skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The prime reason for me to drop Slashdot as a news source is because it is slow to post stories. The stories you see there are generally days old, or even re-posted older stories.

Also, usually their blurbs don't add much to the linked article.

I still sometimes read it, but much less as before. With HN articles are submitted and published on the site almost instantly, and users can determine whether it is interesting. This is great.

Another thing is that Slashdot tries to focus too much on mass "sensational" news, whereas HN has many stories about open source projects, hacking projects, obscure new programming languages/paradigms. Again, much more interesting.
It never needs to be restarted? What OS is it on?
Of the 1%, by the 1%, for the 1%
Download subtitle drumline - Penelusuran Google
>> They implement the effect by using a rather large background image and a mask image and move the background image around via Javascript.

Scrolling the background image position with javascript can be really slow on even recent browsers, pushing the CPU when software rendering. Mobile Safari also shows image "seams" between mask images when zoomed out.
What would you suggest? Keeping in mind that basically all renewable sources sans hydroelectric can't be used to provide baseload power and hydroelectric power both has very few potential locations (most of which are in use) and has the nasty failure condition of washing away a good portion of the countryside.
Google Profile in China Shrinking
I don't quite understand why people obsess over numbers when it comes to consumerism. Just because McDonalds sell the most burgers in the world, doesn't mean they are the best.
I'm doing contingency planning in Japan. Would you guys like an AMA?
I'm a Navy doc and at lunch a couple of weeks ago was told to be on a plane for Japan in the morning. We've been working 24/7 for a while now. I'm ostensibly here as the doctor, for anyone who has a sniffle, hernia, breaks a leg, etc, but very few people come to sick call, and since I have a BS in physics, I have gotten to actually participate in policy and planning decisions, at least at the operational level (no direct line to POTUS, sorry).

IF you want me to, I can ask public affairs about an AMA. Maybe if you post some questions, we can meditate on it a bit (that and it's slow here right now, which is a good thing).
Ask HN: Is there an IRC channel for founders to hang in whilst they work?
#startups on irc.freenode.org?
fusion development hasn't been stopped, especially not for fear of proliferation.

Do you have any information about this subject that I do not?

Also, the major problem with putting solar power plants in deserts is that you lose most of your power trying to get it somewhere useful. Expect this to change when we have commercially viable room temperature (ish) superconductors.
I built something like this for Caltrain: http://epall.github.com/animated-caltrain/
World Cup Champions 2011 Album Photos-India
Just give it to him already. Ask him to pay shipping, and bask in the good deed while you wait for your new machine. Rather than asking him to part with a small amount of money he probably can't really afford and you likely don't really need, tell him to pass the favor on to someone else someday.
Dr. Michael Burry's 2004 Subprime-Mortgage Short
Unity looks promising. Maybe I'll switch back to default Ubuntu desktop again :-)

I didn't know about Unity before this, even though I've been using Ubuntu for the last 7 years.

I used Tint2 on Openbox to get a vertical taskbar. Combined with Tree Style Tabs for Firefox it creates a consistent UI hierarchy going from left to right.
There are good reasons to take $20k from angels and good reasons to take $20k from clients. Both will distract you a bit from building your product and selling it to people - you have to prospect, negotiate, get paid, etc. On the plus side for clients, as soon as the check clears you're even. Two years from now a $20k invoice is a cute memory but a $20k investment still dilutes you, takes a spot on your cap table, and gives someone the right to send you email when you would prefer to be building stuff and selling it.

I am consulting again this week. It will chew a week that I could have done marketing for AR with, but the invoice will make things much easier for me. Partly it will pay for some work to accelerate AR's revenue growth, and partly it will pay for a mini-vacation with my girlfriend to meet my family. (If that suggests mid-term plans not often associated with startups, well, what can I say, I'm quirky.)
Free Kindle edition of "Do the Work", an upcoming Steven Pressfield book
His "War Of Art" changed my life.
I get the point, and it's important to point out to beginners the various subtleties of error checking, etc. - but to me the 'best possible' hello world is rather overengineered, I mean 4 includes to begin with... :-)

And dude, don't go using the word 'worst' as lightly as that. It's dangerous - I am sure we could make it ohhh really quite worse... how about relying on some known compiler/os bugs to flip some bits somewhere, obfuscating it right up then generate some code by repeating various pointless operations (but all slightly subtly randomly different so not obvious enough to remove) to get it to say ~ 5 million lines of code? :-D
I know it's easy to suggest as a New Zealander (lots of mountains, lots of rain, and not that many people), but that hydro you mention is ace, wish all our power came from it.
I can believe it becoming impossible to buy or sell land there. That'd go a long way to making it unlivable in any practical sense, no matter what the actual safety of the area is.
We just need to build newer reactors.

