skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
1. No modern coal-plant leads to waste areas of uninhabitable land. Nuclear Plants do.

2. We do coal mines way longer. Even if the number is right, that "we've lost more people to coal mine cave ins than we have to nuclear accidents", (which is hard to agree with, cause it is statistically a hard problem to count the ones still dying from cancer years later because of Tschernobyl for example), that number would be meaningless.

3. Coal power is highly disputed in Germany. It is only accepted as a transition-help while heading to green energy. And yes, i think that's a good thing - and no, i'm not insane.
> 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'd probably do the same, upon discovering that one of my bots had become sentient.
Stack Overflow always experiences a "summer lull", typically starting around March or April.

Our best guess is lots of people taking vacations offsetting growth, on the 3 year graph you'll notice growth resumes sometime around September every year.

I honestly don't care* too much about it, we're in the business of quality questions and answers; traffic is a side effect, not a goal.

(Disclaimer, SE Inc. Employee etc. etc.)

*Provided it's high enough to pay the bills naturally, which isn't that hard to do.
We've considered it, but we're still working on our reseller/integrator story.
Not all of us are professional virus analysts. No need to mock him, his post is worth reading for mere amateurs like myself.
There's no such thing as UN law. There are treaties between nations, frequently brokered at the UN, and there are UN resolutions, which are more like "this statement was not vetoed by anyone" than they are rulings of law.

Any devolution of ICANN's powers to the UN (which, if not massively fucked up, is probably healthier for the internet than keeping it under one country) would likely be an administrative handover. I seriously doubt it would be done on the basis that the G77 voting as a block could take control of the net.

For an analogy, look at the way the UN peacekeepers typically handle things. They go someplace where there's peacekeeping.. and then they sit there. They don't do anything and avoid taking a side at all costs. If either side says they're not welcome anymore, they're gone.

The UN isn't a government, it's a really big conference room.
1) CSS on dev setup changes very often. Limiting number of <link>'s was one of the goals.

2) It does not. The ' ' is actually a double space.

3) Point 2)
As someone who never used Greplin, I'll focus on what I do like: I found the layout quite creative. The top images of the iPhone remain fully scaled to your browser width, which means the menu below is only revealed when you scroll down. Thus, no matter what the browser size, you're always only focusing on the photos and features of the service, until you scroll down. Quite clever.
Unsigned integer overflow has defined behaviour in C, while signed overflow doesn't. Is it really better to protect people from a simple logical error by exposing them to possible undefined behaviour?

With signed integers, you'll run into the same problem with comparing to n+1 at INT_MAX or n-1 at INT_MIN.
I don't know, really: around me (France) people who say they are profitable definitely include their salaries in the equation.

Even in accounting here, the (company) profit is what remains after everyone, founders included, has been paid.

And if your recurring expenses are low enough, it doesn't mean necessarily a high amount of money either (eg: here our coming SaaS will be profitable for us at around 2500€/mo ex VAT).
Very nice looking theme, and a good idea.

It makes me think though, so much effort lately is going into "dressing" UI and very little attention seems to be paid to improving UI structure. The old list - page hop - view pattern is feeling pretty out dated. Oh well.
I'm sure. I'm not exactly surprised that it happened now ;)
For replies to your comments or submissions there is HN_Notify: http://hnnotify.com/

Edit: I see nickbarnwell beat me to it, but I'll upvote his reply and let mine stand anyway.
Sparrow will be $0.99 for 2 days.
Yes. It really is 99¢. It is a fantastic app and definitely worth the 99¢. In my experience, it is the best under $1.00 software application I've ever bought spanning all platforms.
You don't 'need' to convert it, but HVDC transmission is emerging as more efficient and cost-effective than conventional HVAC transmission.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-voltage_direct_current
In that case, you can be pretty certain that you need a signed integer.
The article makes the point that a business should only be considered profitable when it is sustainably profitable - e.g. when it can pay its workers for their time.

Given the debate that this idea appears to be generating perhaps another way of looking his idea is to say that the business has no value as a business until it is sustainably profitable (even though it may control assets that may be valuable when liquidated such as a web domain or even talent which another company may wish to acquire) - i.e. until it is sustainably profitable a business has no value as an ongoing enterprise and can only be sold for the value of its assets.
I think someone is mistaking the whole "Hacker News" title, here.
The other extreme seems to be a situation like reddit's r/programming, which says (on every page) "If there is no code in your link, it probably doesn't belong here", yet usually half the posts violate it, i.e., you have guidelines but they're pretty universally ignored.

Which is better? I don't know. I personally haven't used either one in a while, because they don't seem to work well if you're not using a mainstream programming language. Google still wins for me here, since the right answer is very frequently on some random person's blog.
Isn't this called "fuzzing"
0 is a really common value for an integer variable in programs. INT_MAX and INT_MIN are not.

