skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Starting a rebuttal with the word "wrong" seems rather counter-productive. If you have a reasonable point that disproves mine, then anybody reading it would notice this and as such the "wrong" is not required. If on the other hand, your point does not in fact counteract mine, then making such a strong statement seems rather foolish.

To begin:
* Uranite (U3O8) is a major ore of uranium https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Uraninite and is in fact mostly uranium by weight.
* "Uranium mining is the largest business in Niger and the life expectations is not much about 50 years there." Is an example of 'correlation does not imply causation'. To give you an example, the number of pirates have gone down over the last few hundred years. Global temperatures have gone up over the last few hundred years. From that information alone you cannot say that the lack of pirates causes global warming.

* I'd also mention here that there are large amounts of diamonds sourced from africa. A trade that is very profitable, yet leaves the people themselves with very little money nor increased standard of living.

* From the wikipedia article you specified: "Because uranium ore emits radon gas, uranium mining can be more dangerous than other underground mining, unless adequate ventilation systems are installed.". Assuming these safeguards are met, I fail to see how it would be 2,000,000 times as dangerous as coal mining.

I will, however, correct my previous statement.
-Natural uranium has an energy density of 443,000MJ/kg
-Coal has an energy density of 32.5MJ/kg.

Hence to produce the same amount of energy as you can produce using one KG of natural uranium you require 13630kg of coal.

Assuming the risk of coal mining is measured in a certain number of fatalities per kilogram mined (equivalent to a certain m^3 mined, given a constant density of the mined material) is R_C and R_U for coal and uranium respectively then the expected number of fatalities per "1kg of uranium equivalent energy" is then R_U and 13630R_C.

As such for coal to be "safer" 13630R_C needs to be < R_U, a statement I consider unlikely.
> I remember Erik Naggum calling out this "citation requested" calls as being passive aggressive, On HN I see them mostly coming along when the view of the other is not accepted.

I, personally, have provided citations for every single person who requested one of me as far as I know, not to mention answering quite a few requests made to others. Feel free to trawl my comment history looking for examples. If you can find one that I haven't seen, I'll go dig up a citation to support it.

It's hard to trust someone's opinion if they can't explain the facts upon which they base it. Of course I'm still wrong sometimes, but the exercise helps me to prove to myself whether or not I know what the hell I'm talking about. I often find new information and refine my opinions accordingly. That's how I learn.
I'm glad that he brough up "What you can't say" because I've never read that particular Paul Graham essay.
An inconvenient convenience. An excellent point, and just the sort of feedback I'd been waiting for; thank you. I'll publish the revised “Best” example shortly with fputs in place, and update the page accordingly.
Why don't you use the standard openssl RSA encryption function to encrypt the entire file, rather then encrypt a plaintext passphrase?

I don't know of an implementation that uses RSA encryption that doesn't use RSA to encrypt a (heavily padded, very random) key which they then use to encrypt the final payload using say AES or IDEA (in the original PGP).
I wonder if they'll continue the pattern they've set so far-
Win95 => Win98SE : Win2000 => WinXP : WinVista => Win7

The OS changes on a more fundamental level every other release. (At least, this is how I see it)

So does that imply Win8 is likely going to be another 'rewrite' (not that they necessarily start from scratch)?

P.S. Yes, I am ignoring WinME.
Why aren't there lines to buy the Xoom (vs iPad)?
Creator here. That's been on my todo list for a while. MDC might be a good replacement.
I wish that list wouldn't be about a metric I couldn't care less about but unfortunately everyone else seems to only care about start up time :(
Deepwater Horizon would have made a much better example, I think.
It is both. You can use it in a fuel cell form whereby you keep the water produced from its combustion, run electricity through it and get oxygen and hydrogen back. Alternatively though, the way hydrogen is turned into energy works if you just refill the hydrogen and throw away the water.
Better report submitted 13 hours ago:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2400915
Typographic style and the web
Exactly this. Top Gear isn't fair (or balanced). That is what makes the show funny.
Hacktivist Maintains Attack on Westboro Baptist Church
6% of nuclear power plants had radiation-releasing incidents INES 4 or bigger. Chernobyl and Fukushima alone comprise about 2% of NPPs worldwide.

