skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Why do we not have a global energy task force whose singular job it is is to plan, produce and protect the worlds energy?

Large parts of the world actually tried this, not just for their energy needs but for all other goods and services, too. It doesn't actually work that way in reality.
Why does one boy spend 10,000 hours practicing basketball or music, while the others watch television all day?

Good question. Have you examined any research on the issue? What sources do you recommend?
I use server density. Great service and worth the price. Lets you monitor almost anything and if they dont have a script to monitor what you want then you can create it in a few lines of python.

The iPhone and Andriod apps are fantastic and the main reason I went with them.
What are the other options, then?
If chiropractors were not quacks, the science would show it. Unfortunately for them, it shows the exact opposite.

And your personal anecdote is meaningless. I know an elderly lady who swears she's met aliens. Nice lady, not trying to get on the local news, no reason to lie. I honestly think she believes it. Doesn't mean alien encounters aren't bullshit.

Unreproducible anecdotes are not how science works.

EDIT: There seems to be a believe in some circles that chiropractors are just a type of legitimate "back doctor". This is the most important misconception that needs to be stopped in it's tracks, the rest would really just be icing on the cake.
The Art of Electronics, 3rd ed.
Now available for pre-order on Amazon. Hopefully this time it's for real.

http://www.amazon.com/Art-Electronics-Paul-Horowitz/dp/0521809266/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1301802821&sr=8-1
I've been working with nodejs a lot lately. Nodejs itself is fine, it moves a fair bit between releases itself but it's predictable. It's built on V8 which really is fast and has not failed me once.

The worst part are the libraries. Some are outdated, even 'major' things. That scares me a bit. Even worst is when you bring a pull request updating the library to work with a later nodejs and get no response.

I've had major issues with sockets, which really sucks because to me that's a major appeal of nodejs. Non-blocking code and sockets make realtime really approachable. But nowjs didn't work for me, randomly working between browsers. So I rewrote it using socket.io, same technology at a lower level. Same issues. Then I finally got response from the dude from nowjs saying it's a problem with socket.io 'wait for 0.7' crossing fingers, knocking on wood.

That's not serious, that gives me the @#$##$^.

I don't think people should go out there, make website promoting their awesome libraries and the thing just falls over after 3 api calls.
There are a lot of parallels with airliner design. From reading articles about the nuke plant design, I think they could learn a lot from aviation engineers about how to build safe systems.
Stop visiting HN so much.

I recently started a routine of only visiting HN once per week - and only on the weekend. I use the 100 point threshold version to gather up all of the interesting articles I missed throughout the week.

http://news.ycombinator.com/over?points=100

I scan through the listing and throw anything I'm interested in reading into Instapaper. Now I'm stocked on great content to last me through the next week.

I'm finding that I'm a lot more focused now that my mind is not being tossed around constantly by whatever the trending topics-of-the-day might be. I'm now driven more to create than to consume.
I wasn't expecting anything less.
I had to look up the Banquiao dam disaster:

"the 1975 Banqiauo Dam collapse in China killed 171000 people"

"The dam failure killed an estimated 171,000 people; 11 million people lost their homes"

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Banqiao_Dam

I did remember the Bhopal gas disaster:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bhopal_disaster
Perhaps we shouldn't mass produce deadly environmentally destructive pesticides either? Would that be a bold statement?

Why do you keep changing the subject? Quit talking about coal and pesticides and explain why it's okay to risk the lives of entire cities of people for the sake of extra electric output?

Edit: I never disagreed with the article's title. I was agreeing with the parent post's sentiment that regardless of the numbers, downplaying the suffering of the people in Fukushima and the risks they still face is wrong. Nuclear power is dangerous and can have terrible costs. It's entirely reasonable not to view it as a praiseworthy technology.
The title of this article is that nuclear power is the safest, relative to other sources of power currently capable of scaling to needs.

That's a very important distinction, so I would ask you to please consider that.
Correction: Andrew Mason actually is a programmer. He built Groupon in Rails.

Also, as the other commenter pointed out, Mark Pincus's co-founder Justin Waldron is a programmer, but Zynga's probably a bad example anyway because Pincus was very much an accomplished entrepreneur with a lot of resources at hand prior to founding Zynga.
Bringing up coal when people start bitching about nuclear is no different from bringing up car accidents when people start bitching about flying.

Danger is relative, and relative to the rest of the power industry, nuclear is absurdly safe.
Game Theory and Kickstarter?
Compounding this problem, conventional security wisdom is that you should never acknowledge unsolicited email, because the spammer might be using a fake unsubscribe link to confirm your email address is real. So a system that requires manual unsubscription this way will actually punish accidentally subscribed users for following good protocol.

