skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> They knew about the meltdowns and the leakages all along, but choose to deny it until months later.

I don't know about leakage, but they've been very clear that the fuel had melted down for a very long time now, at least since after that first week. The only question has been how substantial has the fuel damage been, and now at least for Unit 1 we know the answer.

> I fear for my friends' lives in Japan. Because their government is weak and useless and saving face.

Independent monitoring should be used, but if you're really worried why don't you ask your friends to take actions assuming that there is plutonium and uranium all over the place (e.g. air masks outside, frequent washing of vehicles/hands/outerwear)? I hate to say this but it's not like knowing exactly how much radioactivity is out there would change the actions they should take too much one way or the other: wash that shit off, don't eat foods/liquids that are contaminated.

Plus, you really shouldn't ask for merely plutonium/uranium, as if radioactive Strontium or Cesium that the government is reporting figures for are that much better -- they're also nuclides of concern, so if you don't trust the government then you should also push for independent monitoring of those radionuclides.
How were they calculating operating margins?

Lots of Apple bashers love screaming about how Apple has huge margins because the cult will buy any old iPoo, yada yada reality distortion field.

But on the Apple financials call they pretty consistently come in just under 30% on their product margins, and these guys (asymco) have them peaking at almost 50%.

Is this based on some backyard analyst's estimated component cost breakdown? In which case it is a worthless guesstimate, or is it based on official numbers?
s/bay/state of California/

Sadly, it's true.
Countries That Adopted Facebook Early See Negative Traffic Growth
China Builds Desert Ghost Cities
Is that even true?

A bomb might have 100 pounds of nuclear material, fairly efficiently exploded, releasing a lot of energy.

A burning, melting reactor might have 100s of TONS of fuel pellets, which can be aerosolized and distributed to the four corners.
I don't understand why the Diaspora folks decided to do their own engineering in the first place. Why not just use the money to fund development on Appleseed/OneSocialWeb, then box up the result (with support et al.) under the brand "Diaspora"? In est, do what Apple did with Mach/BSD, and later did again with Webkit/KHTML.
OK, that's fair. Thanks.
Catalan pseudo-primes
Because explanations to the lay person tended to gloss over the fact that "stopping the reaction" didn't actually stop heat generation and that the core still required months of continuous active cooling until the rate of heat generation was low enough that meltdown.

These reactors were presented as fail-safe systems. It turns out that they do not, in fact, fail into a safe state. They are more like airplanes over the ocean, literally months away from the nearest safe landing spot.

The entire crisis revolved around the removal of decay heat, not halting the reactors.

Perhaps you find that to be a meaningful distinction, but most people do not. Especially when the result is fundamentally similar: a meltdown, containment breach, evacuation, contaminated residential area, etc.

I mean this in the :-) nicest possible way :-), but I don't think you 'get it'.
Ask HN: Fastest way to get a CS degree in the Bay Area or online?
I already have a bachelor's degree in business management. This summer, I'm considering taking some classes to get a CS degree. I don't expect to finish getting the degree during the summer, but now is a great time for me to get started on it. I already basically know most of what I'd need to know in order to get a CS degree. However, it'd be nice to have a formal degree as proof that I know what I claim to know.

Since I already have a bachelor's degree, I should only need to take whatever upper-level classes are required to get a second bachelor's. Alternatively, I could pursue a master's degree depending on how many credits and however much effort it requires.

So... anybody can point me in the fastest and/or simplest direction to get a CS degree here in the Bay Area or online?
I'd say no. Avoid something where addressable market is too small. Remember that for academia, human robots (aka grad students) are cheap and viable. Having said that, keep it in your ideas book, as you might use it for idea generation. Otherwise, use it as a way of practising customer development.
Thank you for asking this. I came here to ask it. I'm not sure why you were downvoted for it (I assume that's why the comment has been dimmed). Sometimes I don't think I recognize HN. It's a shame, and I hope it doesn't keep you from asking questions here.
"hoisting the red and black"?

Google doesn't help (suggests maybe resorting to piracy, but that wouldn't result in you getting kidnapped/murdered), so would you explain that idiom?
I agree that it's hard to argue that people were deceived, especially considering that I've chosen not to use Dropbox from the start beacause they only used one key for everyone, because employees could access my files, and so on.

If I (with no degree, no formal training in information security, just my wits) knew, why didn't everyone? I'm tempted to assume "because they didn't care to read anything more than the Dropbox marketing blurbs that say 'secure'".

That said, select employees having access to your files may be expected (as it's the most common practice in consumer backup and file hosting solutions), but it's not necessary.

I use rsync.net for my backups because I can generate a key and use it to encrypt my data without sharing that key with anyone else. Even rsync.net's employees can't read my stuff. (Please note that this is a different type of service than Dropbox: because all my data is encrypted I can't just click to share it with others.)

