skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
According to the german public, for the environment and the whole humanity the risks from nuclear plant are that high that coal plants, even though they are now used more and are unhealthy, are way less dangerous.

Yes, and the German public is flat-out wrong.
Redpomo: Redmine, Pomodoro technique and Todo-txt. Together.
* floats are ever a good idea for storing time. a system i use (no, not excel) has one of its time types defined as a double of days since their epoch. the problem is that it's universally represented in the interface as a timestamp to millisecond precision, and many different values may have the same string representation.

i just ran a quick test, and for a specific millisecond around now, about 13,000 distinct timestamps have the same string representation. if you use that string representation as a serialization of any one of those timestamps, it will always map back to a single float value, which will be only one of those 13,000, meaning the others aren't round-trippable.

the system implements a comparison tolerance for floating point numbers, but this helps only slightly, as only about 1100 of those 13,000 test as equal to the one you get if you enter it as a string.

the end result is that you can have data printing to the screen that you can't actually find in the system because its string representation doesn't match its internal one due to precision issues.

(the solution is not to use the type--they deprecated it in favor of one based on longs of nanos several years ago.)
Ask HN: Do MMO AI simulators exist?
Hey all,

I've recently gotten interested in AI programming (I'm using Ruby). Is there a website which allows me to write some kind of algorithm and have it 'verse' other people's algorithms? I'm thinking something like the Ants game (I think it was Ants) earlier this year.
Other people are not books, and they deserve better than to be treated like books.
One World Trade Center - Vídeo da Construção entre 2004 e 2012
If You're A Dude On The Internet, You NEED To See This Video
(Some) guys are told that their value as a man is tied to how good they are at "getting" women. So every conversation with a woman is framed in terms of an existential threat: if you're not getting enough women, you're not a real man.
Me too (more like 2 years). I figured RFIDs would be involved. I thought of it as soon as I heard Hong Kong Airport used RFIDs to track baggage. Didn't work on it because it seemed too big.
http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:blogs.a...

No screen shots or links in this, obviously.
Arguing kids could have benefits
Correct, but it appears that this process requires (lots of) heat, and that can be obtained from solar furnaces. If this works then we can use a solar furnace and directly create hydrogen gas, missing out all the efficiency-sapping intermediate stages and going straight to a storable fuel.
Is There Such a Thing as Too Much Security?
Flipboard becomes prominent Google+ partner
A linked issue is that an answer to an easy question will gain much more rep as more people will feel able to judge the quality of the answer. Often the only person qualified to quickly judge if the answer to a hard question is correct is the person who asked it.
Leaving the problem of 100 new questions 90 of which are just dupes of existing PHP/Python answers and nobody can spot and answer the new Ruby ones
Agreed (except for the agony part...I've been pairing for a long time and I enjoy it). In my experience, the people that "rip" keyboards from other folks' hands do so rather indiscriminately.
New Resources for Security Awareness Programs
Yeah, except Milo hit this from a different (and completely sensible) angle. While the OP suggests spending years building up a free inventory system for all local merchants, the Milo guys realized that 1) A huge percentage of stores these days are big name stores, and 2) Those stores all use one of about 5 different inventory systems.

So they got at this problem by writing integration code with the existing inventory systems, and thereby got the data for a large portion of the market (nationally!).

I really like OPs idea, actually, but the Milo approach turns a 10-year plan into a 1-year plan, and if you can survive off the revenue you get from your 1-year plan, then you can use the excess to see your grand vision executed all the way through.

Clearly the Milo guys didn't go this route and instead sold to eBay (quickly!), but it's these kinds of "pre-pivots" that I think allow great companies to be built.
#OPG-20 Mensaje de Anonymous a los lideres mundiales de la G-20 2012
How is this useful?

It shows how genres are related but if I click on two genres, it's a large grey ball of relations which shows exactly nothing except there are huge relationships between these genres.
Looking For Work? Let Google Analytics Guide You
Argue for your limitations and sure enough, they're yours.
This feels like a terrible idea, something totally academic rather than usable. I practice the exact opposite, using classes everywhere, and virtually never attaching CSS rules to element names.

