skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The uranium in that reactor isn't different from overall uranium, except that it's concentrated and its composition differs from what naturally occurs.

That can be a pretty serious categorical difference, particularly in the concentration.

However, that's over there. Uranium would be dangerous to US citizens if the uranium was in the US. It isn't.

Duh.

Did you even read what I wrote or are you pasting this from some talking points you got somewhere?

And so far, not even the worst doomsayers that actually know their stuff have worried about uranium or plutonium.

Which is not to say it's not a problem, only that you find some reason to dismiss the views you don't agree with.

That's just not the stuff you care about after a nuclear meltdown. You care about the other isotopes that were produced and that are much more easily carried outside and are easily used to compose other molecules that can spread further.

That must be why they're setting limits on the acceptable level of uranium in the rice then. To draw attention away from the things that are really dangerous.
http://www.businessweek.com/news/2011-03-28/fukushima-may-ab...
Riiight.

Secondly, what on earth is 'hot uranium'?

What I said was "very hot uranium and plutonium directly from the cores of active nuclear reactors and the entire spectrum of elements and isotopes that get produced when ...".

If you are speaking about the temperature: it certainly isn't hot anymore by the time it reaches the US. If you are speaking about it's radioactivity,

In this case, the term 'hot' captures temperature (in Celsius), reactivity (neutrons), and the health effects of radioactivity (Becquerels). It works on many levels.

you're wrong: individual uranium atoms from that reactor, once escaped, do not behave differently than naturally occurring uranium atoms.

You really seem to want me to be talking about specifically uranium atoms in fallout on the continental US. The vast majority of that article is about Japan with only a few sentences claiming some nonspecific particles could be detected in the US.

Is it that you know only this one counter argument, the one that natural and low-enriched uranium samples aren't wildly different in decay rates?

As for your other fears:

I'm not afraid, you're just making that up.

it's perfectly well known what radioactive isotopes controlled and uncontrolled fission processes can produce.

I don't think our knowledge of these meltdowns is anywhere close to "perfect", but note that I said "the entire spectrum of elements and isotopes...".

They don't know what temperatures were reached what state of matter the cores were in and for what time periods. The IAEA says there could have been recriticality, but they don't know for sure one way or the other.

That's why they've been monitoring for things like cesium, iodine and basically every radioactive isotopes that exists: the number is rather limited).

Do you think I've never heard of the periodic table or something?
Hmm, you really got a problem with this don't you?

http://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/i1j67/advice_fr...

There you are on reddit, saying the same thing, and ignoring the fact that you're confounding your experience as a Biology postdoc with you use of code. Hopefully, as a scientist you know what confounding is. :-)

P.S. I'm the author.

EDIT: point at the exact comment.
Google is strong with services in the cloud, Gmail, Google Maps, Voice recognition they are all of the same category. And Google is not platform neutral, it want unrestricted reach on every mobile platform but reserve the best for its own, which is just business, and sometimes, especially with iOS, it is hindered by the platform vendor.

Flash, customization et al can be personal preference. I don't even want custom ringtone and wallpaper is silly to me. Oh and flash is fading, even Adobe knows it.

iOS multitasking leaves a lot to be desired. So is Android's approach(modern smartphone battery life sucks period, Android sucks spectacularly, largely due to its Laissez-faire multitasking and widget management.). The same for notification systems, now they are pretty much the same and I'll still say they both kinda suck, iOS went from sucks hairy dunkey balls to just suck a little less than Android.

Lately I feel iOS busy plugging holes and Android becomes more and more desktop-esque and hateful (feature wise even Honeycomb didn't bring much to the table). I still prefer iOS and find WP7 more interesting than both of them, for now. Though I dislike Metro's animation abuse with a passion.
And no matter how much caffeine you have, unless you're taking it intravenously, you're spiking and crashing constantly throughout the day.
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PG on Bloomberg: Don't Look at Groupon's Numbers
I found this sort of strange. He mentioned that Andrew Mason is a smart guy, and by definition, smart guys end up figuring out that a bad idea is eventually bad.

