skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The problem with nuclear power generation today is it's always way more expensive than promised, in often unpredictable and sometimes not-easily-quantifiable ways. Add the uninsurable nature, the constant risk of human error/decision making increasing the risk factor (eg. not decommissioning old plants), and waste problem, and it gets even less attractive. Meanwhile, renewable energy and power grid improvements continue to be underfunded, and everyone claims the only alternative is coal.
Virool (YC S12) Helps Advertising Videos go Viral
I worked at a company that did something similar. We would have "research" sprints where we basically got to do whatever we wanted for a few weeks. It was a time we got to implement all of the crazy pipe dream features we'd been thinking of. We got to learn new technologies. We got to work with different people.

People also implemented their own ideas. When the sprint was over, if they wanted to keep working on it, all we had to do was fill out a form that our CTO would sign saying that the company didn't want the project.

I miss that part of the job.
This looks great guys. I'll definitely put up a server and hook up the content I traditionally expose through my personal website.

Question: what features that are taken for granted on today's popular social networks are difficult/impossible in this kind of distributed system? for example, i suspect something like "friend suggestions" might be difficult, since you only have access to a part of the network. Auto-friend tagging in pictures would be tough too. I'm seeing a lot of upsides listed, but there must be some things you just can't do. A candid discussion of the drawbacks would be helpful.
Status.net/OStatus uses a similar PUSH model, basically it scales with number of followers, and yes, if you have thousands of followers the load will be significant.
As a data point, I've been running a status.net instance since last December, during which time I've had 50-80* followers, have made an average of 12 posts/day, have followed 100-190* others, and my instance has transferred a grand total of 10,279MB * over that entire period.

followers and followeds gradually increased over the duration.
I have this number handy since the connection is reverse-proxied via pagekite.net, which is metered.
Over the last few months, I've had all static content offloaded to another server, which reduced the bandwith used, I'm not sure by how much.
Business Growth Wisdom: 23 August 2012
Corporate firewalls are the general boogieman, but in reality, I haven't seen evidence that they're much more than that.

To test this, we implemented fallback-to-HTTPS behavior in a very widely used previously non-HTTP client. We then observed the number of clients that failed to connect via our custom protocol, but succeeded in falling back to HTTPS.

The numbers were negligible.

It's ridiculous that we'd seriously believe that we can't trust that TCP works on the internet. We joke about it being the "interweb", but I see no reason to sow fear, uncertainty, and doubt, and thus and actually turn the interweb into reality.
I think you may unintentionally be implying that there aren't lots of people in the "startup culture" that do in fact consider getting funding to be an intrinsically important achievement.

It seems to me that raising a large VC round does have an intrinsic and lasting value, I'm not sure whether it should. Kevin Rose is a great example of this type of success. He's started 4 or 5 companies that I'm aware of, out of those AFAIK Revision3 is the only one that I believe had an exit based on the merits of the company (Milk, was a successful exit but seemed like an acqui-hire).

We also continually get messaged that having founded a company once even if it fails is going to be a leg up when raising money for your next venture.

Anyway its hard to say "raising money" doesn't have intrinsic value, when Silicon Valley (and I don't mean "startup culture" I mean the players actually doing deals in SV) continually signals that it does.
That may be a fair assement.
don't forgot to add Hibernate to that for everyone still living in 2004
Scala's CanBuildFrom explained
I wish this had a timer on it. I don't know which metric it would result in, but it would be fun to race against other people nonetheless
I'm a current user of ARQ, and it has, in my opinion (compared to Backblaze) a phenomenally user friendly description of exactly what is being backed up, and when, and when something was added, or modified.
Can anybody explain how this works, ie: the technology behind it? The page itself doesn't disclose much more than that it uses some kind of secret algorithms to track hands and fingers, but I'd be interested in what kind of sensors and processing are used, and how such a small box can track 3 degrees of freedom so accurately. How can this work so well compared to the crude tracking that Kinect does with 3 cameras and a laser projector?
Right, without at least a TOC you can't tell what is in the book.
hosted service within one month. email apps VERY high on our to do list, been watching freedombox for a while, we'll reach out to them after initial release.
pretty cool. nice to see the emphasis on a company that actually makes piles of money for a change!
The question really is if going to something 'harder' now is worth while. We do something more expensive (and have large oppertunity cost) to avoid problem we will only really have in 200 years.