This is because, in my real-world experience, HTML structure can change very easily. The h1 turns into an h3 for SEO reasons, a wrapper div gets added for a visual effect, an extra span gets thrown inside an existing one. And suddenly, all the CSS is broken because it all depended on the exact structure of the HTML. Maintenance becomes a nightmare.

But if you do everything with named classes, then nothing breaks at all. Writing CSS without classes makes as much sense to me as writing JavaScript code without function names.
None of the actual metrics of the site bear this out. I don't know what "myspacing" is, and "floundering" is pretty subjective, but in terms of actual measurable things, we have more questions asked, more questions answered, more people active on the site, more sites with more activity and most metrics are up about 100% in the last year. Some of the things that we track pretty closely (like number of users who ask or answer 5 times monthly) are steadily growing.
Actually, I was bullied by a caretaker and certain peers when I was a kid and had anxiety related issues as a result. After abusing drugs and neglecting myself for a long time, I faced my problems and learned to stand up for myself. Way to hold a prejudice against me based on my gender, genius.
Site seems to be going up and down. Just keep refreshing, and you should get the site again. With images.
Several other characters in that book are also based on real people, albeit living (at time of writing anwyay) ones, so names and some details were changed, as well as adding some more speculation. For example the character Earl Comstock was pretty much Robert McNamara. A lot of the people in the 90's timeline seem to be based on real people Stephenson wrote about in his factual articles. (particularly the ones about cable laying in the pacific).
Great free icon set for apps on github
Instructions for how to build it would be nice. I see source code for the NXT brick, but no diagrams.
I was reading that article thinking "I remember all of those features (and more) being in Sub7 about 12-13 years ago". Not so advanced, really.
Thanks for your clever comment and for those emitting similar concerns.

You surely are right. I wanted to give a quick example, turns out it was a bad one. Next time I'll write :

int i = 0;
printf("%i", i++); // prints 0
printf("%i", ++i); // prints 2
There's a certain aspect of "functions have domains, not just ranges" at work here as well -- e.g. - restricting the (math) tan() function to the domain of -90 to 90 degrees (exclusive), unless you really get off on watching it cycle over madness. If you are going to be playing around the edges of something, it behooves you to put some kind of pre-condition in with an assert of similar mechanism.

In fairness, I guess a function like this is a good example of why you should put in preconditions, as well as a good demonstration that "not all the world is a VAX" (nor MS C 7, nor GCC version N) :-)
There needs to be an embargo period where votes don't show up for the first 15-30mins to stop the snowballing effect of the first answer - like with real election results
A couple of points (from a top 0.47% user, but that's not why I'm on SO):

* imagine googling for a programming questions and be stuck in 2008 - I don't want to go back

* imagine researching a wittgenstein paper - do you need philosophy.stackexchange.com - probably not; the numbers show, that SO's still the metrics vanguard - I think the demand for the niche sites is certainly there, but large communities have formed around traditional forum sites - and people are happy with that - so there is no pressing need to switch to the new format

* concerning questions - it has been a phenomenon since the beginning, that the simplest answers (C-C C-V the docs) got the most upvotes - interesting hard questions don't earn you much reputation, if that's what you're after - I still get a lot of upvotes for year-old answers, which everybody could have written, while the answers I invested hours in remain relatively untouched; but the main value for me comes from learning by answering questions: try to bring your point across in a few words, collect useful references and show working code - it's like a daily workout equivalent in the tech field

* open questions: I'm trying to make it a habit to answer one hard, unanswered, maybe older question each week - because it's true, the "reputation clock cycle" leaves a lot behind...