But I don't think investors and money money managers know the leaders of their portfolio companies as well as they know the companies themselves.

Would this generally apply to equities investing as well?

He's on now, live, by the way.

Update:

Re: Hipmunk - No money from flight search. The money's in hotel search.

Exciting trends: online rentals (spaces), smartphone/tablet apps.

Show's over.
"Is it just a comment to indicate that Apple isn't about to go out of business?"

Partially, and partially to indicate that the way Apple is doing things must be at least somewhat right and sustainable.

Why is it so hard for Android manufacturers to release updates for their phones? Because they don't make enough on them to continue supporting them. They make money on new devices sales, so they keep churning out more new handsets.
Silverlight XNA 3D considered harmful
How many peripherals do you have? I've never thought of that as "so time consuming", but maybe I just don't plug/unplug that much.
Hm...that's true, I guess I overlooked that portion. I reworded some of the questions so that now it will apply to both a regular hotel stay, and a hotel stay for an occasion. Also, the asterisk is automatically put there when a question requires a response.
Oh, I'm so glad you, the one arbiter of all that is art, is able to correct our misunderstanding of the definition of "art".

The truth is, you can't define art, so in the same way I can use paint to paint my house, or use paint to create a portrait, I can use programming for art or just as a day job.

Finally, everything that requires skill has craft, even art.
Looks like Facebook was similarly flat last May - Aug (2010) - this might just be a seasonal thing.
"so [Google] muscled them out."

Sounds "open" to me.

"a glance at your comment history ... an obvious bias and it's apparently affecting your ability to comprehend or something)."

I could say the same for yours. Let's be clear since I'm being accused of being some sort of one dimensional Android hater:

I like Google. I like Android. I like the openness of Android. I also and sometimes especially like several of the non-Open parts of Android (Maps and Gmail are the gold standard in mobile, Marketplace needs work but they iterate fast, Music and Movies look great and have probably sold me on an Android tablet if/when I get one). I have no problem with Google's location services, as far as I know they are the best in the world. I have no problem with them muscling out Skyhook, that's how business works. I have no problem with Google using compatibility as a club, and as in the case of timely updates they need a bigger club (they know this and are iterating quickly as usual).

Here's the difference: what I have a problem with is claiming that all of Android is this free and open promised land while you're muscling people out at the same time. That's just willful ignorance of what Google and Android (in its totality) are.

You can claim that "Android in it's entirety" is just the open source pieces but at that point we're just talking past each other and should agree to disagree. Is Honeycomb not Android? Would not every review point out that you don't get "the full Android" from a device lacking Google's suite of non-Open Source apps from a device shipping without "Android compatibility"? Since you continually question my reading comprehension use your superior skills and tell me what this quote from Android's wikipedia means: "device manufacturers can not use Google's Android trademark unless Google certifies that the device complies with their Compatibility Definition Document (CDD)"
Yes, it appears I was using Slicehost prices rather than Linode prices because I'm in the process of migrating from Slicehost to Linode. I did the Slicehost to Cloud Server comparison because Slicehost is forcing migration to Rackspace in the next few months. A 1GB Slice is $70 vs. the $43 for a 1GB Cloud Server. Sorry for the confusion.
ECMAScript OOP implementation
Working in a Music product? I have your name, identity and UX right here
Perfectly valid opinion and interesting to read. HN downvoting has become very random.
Thanks, I really do appreciate that.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Myspace#International_sites
I can confirm that post-docs have it harder than the staff that use programming as a tool to 'route-around them'
It depends. If the Chevy drivers don't buy as many accessories as the Bentley drivers do, you better believe I'll be selling to Bentley drivers. And if those Bentley drivers use their accessories more, all the better.

