skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Before the knee-jerk "E-gads! Flying Nukes to Kill us All!" gets out of hand, I'd like to point out that pebble reactors have been talked about as useful for transportation because of their crashability. Blow one up and you get hundreds of thousands of "pebbles" that are slightly radioactive in themselves but not enough to prevent relatively easy cleanup.

Along those same lines (low level fuel pieces assembled in a destruction-proof container), aren't various companies working on micro-reactors or "nuclear batteries"?

http://newenergyandfuel.com/http:/newenergyandfuel/com/2008/...

"The fuel is uranium of a type that isn’t worth much to a terrorist. The reactor operates with principles that shut themselves down so meltdowns and other horrors for the neighbors simply don’t exist."

I'm not saying all the bugs are worked out. But it looks like enough has changed since TMI that we could/should take an honest, open look at what we can do with nuclear now that we couldn't back then. At least to me it has.
In someways I think this could depend on the network effect.
If you are going against a Facebook/eBay/etc., you have to consider how you can grow a significant userbase overcoming the barriers to entry (notice I strangely used Facebook instead of MySpace? - Facebook had to have had the same thoughts you had at one point).

If you are going after a google(search) or Amazon, there is very little network effect (people would argue that Amazon network is built on the reviews, but reviews are available on the web).

Just my two sense.
Baby duck syndrome - preferring an interface you already know
New 'Electricity From Water' System Uses No Movable Parts
Thanks, good suggestion!
It does have weather, but I think I will move it up in the interface.
It warrants repeating, and the 1269 words did a good explanation of why. The "build it and they will come" mentality _doesn't_work_.
Is anyone with IE having issues?
Sounds like a terrible case of humanity. There is no cure. I'm sorry.
Stefano’s Linotype: Why Programmers Suck at CSS Design (CSS Guide)
You call it a science but I think its more of an art. Enterprise sales requires experienced sales staff... I wonder how many young scrappy technology driven start ups have failed for this reason.

I know that I never hear good things about the enterprise software from successful enterprise companies, so it seems like the technology is not the deciding factory of company success. I almost wonder if a company that is too technology focused is at a competitive disadvantage.
Brain peaks at 39 years of age and declines thereafter
"Enterprise sales requires experienced sales staff"

I've seen enterprise software companies with a barely-graduated team of phone sales people kick ass, FWIW. Totally depends on the complexity of the product and whether there is a services component.
my six year old daughter is in love with this and my 3-year old son is green with envy. Using a Wacom Intuos 3 on SuSE 11 in KDE 4 with Compiz on a 5 year old Dell. It would be nice if the Wacom tablet's pen eraser worked. Could a Firefox plugin help with that? (Here's an introductory Wacom-on-Linux howto with links to more authoritative sources: http://en.opensuse.org/Wacom_USB_tablet_howto)
Text Based GUI Prototypes
When did you actually trust Microsoft with online computing? Before Vista? I don't see a huge relationship between Vista and their online efforts. Sounds like a bit of MS bashing propaganda from somebody who has never liked or trusted them.
Microsoft Releases a Technology Preview of OpenID
Microsoft to open up 'M' language
I would venture to say that committing Seppuku is generally a bad idea, unless you have dishonored your family on the battlefield or something.
Great site! Simple idea, simple design. I like it.

Having said that, the "Google Search" looks messy -- a lot of word-wrapping going on. Some better way to display that?

Also it seems like you can easily run into lots of data sources with something like this. You might end up using a device like a tab. Just a thought.

Some of the links didn't give me any information (YouTube videos in the area) until I clicked on the link. I shouldn't have to click to find out the answer is "nothing here". That's probably impossible to do, but users are like that.

Finally the weather forecast could've used some icons. Seems like people expect icons with weather information.

Just my two cents. Keep up the good work. Awesome idea! A little more tweaking and some SEO work, right?
Sounds like the Richard Feynman stories about sitting on the board that chose the math/physics books for highschool students. He was the only one reading them while the others were just judging the book by the cover or what the publisher had said. It just goes to show that even brilliance can be overruled.
You see, the legal system is just a series of tubes. It's not a big truck! If you put me into it I will just clog up the whole thing.
"DH1. Ad Hominem."
"What does he know, he's just a mathematician!"

