skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The article was un-necessarily snarky. Did the author believe Google to be lying about a human being in control? If not, why make fun of Google for blaming driver error for the accident?
Sigh. I'm a fairly pro-nuclear guy and the situation at Fukushima has, apparently has actually been the worst possible disaster it can have. The latest measurements from insider the reactors indicates that core material is exposed outside the pressure vessel. The basis for that is several sieverts of radiation they are measuring in those areas. And those levels would not be produced by byproducts in water sadly.

So on the one hand we can be impressed that only the oldest two reactors in Japan, sitting at the epicenter of the biggest natural disaster Japan has ever experienced has had this failure. Other newer reactors on the same site were successfully shut down and made safe. But the 1 & 2 reactors have it would seem failed completely. Right out past the limits of their safety system. (if the reactor vessel ruptured, and it seems like it has)

That makes cleanup that much harder, it makes the likely hood that the site of those reactors being re-used is zero. And it means that TEPCO is going to probably go bankrupt based on the costs.

What it doesn't mean is that the folks in Fukushima are in any more danger now then they were 5 months ago. It doesn't mean that the radiation will 'escape' and kill people, or even that anyone will die. It doesn't mean that the surrounding area is in danger of more contamination.

I was more interested in the way folks were measuring radioactive fallout on a much finer scale using 'home made' measurement devices. This crowd sourced contamination map can help track down where contaminants have been concentrated in the surrounding area and become a problem. That is, in my opinion, the more impactful problem to address. Decontaminate the area around the plants and let the engineers work on their plans for dismantling what is left of reactors 1 & 2.
As such, the commonly-held libertarian view that an end to military adventurism will be a boon for the US economy strikes me as naive.

Driving economic activity by having the military act as a major consumer is really just running on a treadmill. We need to find an outlet which will lead to increases in economic activity. There is a huge investment hurdle involved, but space exploration and colonization could fit the bill. Once there is a significant human presence in space beyond low earth orbit, there will be tremendous economic growth. The major problem is that hundreds of billions of dollars of investment would be required to jump start it.
> […] gives the skilled UX designer the ability to convey a lot of information without making people think.

What if this is precisely the problem? My guess is that an environment that don't makes you think also tend to discourage learning. This would be sub-optimal in the long term.

More specifically, a GUI environment may be easy to manipulate at first, but if you need anything odd (but dead simple), then you have to find a program to do it for you, or do without it. The CLI, on the other hand, by forcing you to write your commands (suboptimal in the short term), gives you the idea that maybe, just maybe, you could write those 2 or 3 commands in a file so you don't have to type them every time. The next thing you know, you want to automate everything. And you can.

Even more specifically, take me. I use a laptop under Gnu/Linux (for serious work), and a Desktop under Windows (mainly for games and videos). I often download English subtitles for English or American films (I'm not a native speaker). But those subtitles often comes with annotations between brackets for the deaf (things like [Predator growling], [wind blowing]…). I want to get rid of them. That would be one line of sed… But it's for films, and therefore on my Windows desktop. Migrating it to my laptop is tedious, so I haven't written the damn script yet.
31 US troops die in Afghanistan; many from unit that killed bin Laden
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In this tutorial, we’ll making an photo effects inspired by rock ‘n’ roll music called “Red Lady Rocker”. Some tricks you going to learn is about tricky hair selection,
For those of us who are unfamiliar, could somebody share some insight or background on these rare earth minerals?
What do you think of the platform design and the few restrictions they put on the nomination and election process? I though their approach was really unique and would like to see if it would work..
I will judge you by what computer you are using... whether you like it or not
What Does Quantum Physics Have to Do With Being in a Startup?
Thoughts become things. Whatever you focus on, becomes your reality.
The debt is not the problem.
Live Stream Casualty Season 25 Episode 47 Thanks For Today 
The Final Episode Casualty Season 25 Episode 47 - Thanks For Today
Vimperator can do that. http://vimperator.org/help/vimperator/options.xhtml#%27edito...
Did anybody else catch the stab at TC parent company AOL? Classy.
If that were really true, everyone would be crazy not to have a Linux machine, wouldn't they?

This may be true some day, but certainly not now. And even if it becomes true, "the browser" won't have more than a 50% role in the transition (remember how HTML was supposed to obviate the need for Microsoft Office formats?).

As long as people (in mostly businesses) cling to their legacy of crap that is dependent on Windows, it will be very hard for them to use anything else. It's never as simple as a few apps. It does seem likely though that in the long term more nimble businesses will overtake many of the ones who have their hands tied, and that ultimately a younger generation of workers will refuse to maintain old software anyway.