If you look at the change of technology in the last 100 years you can only assume how small this problem will be then.
No; the waste is far more radioactive than the fuel. Nuclear fuel rods are perfectly safe to touch when they're first made; they rapidly become more dangerous as they fission in the reactor. By the time they come out they are lethal. Then their lethality slowly dies off as the short-lived fission products decay. It would be a very bad idea to mix raw nuclear waste into the sea.
If you have to do it, that's probably the least offensive option.
Building Reliable Systems from Unreliable Components
Winner of Microsoft reality show claims his prize — a job
I like how they support Tor hidden services. Though I wish they would go a step further and support I2P.

It's really nice to see people are working on ways to sort of "replace" the current centralized services out there.

Let us hope they are attractive enough to developers and users.
And I would argue that arguing bout what a unit test is and isn't has missed the topic of this parent post entirely. I have seen those links and I know both people as they worked where I work now. Arguing over speed and/or what a pure unit test is has never been my cup of tea because every single codebase is different for a variety of reasons.

Tests and code don't always fall into these neat cult buckets we've drawn up for ourselves. Good doesn't mean just fast. It can also mean readable, to wit FG usage addresses quite nicely. Just another tool in the toolbox.

Just like ruby, I can write crap tests with or without FG and great tests with or without FG. Same goes for stubs, doubles, and collaborators.
A medal is, in and of itself, the award you are seeking to win

I think you're missing the distinction between the symbol and the act. A medal is not what you are seeking to win. Its a representation of what you have achieved (which seems to be pg's point). You can take away all of Michael Phelps medals and it won't in one way diminish the fact that 18 times he was the fastest guy in the pool at the Olympics.
The public URL for the Secret Safe given to me in Level 0 doesn't actually return a response when I get request it, the connection just sits open - is this expected?
Isn't this something Activity Streams could be very useful for? Activity Streams is also JSON-friendly.
TorStatusNet: http://lotjbov3gzzf23hc.onion.to/
It depends on what you mean by complicated. First of all you need good black dirt to farm. If you don't have that no matter how flat it is it isn't going to work.

They already have levelers[1] available which get us most of the way there. Again, no good black dirt, it's not worth farming (at scale anyway). A combine or chopper can easily push you over a quarter million dollars, so the guy running the thing for a couple of tens of dollars an hour for a few months a year isn't that much of a cost compared to your input costs, etc.

Variability in land form doesn't contribute to risk mitigation much if at all unless you're talking about large geographic distances, which of course it's the fact that diseases and weather systems don't travel far and fast enough not that the land form is different.

More specifically, GMO provide the best opportunity to address disease and weather issues. That said, maybe that isn't what we should be optimizing for.

[1]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1uaYbXtPs_o&feature=relat...
Recently, one of my in-laws told my kid that she ought to eat everything on her plate. I responded "If she's full, the food is wasted whether she eats it or it goes in the trash."

I'll bet that pushes the percentage up to ~60%, since the article only talks about food thrown in the trash.
AOL does a lot of weird things. Last year, jrecursive actually observed that their servers would make an HTTP GET for any URL passed over an AIM conversation. Looks like that doesn't happen any more, though.
Shameless, ala tptacek: Enjoying this challenge? We do similar things on a daily basis over at Tinfoil Security. We develop tools to attack websites in a lot of similar ways to this Stripe CTF. We're hiring in Palo Alto, and even if you've never done appsec work before, we'd love to chat.

https://www.tinfoilsecurity.com/jobs

(Or, you know, ask Stripe or Matasano for a job. They're both crazy awesome, have a ton of respect from me, and are also hiring.)
Confirming that I intend to write one for (gasp) PHP.