It's just my experience. Don't get too wound up about it ;)
Temporary tables default to being mapped in memory and for more complex querying (where you have multiple queries and conditionally select further queries depending on results) are faster since the table that they are based off of could have changed, but they will not, so caching is much more likely. Keys and Indexes are not exact synonyms. Give it a try some time, do a where clause with mod(id, 5) = 0 on a keyed table and on an indexed table. The indexed table will be non-trivially faster (I've seen 3x faster).
True. Just find it odd that this gets posted on the official blog. Interesting indeed, but a bit careless.
This is a device that Microsoft is building (well, contracting to build undoubtedly) and selling with their own name on it. They are the OEM here, and they'll be setting 100% of the hardware specs.
As far as measuring the sort of thing people are talking about:

How has your Net Promoter Score changed? Do you do surveys with questions like, "How disappointed would you be if Stack Overflow went away tomorrow?" How does attrition of users with at least 3 upvoted answers look over time?

I wouldn't expect the metrics you mention to capture the sort of user satisfaction issues, and I could see the above numbers not showing a problem because general growth is masking specific issues. I'm sure you can name quite a number of products whose quality decline started well before popularity peaked.
Twitter Bootstrap for Rails 3
twitter-bootstrap-rails project integrates Bootstrap CSS toolkit for Rails 3.1 Asset Pipeline (Rails 3.2 supported)
First you can't put "opportunity cost" in your ledger on the expense side. Opportunity cost doesn't really work that way. Moreover opportunity cost is am abstraction. It's an abstraction which is partly there to keep you aware of the fact that where you take one road, there are others, and you can't take them all.

I think what the article is trying to get at is the difference between sustainability and profitability. Something may be profitable and yet not sustainable (for a variety of reasons). Something may be sustainable and yet have no profit (the Apache foundation), but one key part of sustainability is being able to fund core activities.

As for why folks should care, I think it is important to be clear about things when analyzing financial health of a business. A business which makes $1000/month net profit a month may not be able to support the founder (but presumably the founder has some other source of money to live on) but what it can do is absorb $1000/month in additional expenses without requiring additional investment. A business with no money in the bank but $1000 in net profits every month may be better able to weather unexpected mishaps than a business that's losing 2000/mo with 20k in the bank.
An example of mine: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3165794

The article was originally called Better disagreement. I chose to call my submission 'How to Disagree' on Steroids: DH7. Someone later changed it back to the article's title.

You could say my title had an editorial spin (I'm looking at 'Steroids'), but I resent the edit for not even keeping the explicit reference to DH7 and PG's article.

I have chosen this title because I assumed most of HN knows about PG's article. This submission is essentially a rehash, and therefore not interesting HN material (better link to PG's article). Except for the DH7 part, which was original. By changing the title, I hoped to tell readers about that, so they don't lose time, nor stop reading before even reaching DH7.

I also hoped a karma boost from this submission, but the title edit (which I think was responsible for the lack of upvotes) quickly squashed that hope. Which is the real reason I was pissed off, I must admit. Plus, the moderators cannot take the time to ponder every fishy title. I stand by the rationalization above however: the best HN title possible certainly was not Better disagreement. That title was meant for LessWrong, not HN.
Is this sort of stuff turning application development into a commodity?

You can spin up a Rails app, Bootstrap it, and them theme it off the shelf with about 30 minutes work nowadays. 10 minutes later you can have it running on a PAAS such as Heroku.

Each of those jobs would have taken a number of different specialists many days in development, design, and sys admin work just a few years ago.

The average simple CRUD SAAS app that is presented here is such a low barrier to entry and becoming increasingly so.
Maybe they're taking a page from Apple's playbook in realizing that best user experiences come from harmony between hardware and software?

I'd still peg Microsoft as a software company, although now they seem much more willing to praise the hardware side of their business. It's likely the hardware division's primary goal is not profit, rather to maximize potential software sales.
Probably. An obligatory reference to downornot - http://www.downornot.com/mandrill
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Because I'm not involved in the community because the community doesn't really exist.
Worst Pivot Ever? WTF happened to Greplin?
ClamAV team leaves the project
Ten years after the first release (and five years after the acquisition by Sourcefire) the ClamAV team has left the project and the company.
Is this the end of the only open source anti virus?
I don't know anything about WUSTL, but I had similar issues with my local University, which has a great CS department, but we found the normal channels too complex.

We contacted the University ACM chapter and threw them a party -- pizza, wings, XBox, music, etc. Told them to bring resumes and had enough of our engineers around to answer questions. It was fun and we got our hire.
The beauty of phrases like "beer money profitable" and "ramen profitable" is that people will understand what you really mean. Even a VC will understand that "beer money profitable" means that you clear $200 above raw expenses without accounting for the cost of your time (ie, it's a hobby that doesn't lose money).