There must be some creative statistics at works behind those safety figures.
Difficult to say if this is a April-fools joke, but if not, here is my thoughts.

I hope Microsoft does not apply the ribbon UI to all their future programs as it takes a lot of pixles and makes the menu messy and complex. The minimalistic side of me would hope for more shortcuts and _one_ place where you did settings/preferences for a program. I believe Mac OSX has done this very good with their system preferences panel and globally accessible cmd+',' shortcut in order to get to the preferences of current program.

And what is up with that background picture?
Downvote me if you want, yet I'm really sad about Hacker News. This is the 4th or 5th pro-nuclear propaganda article up-voted in a couple of weeks. Personally, I'm always sceptical about superlatives.

Yes right ... the safest. Especially, for our children and their children. For everybody who's a proponent of nuclear: If it is so save, why can't you get one insurance company to insure a plant against accidents?
And what do we do with the waste? How do we deal it? How do we make it clear for coming civilizations that they are not supposed to dig there etc. as the the waste will stay hazardous for 100,000 years?

Please watch:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Into_Eternity_(documentary)

Is there any other way to make electricity that puts that high of a burden on coming generations? Maybe I'm totally off, yet can effects from coal/water/wind/sun power plants kill people 100 years after they been shut down?
Pretty cool!

Not to be pedantic (I hate that word), but in the spirit of improvement, you may want to spell check your popups.

(example: "<bdi> Text that is seperated from directional formatting of its surroundings."

... should be separated)

At first, I looked at this chart, and thought "cute, but what good is it." Then I started clicking on it, and eventually found myself printing it and hanging it in my office! Good work.
Break helper for better vision [Chrome]
I have one non-tech-savvy friend who just holds his laptop's power button down for 5 seconds when he's done using it. "Oh yeah, it's great, it shuts down properly and instantly and I never lose any data!" I had to emphatically explain to him that he was effectively playing Russian roulette with his life's work. This is just an anecdote, but while anecdotes cannot set averages, they can be used to find a lower bound on extremes.
* We currently have massive political pressures blocking the production of nuclear reactors. There is no problem in building it, the problem is in the politics.
This Woman Lives in a 90-Square Foot Apartment in Manhattan (VIDEO)
Everything is ultimately a dead end. You can thank entropy for that. The sun will die, too, as will any star we go to.

Fusion would probably be the best, because a large fraction of the universe's mass is hydrogen. Antimatter would also be cool, but it's also incredibly dangerous and we're far from being able to create significant amounts of it.

In the long run, we probably can't afford to drop any power sources. But in the long run, we're all dead.
Apple Fails When It Comes To “Basic Durable Product Design”?
Nobody advocates building more nerve gas plants.
True, though one problem is there are a non-zero number of people quite willing to having their real name attached to their conspiracy-theory or racism-mongering stuff. They might even prefer it, because their rl occupation is selling their conspiracy-theory books or otherwise hawking their conspiracy-theory website/organization/etc. It gets rid of the kids trolling for laughs, but you still end up with the hardcore people who are 100% committed to their odd views as a lifestyle, and have to decide what (if anything) to do about them.
I could say the same about Apple's iOS (e.g. you can use hardware not present in all devices, or target APIs that not all devices have (or are even capable of being) upgraded to), and it wouldn't be be an accurate reflection of the real situation there either.

Unless you put numbers on it, then it's an empty statement.
Yeah, there are a few different types. One sits on shore and uses wave power to compress air, which then runs turbines. This is probably the most efficient method i've seen. There are a few others though, like the buoy method, etc.