* moderation: most moderators have been long around - and I can somehow guess, in which tags a person is active, because I likely saw their comments, answers, flags already a couple of times - can't really blame them for closing a lot of questions - it's hard; if you can, sift through http://stackoverflow.com/tools/flagged and you might know what I mean

* tldr: SO rocks if you're a programmer, for other SE sites YMMV; unsatisfied with closed questions? reopen them or discuss it on meta - it's not possible that moderators don't make mistakes and it's not true, that you can't at least try to discuss specific issues; unsatisfied with unanswered hard questions: find one and write up something great
OSX running on ARM? I don't think that would fly, not enough horsepower and you'd have to rewrite/recompile all legacy apps, exactly the problem Win8 RT has with ARM.

If x86 mobile SoC's do improve as much as Intel thinks over ARMin the next 1-2 years, will be interesting where that leaves Apple and iOS.
Comments on Reddit suggest this is also a fully-mechanical Lego Turing Machine (including electric motor), but I haven't watched the full video to make sure there's no Mindstorms CPU kit:

http://www.turing2012.fr/?p=530&lang=en
I'm pretty sure the only serious part of the description is "Zach Holman", "Ruby developer" and "He works at GitHub". The sentence before that says those phrases ("sound fundamentals, firm grasp on the industry, and innovative development approaches") don't apply to Zach.
New Android Malware is Disguised as a Security App
The best strategy seems to be incremental editing. Post a short and to-the-point answer first and then edit it to expand and add finer points. This way your answer is already competing with others even as you write it (properly).

It feels slightly weird to be forced to employ such a tactic, but at SO's scale it might just be necessary.
It looks quite small? Given that it is an universal computer, I guess that is quite a feat.
But a much bigger audience with the SO crowd
Yeah, well. If you're on a mac, and use Redmine, and like pomodoros.
Ask HN: Please recommend a good outsource site
I would like to build a website with impressive UI and massive SQL actions in the Back-End.
I am looking for an outsource site where i can pick developers and designers for Front-End and Back-End job.

Can you recommend such a site? (Please elaborate about the Payment process, interview process and quality of the selected developer/team)

Thanks
A Twitter Bootstrap based simple table generator
Aymara Language and Gesture Point to Mirror-Image View of Time
The nuclear plants are not the only source of highly toxic nuclear waste -- medicine, science and industry have also a fine share, and they are often dealing with much more dangerous isotopes that are in the nuclear waste.

The storage problem comes fact any attempt of reason immediately sinks in an overall panic; and the by-design scaleable long-run solution is pretty simple -- to put them from where we have mined them. Oklo reactors proved such storage can last billions of years.
I've been using it since a couple of months... no doubt: best tool of the year!!!
That brings up an interesting idea of dynamic pricing based on pain (distance). Sort of the anti-hipmunk model. The app could offer close retailers extra profit because they are the most convenient to the customer OR the customer can opt to pay less by walking more.
Maybe a simple answer to having a question closed/moved as subjective would be that at least two mods find flag it as such.
We have not a single working endlager for the waste the nuclear plants are producing. Historically, there have been several large accidents, Tschernobyl, Fukushima, Three Mile, and several more smaller ones which would almost been fatal.

I know that people on HN obviously like technology, and noticed that many people who like technology like nuclear plants. Maybe because they see them as great technology and are able to believe in that.

But given the facts, no, the german public is not wrong. They are undisputably right. The Super-GAUs prove that.
Just tried with Plan 9-derived compilers shipped with Go, and there's no bug (provided that my re-implementation of the test case is correct).
Imagine a historical database of Russian birthdays, copied from historical archives by data-entry clerks who had no idea when Russia switched from the Julian to the Gregorian calendar. (For extra fun, imagine that half of the clerks doing the data entry converted the dates before entering them, and half didn’t.)
I also think government dilutes the effectiveness of the experts it employs, but at the same time the private sector is amazingly, exceedingly incapable of seeing benefit from anything but immediate profits. Investing in highly risky pilot programs which have high costs and uncertain benefits is something the private sector, except perhaps a few optimistic billionaires, would never do. If we had never supported difficult-to-quantify never-never projects, we wouldn't be finding exoplanets, we would have never discovered that asteroids are clumps of unfathomably abundant resources, we would have never gotten to the Moon, and Europeans would never have explored the New World, because the benefits at the time seemed dubious and the funding came from governments.