There may be more Android phones, but mobile web usage of iOS (or even just iPhone) dwarfs that of Android. Ditto with app purchasing/usage.
Interesting mention of UPC codes.
Top ten tips for developing enterprise mobile apps
You think? On my iPhone, the page width is about twice as wide as would be comfortable to read, so either you read tiny print or zoom and scroll constantly.
"This makes it extremely difficult to evaluate products shipped in such incomplete form. "

No it doesn't. If that's what they give you, that's what you review. If x is missing, you say the product lacks x. If the manufacturer is not happy with that, then maybe they shouldn't release the product until it's fully functional.
Burzynski: Cancer Is Serious Business [vimeo]
Most job boards provide XML feeds to aggregators/search engines, so you don't even need to scrape it. Filtering out recruiters is the tricky part, how would you do it ?
I'm with you most of the way, but in what manner is QNX a liability?
Comment on the title: He didn't say "Don't look at Groupon's numbers". That's what Bloomberg flashed. He said something like "I wouldn't be looking too closely at Groupon's numbers if I were to invest in them. I would look at Andrew Mason instead and he's a smart guy."
Sometimes PR speech is directly symptomatic of executives' thinking. They talk like this because they think like this - i.e. vague, non-committal, detached abstract concepts that sound professional but are ultimately flat, uninspired and purely reactionary.

I'm only saying this because I'm still bitter from my last employment where this kind of business talk was routinely used to fill the void where management's vision was supposed to be. It really begins to grate.
Show HN: Instant object recognition
About three months ago, ipplex, a technology startup I work with released a real-time Money Reader app for Blind users that has been recognized by major publications and blogs, and has a 5 star rating in the app store. You can see a quick in office demo of it here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lvfDnGMPrkI

I wasn't active on HN then, but I thought the community may enjoy seeing some very early real world applications of real time object recognition.

We are working on bringing this to all kinds of objects as well as landmarks, and incorporating some really interesting things to make this useful for consumers. Think of it as live search.

I'll keep the community updated with interesting milestones as this progresses.

By the way, we need a few hackers in Los Angles to help us with this! http://www.ipplex.com/careers
Well, good thing you gave up rather than using code to solve hard problems other scientists in your field can't solve.
While I'm yet a young programmer, the primary paid experiences/internships/jobs I've had with programming have been in the biomedical/bioinformatics field. My first day on the job? Did probably all the work they'd expected of me the entire summer (all using a simple "programming" trick with Excel) then proceeded to write them a few program to make their data-entry/processing jobs a lot easier and more precise. I was like a magician.

It was pretty cool.

I've had nowhere near as much experience as Zed or many of the people replying on here, but my experience in different labs and situations has been similar.

On another related note; I was talking with an international finance/investment profession when I expressed my dual interests in finance and neuroscience. She immediately made the point that I'd be infinitely more valuable in finance with a hard science background (particularly in financing the field my background was in).

Moral: Domain knowledge and niche/cross-discipline expertise is valuable.
And given this is a dev focused site -- do you want to make accessories that work in Chevys or Bentleys?

Depends on the accessories I want to sell.
If you want a recycling bin don't use rm, use mv.
It's an interesting contrast how cheap the technical tools are compared to the financial and legal skills retained. I'm not sure if Ropes & Gray does something special for early stage companies, but they are a top and expensive firm.
He actually did say that. Your quote is more of a paraphrase.
A few thoughts, based on your description and the front page of the site:

How did you arrive at the price? You might want to do some price analysis to find out if you've under-priced your service significantly.

You describe the one-time-click thing as one of the biggest headaches your clients deal with, but it appears as a small item in the bottom-right corner of your front page, in the row with no accompanying pictures. Meanwhile, you prominently talk about features like calendaring that come across like features available from Google Apps or similar. Talk more prominently about your unique features: saving one-time-access PDFs for future access, automatically adding court dates to your calendar, automatically filing documents by client... (Your text at the top does some of this, but doesn't mention that it solves the one-time-access problem. Your individual items below the fold definitely don't reflect your most important features.)