Solar is about the most reliable solution you can come across, aside from an RTG mostly because it has no real moving parts and as such has no real way to fail.

What will be interesting is if they manage to up the energy density to the point where it is economical to build.
On the other hand, you can always use thorium deposits, use nuclear waste from other nations as fuel, pull uranium from seawater, etc.
Android is destroying the low-margin smart-phone market, it's also demolishing what's left of Nokia's bargain phone space. Apple is still going to come out on top in terms of profits. I'd hardly call that dead in the water.
Interesting, do you have any links as to how they work/how they are constructed/etc?
I do not find this to be true as I have had multiple connectors with the design proposed as 'durable' in the article and they have simply began to to fray some other place.

As proven in the original reddit-thread[1] you can easily find proof of other designs - broken [2].

[1]: http://www.reddit.com/r/pics/comments/gd2lm/apple_has_yet_to...

[2]: http://i.imgur.com/KFIhV.jpg

EDIT: formatting
I don't know for sure but I suspect that people in the UK paid more attention to total personal wealth including property asset values, which were rising at a pretty ridiculous rate.

To put this into perspective with an anecdote, I know a family who bought a house about 10 years ago to rent out in an up and coming area for £60k. Two years later they bought the house next door for 220k. Now each house is worth around £400-500k. This isn't even in London/the South where the rises were even greater.

So property assets perhaps made up for relatively low income, and I feel that the government at the time played up to this. I also know a lot of people who took debts against their homes to increase their cash flow and buy cars, kitchens, etc with it.

EDIT: Of course, now the situation is different, with the property market being flat. Who knows what will happen from now on, but our new government has made noises about making sure the property market less important to the economy.
You're also ignoring WinNT, which became Win2k, which became WinXP. The real story is more complicated: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_NT
IAEA and WHO are notorious for counting only directly attributable deaths. If someone dies from radiation-induced cancer 10 years after in the ripe age of 30-something, it doesn't get in the stats. Then the stats get perpetuated endlessly by nuclear fanboys.
Well it's definitely not cost of housing, which is very expensive here. For the most part you can expect to pay a lot more for a much smaller house in the UK compared to the US.

I'm not sure where it is that we make up the difference in costs, or if indeed we do.
Qualcomm's new mobile ARM chipset has breathtaking performance
1. Why do people have to fix their mistakes if automation can solve the problem for them? If we can assume that mistakes will be made, and we can find an automated way to solve those mistakes, then why should we force humans to jump through hoops?

2. Why can't a parser be strictly standardized and liberal with its input at the same time? If the spec provides error recovery behavior, what is wrong with that?

My point is that there's no such thing as too liberal as long as all parsers implement the same exact kind of liberal parsing. Our low-level communication protocols have no concept of invalid input, they can recover from any random burst of garbage input, and we think this is normal. But then at a higher level of communication, like XML, suddenly error recovery is a bad thing? It makes no sense to me.
Those accidents are mining accidents alone. It ignores black lung, for example.

For the other thing, if that's the actual reason they're locating plants there, I'm against it, for whatever that's worth.
I will agree with you that OS X Preference windows are easy to natigate and often have very apt UX for various types of preferences.

However, the menubar system (File, Edit, View, etc) as it currently stands is in much need of improvement. How many times have you hunted for an action/preference in the menubars to no avail? It's rows and rows of text with no visual feedback for various types of actions.

The only improvement of late has been the addition of a live "search and hunt" (by that I mean, type in a search keyword and it will hunt it out of the menu and point to it).
The basic argument that most people responded to was the claim that the ipv6 transition was practically impossible. The central point of the counterarguments is that since djb's article, a lot has changed and there now actually are sensible transition plans. Even djb has acknowledged that fact.

The remainder of the arguments were mostly about taste. He accepts NAT; many others argue that NAT is horrible and he ignores those arguments based on straw men (an edit in the original article) like:

(Update 2011/04/02: A lot of people have criticized this
article by talking about how nasty it is to require NAT
everywhere. If we had too much NAT, the whole world would
fall apart, [..]