Furthermore, if the "confirmation" email winds up in a spam filter and the user never sees it, subsequent emails will still go out and probably be auto-marked as spam.
"Nuclear Power is Safest Way to Make Electricity"

In case you are unversed in the nuanced English being used here, "safe" != "safest", nor are their meanings equivalent. So why do you keep changing the subject?

Nuclear isn't 'safe', but it is the 'safest'. Modern society assumes some amount of risk, get over it.
I understand. However - I am curious - energy is the fundamental resource we now are 100% dependent upon for survival. Obviously the energy industry knows this , thus the fact that they have successfully staged a coup on global politics.

I do find it interesting though, that there is not really any apolitical/civilian organizations that seek to guide/set/create global energy policy. I mean real apolitical orgs - not a shill think-tank such as CFR BS.

God I'm getting cynical.
Opt in vs opt out. It makes a difference under the law.
why it's okay to risk the lives of entire cities of people for the sake of extra electric output?

Do you not understand, that's the exact reason why people are bringing up coal.

If we were to switch off of coal and onto nuclear, scores less people would die and get sick. A massive amount. Not to mention the benefits of halting climate change.

That doesn't mean nuclear is all sunshine and rainbows, and nobody who reasonably supports nuclear over coal thinks that.
Thanks for the comparison, I'm actually very impressed by the accuracy of Google trends.

I wonder given the lack of accuracy between quantcast/alexa/compete if there is room in the market for another traffic intelligence site that piggybacks off of Google trends somehow.

[Edit] Looks like its against their TOS: http://groups.google.com/group/google-labs-trends/browse_thr...

Hmm...
Well, for that matter, we don't have enough nuclear power production capacity to meet our needs either, so I don't entirely see your point. Reducing the amount of power we're producing with fossil fuels will mean needing to increase our production from other sources, but it doesn't mandate that we have to increase it from a particular source.
Hey Matt, nice to see you chiming in. Appreciate the thoughts.

Ah more MN Nice.

You say "You are left funding founders not dedicated enough to their startups to move and give their startups the best chance." Interpreted another way: everyone not smart enough or driven enough to move to the Valley we'll be stuck with. Second raters.

No interpretation needed. I said dedicated enough. You stated they weren't smart enough or driven enough.

But you're missing the point: Is this pool still good enough? In the pool of 5,000 rejected YC and TS applicants per year are there any winners? We think so. We think there are a lot. Chicago is a far cry from SV or NYC yet a full half of Accelerate Labs' last class went on to raise an impressive angel round. 50% follow on funding is nothing to sneeze at no matter how you measure it. Most accelerator programs cross their fingers for that.*

Geography does not dictate success. If so, Phoenix would have more successful incubators than Boulder.

You say "Thanks to Angel List you don't have to pay an accelerator for access". You just made raising a round leveraging AL sound really easy. You've found success with it -- is it really that easy? But even so, how do you think companies that are a tad too early for that going to maximize their chances of getting to that point? A Pedal Brain c. 2009?

It is that easy. If you can't get to the point of a prototype, you shouldn't be funded. If you can't convince someone to work for equity/options to get you to a prototype, you shouldn't be funded.

You bring up good points, and I think that they lead to the fact we appear to be "just another YC". Stay tuned. This is just our first class (what we call a cycle). In 2012 and beyond we'll be focusing much more on niche cycles. Ones that are absolutely perfect for this ecosystem. See this year merely as our test drive, but we know we're not perfect. Factor that in before you short us into the ground. =)

Do the startups applying this year and giving you 6% of their founder shares understand it's just a test drive this year?
We used Nagios and now switched to use Zabbix.
Dude - your "th" key is a little flaky
At the last company I managed, we did a side-by-side comparison between CloudKick and Scout, and ultimately went with Scout.

It's not perfect, and not very extensible, but it had the singular advantage of being very reliable.
Hydro-electric, wind, solar, geothermal, tidal, to name the ones that come immediately to mind.
Did you read the article or just the linkbait HN submission headline?
Artificial Leaf Power
You can't blame Clarkson. Top Gear's reviews aren't necessarily based on some objective standard. They rate a driving experience. For them, electric cars haven't provided the same experience that they are used to and it will be a while before mass-market electric cars do that.
One thing that blows my mind with the Fukushima plant (and presumably others) is that the spent fuel pond is seemingly built above ground. Wouldn't you want this to be at the very bottom of the reactor building, so that water could collect in it in an emergency situation like in Fukushima where water is pumped in from above? Maybe this is (was) one of the unknowns/unthoughtofs that you mention.

As an aside, if no one's seen the excellent Battle for Chernobyl, I highly recommend it. It details the insane clean-up operation that took place after the Chernobyl disaster. It's on Google Video.
That's impossible to answer, because the definition of best is completely subjective.

