from Rails 2.

2. I used an old tutorial for rolling my own user model from scratch (still in the Sitepoint piece): http://www.aidanf.net/rails_user_authentication_tutorial

3. I ran "rails new" and started trying to code out what I was imagining. Anything that Simply Rails 2 didn't teach, I googled (e.g. FB/Twitter authentication with Omniauth, following/follower "friendship" models, Twilio integration, etc.).

If you're not coming into this with any scripting experience, I would absolutely recommend checking out http://tryruby.org/ first.
Compete.com stats are often wrong. They say HN's traffic is down from last fall, and in fact it's sharply up.
India wins the worldcup
or you will remember your grandfather (or something like that) who woke up everyday extremely early to go to work at the fields, do the same and get things done.
> I switched to Haskell + Emacs and never looked back.

Uhm, yeah, I did that too. It linked seamlessly with the rest of the codebase (C++), the colleagues were delighted to maintain my Haskell code (after all Haskell is so much better.) In fact the effects were so good that the company rewarded me by turning me into a unicorn.
Best ever DIY phone stand in 60 seconds
Well, I can tell you that I only had the latest FF4 and Firebug installed (this was 3 days ago). No other add-ons were installed.

The only other change was to disable the video acceleration because I was getting some weird flashes on page reloads. My home page (Google.com) was flashing for a few milliseconds while reloading my local app. From what I remember, disabling the hardware acceleration fixed that issue.

Other than this it was basically make changes to my local site, hit refresh in FF, make changes, refresh again, and so on. Nothing special about this site, basic HTML / CSS / Javascript (jQuery), no Flash. You could see the memory steadily go up in the Task Manager.

The only reason I even noticed it was because the whole system was slowing down. I only have 3GB of RAM (Windows 7 64 bit), but I never noticed any memory pressures before. I could "feel" Windows paging the memory to disk which was slowing down everything on the box.

Good luck, and let me know if there's something else I could do to help.
Some light on the dark side of App promotion
You can go running or whatever, get back to work and be focus as well. smoking is not necessary to be productive. For the record, I know what I'm talking about because I used to smoke for several years and I quitted like a year ago.
Problem is I want someone in-house. Doing that, then paying them to come out here, relocating their life, etc. seems like slim odds...
Trending on Hackernews with a two year old post! Way to go Raincoaster
Poll: Do you eat banana peels?
I've got a deposit down on a Model S, and I don't think I could care less one way or the other. I thought the review was misleading and stupid, and I think the lawsuit is a stupid response.

But whatever, I'm still excited about the Model S.
Seems as though a better plan would be to challenge Top Gear to a rematch of some sort. Make something fun out of this and get the auto enthusiasts cheering.

Southwest did this perfectly: got sued, took it to the ring, arm wrestled over it, got crushed, paid the other guy, laughed all the way to the bank and everyone cheered them on. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EwU9m4oCtRE&;
Financial forecasting for social games
That's interesting, do you know if theres a better alternative? Seems like it should really be something that should be fairly accurate, at least in terms of trends
Important IRS Requirements for 2011
I don't think I've heard of anyone eating them before.
Just a couple of quick thoughts:

Design is 'meh', and off centered, which pains OCD people like myself.

Focus on one or two social networks (Facebook + Twitter would cover 90% of the people that would use this site).

The great thing about ThreeWords.me was it's simplicity. Type three words on the profile page, and done. Look at the site, and remove anything that doesn't -need- to be there for function or viral growth.

I don't use Facebook, so couldn't log in and check out the actual service. Just my thoughts from visiting the home page.
exactly...it seems like all the developments have ben purely cosmetic
While I'm sure Tesla wouldn't accept just an apology from Jeremy Clarkson, there'll be "lost sales" damages in the squillions, this is very true. Clarkson's offended entire countries without remorse and everyone involved moves on and gets on with their lives.

Does anyone know the jurisdiction for this legal action? I suspect treatment of the case in the UK will differ to that in the US.
People in the comments need to realize the article, the shit list, etc all of that is about effects on START-UP time only.

Who cares about start-up time? My FF browser is ALWAYS open, it never closes.
Without Google Analytics to do a 1-1 comparison, any metric will be suspect. Alexa will suffer from its standard bias of only counting people with the Alexa toolbar installed, which won't be many for either site. Compete's metrics are compiled from a variety of sources [1], including a toolbar, none of which seem particularly definitive.