(I don't have any affiliation with Dropbox or rsync.net. I'm just a consumer who chose one over the other.)
Let's find the closest friends and relatives of these politicians who infringe any intellectual property rights in any way and then get them on record saying they'd readily see their own kindred hit with felony convictions.

Things like this come from people who don't understand why intellectual property was enshrined into law in the first place.
Thanks for this info. What was the name of the other company?
It's not that bad, you need to execute it extremely well. Last year I tried something in this direction called as MolSeek. Did not work out well, but I think I will try again. I will be keen to listen what you are up-to, only if you think year idea is worth sharing.
It's mind-blowing to read that they could get data in mongoDB faster than to get it out of MySQL. I wonder if their structure was so complex or if the queries were complex as well, or is mongoDB that fast? Anyway, great to see sites like this embracing new technologies and revealing the details.

[edit] I guess watching the video explains a lot more. Do watch!
Asking the potential buyer to name a price is a good strategy, as others have noted. However, if you want to stretch things out a bit, you can start by asking questions that lead up to him naming a number. For example, ask how he would determine a value? How does he expect to make money with it? How much money does he expect to make with it over the next year, two years, five years?

As you go through this kind of dialogue, you might find, if he has wildly ambitious plans for your service, that a combination of upfront amount plus an earnout amount makes sense. Maybe that includes your staying on as a consultant for additional money as well.
This is seriously awesome. It'll allow us to have hard data on where corruption is most concentrated. Maybe, we'll be able to focus on fixing those areas, to make the world a better place.
How Facebook changed their software to bring a new data center online
That sounds reasonable. I commented without reading the full article and bill because I know how much the Internet helped me experience the world when I was growing up in a small town, and would hate to see future generations deprived of the same benefits.
The distinction between downloading and streaming can be considered odd from a technical standpoint, however I do think that it's much much easier to stream illegal content unknowingly than it is downloading it.

Basically, if you download an episode of a TV show for free, common sense would tend to say that something is fishy: you end up with a file on your drive forever. However, in the case of streaming, I feel like it's much less clear.

Two scenarios: I want to watch an episode of The Office, I google "The Office season 6 episode 3" and end up watching the episode with ads on Hulu. I can also pay a subscription to watch any episode I want.

I then want to watch an episode of Dexter and google "Dexter season 5 episode 3" and end up watching the episode on MegaVideo with ads (for MegaVideo, MegaUploader… mostly) and a daily limit that can be waived with a subscription.

The first one is legal, the second one is not but a non-savvy user couldn't really tell the difference. I don't really have a way to know that MegaVideo doesn't pay the copyright holders with the subscriptions and ads.
I Don't Know Any Programmers
I am unsure what these things are intended to induce, but I mostly find the flashy bits annoying at best. The sound by itself can be soothing, but combined with the flashes, it just stresses me out.

edit: I should probably note that my brain is not exactly wired 'right'. So that may have some mitigating consequences.
I got a patent for some of the stuff that went into Word Lens (augmented reality translator). I think software patents are awful, but I feel like I need to play the game that's currently in place. A significant part of our company's startup costs and time went into getting that patent. If I could, I'd pay all that and more to eliminate software patents completely - including my own. Software patents kill innovation.
CUBRID 8.4.0 has arrived w/ x2 faster database engine
CUBRID has just released the new version of its open source database. The new release comes with x2 faster database engine, 90% MySQL compatibility, extended implicit type conversion, and many more! This official blog post shows the performance and optimization results and explains how the team managed to reach these results. Nice article to learn about the Web optimized DBMS.
Is this sarcasm? Rooftop solar panels have never caused an evacuation. Bicycle accidents tie up traffic for a few hours at worst. Yes people die but that's hardly the only dimension of interest.
In my case it induced a sweet end of the workday headache.
recently, i needed to encode/decode similar data, and base64 with a variable 64 chars seemed to work just as good. say, - or / are problem chars, then make another set of 64 chars which would have a comma and a dot or alike and there you go. keep the sets in a table or somehting and use the first 2 chars as indicator which set of 64 to use for that data.
"Site replicates effects of psychedelic drugs"

No, it doesn't.
I suppose the key to having one, for a parent, or for someone building one, would be to leave a kid completely unsuspecting.

If I were a parent installing monitoring software, I think I'd tell my kids exactly what the software monitors, show them the logs, and teach them a way to get around it that logs access times but not content. I would say, "If you need to hide something from me, that's cool, but I'm going to know that you hid something and I'm going to ask about it, so keep that in mind." The purpose of the monitoring software would be to provide an opportunity to analyze the potential consequences of my kids' online activities.