The problem isn't that we don't have designs that can deal with these sorts of problems. The problem is that we don't have the political strength of will to decommission the older, unsafe plants and replace them with newer, safer plants. Similarly we don't have the political strength of will to do what is required to ensure uncompromised safety, ie. moving spent fuel into secured areas away from power plants, breeding fuel to dramatically reduce the amount of radioactive waste created and burning that waste out to make it less radioactive before it ever needs to be stored, etc.
Rosa parks did not sit at the back of the bus because she was tired as most histories have it. She sat there as a courageous act of civil disobedience after being carefully selected due to her impeccable character (so that the incident could not be dismissed as an act by a person without good standing).
What about Wave Power? It's pretty safe and has a very minimal environmental impact, almost constant output and for the most part is hidden from eye.

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

Just listened to an interesting podcast about it on Late Night Live:

http://www.abc.net.au/rn/latenightlive/stories/2011/3176948....

Obviously this wouldn't work for landlocked countries or countries which don't have shores with a constant supply of waves (I'm looking at you Baltic Sea) but for many parts of Africa, the Americas, Australia, Japan, etc, it might just be what we need.
Sleep cycle calculator
You can use Gravatar to show different pictures for every John Smith.
I have to say that both Unit and Windows 7's desktop bar look absolutely horrendous to me. I haven't used either, so I can't tell if this leads to some surprising productivity boost but there's something about the space-consuming giant-kiddy-icons that make me think it will only work against me.

I don't have any problem right now with the size of the icons, but screen estate is always an issue. Window organisation, as it has been for the last 15 years, seems like it has much better room for optimisation.

Other choice have also seemed a bit arbitrary - like moving the power options to the status bar, whilst also moving the window controls away from the status bar. Mouse movement has increased in my experience.
Valid. If everyone else is using the same news, doesn't matter if it makes sense or not.
The "best" is way overengineered. I doubt this error-handling will even work. If the program fails to print "hello world" using puts then it is very likely to fail on fprintf to stderr.
Out if interest, the way I'd try and design a fail-safe solution would be to have meltdown trigger a shutdown.

Picture a bunch of large, heat-proof (ceramic?) test-tubes, with their bases apart but their openings together.

Put that underneath the core - then if it melts and drops down, small pieces of it flow in different directions - until you've got a sub-critical amount in each one - so the fission reaction stops.

Anything which requires active prevention of fission seems odd, presumably passive is better?
A major problem here is that people often conflate nuclear power plants with nuclear bombs - in people's imaginations nuclear power plants could go up like a bomb and are therefore very dangerous. The fact that this is impossible doesn't get in the way of people's general perception, unfortunately.

Actually looking at the evidence provides a different story altogether - the XKCD radiation chart [1] being one of the most striking examples of the levels of radiation we're talking about here.

It's a pity (though not unexpected) that the media lap up this kind of sentiment despite the fact that hey, our planet is dying, and maybe we need to stop playing around with misconceptions for a second and maybe try and work on fixing this?

I guess our grandchildren will be the ones to find out how this one plays out.

[1]:http://xkcd.com/radiation/
"Scientific American, a most conservative scientific publication, in a cover story on October 26, 2009 -- unveiled its 'A Plan for a Sustainable Future.' It declared in its 'Plan to Power 100 Percent of the Planet with Renewables" that, 'wind, water and solar technologies can provide 100 percent of the world's energy, eliminating all fossil fuels.'

The British magazine New Scientist, in a special October 11-17, 2009, issue on safe, clean, renewable energy technologies -- titled 'Our Brighter Future' -- presented a United Nations report declaring that 'renewable energy that can already be harnessed economically would supply the world's electricity needs.'"

From: "Renewables Are More Than Ready"

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/karl-grossman/renewables-are-m...
Two things annoy me about Unity:

1. The menu bar at the top is now wasted space.
2. The task bar is on the side.

Shortcuts to spreadsheet, worth authoring, etc, should be hidden away in the menu. Honestly how many new spreadsheets do you create every day? Not many. What you might do is double-click on a spreadsheet and have it open, but that doesn't require a big shiny shortcut being in the taskbar.

These are just defaults and can be changed, but still, I feel as if they are poorly considered defaults.
In regards to the first point, note that it's $6000 per founder as well, so they are investing between $6000 and $30000 per company. The amounts seem to be in line with other tech accelerators. Also, the hope that these tech accelerators / incubators seem to have is that the money is only a small part of the value that they bring to the startup. The mentorship and connections that they will supposedly bring could be worth much more than the seed funding.

That said, since we don't know their ability to bring in good mentors and connections/investors, it might not be a good idea. So I kind of agree with you there.
Yes, and besides aggressive spam filtering, it's just a good way to confirm a usable communication channel before you need to use that channel.
What about hydro on natural waterfalls? No space lost. No dam-failure risk. I don't think every rainy mountain is fully tapped.