[1]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compete.com
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2400939
I don't know what your stance is and I don't know the book's stance is.

All I know is what the synopsis and the comments state its primary arguments are - that religion is the cause of trouble with scientific literacy of the US public. Beyond that I have made no comments, but I see a lot of downvoting and feather ruffling in response to simple statement of facts. I did show with a link that the premise of the argument, that there is trouble with scientific literacy in the US, is questionable.

I responded to the question "where did you get that idea" and was downvoted when I answered the question. I find that interesting.
Yeah, I am working on transitioning to running, smoking is not my long term plan for productivity enhancement.
> The poster is Swedish.

Sweden is also an intrinsic part of Western Civilisation. People in other western countries have fought many wars, and many civil rights battles -- both violent and non-violent -- over the last two centuries, to get where we are today.

> the existence of civil liberties and democracy in Sweden has more to do with peaceful activism and good government that with bloodshed and violent struggle

Both have their place; it's a question of whatever tactics win in a given situation. To use a modern example, the Egyptian people were able to overthrow their dictator with a good deal less bloodshed than the Libyan people are.
Since you have a deposit down, just out of curiosity, are you a home owner?
Because openpoke is the only one that focuses on pokes. Which is clearly the biggest reason that drove Facebook adoption. I think by peeling off one small part of the whole social networking scene, and doing it really well could be a hit.

Its the MVP of distributed social networks.
In-effin-sane 360 video with iPhone 
http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1106196796/the-gopano-micro-a-lens-for-capturing-360-video-on
What part of it did you think was misleading? At least according to this article, everything they said in it was true (and was supported by Tesla)
Not positive, but I think newobj is making fun of how inaccurate compete.com numbers are, in light of comments on this post http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2399570 and especially TC's take on compete.com's numbers, http://techcrunch.com/2011/02/09/compete-on-compete/
I don't see anything restricting this to HN, either. Am I missing something? While I imagine that HN is the majority of traffic to YC these days, it'd be silly to pretend the rest of the site wouldn't have visitors HN doesn't.
Interesting. So the decline of the "low-hanging fruits" of technology is the cause, and not the effect, of the decline in the social prestige of science and technology, if I'm understanding you right.
What's the betting that when replicators like reprap get good/useful, traditional manufacturing industries will try to get them banned?
Personally, I'm not an android, or open source, advocate. I don't use it at the moment and I wouldn't necessarily recommend it to someone else. All the phone oses I have have used are flawed to some extent and picking one is a matter of deciding which flaws you can tolerate or not notice.

Gruber doesn't care about openness either, he uses an iPhone. His argument is is simply a way to bash android without addressing anything that is substantive to most people.

Last month he was trolling that android wasn't open because motorola hadn't provided a froyo update to an older phone, completely ignoring the fact that the comunity had already provided multiple updates.

Next month he will be complaining that android isn't open because google hasn't provided the source to something else.

To most people, it doesn't matter if android is 65% or 70% open. What matters is how well it meets their needs. If openness helps meet those needs then it's important, if it doesn't then it's irrelevant.

Finally, if Gruber was interested in openness, he would allow comments on his blog. Without that, he is just a troll with a pulpit.
Ask HN: Textmate and RoR?
Yesterday I bought textmate. Today I'm starting to learn Rails. How should I set up (and what should I know about) textmate to make things as easy and fast as possible?
It's a tech demo. The point is to explore the capabilities of CSS - not to be a shining example of usability.