Of course, imagining and doing are very different things, so ask me again in n years after I've actually started a family and see if I actually followed my own advice ;).
Adults especially seem to forget that there is no clear change that happens when kids turn 18. Children turn into adults in a very gradual manner over a large period of time rather heterogeneously. This then causes problems when adults, especially those who have been adults for a large period of time attempt to treat all "children" (including teenagers/etc.) as children, especially when the use of power is used.

To give an example (taken from this page), put yourself into this sort of position. You have somebody who cares for you, wants all that is best for you. Somebody like a spouse. You live together, talk/etc. If you found out that they were spying on you, listening in on what you talk with to your friends, trying to find what websites you visit/etc. You'd consider it a rather massive invasion of privacy and you'd consider the spouse to be at the very least creepy, even if they were aiming to learn this information "for your own good".

Similarly a few posts here are variants on "spy on your kids", using various clandestine methods. I'd imagine that you would find it rather distasteful if your government were caught doing similar things to you, especially if the reasons used were that it was "for your own good", and yet the child's perspective in this isn't being considered.

To illustrate, say you are 18 and one day (age of majority 18), and had any of those things happen to you, you would be, quite understandably, pissed. Now as a 17 year old, your reaction would likely be unchanged, however there would be a lot less understanding and a lot more of a tendency to explain the anger generated and the resulting behavior as simply "poor behavior" of the child.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/JXTA is pretty decent
> MonoTouch directly helps bring apps to WP7

Particularly if it means there could be one platform on which to write apps for both WP7 and Android.

I doubt Ballmer would go for it. He probably still thinks "Linux is a cancer" and a threat to be destroyed, whereas in fact the threat to MS is more from Apple.

If I was running MS I'd use the disquiet Oracle has created in the Java world by pushing for .NET/C# to replace Java as the standard OS-neutral run-anywhere platform.
Louis Vuitton Men's Shoes - Cheap Louis Vuitton Men's Shoes
Especially considering the amount it would cost would be peanuts compared to Skype.
I would be careful with Maverick (or Lenny; Karmic was unaffected): there is a serious issue with it dropping interrupts on EC2. If you are going yo use Ubuntu on EC2, you /really/ want to be using Natty.

https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/linux/+bug/666211
Honestly if you're using Ubuntu for a server then performance is not your priority anyway.
Site attempts to replicate the effects of psychedelic drugs. It's mildly effective, but no more effective than listening to dubstep with a subwoofer.

.

Actually, a bit less effective than the latter.
Please let this spread nationwide and be generalized to more forms of advertising. It's just littering at this point.

I know somebody pays for them, but people pay for their fast food wrappers, too, and they aren't allowed to leave them on other people's porches. I paid for the beer in my fridge, but I'm not going to leave a bag of empties hanging from my neighbor's doorknob.

I really don't know how the legal exception works, how the law distinguishes one act of spewing worthless crap into the environment from another, but it should be possible to cut down on the constant flyers under wiper blades, takeout menus on doorknobs, etc., and still let people put up posters about lost pets, local missing persons, and neighborhood garage sales.
Why Being Stupid is Close to Being Smart
Few enlightened, modern couples believe that the responsibility to care for a baby falls primarily on the woman. That's because men and women have babies together.

Women carry babies for a 9-month term, during which time they are - in most cases - 100% able to work and 'contribute'. Labor takes ~36 hours; it can take just a few hours for scheduled c-sections. After labor, the baby comes home to Mom AND Dad.

For the average couple, there's a window of about 2 days in which the woman is out of commission. (Yes, that's simplifying things.)

A woman is only out of commission if her partner is not able or willing to help her with the responsibilities of being a parent. That's the only scenario in which she'd have to choose to be a mom before being a 'career woman'. So simply help your wives/girlfriends with the baby duties, and no choice will be required. :)
This bug affected several "supported" AMIs running 2.6.32 series kernels that we tested at SimpleGeo, including the official AMI released by Canonical. After we ran out of patience debugging this stuff we contacted Amazon and worked on the issue with a guy from their kernel team (who was really helpful, fwiw). He agreed that the behavior was bizarre and opened an upstream bug with Canonical [1].

You're sort of contradicting yourself here. You suggest that the distro you're running is independent of the kernel version you're running. But then you go on to claim that this bug was introduced by someone who was not running the default supported kernel. Are you saying that people should run the supported kernel, and be tied to whatever's supported upstream, or are you saying they should risk building their own? Clearly there are benefits and drawbacks either way.

[1] https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/linux-ec2/+bug/708...
Michael Yavonditte On Going Toe-To-Toe With Google
PNC Virtual Wallet. The Flash interface is really irritating.
Recompiling a Linux kernel with a custom patch is in the core set of skills that I would expect any Linux admin to have. It's not that hard. It's not even that hard to take existing distro kernels and add a patch to them, and maintain your patch going forward as the distro continues their refinements.