Your calendar image shows a bunch of colored dates, but no appointment information; to make the benefit more obvious from the picture, consider showing an example of what pops up when you hover over a date, or otherwise showing an example appointment rather than just a calendar.

And finally, you have a typo "Tedius" on the front page. :)
Yes Apple seems to be stupid in their own ways, and that a big reason why Android is overtaking them. No one can argue that Apple is a successful company, but I believe they could have had a de facto MONOPOLY on smartphones right now.

First, there's only THE iPhone. When Nokia was the biggest manufacture of mobile phones in the world they released 10-20 phones a year. There's a reason for that, people have different budgets and people don't want to have the same phone as everyone else. That's such an important point I can't believe they are still ignoring it.

Next, they really need to open up the system. iOS would have had wireless sync 2 years ago if APIs were more open and there weren't any AppStore restrictions. The walled garden is supposed to for the benefit of the users, but - to be really honest - that kind of ideology has been proven, time and time again, to not work very well.

So I'm kind of disappointed in Apple they didn't take the opportunity, they had, to truly own the mobile market, and instead let it slip, because of what, stubbornness?
Exit strategy more important for startups than a business plan?
I'm clapping my hands right now!
Good text :)
Meditation

scientific keyword here is "executive function"
My main email account is all over the web, and I only get one or two spams per month in my inbox (and as many false positives for registration confirmations). For Gmail users, spam is a solved problem.
partially to indicate that the way Apple is doing things must be at least somewhat right and sustainable.

Just an odd concern for an end user, IMO. When I go to buy a car I don't look at the profits of Honda vs Ford. Sure you may not want a company that will go bankrupt, but even if they did the impact really isn't all that huge.

Why is it so hard for Android manufacturers to release updates for their phones?

Because they make deeply integrated skins. They have to reintegrate the skin with a new drop from Google -- not on their schedule, but on Google's (that's when customers start screaming for the update).

Because they don't make enough on them to continue supporting them. They make money on new devices sales, so they keep churning out more new handsets.

Everyone makes money on new device sales. The difference is if you get an iOS device -- Apple gets the profit. HTC/Samsung/Moto/LG/etc have to compete for the next sale, even if you've already decided it will be Android.
I've built a lot of sites for small businesses. It's a big struggle to try and dissuade them from the hard sell.

The key is to persuade people to buy from you and not just shout at them like the ads on late night TV.
Because as a company profit is a very important goal if not the most important goal.

RIM collapsed this quarter but for keen market watchers its fate was clearly shown when its profit per unite slipped with no significant unit gain.

The same goes for Apple, when iPhone has to be sold at a discount but market share does not go up noticeably, Apple is in trouble. For now iPhone enjoys a better half of the entire industry profit while ARP goes up and defies seasonal fluctuation.
There is a second element in the NOKIA/RIM/MSFT/AAPL/GOOG that I wish someone like Asymco or JD Powers would track - and that is "Consumer perceived value 1 year later" - I realize WP7 hasn't been out for a year yet, but most of the other platforms (is Nokia still a platform?) have, and it would be interesting to see if people still value their smart phone after the initial wow factor has worn off, or whether they have seen a decreased, or increased value.

It's complex - because a lot of factors come into play. iPhone has better battery life (as long as you don't touch the GPS), Android has more freedom, WP7 has a nice engaging interface, RIM is unbeatable in messaging, etc...

But, it would be nice to see what people think of their smart phones a year after purchase, and add _that_ into the unweighted graph [1] of Profit/Market Share/Revenue Share that Asymco does.

I guess, to some degree, that's represented in a "Will you buy the same model during the next refresh" - and the answer to that question might be a good proxy for "How happy are you, one year later, with the value you receive from your smart phone"

That, too me, will be a key indicator of which of the mobile providers will prevail.

[1] http://www.asymco.com/2011/05/26/a-new-mobile-phone-market-i...
Short list:

- Keyboard. For programmers not having Home/End/PgUp/PgDown are a major drawback. Even as a Vim user I feel the keyboard is still kind of wonky.