Some people just like certain hardware. Some people like games, whereas others need an OS with a real Unix base. The list of reasons to choose one, even now, is quite long.
I like that plan 9 has stayed out of the chase for users, but I do think the multi-button mouse interaction model needs to be updated to leverage touch-sensitive surfaces and gesture commands.
Agreed. This whole mess has been nothing but a demonstration of how awesome our technology is; homemade fallout counters are just one manifestation. For me, the very most important statistic is simple: zero deaths from radiation.
Programming and Scaling
there's more downside than upside. One failure cancels out 3 or 4 successes

Some should be so hard that the hardest exam problems go for years without being answered. Make it so hard that 20% is passing and 60% is exceptional-- instead of 70% being passing and 95% being exceptional

I think what you're getting at here is the question of scale. The students in the linked story quit upon reaching 100%. But obviously they had not learned 100% of the words in English, they had only learned 100% of the words on a very short vocabulary list.

One way to keep their motivation might be to scale their accomplishments relative to the total number of words. There are somewhere between 600,000 and 1,000,000 words in English (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/English_language#Number_of_word...). The teacher might keep track of the total number of words the students have learned. Basic English is about 850 words, and newspaper literacy is somewhere between 4000–10,000 words. Regardless of how many they learn in class, they will always know how many more there are to learn.

You ideas about higher downsides to grading and scaling the 'exceptional' point to a shift from averaging grades based on mastering course content to cumulative grades based on mastering field content. Does that sound about right?
Italian Police website SAPPE defaced by #Antisec Hackers
I could have sworn china only held 97% of the worlds current stock of processed rare earth minerals...rather than the actual deposits themselves. Not to mention the rarity of these processed minerals elsewhere is not due to the scarcity but rather due to the heavy processing & costs required to extract them...Which is why the mines that do so are rare in their own way.
Their storage costs are constantly coming down. I don't know what else they might be cooking up, but with 25 million happy users they could come out with a second product and up their revenue by 20 to 50% overnight. They solve this problem very, very well and are very competently managed.
Thanks! :D

That's a really good suggestion. The live demo was a bit of an after thought on my part. I bought the design from Theme Forest, customized it, and launched it in a few days, then realized it would be good to see the tool in action somewhere.

We're kind of pivoting towards a more dashboard-style product for professional, highly-paid writers (lawyers and speech writers mostly), and once I'm done with that we'll certainly have a cool live demo ready. We'll also probably release a scoring API with free and for-pay rate limits, since developers have already shown some really creative applications [1, 2] in our hackathons.

[1] http://blog.effectcheck.com/2011/07/14/interview-with-joey-c...

[2] http://stalkerbot.com
I'm interested in hearing about how you guys upgrade topologies in production (assuming you do). It's designed to be able to run forever, but obviously once in awhile you find a bug, want to track a new stat, etc. I guess if you're pulling data off of a queue, you might be able to get away with letting things queue up for a few seconds as everything restarts with the new code and then catching up. Is that how you handle it, or do you do something more clever?
I've read C10K years ago. I don't consider it a useful educational document. It doesn't go deep enough into the subject and it doesn't describe well enough why things like threading don't work well. I all had to find that out through experience (of writing a web server myself), and even now some things are still blurry. C10K is very old, it doesn't describe recent advances in threading implementations. Why are threads unscalable? Is it because of context switching overhead? Because of the VM addresses required for the thread stacks? Because of frequent CPU cache flushes? C10K doesn't go into those kind of details and it doesn't look like many people know the answer. I suppose I can find out by studying the kernel but frankly I have better things to do with my time, like actually writing software and making a living.

Furthermore C10K is not the complete picture. It describes only connection management, not what you actually do with the connection. The latter plays a non-trivial role in actual scalability.
I think that goes further than 'a companys web services'.

Every business should be looking at their weaknesses.
If you are using someone else's service at the core of your business, that could go away at any time- you should have a contingency plan. The same for if you source something for manufacturing from another country, or have your factories in another country. What if that country becomes unstable? What will the impact on your business be?

There is nothing wrong with building your business on something that might disappear, you just need to understand that.
I have a suggestion. We have a lot of citations of Techcrunch articles (and for good reason). For events like these, however, could we look for better quality articles and submit those? (I know someone else could. But this is just so that we reduce the barrage of submissions.)

Some of the other articles are:

http://www.wired.com/geekdad/2011/08/world-wide-web-20-years...

http://www.zdnet.com/blog/networking/20-years-of-the-web/133...

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-14430076
Apparently, appending ? and then anything to the link usually gets you in. (I like to append "?reddit". It's often true, even.)
Its in 'The Facebook Effect'
And who will write the spec? And why will it be any easier to write the spec than the program?

Sure, there will be people at the top of the command hierarchy dictating what needs are being met. That doesn't mean that spec-writing jobs will provide gainful employment for as many people as are employed fulfilling specs these days.