Best is what works for you in whatever role you happen to be in. I know people using windows coding in RoR, Python, Java, etc with a high degree of efficiency. I know others who are doing the same thing on Linux and OS X. It works for them.
From a tax perspective, locating the US office in a tax free jurisdiction is most wise. These states would include Washington, Nevada, Wyoming, Texas, Florida, and (sort of) New Hampshire. Also, setting up a relationship between the foreign entity and the US entity to minimize US taxes (as Microsoft has done --see above) certainly helps. Finally some attention has to be paid to the tax effects on the US citizens (or green card holders) and the non citizens (or green card holders). Most foreign tax questions involve an expert in the US as well as in the foreign jurisdiction.

As for legal issues - contracts are handled internationally all the time with ease. But liability issues vary dramatically from state to state and even more from country to country.

For a start up, unless the nature of the business is very liability intense, I would focus on the tax issues. As this article has shown, tax can be really, really expensive.
This is the first time i see this amazing book "Cloning Internet Applications with Ruby", a must read and chance to know more about Sinatra.Thanks
I saw this graphic the other day that puts into perspective various sources of radiation exposure (from xkcd, but it's not a joke...) I didn't realize that the lowest levels clearly linked to increased risk of cancer were so high.

http://xkcd.com/radiation/
It's just a matter of time before a version mismatch or something bites you. My money's on the idiocy of the case-insensitive filesystem.
Statsd takes realtime info and dumps it in. You have to at least know what you're measuring when you start. I
Ve got a month or two of debug logs, and I dont know whee the gems are yet, touugh I'd probably start with timings and go from there.
Ask HN: Evaluate my startup idea: Q&A website for solving health problems
The idea of this website is to help people solve their personal health problems through the form of question and answer to a community of people.

People will ask questions about a disease or symptom they have; someone who has the same health problem can share their experience on how they mitigated or cured it.

I want to know if you think this offers enough value for people, or is a bad idea that will result in fail. Please explain your reasoning.
You know, the title made me expect something... very different. I was wondering what kind of bombs "Warlock bombs" are and who let them loose in a major city.
Seems sort of revisionist to say "of course Mark I BWR's aren't safe". You know what nuclear experts were saying 3 weeks ago? They were talking about all the safety features, and the multiple levels of basically impervious containment, and how radioactive material would never get out into the environment. And here we are with a pretty serious radioactive mess to clean up (and from the looks of it it's probably going to get worse before it gets better)
The headline here is very unfortunately chosen. The actual article is a very interesting look at a project of which I hadn't previously been aware, but the game theory discussed within is both very little and not the most interesting bit of the content.
Simple, Effective Password Management with Keepass and Dropbox
My point is that fossil fuels and nuclear power are the only two types that scale efficiently with current technology. Everything else doesn't scale as well. Not sure how else to word that, and that's exactly what I meant up there.

It has nothing to do with current capacity. Nuclear has lost a lot to debates much like this one; however, if we wanted the capacity, nuclear would step up and fill it in at a reasonable price. The same amount of power generated by the alternatives would be astronomically expensive. That's one of the problems that plague the alternatives you've named: either they are far too expensive to use at any kind of large scale, or suitable locations are in thin supply, or power output fluctuates unsuitably with a change in weather, and so on. They just can't compete.

The current research into nuclear is making it even cheaper and safer (thorium, etc); the current research into the alternatives is making them cheap enough to be possible with significant demand.
"Sprint’s going to have a hard time convincing consumers that they should pay extra for its slower 4G speeds"

Sprint no longer charges a premium for 4g users. All smartphone users pay the extra 10 bucks they once charged 4g users.

Even with the extra 10 bucks, Sprint is still 20-30 bucks cheaper per line than Verizon.
hmmm... I have to reboot daily - sometimes more than once a day - on an ASUS Eee 1GB running XP
I read the name of this, and thought "Mal Odor... oh dear."

That being said, this is like a Mac version of Wine for Linux? If so, cool.
Madden Puts Concussions in New Light in His Game
This just means that the bar is set very low. Any method of producing power that harms large numbers of people deserves serious scrutiny. We shouldn't be discouraging it, we should be calling for more!
CollegeBoard too
If you're living relatively close to a coal power plant you're already worse off. Statistically, you should be far more afraid of living next to one.

I'm not saying it's something that should be dismissed, but I do think that we just have to take into account that anything that handles humongous amounts of energy in a concentrated space is dangerous, but nuclear energy is less so than most alternatives.
Don't believe the trolls! They just want the gold!
The stock market ... what’s important ... is the potential growth of your sales, not your current sales, since the point of buying stock is to sell the stock to someone else later on, at a higher price.

Or to receive dividends. Heard of blue chip investors? Buy-and-hold strategy?

"Mining" versus "farming" is disputed in the stock market as well. That's why people talk about P/E ratio.
You ask: "Do the startups applying this year and giving you 6% of their founder shares understand it's just a test drive this year?"