I am optimistic just because I have a high amount of trust for German government. They are a lot more cautious and less bandwagon-hopping and more capable of pulling stuff like this off whereas for most other industrialized governments the Energiewende would just be a dramatic stage show created by former-execs-turned-bureaucrats to put taxpayer dollars into contractor's pockets without any concern for actual results.
Tips to write better JavaScript
"Well, we can't have all these people communicating directly with one-an-other now can we? Next thing you know they'll be exchanging ideas and experiences or organizing things on their own! Better regulate it".
When I was a teenager I found it fun to intentionally infect myself with malware and try to study it. I know realize this wasn't the most responsible thing to do, as I wasn't in a sandboxed environment, but it was a great learning experience and taught me a lot about networking and security.

One of the biggest malwares I ever managed to infect myself with was a bot, which caused my computer to become a zombie on a ~10K botnet. I spent hours running a packet sniffer and seeing how the client interacted with the IRC network it called home to. Upon connecting to the privately run IRC network, the bot would authenticate with a user and pass. I assume it created one upon connecting the first time to the network. My best guess as to why this is is so that the bot master could track the total number of zombies and compare it to how many were actively connected to the botnet. Kind of a cleaver way to get metrics, now that I think about it.

When I temporarily stopped the bot from connecting to IRC, I decided it might be fun to login as the bot and join the channel I saw it connecting to. Upon joining the channel, I saw thousands of other users on the channel. I spent a couple of days sitting there, masquerading myself as a bot, and watching the botmaster interact with the bots. The botmaster would issue commands that I can't really recall anymore, but I do remember seeing a lot of commands that I assumed told the bots to download extra malware from a remote host. I remember seeing URLs for zip and exe files.

Eventually I got a little bored of this, so I decided to message the botmaster. It was easy to spot him; out of the three ops on the channel, he was the only full op. I tried a "hello" and waited. And waited. And then I was k-lined from the IRC network.

The next day when I logged onto my computer, I found my Internet connectivity was being overwhelmed with bogus TCP requests. I had pissed off the botmaster by snooping, and now I was getting DDoS'd. I imagine he/she commandeered a small number of the bots to do this. It wouldn't take many... I imagine back then, given my bandwidth, 10-15 would have done it.

Fun times. I remember posting about my botnet adventures to Security Focus way back when. Some people got really interested and followed my posts, while other professionals asked me to stop because I wasn't running a sandbox.

IMO, those were different times. I'm not sure I'd recommend something like this these days. After hearing about certain botnets being tied to various mafias and gangs around the world (which is probably more common than you think. See http://www.ibtimes.co.uk/articles/321149/20120329/mafia-cont...), I'm not sure I'd really want to risk interfering with their activities.
How we are helping the world Soccket | The Power of Play
How Start-ups can Benefit from Social Media
- It's not just wind (turbines) but also solar.

- You don't have centralized access to all the facilities. E.g. small and medium-scale solar falls under the control of the owner AFAIK. Large scale wind also has other parties involved that don't want to miss out on income.

- Control of energy production on a national or regional scale follows prediction models, not only for demand but also price of resources such as gas and weather forecasts for renewables. So for a holiday they would shutdown a number of "classic" facilities to follow a day-ahead schedule. This probably increased the dependency on renewables for that day.