True, they aren't everywhere. Maybe some of the power-intensive industry can move to them.
The CNN anchors were morons, notice the flamboyant arm waving the woman on the right employed when they were revealed as being out of their league.
"forty years of complete absence of nuclear accidents"? The same Wikipedia has a fairly large section on accidents at nuclear power plants, stating "worldwide there have been 99 accidents at nuclear power plants from 1952 to 2009 (defined as incidents that either resulted in the loss of human life or more than US$50,000 of property damage, the amount the US federal government uses to define major energy accidents that must be reported), totaling US$20.5 billion in property damages.[4] Fifty-seven accidents have occurred since the Chernobyl disaster, and almost two-thirds (56 out of 99) of all nuclear-related accidents have occurred in the USA." On a brighter note however, "There have been comparatively few fatalities associated with nuclear power plant accidents"
As a quick bit of thought.

Lets say that you need to mine, say 2,715,384x the amount of coal to produce the same amount of energy as you would uranium. (From https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Energy_densit...).

Now if mining uranium is less then 2,000,000x more dangerous as mining coal, then per unit of energy generated it is actually safer.

Hence yes, I do think that coal mining is more dangerous then uranium mining, per unit of energy generated.
http://sixrevisions.com/resources/10-puzzle-websites-to-shar... and recently I came across dropbox challenge as well! http://www.dropbox.com/jobs/challenges
I just want to attach an anecdote here and explain why I prefer confirmation emails.

One day, somewhere in the last couple months, I checked my email box and saw a message from some craft site. It was informing me that my paid subscription was activated and that I was entitled to X, Y, and Z services. I ignored it. I received another related email the next day. I ignored that, too. When I received a third with another advertisement, I realized this was legitimate and that someone had accidentally used my email address! My inclination was to find someone in control of the site and let them know the mistake so that the original person could see their offers and track their subscription. I headed to the website and noticed the login form on the first page.

Curiosity struck me. Was this one of those sites that people make fun of online with bad security? I clicked the link saying I forgot my password. They asked not for my username but for my email address. So I entered that. Next thing I know, my Inbox has an email from the craft site with the registered user's plaintext password!

Uh oh. Is this for real? What if I was a malicious user? I had to see how bad this situation really was. I logged into the user's account. I was able to find their home address and phone number, but thankfully (dear Lord, thankfully), the website made no mention of credit card numbers. I did not look to see if I could order more service; at that point and in my shock over the situation, I felt I was deep into some weird grey area and was way past my welcome. I logged out, found an online contact form, and explained the situation as well as how they could improve their system to avoid harm to their users.

The security mistakes in this situation were compounded.

(1) Email alerts went to the wrong person. If you verify the email, the right people get the messages. If you do not verify the email, the wrong person can mark your site as spam or take advantage of the situation.

(2) The site stored plaintext passwords. This was a craft site... By the name of the victim and other factors, I realized that this was some old lady who has faith in the trustworthiness of the Internet and probably, like most typical people, uses the same password for multiple sites. And this site happily handed it over to a stranger. That, my friends, is scary.

People make honest mistakes. If the email address is important for account management, send a verification email. And give the user an opportunity to fix the problem in the event that that verification fails in some way.
Not even one mention of solar power? Maybe the technology is not at its peak yet, but combines with saving a lot of energy, is it not an option? Let's not forget that a lot of money went into perfecting nuclear power, probably a lot more than into solar power.

Comparing with coal deaths seems a bit like a strawman. Also I don't trust the way the victims of Chernobyl are calculated. Adding up victims from survivor stories ("all my colleagues are dead by now") seems to easily give more than 26 deaths.

Yes, I love electricity, too - especially for computing. But I also think the world could be improved a lot by saving energy at the right places. I'd be much happier if there were less cars, for example. I think I could power my computer with a solar panel, even when not living in the desert.

Heating seems to be another big one. Where I live renting is the norm, so home owners don't have much of an incentive to insulate houses properly (renters pay the energy bill).

At the very least, please give me an Android phone with a Geiger Counter so that I can check the milk when I go shopping...
I have been playing with it since alpha 3.

When it is properly released I will do a reinstall, and I will be using gnome with it. Unity is crap.
I would have a look at pebble bed reactors, molten salt reactors and heavy water moderated reactors.

long story short, the designs exist, we just can't seem to get rid of the old ones that are currently built and we can't seem to get the new designs built in any sort of scale.
In design and usability, (iOS & Android) >>>> Feature phone.

So for most people in the world moving from feature phones to Android is going to be a huge leap forward. The difference between iOS & Android is a rounding error in this comparison.

A HTC Wildfire @ USD 250 is equivalent to an iPhone4 @ USD 600 for someone upgrading from a Nokia 1100!!

Android is allowing different manufacturers to offer phones at wildly different form factors & functionalities and most importantly price!