Moreover, his arguments included technical errors that limit their applicability. All in all he was simply far from convincing. Getting into a discussion where you defend the virtues of NAT is not saying something "you can't say". It saying something unpopular that needs good arguments, because there are good reasons it's unpopular.
Interesting also is the earlier American-German GRACE satellite. For more information on both see here http://www.science20.com/planetbye/grace_goce
Quick question - what are the killer features that you would want to see in Windows 8?

I can't think of any. While Windows XP was getting a bit old (in terms of age) it did pretty much everything you'd want from an Operating System and some security weaknesses aside (which as someone working in that field matter to me, but may not to others) I struggle to find what, other than shininess and less reboots on major changes Windows 7 brings to the table. Likewise, Windows 7 is so 'good enough' I can't imagine what features would possibly make me want to upgrade. Anyone got any ideas?
Some good points, but consider:

- alternate tasks to switch to when dealing with unavoidable delays (e.g. waiting for other people, information, etc)

- alternate tasks to switch to during periods of weak concentration or limited time or high interruption

For example, you might build that big scary new algorithm in the morning in an uninterrupted block, but towards the end of the day, you might be good for nothing but a bit of code gardening or tools work.
Remember that you need to produce massive amounts of toxic waste to produce solar panels. (Semiconductor fabrication is many things, green it is not).
PGP/GPG?
Mvc for client side javascript apps
I had a similar feeling with HTTPS [0] in suggesting a transition to making encrypted connections the norm on websites so that networks can't sniff activity. The point was lost on most posters who want absolute security for every website that uses HTTPS despite the unfriendly UI warnings for even a 5 minute expiry despite being valid [1]. Not just banks, but websites like Wikipedia too.

[0] http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2376548

[1] http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2376183
I suppose the referenced blog post by the TextMate author Allan Odgaard is quite old (2009), but boy it sure has eery similarities with the development of cloud sync for Things:

A beloved product. Fans wondering whether to hold tight or jump ship for some less polished but actively improving alternative. Awkward blog posts in the interim.

I do wish the best for both, because I am a fan of both products. I wonder if a cushion of money from creating a successful product causes passion burnout for some of these developers.

Direct link to Allan's post: http://blog.macromates.com/2009/working-on-it/
I thought it was a fabulous (tho limited utility) hack around the key distribution problem.
Yes, I agree with you on the 'file, edit, view, window' etc. This need some rethinking and redesigning, but I'm not sure these huge ribbons is the right way.

Hence my example to Mac OSX cmd+',' : if I want to edit some preferences in my program I know where to do it. In windows the preferences can be both under 'file', 'view' or 'window' for that matter.

This is only an example, but the Windows-line has proven to have almost non-existing 'rules' for how to layout preferences and this affect mainly the non-technical user.
I think it's more like saying it's not worth the cost to scrap all existing airplanes for a new airplane design with a 10% gain in fuel efficiency, if a modification to existing ones will make them slightly uglier, heavier and still give you an 8% gain.

Some "purists" would much rather see all-new planes flying around. They would point to any number of deficiencies in the old airplanes to make their point and they would try to minimize the extra cost of replacing all the old airplanes (you're going to have to replace them in 10 years anyway, so why not start now?).
CSS3 3D Slideshow Framework [Chromium 12 or Safari]
So it appears that this site has the perceived advantage of turning a web developer's SSL cert into key for encryption, which at first sounds like a good idea.

If on the other hand you don't exclusively communicate with SSL-using web developers, you're better off using a PGP implementation. Unfortunately Symantec bought PGP Corporation, but GPG4Win[1] is free, as are GPG-based PGP implementations for almost every other platform.

Worried about it being hard? It really isn't. In fact it's easy to get up and running with encrypting your Gmail in Firefox[2] even if you have a Mac or something else[3].