We're not going anywhere, nor will our support, nor will our mentors. We may change the focus of our classes (although we haven't decided yet) but nothing changes for our startups this August. They still receive massive value from us and will continue to long after they leave the nest.
This doesn't address what you want perfectly, but you might find it interesting.

http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2011/04/02/world/asia/ass...
I wholeheartedly agree. Really good point! Wait to swing at that ball until it has almost hit the floor--wait, hold, wait, hold, and wait some more. And other than the fact that the article addresses incorporating in Delaware, why are we limiting this discussion to corporations as apposed to the myriad of other entity solutions? And shouldn't we be discussing how to formalize our relationships so that the formalities HELP us, not hinder us? So I would add "what kind of formalities do we need" and then "what kind of entity?" to your "other" questions as well. I don't know if you need a lawyer -- depends on the lawyer -- a lawyer who is willing and able to see into the dynamics of the group and has the wisdom to keep the agreements as loose as possible for as long as possible.
Maybe CL looks at Padmapper and thinks "oh great, somebody else did it and now we don't have to".
"History suggests that nuclear power rarely kills and causes little illness. That’s also the conclusion engineers reach when they model scenarios for thousands of potential accidents."

Auditing nuclear power's extremely short history is not a valid method of assessing risk. In poker they call this 'results oriented thinking'. Especially when discussing black swan events, history is almost by definition not a very useful basis for predictions.
I can't really offer an opinion of success/failure, but the idea makes me highly uncomfortable. As is, self-misdiagnosis is high, with untrained people flocking towards "popular"/well-known diseases that "kind of fits" their symptoms, or finding out about a disease they hadn't previously known about that sounds "just like" what they have, or just chasing zebras. With a community encouraging and amplifying this effect... I'm slightly terrified.
NOBODY is saying that we shouldn't learn from the past when it comes to nuclear power. However, sensationalists such as yourself, claiming shit like "Nuclear power is inherently UNSAFE. It takes a lot of hubris to claim otherwise." are not adding to rational discussion, but rather detracting from it.

The only thing people like you accomplish is preventing modern reactor designs from being implemented, therefore effectively discouraging improvement in the industry.
No when you're mining you use the capital you acquired to start more mines. There are lots of unprofitable mines, software is much more akin to mining in that your market is generally unknown, it requires a lot of capital cost and the the payoffs if you strike gold are enormous, however most will not strike gold. As we've discovered in Canada once you've dug that hole you can make decent coin by allowing cities to fill it with their trash.

Producing software is a capital intensive business with large pay offs that are irrespective of the amount of labour/capital inputted, consulting is a business in which one makes a slight profit over labour. Software that you own outright is a labour intensive capital good. If you're advocating the farming market of the software business then you're advocating consultancy which if done right can make you decent coin, the problem is that if you can actually make software that people want to use then you're generally better off moving towards the mining market.

What the OP is talking about is largely the difference between owning a mine and being a mining industry consultant / mine worker. Mining is an industry that is unpopular and his impression of farming is largely that of something that last existed in the 1920s.

Modern farming has nothing to do with returning the land to it's native state and has everything to do with pumping it full of nitrogen, spraying it with pesticides and hiring low wage workers, applying for gov't subsidies so that you can eek out 1-3% profit with enormous capital costs. The picture in the supermarket of a farmer is not reality.
Hydroelectric has the problem that:
1) You're making tens of square kilometers of land uninhabitable by flooding.
2) Such flooding promotes the formation of anaerobic algae which generate thousands of tons of C02
3) Dams collapse too.

Wind cannot provide a stable energy source. The advances required in battery technology and so-called "smart grids" are still too far off. You can't power a steel mill on wind power.

Solar is extremely dependent on location and, once again, requires a power infrastructure overhaul.

Geothermal and tidal are still untested.

All of the mentioned experimental technologies will require at the very least 20 years to mature and will bring their own problems as well (geothermal has the tiny little problem that it causes earthquakes).

Most people don't understand that undertaking an energy infrastructure update is something that takes decades and has to be planned thinking about its effects 30 and 40 years from now. And that also means that while you wait for technologies to mature you have to use stopgaps. Right now there is no alternative for nuclear and there likely won't be for 20 years unless nations are willing to invest hundreds of billions in research and upgrades.
People ported Quake II to managed C++ and you can't get "Hello World" to work? No offense, but it's you.

http://www.vertigosoftware.com/Quake2.htm
They were later removed because they cause difficulties in performance optimization. They're hard to implement consistently and correctly (i.e, so things like post counts for each thread etc add up correctly for the hellbanned user) without blowing performance out of the water for the general case.
Man, those are some ugly demos.
None of those can replace coal / nuclear.

EDIT: Here's Bill Gates explaining why nuclear is not optional: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JaF-fq2Zn7I