NB: I am the technical cofounder of elgg.org, and I believe software like Tent is (part of) the future of the social web.
Well, he could make it open source and still earn money with it. I haven't always an internet connection, so this would be a huge advantage.(plan to travel in the next time)
Something most people don't realize is that it wasn't that long ago that we were still farming with mules.

My grandpa farmed with a Jeep that had a PTO and a team of mules into the 60's.
You definitely seem like what I would consider a light user then. My wife has 1000+ Facebook friends, and posts 15-20 times a day. If I round to 1GB/mo in your case, then she would probably use around 20GB/mo... which is actually not bad.

Thank you for the numbers!
Any plans to make this book available in iTunes/iBooks? It's just that i have a gift voucher that i'd love to be able to use.
Apple attempts to scrub controversial "Genius" ads from the Internet
Maybe anything that requires knowledge of the whole network would be pretty difficult. For example, showing the full list of the photos that are being posted. You can't just follow every user that posts photos.

The best solution that comes to mind now is building a server with a database of all the users and their respective servers. But, of course, that would break the decentralized purpose of Tent. It's an interesting problem to solve.

EDIT: Another big problem, how do I search users? A DNS-like solution would be feasible?
> What freaking standard is it to write dates as mm.dd?

American.
Same here on a german keyboard layout (Linux & Firefox 14.0.1). It works well until I reach a special key, which kind of spoils the whole thing.
Nope -- scaling issues. Should be fixed now.
A hosted service, extremely simple APIs and libraries, and some really great end-user clients will go a long way. Make it easy, in other words, and don't make it technical (except for the people who want it to be).
This sort of advice works well for small companies (where employees will wear lots of hats), or certain jobs in big companies. But for a lot of jobs, increasing sales or reducing costs is not the point--at least not directly.

If I'm hiring a graphic designer, a resume full of monetary claims is going to look like vague fluff to me. Instead I want to see a portfolio, because the result I am looking for is really great graphic design. It is my job as a manager to understand how that might fit into our product cycle and business model. But it has to start with demonstrated talent at the skill I need to fill.
> but on a rough-order-of-magnitude basis, is that a reasonable conclusion?

No. Uranium is barely radioactive. In contrast the waste from a power plant is very radioactive.

Radioactivity is directly related to half life: The longer the half life, the less radioactive, and the reverse as well.

Uranium 235 has a half life of close to a billion years, and 238 (the much more common kind) of nearly 5 billion years. So it's barely radioactive.

Once you "cook" it in a reactor you generate all sorts of isotopes with much shorter half lives (so none exist naturally in any quantity). Those isotopes are also much more radioactive. The good thing is that the very powerful ones don't last long.

The "worst" isotopes are the medium lived ones. Short enough to be radioactive, long enough to last for centuries. Of those Strontium-90 and Caesium-137 are the main ones.

Now you also know why nuclear fuel reprocessing is a great idea. The uranium left behind after a pass through a reactor has not been changed (it's not any more radioactive than it was before it started) - you can isolate it chemically and use it again (only a small amount actually burns each time). You still need to deal with the dangerous stuff, but the quantity is massively reduced. (Technically you can burn that as well in a reactor to other shorter lived isotopes, and essentially destroy any hazard, but I don't believe anyone does that.)

Just to respond to your actual idea, there are proposals to bury waste in subduction zones. You can find more about it via google https://www.google.com/search?q=nuclear+subduction+zone
Best thing to share these is to root and install veency
There are a few "standard features" of centralized social networks that are more challenging to implement, but we haven't found anything impossible yet. Search, especially real-time requires an external search engine. But it means Google (et al) needs to subscribe and essentially ask your permission for real time updates. Friend search is a bit easier if your followers/people you're following are public. Likely there'll be an app for that.
Until I took over backups, and instituted a rotation methodology, the guy prior to me just bought another 60 AIT-3 tapes every month and shipped them off site to Iron Mountain.

Agreed - how-often you re-use tapes (and whether you do) - has a dramatic effect on "system cost" of your backup system.
Startups certainly "take responsibility" for announcing and heavily publicizing their fundraising rounds. It's a strong signal that your company is on a path to success (not the only path) and you certainly want it spread as far and wide as possible.