[1] - http://www.gpg4win.org/

[2] - http://www.instructables.com/id/Send-and-Receive-Encrypted-E...

[3] - http://www.instructables.com/id/Encrypt-your-Gmail-Email/
But one expert says the radiation leaks will be ongoing and it could take 50 to 100 years before the nuclear fuel rods have completely cooled and been removed.

"As the water leaks out, you keep on pouring water in, so this leak will go on for ever," said Dr John Price, a former member of the Safety Policy Unit at the UK's National Nuclear Corporation.

"There has to be some way of dealing with it. The water is connecting in tunnels and concrete-lined pits at the moment and the question is whether they can pump it back.

"The final thing is that the reactors will have to be closed and the fuel removed, and that is 50 to 100 years away.

http://www.abc.net.au/news/stories/2011/04/01/3179487.htm

I actually heard an interview with this guy, and he was assuming the exclusion zone (20km from the plant I think?) would remain for at least 50 years.
Amen: I really want to like it, but found the documentation completely impenetrable. It doesn't help that there's a big refactoring effort underway, and the entire views system seems to be changing to Template.

I wouldn't write it off already though: the team knows that the documentation is an issue, and there's definitely a push towards improving it. http://guides.sproutcore.com/ for example.
Exposé. Virtual desktops.

A massive overhaul of Windows Update that turns it into part app store, part package manager. I want a Debian-like system where it's easy to add my own sources, and everything on the system is updated with one service.
Of course there are skilled young developers as much as there is terrible old developers. I was responding in context of the OP wasn't trying to pass judgement on age group simply trying to restore balance. Sorry if it was unclear.
The rise and fall of the man who invented the portable computer: Osborne
Personally, I feel this way about everything thrust on humanity. Religion, politics, science - so many ideas are excellent ideas in theory, but when implemented by people, we seem to screw them all up. I suspect this may be our undoing.
I agree. Softening, sugarcoating, removing the negative aspects of a comparison, is dishonest. It is incomplete and misleading. And as such it is not the most useful information for the recipient.

One great thing about techie and science culture is the wide agreement that being straight and blunt is the way to go. It allows us to identify the problem instead of getting into a game of reading between the lines and trying to figure out what was really meant. In this case the interviewer wanted to know why his offer was rejected. The more complete and direct the answer, the better.
Disclaimer: I'm a technical person, or in some cases called geek :)

The non-technical user, I'm sure loves these large buttons, informative popup-bubbles and cool icons everywhere.

But if one is supposed to _use_ the system for anything else than the most basic tasks I have found these 'features'/designs to be more annoying.

I hope windows 8 (or whatever the next version is called) to be more minimalistic - or at least give me _the choice_ to have tiny tiny icons, lots of raw text and links, small menu-bars etc.
So, you are anticipating features that have been in other operating systems for years?
Speed, because cryptanalysis via cipher-text only attacks becomes easier as you get more and more ciphertext associated with a given key, and because if someone attempts to analyse a memory core dump or the memory space of your computer hopefully the only data available is the session key, rather than the full decrypted RSA private key.

See:

https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Session_key

https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Ciphertext-on...

http://academic.csuohio.edu/zhao_w/teaching/Old/EEC693-S07/l...
That's what they've done with NT for the past 4 releases, yes. 2000 was the first NT5, XP was the second. Vista was the first NT 6, Windows '7' was the second. The actual version numbers of Windows, unlike the marketing names, reflect this release style.
Running Your Own Job Auction Service
Using /dev/urandom as password source is a very bad idea.
Portable C Compiler 1.0 released
Is anything special in this version?
I love the idea behind 'nested slides' , hope to see this implemented elsewhere as well!

If one is at the bottom of the nested slide you can easily go forth by pressing : "↑ + →". Brilliant.
The Forbes 400 is mostly entrepreneurs but the "Forbes 40,000" is mostly financiers, only a small fraction of whom create net positive value.