If you disagree with his thoughts on the matter, feel free to share your low opinion of him, but do try to back it up with real reasoning.
I hesitate to wade into this, especially this late to the party, but what the heck...

I think a major fallacy of the crowd around here is to see SEO as primarily just code/content optimization. Good HTML, page structure, and tagging is a bit of an art, but business as usual to any top flight developer.

The elephant in the room with SEO is paid links. You may have a wonderful validating, user friendly page, but if your competition has 1000 backlink lead on you, you'll never see the top SERP spot for big keywords. Viral content can certainly help, but the unpredictable nature (esp of the links) tends to keep it in second place.

I think most programmers consider paid links 'beneath' them, and most marketers don't understand it (and technically it's grounds for a google ban, but that's only in blatant cases in my experience), but in reality:

1) Identifying proper backlink candidates, in your niche, and tracking contact info down

2) Crafting a non-spammy pitch, and following up on it

3) Making a deal, optimizing the link, and keeping it up to date

is not only a skill set to be mastered, it's a full time job for any site of large size.

Of course throwing down a technically sound site with good content is job #1 for any of us, but the idea that that alone will get you traffic, especially if your idea isn't novel/brilliant, is awfully optimistic. We all want to be Twitter, but somebody out there is getting rich selling wrenches, and the publicity/viral opportunities take real work to master.

Finally, many of the services good SEOs offer like advanced site analytics, integration with PPC campaigns, etc, can be major ROI gainers. They're not necessarily SEO, but they tend to fall under that community's expertise.

whew All that said, I too believe that 80% of the SEO experts out there are hawking snake oil, or black hat google-bomb of the month stuff that will have negative repercussions, but the idea that the whole industry is bunk comes from a large number of people that either all have a brilliant, novel idea, or are missing a serious ROI opportunity.
so is systematic irrationality. Turns out that according to polls, people has systematically irrational beliefs when it comes to voting (probably because they have no immediate personal stake). Poll here: http://www.kff.org/kaiserpolls/1199-econgen.cfm
This could be done with a synchronous ajax request attached to the (nonstandard) onbeforeunload event.

Something else I'd like to see is a measurement of average page load times. In practice the best you could do is time from tracking script load to dom ready and/or body load. So your numbers would be off, but still useful for spotting trends.
Review My Startup: Feedbeater
FeedBeater is an intelligent service that allows anyone to syndicate any URL with zero configuration and no registration. With Feedbeater, users no longer have to rely on sites to generate an RSS feed.
Yeah, I was considering holding out for that, but my 360 is just loud; I don't mind it for video games, but I don't need that thing humming along while I'm watching movies. The Roku's really nice that way.
Microsoft has never "gotten" the internet. They still don't. I don't see any reason to suppose they have suddenly "gotten" it here.
If you chose a state, say CA, a page that shows all the parks in California appears. The page is rather long and it takes some time to load. My browser actually wanted to stop the script. Maybe you can first show all the counties in CA and then the parks in a specific county.

Besides searching for a park near you, it might be interesting to search for a park near you that has a certain activity, say rock climbing.
I agree on all points. I like the name of your plugin(s).

The main issue I have with bcrypt-ruby as I said is that there is basically no Windows support for it that I can find. I know that most of us who develop with Ruby/Rails use a Mac or Linux/Unix but there are some, like my business partner, who still use Windows as their development environment. For a Rails plugin or Ruby gem, I think it would be really nice if at least some effort was made to keep it more easily cross-platform compatible for those of us who are not C coders.

But, I really think for anything that is not being used in the NSA, Sha256 + salt would work just fine.