- There's no standard for 'cycle through document windows'. Some programs cycle using Ctrl-Tab, some using Cmd-Alt-Arrows, some Cmd-Shift-Arrows.

- Small Enter key (although I guess that's mostly an American layout problem, rather than Macbook specific)

- Finder sucks, every other file manager is $30 or more

- When coming from another OS the whole 'closing the last window doesn't quit the application' paradigm is really confusing.

- Cmd-Tab-Option to unminimize a window from the program switcher is the most RSI-friendly keystroke ever

- Two USB ports? On a $1100+ notebook? On the same side? Really?

- Package management does suck indeed. Even windows has a centralized 'uninstall this crap' list. AppCleaner does a good job though.

Probably a bunch of things I'm forgetting right now. I still love it, it's just that we are going through a 'phase'...
The two sure fire ways to live a long and happy life:

1. find . -name "pattern" <enter> <look carefully> <up arrow> | sudo xargs rm -f

2. WHERE some_id = 36; <home> DELETE FROM table_name
It was really interesting for me to look at all of the different directions me and my fellow students took after completing our CS degrees. I always joke that I 'sold out' with my programming skills for going to work at a news/media company to build their websites, whereas a couple of the guys a I know are doing a much more honourable thing by working in Biology and Space Tech.

I think it's unquestionable that they are the ones who are deserving of more respect, but I still think that it's not just our jobs that define how well we've used our programming skills. We're always hacking away on our own little projects, and hopefully carving our own paths, creating useful software along the way (something you excel in, Zed). I think that having the drive to do this commands more respect than any specific career choice.
I have always been amazed by knife-throwers' ability to calculate the amount of revolutions between their hand and their target when throwing. It just seems like one of those things that the human brain couldn't possibly calculate correctly on a consistent basis. Does it take a very long time to get comfortable with it when training?
What I believe he means is that since code is the tool, to code within the programming industry is laboring on the tools themselves, but to code to solve the specific problems of another domain is applying the tools.

Ability to code in another domain gives you leverage for work done IN that domain. The caveat is that knowing ONLY how to code without working knowledge of the domain itself will not get you very far.
I think you're overestimating the difficulty of programming.

Let's face it, there's a hell of a lot of moderately bright twelve-year-olds who know how to program adequately well.
What's so bad about being a cog in a wheel, if you're enjoying your life?
How does this make any sense? Apps from the iOS App Store can use webkit views where webGL could apply but native apps have had direct access to OpenGL ES for years (only the original iPhone, iPhone 3G, and the first iPod touch iOS devices did not have a GPU and hence no OpenGL). I was pretty sure iAds only ran in native apps and hence could use OpenGL directly. So why would iAd developers have any interest in using WebGL.

Obviously web site developers and HTML5 app developers care very much for WebGL access in mobile safari. If Apple 'artificially' holds back WebGL they will just be shooting themselves in the foot. Imagine the damage if other pad platforms allow interactive, 3D web browsing and the iPad does not. It would be suicidal.
I think it was pretty obvious that the iPhone was going to be a huge success. It's one reason why Microsoft's board is negligent in keeping Ballmer as CEO. If it was obvious to me that the entire cell phone industry (or at least the only profitable part of it) was being turned on its head, it should've been even more obvious to Ballmer, Lazaridis, and other key industry executives.

The iPad, though, was a different story. I knew I wanted a giant iPod Touch as soon as the iPhone came out, but when the iPad was finally announced I wasn't sure if they were going to sell 2,000 of them or 20,000,000. To this day I think my uncertainty was defensible, because unlike phones there was no existing mass market.
"...are cutting down their use, and eventually leaving. "
"The main slang term for facebook amongst it's younger users in the UK is 'facecrack.'"

If there are any similarities to crack, the people who say they are cutting their use and eventually leaving rarely do.
Recommended. Especially

5. Don’t you fucking dare ask me a riddle.

An unbelievable time waster.