Related: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2400392
Patient: Doctor, it hurts when I do this.
Doctor: Then stop doing it!
So consoles are basically killing off PC gaming

The whole "PC gaming is dead" adage has been repeated for years now, but is simply not true. These are figures for the US, where console gaming is bigger than everywhere except Japan: http://www.gamesetwatch.com/newzoo_2010spend.jpg

As you can see, traditional non-MMO, non-casual PC gaming adds up to 19%, while all consoles put together (Xbox, PS3, Wii, DS, PSP) add up to 43%, so it is very likely that PC gaming is bigger than any single console. Other places like Europe probably have PC gaming bigger than all consoles combined. And even more importantly, console game sales have declined while PC game sales have jumped up.

edit: of course, I'm biased here -- I think stuff like paying to play peer-to-peer and console makers using that money to pay for timed exclusivity is what will destroy gaming as a whole. I'm also philosophically inclined towards open systems rather than closed ones.
Clickable link to the project website:
http://projects.ict.usc.edu/mxr/faast/

This makes me want to get a kinect to play around with.
I've just looked at the HN report, some if the dips in the report are insane, from 200k down to under 50k and back up to 200k in a month.
Banana peels contain significant amounts of norepinephrine and dopamine. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Norepinephrine#Nutritional_sour...
Sounds like you guys have identified a problem in the startup incubator business and are attempting to provide a solution for it, though from reading PG it sounds like there are very good reasons for the existence of that problem. Good luck!
The Rise of Desktop Medicine
You cannot make a better car by suing people.
His first post/comment was that thread though (unless he deleted everything previous to it).
Like I said, I'm successful at finding things I'm looking for.

In the last month, for instance, I've purchased:

-- a pressure washer (had it in my garage within 90 mins of searching)
-- an industrial grade hedge trimmer
-- 4 dock floats
-- a folding swimming ladder

The first three I found looking, the fourth I found by placing a "looking for" add myself.

Sure, I've had shitty experiences with Craigslist, by far the worst was when I was selling a truck. I had a lot of moronic callers and a couple of no-shows, but I also ended up selling it for good cash to a respectful guy.

The best bet in handling the bad parts was basically saying "sorry, not interested in selling it to you" when I get the sense that the other end of the call was a flake or not worth wasting time on. Sure, pissed off some of them, but I like to think I have a reasonable ability to read people, and wasn't desperate enough to sell the truck that I felt obligated to follow through with every potential buyer.

In the end, I'd rather deal with that crap than a dealership any day.
I agree that the windows v. Mac comparison falls apart on scrutiny but not for the same reason. I think that android commoditization of the smartphone is very comparable to how windows commoditizatized the the pc.
Parallel Haskell Digest: sparks, threadscope, concurrent servers...
The sad thing is, I saw Google Motion appear in my Gmail toolstrip, but I didn't even think about April fools, I just thought 'oh, great, another half-baked wannabe social media experiment masquerading as a feature from Google (the email and search company)' and didn't bother clicking it.
Was this in 2003?
Sam Hughes had an interesting perspective on this: http://qntm.org/number

Basically, meaningful numbers are so sparse that to claim there's nothing special about them is ridiculous.
Ask HN: Are there any open-source APIs to do what Color wants to do for photos?
There are lots of really awesome projects I can think of that involve knowing who is physically close to you. Color apparently can do this (though I haven't used it, so I can't speak to how well it's done)--are there any open source projects that can do it (or are working on it)?
There's a similar one for Swiss trains.
very cool! but this seems to work right only on Chrome 11? FF4 animation does not change color / does not restart and in IE9 it just looks green and ugly. can't see much use right now :\
Kudos to the launch.

The makeup of the founding team thing will be the make or break. I've barely seen a recent success story of a startup where less then 100% of the founders were technical. It used to be possible but I expect that times have changed in this regard.

Bluntly, this approach sounds wrong to me from an investment portfolio strategy point of view but I'm glad you are taking the risk and try it.

I definitely think that being in Minnesota will be a competitive advantage however. The area is vastly underrated and pretty incredible talents live and work there. Best of luck to your team and project.
You know that it takes a lot less than "2^(1099511627776x8)" bytes of storage to record that number? And while the entire sequence takes about that much space, it's only one such sequence, hardly "all music and movies".
I don't know, I think if you're an enthusiast who cares about the environment, Clarkson isn't your favorite guy ever. I felt like the piece on the Tesla was pretty offensive in how biased it was, and I normally like the guys on Top Gear.
Ok, so you want to look at a market share snapshot?

By that argument, Nokia and RIM are going gangbusters in the phone market and have a bright future ahead of them.
I couldn't agree more. You got 20k visitors in 7 days? Nothing to get excited about. Especially since most of your visitors must come from HN and that you might struggle to get that many visitors in the coming weeks.
If you get the same amounts, ore more. Then write about it.
That's not very helpful, Socrates.
Emphasis on doing what interests you. I wanted to learn Rails because there's plenty of work opportunities for it, Ruby is neat, and is built around a *nix and OSS. Do what you like.