The key in any communication is accurately conveying the facts. So use words that will be understood in context by the audience. For example, my own friends would use the same standard as a professional investor to define the term "profitable". They would think I'd lost my marbles if I claimed I was profitable making just $200 a month.

But if you're a high school student, and you're talking to your Aunt Nelly, sure you can use the term "profitable" to describe making $200 a month above expenses. In fact, if you were making $200K a month you would have to say "WAAAY more than profitable", lest she assume that "profitable" meant $200 a month.

Just be clear so that you're understood, in context.
That is a disputed fact (when taking into account the radioactive waste and thinking about what "into the atmosphere" means, at least that is what I remember from the reports about the last study concerning this), on one hand, but even if it were right: It's less than the radiation generated in the event of a disaster and not bundled into a pile of radioactive waste you can't place nowhere.

Edit: For the downvoters: http://www.cejournal.net/?p=410 - It IS disputed, I didn't say what is right. Stay fair.
Wow do I ever think you (and even 'damoncali below) are wrong about this. This is the opposite of a "useless post". This is a post about how lying to yourself about the definition of "profitable" can cost you tens of thousands of dollars.

The idea Cohen is expressing is so extraordinarily simple it would almost be banal, if it didn't target such a widely held misconception:

You cannot factor out opportunity costs when accounting for your business.

When a new founder with a business throwing off $1500/mo after line-item costs like hosting claims to be "profitable", what they are effectively saying is that their own time is worth $0/mo.

In reality, that founder is almost definitely losing at least $11,000 per month --- by taking a SWAG at what any person capable of booting up a product to reliable $1500/mo can earn as an employee or freelance consultant, that SWAG being almost certainly so lowballed as to be insulting.

To my mind, not being able to tell the difference between "profitable to the tune of $1500/mo" and "losing 5 figures a month" is an alarming difference that is very much worth calling out.
That's mine. It's a physical implementation of a 5-symbol, 2-state Turing machine which was shown to be universal by Wolfram. If it were perfectly reliable (it isn't) and had an infinite tape (it doesn't) then it would be universal. Going to the extremes of low symbols and states makes it extremely inefficient in terms of code density, if you can apply that term to a Turing machine. The shortest program I've been able to write for it, doing unary subtraction of 3 and 2 would take about 60 hours and need a tape three times longer than I have.
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Focus vs. Myopia
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Crazy to me as a loyal Greplin user that they would pivot from being a personal data search engine to a Calendar app overnight with no heads-up to their users.

I gave Greplin access to all of my personal data-email, calendar, dropbox, etc, etc. What happened to all my PII now?

The new website no longer lets me access my account. It just says "get notified when the new web app launches". WTF?
For a fairly quickly implementable web product logic (include basic auth, profiles, blogs, dynamic pages - they don't count to main logic, however are necessary), I usually end up writing ~40% of the code, remaining is code-reuse or available in choice of development framework or at some corner of github.
I used to think Cooliris was interesting, but they appear to be stagnant.
Respectfully:

First you can't put "opportunity cost" in your ledger on the expense side. Opportunity cost doesn't really work that way.

I stopped reading here. I had a hard time believing the rest of the comment was going to provoke anything but annoying yelling from me.
Exactly what I would have done. DC'ed and headed for the closest bunker.
Interactive way to learn python
I've always wanted to learn python but just never seems to have time. I work 9-5 so it'd seem I should have the time, but so darn hard to find time. I'm using the above link now. Any thoughts on how you learnt a new language is welcomed.
>If the result differs from the specification, it is a bug.

A large part of the C standard is implementation defined(see acqq's post here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4131828 ), so the result could be different on multiple compilers, not a bug, and STILL completely within spec.
> Energy demand is going up ... no amount of pollution that is avoidable is acceptable

Exactly. And renewables produce HUGE amounts of pollution compared to nuclear. It's not even close. Nuclear wins the pollution battle by such a large amount that's it's not even a race. Everything else is a joke.

Do you know how much waste nuclear produces? Very very little - it's tiny. The entire waste from a person's lifetime of energy use could fit in a teacup. Do you know how much waste every other energy source produces? Huge, huge, staggeringly large amounts.

> letting alone the often brushed over but equally horrifying ecological cost of mining the fuel

Horrifying? Really? You have no idea what you are talking about. Do you realize how little uranium you need? Compared to just mining iron, (never mind coal, or oil, or natural gas) the amount is a rounding error globally. Everything you do has consequences, the idea is to pick the best one.