Apple is focused on the niche high end market where they can make maximum margin.
There are plenty of other designs, most of which get built as test plants, work nicely then never get built again due to political pressure to stick to "safe" designs.
I was shocked at the time that some people actually think Postel's Law is wrong, but now I understand. Some people believe the world must be purified; hacky workarounds are bad; they must be removed.

Parsers that refuse to parse, Internet Protocol versions that don't work with 95% of servers on the Internet, and programming languages that are still niche 50+ years later... sometimes you just have to relax and let it flow.

Just "letting it flow" is what we've been doing, Postel's law is exactly that. And look at the mess that's gotten us into. Letting people off the hook by working around their shitty "interoperable" implementations by being liberal in what we accept doesn't help in the long run, and it, IMO, naively assumes that eventually everyone will come around. It's short term thinking.

It's not about purity, it's about sanity.

And for the record, I'm a proponent of Postel's Law, because it's pragmatic, but not blindly. One must learn from one's mistakes. The problem is when the 800lb Gorilla decides to be liberal in what they generate because they know that everyone else will be liberal in what they accept--Postel's Law being effective pretty much "requires immediate total cooperation from everybody at once" (which you might recognize as one of the possibilities on the "Universal Crackpot Spam Solution Rebuttal"). There's a time and place for Postel's Law, and the hard part is finding the line where on one side it makes sense to be liberal and on the other it makes sense to be conservative.
The worst kind of article is the kind that makes you want to flag it for being inappropriate and rant about it at the same time.
"Nearly one million people around the world died from exposure to radiation released by the 1986 nuclear disaster at the Chernobyl reactor, finds a new book from the New York Academy of Sciences published today on the 24th anniversary of the meltdown at the Soviet facility."

http://www.commondreams.org/headline/2010/04/26

Excerpts of the book here:

http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/nyas.2009.1181.is...
This is actually quite a laugh. Compiling the author's recommended "best" hello world on Mac OS 10.6 (gcc 4.2.1) yields this:

% a.out
Hello World!
ERROR: fputs did not succeed in writing our message string (error returned: Unknown error: 0)!

A look at the man page for puts shows that the author bungled the test for error:

fputs() now returns a non-negative number (as opposed to 0) on successful completion. As a result, many tests (e.g., "fputs() == 0", "fputs() != 0") do not give the desired result. Use "fputs() != EOF" or "fputs() == EOF" to determine success or failure.

That's the price for over-engineering.
This is written more like a speech by a politician than as an attempt at analysis. The type of economic inequality that successful startups yield, and which accounts for a lot of the entries in the Forbes 400, is described merely as a theory cherished by the rich, and dismissed with evidence it would be a compliment to call anecdotal. And while there's a lot of talk about how the rich own the government, he doesn't even attempt to analyze whether this is more or less true now than it was 50 years ago, when there was less economic inequality (on paper).
It's really difficult to take this sort of article seriously. Whether it's the talk of the top 1% "taking" (which is strange, because everything else in the article is trying to demonstrate ther undeservingness) or this:

> While many of the old centers of inequality in Latin America, such as Brazil, have been striving in recent years, rather successfully, to improve the plight of the poor and reduce gaps in income, America has allowed inequality to grow.

Wait, is the problem poverty or inequality? If "the plight of the poor" is simply that they're not as comfortable as those in the top 1%, but they still have cars, and TVs, ad microwaves, I'm never going to be impressed by this sort of article.
This makes sense as Microsoft actually used to use the LineDrive technology.

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc514631.aspx
Thanks. Pharmalert was the reviewer I was thinking of. "He" has posted 2359030 reviews since 2006-08-24.
It's interesting, but from what i've seen of it (albiet not all that much), it has two major issues.

* It has a low power density, hence requiring large arrays of collectors/etc. this makes it costly to build at scale.

* It generally either takes up valuable land (land by the sea is costly), or it requires lots of engineering to try and build/maintain these things out to sea.

It is very cool tech though.
As I see it, Clarkson and the team are basing their eco ridicule on the long view. They know that if they praise the current half-baked electric car technology, they'll look quaint and whimsical in 50 years when electric cars are practical. Better to be insightful and honest about just how far short the current offerings fall when compared with mature fossil-fuel powered vehicles, surely?
Perhaps attempting to solve a major problem with something that also causes major problems isn't much of a solution.
The strife of mobile programming
Ouch. Now the article isn't just advocating overengineering, it's just plain wrong - have you contacted the author to let him know? Probably best for him to fix this up asap.
Unity!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=toAEQTsidvg

I guess I'll try out Unity, but I may have an itchy trigger finger ready for a switch back to something more familiar.
I'm sure they know how to build safe systems. But equally important is whether they'll spend the money necessary to make them safe, or if they'll sacrifice safety in the name of profit.