I started learning web dev with Rails recently and am very close to deploying a small but significant project. Here's my two cents on how to learn:

0. Pick something you want to build. Solve a problem that nags you or someone else. Or reimplement something as you think it should be. Hack to learn.

1. If you're new to web dev, go to wikipedia to at least figure out how all the parts fit together (JS/CSS/HTML on client side, web servers, etc.). You should be able to at least diagram what does what.

2. For JS, CSS, and HTML, w3schools is a great place to start. Read all of the stuff on there for those three things (JQuery, HTML5, CSS3, etc. can be put off for a short time). It's relatively light and concise so it can be read entirely up front. Write yourself some pages to test what you read. Styling can be fun!

3. Unlike the previous reading topics, I would NOT suggest reading a massive book or all the Rails guides up front. I get bored on long reading stretches and question the effectiveness of the time spent; I'm sure this is common. I prefer to do a little reading to get me started, build something until I need to figure out a missing piece, read to fill in the puzzle, and repeat. You'll make mistakes along the way, but you'll learn actively. You'll slowly pick up the fundamentals of Ruby without having to read an entire language primer. You can and should improve your skill over time by supplementing it with more comprehensive resources. However, that's for another day after you have something minimal running.

If you know an overview of Rails, you can at least outline an architecture of your app to be built. Then you figure out how to implement the parts of that architecture using Rails by selectively reading small parts of a variety of sources. For me, I used snippets of the Rails guides, Hartl's book, Stack Overflow, the Rails API docs, and a variety of blog posts. I bought one of the Peepcode screencasts but didn't see the great benefit that is suggested by their user comments. Start easy and work towards the hard stuff. At least you'll have a string of small accomplishments for encouragement to go further.

On the other hand, I ended up reading 70% of the dev guide for Android to build my first app. It's in a world of its own so you have to do the long reading haul.
I think it's the eventual consequence of the mutation of the dev community. I guess and hope that we won't need to create a new website for better community sharing the content we're interested in. I wish we had a mixage of Torrent and Github to share any kind of content; article, links, video, picture, even spam texts...
Foundation 4: Kevin Rose and Tony Conrad
Noahlt wrote "Today, do any colleges even consider this?"

It probably depends on the school. Perhaps in some pretty perverse ways.

I'm surprised no one has mentioned the Espenshade and Radford study yet. It's quoted at e.g. http://www.transterrestrial.com/?p=28258 . Apparently "Being an officer or winning awards 'for such career-oriented activities as junior ROTC, 4-H, or Future Farmers of America, say Espenshade and Radford, 'has a significantly negative association with admission outcomes at highly selective institutions.' Excelling in these activities 'is associated with 60 or 65 percent lower odds of admission.'"

The scuttlebutt I'd heard is that Caltech was and is the highly selective school most interested in straight-up academic performance. Anecdotally in the 1980s my grades and SATs and decent MAA contest score and after-school job writing PDP-11 and Z-80 assembly language got me into Caltech, but they sure didn't impress Stanford or MIT. My brother had similar academic qualifications and test scores, but did a lot of photography and ran the yearbook instead of doing much programming, and he got into MIT the next year.

Caltech was my first choice anyway, but my father was an enthusiastic Stanford alumnus, and he was grouchy about me not being admitted. Around my sophomore year at Caltech he sent me a clipping from the alumni newspaper lamenting how Stanford did poorly in the Putnam math contest (http://www.maa.org/awards/putnam.html) and suggesting that alongside all the other baskets for people with nonacademic qualifications, the admissions office create a basket for people who are just extremely academically impressive.
All corporations want to make money, what makes you think Apple is different?

They have turned evil in the sense that they are restricting developer freedom, overwork their employees (who are happy to oblige, at least in the US, but that doesn't make it right), play the patent game to stifle competition, and all in all, are behaving in worse ways than Microsoft ever did. Thanks to Android, they have had to back off on some of their initiatives, luckily.

The only reason why they're getting away with all this is because they are producing pretty good products overall, but again, this doesn't make it right.