We don't have to solve the storage problem. What we will eventually do is burn the waste, and gain energy from it. You burn the nuclear all the way down to iron and lead. We can't do it today, no, but if people would stop running screaming from nuclear we could. The technology is known, we just need the engineering.
IIRC they've already done that stuff.
I agree with the need for discussions like this to take place in the open so that people can be informed about what their representatives in government are discussing. International treaties are very important.

However, both this article and the WSJ seem to take the quotes very much out of context. For example:

'What it shows is breathtaking. First, China is proposing "to give countries authority over the information and communication infrastructure within their state" and require that online companies "operating in their territory" use the Internet "in a rational way" - in short, to legitimize full government control.'

I could only find a similar quote in the alternate version of the document linked: http://files.wcitleaks.org/public/CWG-WCIT12_TD-62E.pdf and only in a section discussing network security and cross-border network attacks:

---

"a) Member-States have the responsibility and right to protect the network security of the information and communication infrastructure within their state, to promote the international cooperation to fight against network attacks and disruptions.

b) Member-States have the responsibility to require and supervise that enterprises operating in their territory use ICTs in a rational way and endeavour to ensure the effective functioning of ICTs, in secure and trustworthy conditions.

c) User information in information and communication network should be respected and protected. Member-states have the responsibility to require and supervise that enterprises operating in their territory protect the security of user information."

---

Which in the context where it appears seems to be a discussion on a Chinese proposal about the need for countries to have policies and procedures to deal with cross-border network attacks. In any case, it seems like there are calls for clarification and some discussion that it is unnecessary, especially this portion:

---

"We believe the proposed text in C 59 imposing new treaty rights and obligations on Member States regarding domestic network security is both unnecessary and beyond the appropriate scope of the ITRs. The United States looks forward to a further explanation from China with regard to the proposed amendments, and we note that we may have further reaction at that time. Source C 75 (USA)"

"The intention of the proposal is to refer only to network security and not content, that is, to the security of the infrastructure. The intention is to encourage Member States to cooperate to improve infrastructure security. Further, article 8 should concern only dissemination of information and a new article should be envisaged for security matter. (China)"

"Portions of the proposal (e.g. rights at national level) are already covered by the Preamble and should not be added here. Provisions regarding responsibilities of Member States excessively expand the scope of the ITRs. (USA)"

---

In those contexts, the statement seems much less nefarious, and as the US representative mentions, probably unnecessary.

I don't have the time to source the other quotes and summaries but I can't help but think that the articles are poorly researched at best.
> but we can "solve" energy differently

Really? How? Just about every other technology is net negative on energy, so how do you plan to solve energy?
It's easy to make the argument that per-hour productivity peaks around 30 hours. It's harder to make an argument that you shouldn't still be working hours 31-40/50/60 (e.g. that you will accomplish less in 40/50/60 hours than 30).

I've seen the arguments about bug count increasing as you're overworked and I'll buy that argument for huge work loads approaching 60+ hours/week. 40-50? I'm not as convinced.

I average 40-45 hours in my cube every week and I can't say I'd be more productive with 10 extra hours at home.
Like you, I strongly reject the idea that literature means anything and everything the reader wants it to. Nobody really believes that, even if they say they do. Just try interpreting the English professor's exam directions however you like and see what happens.

However, you must admit that there is some subjectivity involved in literature. Maybe no more than in programmers.stackexchange. But that has the benefit of spillover from StackOverflow, where the right answer proves itself by executing correctly.
Seem's like it might be a better model to charge per # of fact usages (similar to EC2 hourly usage, DB queries, etc)?
Codecademy Raises 10m from USV, Richard Branson, Kleiner and Index
Your reply here comes across as kind of dickish. One of the points of the comment you're replying to is that the mods seem to have radically different standards than the audience. And worse, that they're high-handed about it. So your you-probably-don't-know-what-quality-is reply is just demonstrating the problem.

However, here's one that bugged me:

http://programmers.stackexchange.com/questions/18120/what-is...

I thought it was a great question and set of answers. I only know it's gone because I linked it from my personal website as I was proud of my answer. Eventually somebody contacted me to say, "Hey, your site is broken." So not only did some jackass delete a popular set of questions and answers, they did it without warning and with no apparent way to recover the lost work.

That was my "Fuck you, I'm done," moment for Stack Overflow.
and there's a type in "Confirmation code" on the airplane ticket on the front page slideshow.
Well, sometimes saying you're profitable is important to the topic at hand, and sometimes it's not. If it is and you gloss over the details, people will find it less helpful, and I personally have less confidence the author knows what they're talking about. Everyone has their filters and this is part of mine since there's so much bullshit out there. If you want to call that pedantry go ahead. No sweat off my back.
“Continuous Fixing” to Mend Loophole in “Continuous Monitoring” Doctrine