As I said, I'm no security expert, but the reading I have done would lead me to agree with you. It's all about degrees of security with the trade-off always being more security means less convenience for someone, be it the developer or the end user. I've weighed the security/convenience issue for me at this point in time, and I'm sticking with salted SHA256.
Under Park Activities, there's no mention of playing fields, tennis courts, etc.
I'd love to see an API on this as it is something we could potentially integrate into our products.
Looks great! What are you using to geotarget?
This is an area with some experiments actually. Peter Sinegr seems to be involved in a lot of them. He's a famous(ish) utilitarian. Considered pretty extreme.
Actually, you can almost use his moral prescriptions as a what happens when you take your above reasoning to the extreme.

Anyway, most people are instinctive deontologists. From the above link:

"the minority of subjects who did consider that it would be right to push the stranger off the footbridge {Right from a utilitarian/net-good perspective} took longer to reach their judgment, and had more activity in the parts of their brains associated with cognitive activity, than those who said that it would be wrong to push the stranger off the footbridge{Right from a deontological perspecitve}"

You seem to be a good example. Instinctively/emotionally a deontologist, rationally a utilitarian. A torn man. (;
and the alternative?
I had some really smart kids working for me over the summers at Canoe U. Marshall scholars, Rhodes scholars smart. I saved up miserable work for them all year and, come June, I'd give them one project each. I told they didn't have to come in, nothing. Just log their hours and send them to me every week. I'd make an estimate of how long each project should take, with a guess at what a standard dev might be. Invariably they went insane with boredom and frustration and asked for more projects.

I'm not saying my management style was exceptional, but their insight into the nature of work was: if the project bores the crap out of you, ask for two or three more. By working on the more interesting projects, you can save up willpower to tackle the dull-as-rocks first project. You might actually get through the first one faster.
i'm in iceland.. tried to find a park here.. didn't find any.. so i'm of no use to you,

good luck anyways!
'Lame Duck challenge' met, so software is free (for a day)
Beat it?!?
Election Reading List
I'm a Millenial and didn't find the original comment all that indignant or upset. It was another side-comment that tossed in the "Millenials, eh? ;-)" and I just figured that was a humorous attempt to tie this to another discussion.
I can see a bunch of generals in a room now

"That's the last thing they'll expect! A giant flying Christmas Tree!"

Yes. IF (and it's a big IF) aliens are visiting us, they are probably so far beyond us we'd have no more inkling of them than an ant has of a person.
"Salt" does nothing to address the primary way passwords have been cracked for the past 20 years, which is with incremental password crackers like Crack, L0phtcrack, and John the Ripper. Your comment about "anything not being used by the NSA" is silly, and misses the point entirely. Most Rails app users will entrust those apps with horribly bad passwords; bcrypt protects those passwords, and "salted SHA256" doesn't.

If you don't understand the problem you're trying to solve with this plugin, why are you promoting it?
It is like I made it myself
Five Common Myths of Angel Investing
Maybe I'm missing something here, because nobody is mentioning it, but isn't this a major shift for MS? Microsoft is a software company basically (other than mice and zunes and 360s), but here they are offering essentially hardware-as-a-service. If, last week, I would have gone to Dell and bought a server with a windows license (Disclaimer: I'd never do such a thing!), I'd now just pay MS to run my app on Azure . Dell, HP, IBM and whoever else make windows servers have just been cut out of the equation, right?
hah! StartupColony perhaps? ;-)
Indeed, you are correct.

function obj:method(arg) .. end

is the same as

function obj.method(obj,arg) .. end

I think the reason I mentioned the latter is I generally use Lua closures to code the way Eckel preferrs.

"Objects are a poor man's closures" -- Norman Adams
<begin brain dump>
I've never really seen a good visualization of a site's link graph (with focus on link text & page rank), probably due to the sheer size of many sites.

I'll second other posters that time on site for each page is a biggie.

Anything you can do to expand on the 'funnel' model is solid. (Clicktracks treatment of this is especially good IMHO)

Just to throw it out, I'd love to know more about if/how my users use other sites (so i could see if they've been on competitor.com or wherever recently =P), Although I can't possibly think of a way to do this that isn't a blatant privacy violation.