When you have Linux on your server, you own it. You can do whatever you want. The distro is the beginning of your power, not the end of it. If you're running a Linux server and you currently have the attitude that you are boxed in by your distro I recommend that you immediately dig into the relevant packaging system and learn enough to put your own patch on top of any existing software package, and recreate the package in the relevant manner (new RPMs, new .deb, whatever).

(Yes, there's a cost/benefit tradeoff to each such patch you have to carry on, but there is still economic value merely in having the option.)
I don't understand your question.

2003-2008 Founder of X
Achieved X and Y

2001-2003 Founder of Y
Achieved X and Y

etc.
The link should probably be to this page:

http://blog.mongodb.org/post/5545198613/mongodb-live-at-crai...
When my wife and I moved out of our apartment a few years ago, after most of the stuff was moved out including the computers, we happened to need to look up a phone number. It literally did not occur to us that there was even a way to look up a phone number without using the internet. Meanwhile we were tripping over a pile of dusty yellow books that were one of the last things we left in the apartment (and weren't taking with us).

After 20 minutes I finally remembered "oh, that's what those yellow books are for". It's just how infrequently we've cracked open a phone book - which is to say never since 1993. I can tell you, for anyone in their 20's, that phone book goes straight from the doorstep to the dustbin, just like the paper newspaper. Good riddance!
I'm not sure about your case, but the free wifi provider my city lets you visit Google without clicking through their portal.
The Raditz evil saiyan
PeopleSoft, variously re-named by universities to something dumb and cutesy.
Of Heroes and Pit Crews: Bringing techniques from the surgical world to software
Chrome OS 12 — AKA: The Shipping Version — Hits Beta
Literary: of, relating to, concerned with, or characteristic of literature or scholarly writing: http://www.thefreedictionary.com/literary

Charts and graphs aren't writing.

Writing: Meaningful letters or characters that constitute readable matter: http://www.thefreedictionary.com/writing
"To further my ambition, my mother “hacked” the system by using her co-workers’ address in a more affluent neighborhood to ensure that I received the best public education possible."

Oops now she would be a criminal for doing that.
You're clearly in over your head, it's clear from your question that you don't even understand what you're asking.

If you really want to learn yourself, break down the questions into smaller questions, and then ask them at stackoverflow.

Alternatively, if you really want to get this built, hire someone or get someone to work with you.
They certainly have enough floorspace. Unlike Best Buy which has a whole wall of TVs from 10 different manufacturers, an Apple television would be only one or possibly two SKUs (a 42" and a 50" perhaps).
If I had to guess, I'd say this will be the launch of Apple's cloud service. Coming right on the tails of Google I/O, it should take the spotlight from Google Music(what little it has). Also, this early announcement will allow developers to come to WWDC with some background on the service.

Actually, if I was a betting man, I'd say nothing is going to happen at all :)
Random access was not a priority, yes. In fact it didn't even occur to me, not even for a moment :)

As to your proposed algorithm, yes, it could work. It's discussed in passing a bit earlier in this thread, here's direct link: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2554726

Not sure about comparative space efficiency of this vs Maze64, but we're likely splitting hairs at this point :), it should be very close. Yes it could work. Converting 128 characters from base64 to base62 would cost N^2 time, where N is 128. Not sure if it's a big deal. Just another approach.
Tech boom predicted in Australia as Style Tread gets $4m investment
The economic harm of the uncertainty created by the patent system is way greater than the harm done by the cases that make it into the news.

And this harm is ignored by almost everyone (at least somebody else in this thread pointed it out) including "geeks" the focus is on specific examples of patents being abused).
1. Pick a price you'd not be happy with. (say, 200$)

2. Pick a price you'd be very happy with. (say, 1,000,000$)

3. Now try to find the minimum price you'd sell it for that should lie somewhere in between those. (say, 5,000$ or $20,000).

4. Ask for three times that. (15,000$ or $60,000).

5. Negotiate.
Another thing people don't talk much about is copy-paste. Double click on an alphanumeric will select the entire thing, whereas other characters might cause selection to end prematurely, and differently so in different text editors.
I'm not sure how it can be moderated. If I say you have to pay X to some military police man in the middle east when travelling east, but it turns out the guy isn't corrupt... ouch?
If you think that the quote regards an evil mastermind, and not a corrupt and ineffective government, then you haven't read the book. Those bad guys may have thought that they were being evil masterminds, but (spoiler alert) in the end, they wind up as king nothing, as civilization falls to pieces around them.
It wouldn't surprise me though. In Australia I can get a Nexus S for AU$29 a month, while the absolute cheapest I can get an iPhone 4 is AU$47/mo (same plan/inclusions, both over 24 months), with a total cost difference of AU$432.

Internally, they're essentially the same phone. The iPhone is a better built phone to be sure, but I find it hard to believe that it costs that kind of difference. But hey, people still buy them so I can't see the pricing structure changing for the moment.