As for why it will be any easier to write the spec than the program, it already is. "Plain language" is exactly how people spec things out all the time these days, it serves me quite well when I'm getting work assignments ("The Fizzle button is making the back end Furble on Tuesday nights, fix it!", or "Add a coupon code field to our order page and an administration tab to add codes to the database - just make sure the same code can't be used more than once").

Idealistic people try to write legal contracts in plain language, but it doesn't work.

People tell their lawyers in plain everyday language what they care about achieving with a legal contract, and the lawyers fill in the blanks based on what they know. Similarly, normal people tell their programmers what they care about achieving, the programmers fill in the blanks. Sure, we can't automate that filling-in-the-blanks super well yet, and yes, there often has to be some back and forth to figure out what the person really wants (this is, IMO, on of the most important things missing in a lot of machine learning approaches, as human thought - especially language processing - involves a lot of feedback between systems and backtracking), but to me it's not hard at all to imagine all of that being extremely successfully automated once we have thirty years more NLP research under our belts and laptop computers that would put the most expensive Hadoop cluster you could construct today to shame...

Then again, I'm one of the weirdos that thinks that the "problem" of intelligence can be solved by a much less sophisticated algorithm than the one that our brains implement, under the theory that typically evolution only ever seems to do one thing well: create highly complex solutions to medium difficulty problems.
Seems a reasonable assumption. Thanks.
> "Breast feeding goes on for as long as you want it to go on."

Yes -- and a lot of people want it to go on for the first year or so, because it's far and away healthier than formula. Ergo, a lot of mothers take more time off work than fathers do.

Even among women who choose to go back to work, many do it only part time, because of the added time commitment of breastfeeding or pumping. This is something a stay-at-home dad simply can't replace; infant formula is a sad substitute.
AppHarbor is awesome. The development process could not be any easier. You literally just create an MVC project and push it to your AppHarbor git repo and you're done. They also have support for SSL, multiple collaborators, and error logging. There are also a few features that I know are coming that will make it all the more awesome.

The add-on program seems pretty cool too. We're planning on adding EffectCheck to the list of supported APIs soon.
Gah, stop it with the presidential runs. It is MUCH easier to infiltrate U.S. politics via the House of Representatives. Elect a half-dozen representatives - which is entirely possible and much cheaper than a single Presidential run - and suddenly you're Joe Lieberman - the swing votes on a lot of issues.

But since most of the third-parties are driven by ego and really are just advertising for one specific person, they concentrate on a doomed Presidential run and fail miserably. What a waste.

Oh, nevermind, I see Thomas Friedman was excited about this. That clinches it: it's a failure.
I'm sure if you Google around you will fine a number of opinions on why the majority of startups don't go with .NET, but I'd say it is possible it is simply because many .NET developers love in the 'enterprise' world and are far away from the startup world most of the time. As a .NET developer I'm seeing this starting to change but it is only just starting.

There are certainly some disadvantages to .NET particularly when developing for the web, namely it's web framework maturity, ease-of-use and the lack of a strong open source community. These things are often cited as reasons why, say rails developers, are able to go "faster". And by faster we are not talking about performance but time to build your product. I'd say I find the last one, lack of a strong community as a big factor.

Anyways, I probably can't help you answer this personally, but here are some recent posts by fairly prolific .NET bloggers on why they decided to start moving away from .NET for what they feel are greener pastures in the rails community.

http://davybrion.com/blog/2010/08/how-i-feel-about-the-net-w...
http://wekeroad.com/post/7468824379/i-find-your-lack-of-fait...
http://osherove.com/blog/2011/1/2/the-journey-begins-and-why...

And a specific article about Rob Connery moving his startup from .NET MVC to Rails and why
http://www.infoq.com/articles/architecting-tekpub

Again I don't mean to advocate rails over .NET, but I wanted to answer your question as best as I could and I figured some thoughts from people who have already made these choices would help.
I had a friend asking me essentially the same question as the OP a week ago (I'm a professional iOS dev who also picks up a lot of loose ends in a production Django app for an established NY startup and have a couple pet Rails projects I work on on the weekends). Said friend had a product idea and was eager to invest a few thousand dollars into an MVP but does not have a programming background. He insisted on majority ownership and "just needed someone to build it". I told him that he needed to be more respectful of the fact that the product he wanted to sell was a PIECE OF SOFTWARE. Though a lot of people here will tell you about the importance of user acquisition, etc. the software in a software business cannot be regarded as secondary. My breakdown of his options I presented to him is below:

(1) solicit quotes -- if you get one that you can stomach from someone not in a third-world country, go with it, but I wouldn't be too hopeful.

(2) Consider partnering with a young and ambitious person with technical ability, and be prepared to give him at least 50% percent ownership in respect of his 100% authorship of the product that is at the core of your business.