I'd also like more clustering options by language or country, so i could see if US/English users use the site differently than UKers or German speakers, although I realize that for most sites that are international enough to care, they have multiple language sites, there's still visitor cross-over.

This is a stupid one, but automatic FTP downloading of log files is something I seem to have to set up all the time, so a mechanism for aggregating logs would be nice =).

All just random brain noise, hope it helps =).
How to deal with Machiavellian investors
What's to invent? ;)

The hard bit surely is building a userbase that uses it. Not coming up with the idea. Right?
I did read your comment, but it made no sense, so I assumed it was a typo.

You wrote: "proved beyond the shadow of the doubt that it's both doable and feasible" - and at the same time that they didn't do it.

So how did they prove "beyond the shadow of the doubt" something they didn't even do?

That made so little sense I assumed you didn't realize they didn't power the engines from the reactor.

Edit: maybe you don't realize that carrying the nuclear plant is the easy part (heavy lift vehicles exist after all), powering the engines is the very hard part.
Science fiction was not over-optimistic. Rather, we have lost the will to explore.
You know how people have been talking the past couple months about how Alaska gets more federal money per capita than any other state? That's Stevens. What you call pork, locals call boosting the local economy.

It's the same reason why Congress is at a 12% approval rating yet most incumbents have no trouble keeping their seats. Everyone thinks their Representative and Senators are great, it's all the others that are crooks.
It's down right now. 502 gateway.
502 Bad Gateway

dead for me...?
Not intimidating, familiar interface, many of the PS shortcut keys work, only SLIGHTLY laggy, really really great work.
This one looks much better - http://www.balsamiq.com/products
I could see this being useful someday soon...

I'm not a fan of the big popup of state abbrevs. First, because some state abbrevs aren't immediately obvious to me (MD and ME I have to stop and think about). Second, because mine is always way at the bottom. (Then I get a mostly-alphabetical list, again sorted by county name.) I wish it would just show me a map and let me click where I am, even just the simplest USA.jpeg with an imagemap to pick a state.

If I type "wa" in the box and click "search", I get the standard Rails "something went wrong" page.

If I type "washington" in the box, I get a bunch of "Washington, DC" parks, followed by a bunch of parks with "Washington" in their name. I admit my forefathers didn't pick the most creative name for my state, but it would be nice if it was a little more forgiving, and show me some Washington parks when I search for "washington".

I can't find either of the parks I usually visit, nor a way to add a new entry. I guess that's version 2. I'd also like to be able to search by what features a park has, which is probably also version 2 (after users have had time to vote!).
Little Known Ways to Ruby Mastery by Chris O’Sullivan
Cool, intuitive javascript selection technique
You can find more docs on Windows Azure tables (distinct from the blobs service which you missed :-) ) at http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkId=131257 . Sorry about the doc link. I'm sure there's a web version somewhere which I can't find right now thanks to the flaky connection I'm on
"with the same lethal outcome in case of failure"

Not so, it's a lot easier to put extra safety equipment on the ground then on an airplane.

I quite agree that parachuting the reactor is not going to work - if you were flying the thing, and you had a 50% chance of saving the plane if you had a power plant, but a 100% chance of crashing if you let it drop - would you do it?

The military is trained for such choices, civilians are not.
Windows Live ID Becomes an OpenID Provider
When I read the title I was prepared to disagree but after reading the article I am convinced there is a lot I don't know about design. Good stuff.
A French Family Dynasty Reinvents the Oyster
Why specifically?
It was news to me, actually. I thought the credit card companies just wanted to get lots of nearly insolvent customers because they were old fashioned loan sharks, not because they wanted to resell their debt as securities.
One good wikipedia citing deserves another.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ramjet

Nuclear powered ramjets

Main article: Project Pluto

During the Cold War the United States designed and ground-tested a nuclear-powered ramjet called Project Pluto. This system used no combustion - a nuclear reactor heated the air instead. The project was ultimately canceled because ICBMs seemed to serve the purpose better, and because a low-flying missile would have been highly radioactive.
As long as they aren't attractive women. http://www.pubmedcentral.nih.gov/articlerender.fcgi?artid=18...
Amazon currently have 3 separate data centers and additional S3 storage in Europe. This trend will continue as SLAs become more of a selling point for all Cloud purveyors.