The big question "why didn't they shutdown wind farms": I don't know but I plan to find out.
Rock Health Graduates 2nd Class of Health Startups
It's not meant to, it's if you wish to donate it makes it easier to find/discover organisations accepting bitcoins as a method of donation. I know there's a page on the bitcoin wiki but you still have to go onto each site and search for the bitcoin address. This also makes it easier to send to multiple organisations quickly and painlessly.
Think of graphics cards, since they're the most commonplace example of coprocessors. You don't install a game on your graphics card; rather, the system gains the ability to offload graphics processing to the card, in order to improve how well the system as a whole runs the game.
sure for the first and second points; I don't like pomodoro so much but I always need a time tracker and something to check the time I'm spending daily. This has been really usefull.
I've tried this and it looks interesting; probably there are too many tools to install to get it working though, i.e. todo.txt looks a bit like garbage to me.
Retina Display Teardown (MacBook Pro 15")
I disagree. I recently picked up pyparsing, and in trying to understand (I'm not a comp sci major), I made an account on stackexchange. The author of pyparsing answered my question. I'm sold.
Cara Cepat Membersihkan Karang Gigi secara Alami | All About Cyber
My girlfriend and I came up with exactly the same idea a couple years ago. It is a pretty big one, and I could have used it last night when I needed a bar of soap at 10 PM in downtown Seattle.

For those of you who are saying stores would never go along with this: I ended up buying ice cream at the first store I could find that happened to have the soap, because I was tired and wanted ice cream. There's a competitive advantage to being the closest/best-priced store with a particular thing I need, because that gets me in the door with a guaranteed sale, and once I'm there I just might buy something else I don't need. If every corner store had a data-driven way to choose which products to carry, they would improve their business in a positive-sum way.
WinZip Now Available In The Google Play Store
Actually no, they know I am outside EU, but they just didn't do any offer to help, but i will be trying to talk with them.
This is the third article I've read from various sources underlying the importance of the upcoming Dubai meeting. To me it sounds a heckuva lot worse than SOPA/PIPA was in the states. I tire of breathless articles, but unfortunately we are living in a time where multiple interested parties are all trying to use their political power to control what we see, read, think, and share. Hopefully this ITU/UN move will get the international press attention that it looks to me like it deserves.

On a tangential note, Google reports a record number of requests from governments to remove things from their search results. Not just places we normally associate with censorship, but lots of supposedly more "liberal" western democracies as well. Control over the net is simply too powerful of an incentive for governments to maintain the principle of keeping their hands clear.
It says it's a Turing Machine, I seriously doubt that it is a Universal Turing Machine.
Except in this case, you can install Linux on it.
Love the idea.

Small issue - when I mouse over the Buy Now button, the popup/hover box shows up for about a second, then disappears.
The problem is that H2 is very volatile, so storing it efficiently is not trivial.
1. no cache?! what year is this?! 2010?!
2. keeps automatically refreshing/restarting the graph every time I switch the tabs in Chrome 19.
3. at my first refresh I think it loaded all the music styles at once.

Nice. Get working on your next one.
Stay away!: http://online-storage.no1reviews.com/user-reviews/onlinestor...
Great idea, good execution! I like this a lot!
Absolutely agreed - but we can "solve" energy differently. Not so much for other applications. So nuclear waste in energy is completely avoidable.

Not sure I understand your second paragraph.
Thanks a lot for sharing this great resource. A very simple & covering large range of concerns on designing highly scalable & available services.
The brilliance of the ipad isn't what it can do, it's what it doesn't do. E.g., Apple took away file management from the user, much like an automatic transmission takes away shifting gears from the driver. Consumers love it but enterprise IT is resisting for various reasons, so MS still has the advantage in the corporate world.

But I'm not convinced this 'all in one' strategy is the best way for Microsoft. If it's just Win7 with a fancy tiled interface, then it's really not that much different from their previous tablet efforts. It all hinges on getting good 3rd party app support. It'll probably sell higher volume because they are faster and more responsive than the last generation, but they'll be lucky to see half the sales of ipads in 5 years.
Medical Tourism Costa Rica
Are You Agile Enough for the New Business Economy?
Creator of the project here. Thx :) What browser are you on?
Tracking Original HTTP Referer to determine customer LTV
'No-Sleep Energy Bugs' Drain Smartphone Batteries