(3) Do it your damn self. This is what I most strongly suggest and there's a massive community out there eager to give you assistance and encouragement. You could truly own the thing AND not be vulnerable to your technical co-founder/serf deciding he doesn't like you and wants to, say, expose all user data and get you sued and/or arrested.

Furthermore, it's very, very fun: (resources I pointed my friend to below. note: friend was interested in building an iPhone app)
http://rubyonrails.org, https://www.djangoproject.com, etc. <--- for your backend
http://developer.apple.com/library/ios/navigation/ <--- for your client (or, if your lazy, http://jquerymobile.com/)
http://aws.amazon.com/ec2/ <--- for hosting
http://git-scm.com/ <--- so you don't break shit
http://www.gnu.org/s/bash/ in http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_Terminal or http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xterm <--- so you learn shit
Shit just got real...
This may vindicate what I've been saying for years: "we don't need to mine asteroids, there's more of whatever you want in some corner of Nebraska!"
Mark Zuckerberg's sister Randi quits Facebook to set up on her own
Unless you keep the app open all the time (I’m assuming you do that because you have the focus of a guided missile), this is a program that you open and close several times a day. So why, oh why, does it take so much time to load?

This is why, even though I disagree with many of the things Apple is doing with the OS, I think Apple is on the right track with the app lifecycle model with Lion. Most computers ship with far more memory than people actually use these days; why should you constantly open and close apps when you can just leave them resident?

Most of the reason people even bother closing apps anymore has less to do with the resource-juggling that made it necessary in the past, and far more to do with workflow and window management.
Rare Earths are deposits of exotic minerals used in nearly every advanced technology today (wind mills to MRI's). California used to produce the entire world supply until China undercut the price. As demand boomed (prices going way up) and China started using them as a trade weapon so companies started looking for sources in more stable countries.
Currently you let things queue up while you redeploy, but I'm working on a new feature that lets you "swap" two topologies. The new one is deployed in an inactive state, and then the two topologies are swapped. This lets you minimize the downtime to almost nothing.
Can online Social Networks replace Real Socializing?
Here’s the full change log for iOS 5 beta 5
Dude I Hacked the Op-Ed Page!
Jazz album by Pakistan music veterans storms western charts
This is not true. Newspapers are dying because the marginal cost of distributing the content is almost zero. There is no other good way to make money off of news content besides advertising. And note that newspapers were already making a significant portion of their revenue from advertising. The failings of the newspaper business model have almost nothing to do with Google.
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Sadly, the open world is not immune to this. I've seen Eclipse's remote Java debugger intermittently fall over with bizarre JPDA errors, and spewing to log4j was also my quickest workaround. I'm not invested enough in the success of Eclipse, or Java for that matter, to contribute fixes.
http://www.npr.org/blogs/money/ is great for understanding what's going on right now

There was a fantastic 1980 PBS (video) series called Free to Choose, by Nobel-Prize winning economist Milton Friedman and his wife Rose.
It's available for free viewing here: http://miltonfriedman.blogspot.com/

Once you get into economics, you will like this blog: http://marginalrevolution.com/
“Finally, we use a few stateful, global data structures to track incoming requests and funnel them off to the right backend queues. In Erlang, the right way to do this is to spawn off a separate set of actors to manage each data structure and message pass with them to save and retrieve data.”

Nope, that’s not the right way. The way you were doing it ended up making all calls sequential and bound to single processes that could lose state. That’s not right.

The best way to do it would have been to use ETS tables (which can be optimized either for parallel reads or writes), which also allows destructive updates, in order to have the best performance and memory usage possible. Note that you could then have had memory-only Mnesia table (adding transactions, sharding and distribution on top of ETS) to do it.

As for string performances, I’m wondering if you used lists-as-strings, binary strings or io-lists to do your things. This can have significant impact in performance and memory use.

Then again, if you had a bunch of Python and no Erlang experts, I can’t really say anything truly convincing against a language switch. Go for what your team feels good with.
Ugh, the personal data and "snitch list" seem particularly bad to release. It does raise the question as to why this stuff is on remotely accessible servers, but still, it seems like this is just a freebie handout to identity thieves and perhaps worse for the snitch list?
I have no idea how to pin a number like $10B or any other on DropBox. I will say this:

DropBox has potential to be much more than about syncing and sharing files in the cloud. If they manage to come up with a useful enough "app API", they could grow into the backbone for the myriad SaaS apps where people worry "what happens to my data when 'tiny SaaS start-up' dries up and blows away?" or maybe more appropriately "who owns my data and how do I ensure it's secure, backed up, and accessible through 'neutral, well understood, and reliable means'?".
I follow Rails example and use 422 (Unprocessable Entity - The request was well-formed but was unable to be followed due to semantic errors).