Second why do people think that your own data center will be better? It is like putting your money under the bed rather than in the bank. So people do that but not a good idea.

Lastly we will see a common API emerge that will allow us to move with little impertinent. The emergence of Eucalyptus is an early indication of this.
Where's the service going to go from here? A good start, but I'd like to see it help me with something that other services don't already solve.
Stanford’s SSE Ventures Funds Diffbot
Hey Tectonic, I just sent you a note via Iteration Labs. We've got a bunch of park reviews you could drop in, and we're looking for a launch partner for a new consumer ratings API. Let me know if you want to talk.
I'd add a number 6.

Angel Investors are competent negotiators.

I just lived through a startup where the board, led by the Angel Investors representative turned down a multi-million dollar offer because they thought they could get a better one. (They were wrong.)

So instead of getting their money back plus a bit, they are losing it all and trying to recover it by trashing what's left of the business.

Eventually I will write my blog post on "More tales of greed and incompetence on the electronic frontier."; right now I'm too busy picking up the pieces and making sure that our customers aren't going to be left stranded when we fold up the circus and put it away.
To me, the cloud-computing landscape feels like the Web search landscape in 1996. Back then, Everybody who’d thought about it had clued in that this was going to be really interesting and useful. There had been a few offerings, much better than nothing but not really hitting a sweet spot. [Disclosure: One of them was me.] Then Altavista launched and it was clearly better than anything else. Meanwhile, Larry and Sergey were at Stanford thinking about transitive functions over the graph of Web hyperlinks.

Maybe. To me it feels more like commercial software development in the early 80s. There were a bunch of platforms (C64, PC, Apple II, etc), none of which was a clear winner, software had to be written twice to work on two different systems.

People talk about lock in, but seemingly mostly in the context of getting their data back out when they're done. I'm particularly interested in watching how the space commoditizes (hmm, the red bars tell me that's not a word). Over and over we've seen markets converge on one or a small few standards -- I think we're some distance from seeing that here. I think it's too early still to put any guesses on how it might standardize yet.
And both are big asset oligopoly industries. Content owners specifically don't have any reason to believe that better distribution channels will improve their bottom line.

Actually I think with record producers, video content owners & to an extent, publishing giants are all in a similar (leaky) boat. They are in a situation where life has been good, they are on top of the world. Only way to go is down.

Any move in the directions that technology is pushing towards like better, wider distribution, reduced production costs & power to the consumer is troubling. For one thing, they have a better hold on the here & now then the long tail. Sure they own most of it, but better distribution opens the doors to a groundswell of small producers. Expensive special effects, 1000 actor scenes, are no longer as big a differentiator. Now you want to give these $100k budget jokers access to living rooms?

Will better distribution make people watch more TV? probably not. Why take a chance?
The trade-off is indeed the security of your users versus the convenience of your developers.

That said, I don't so much care whether you store your passwords with a demonstrably inferior scheme like Authgasm's default or the 1-line-delta variant of it that resolves its biggest problem. It's fine to be ignorant about this stuff; it's not going to make you 1 extra dollar to do it right.

Just don't be militant about your ignorance.
Interesting article, but some numbers would be really great.
No prob. Sorry I couldn't be more help with the investor question. Our company is RateMyStudentRental.com.
Lol all this, and we all ask one question in return:

why?
I just turned 27. I've been told we learned more about the brain in the 90s than all previous history combined. My hope is the given the amount of research going into myelin breakdown because of diseases like MS, by the time I'm 39, that date can be pushed back a bit. Escape velocity with respect to anti-aging is a delightful idea.
Hidden Features of ASP.NET
Is this a problem with the VM or is it a problem with one of the C libraries available?
Hidden Features of Ruby