I don't care if some people think my funding announcement less valid than other industry news, or somehow "less earned." The fact that there is a market for that kind of news means that enough people derive value from it. Not all news is valuable to all people: celebrity news and financial news have two very different audiences. If an investor is accidentally exposed to celebrity news at the grocery store checkout line, is it the fault of the celebrity?
Diaspora and some other platforms are federated communities - in other words, they federate between collections of multiple people. Here, the decentralized social activity occurs between individuals. It's decentralized all the way down.
Older fathers pass on more new genetic mutations to offspring
Possibly one of these will be useful:

https://github.com/madrobby/keymaster

https://github.com/ccampbell/mousetrap
Ah this is awesome, we've had a few similar stuff appear recently but this is exactly what I was after.
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/02/12/sunday-review/big-datas-im...

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/08/12/business/how-big-data-beca...
This reads like a poorly-executed Onion story. This is either a terrible parody or one of the best examples of how tech "journalism" has become a complete joke.

Can you imagine a story on the front page of the NYTimes: "Something crazy going on somewhere in the world, but we're not sure where or what."
The issue is with portions. There is no need to give a human being 5 meals in one dish in one meal. You are just asking for them to a) get fat b) waste it.

Other countries, no doubt, have lower waste percentages because their portions are smaller.
Yes. For something to be statistically significant means there is some difference between the two groups that is most likely not attributable to random chance. For something to be clinically significant means the difference between the two groups is large enough to have noticeable health effects or impact one's decision-making about medical issues.

In the book The Emperor's New Drugs, about the efficacy of anti-depressants (or lack thereof), Kirsch gives the example that if you had a group of 500,000 people and found that smiling frequently increases life expectancy by 10 seconds on average, this may well be statistically significant because the study population is so large. However, it's not clinically significant because no one really cares if they live an extra 10 seconds, certainly not enough to change some major aspect of their behavior at least.

In this case, if the chances of having kids with autism or schizophrenia increase by/to? at most 2%, as the article states, then in practice this shouldn't really deter anyone from having kids. Thus, while the findings are statistically significant, they are not clinically significant.
I don't understand why you can't mix and match Python 2 and Python 3. I mean: Python can link C libraries and it can't link libraries from a different Python version? Having different languages coexist and call each other in an application is not a thing from the outer space.

Have an declaration at the top of the source file that states what Python version the source file is and/or use a versioned file extension and be done with it. If you want to take advantage of Python 3 features in a Python 2 source file, you'll have to upgrade the source file, that would be a given.

Maybe a Pythonista here will answer. But then, I've seen this mismatch between versions of other languages, too. Either language designers or I are missing something here.
You may be in trouble. There are other forms of EAP that do not use MS-CHAP, like EAP-TLS.
I think that the father's age might be also linked to the intelligence of his child.

Schizophrenic people often have a high intelligence quotient.
A link between autism and intelligence is also probable.
Just so. Feed lot was the term I was looking for but couldn't remember. Thanks for providing clarification.
37signals is the real deal of superhuman talent.

I had the benefit of exposure to members of the 37signals team in their early days when they did contract work, built their remarkable "redesigns", etc.

It was crystal clear to me instantly that they were ABSURDLY talented, their design work looked like nothing else at the time and influenced an entire generation of not only web designers, but entrepreneurs, etc.

So while I agree that "anybody can do anything", 37signals started the race with an incredible lead in just raw, unfiltered talent.
definitely. very refreshing indeed.
Source: http://www.nrdc.org/food/files/wasted-food-IP.pdf
I'm curious too. I'm guessing the main draw is the ability to write extensions and enhancements in Clojure rather than Emacs Lisp?
Sorry - clarification - when I said "today's 37signals" I literally meant that 37signals TODAY, in the present.

37signals is NOT a startup and yet much of the advice / information that they produce is disseminated in that spirit.

In other words I see an article like that and I believe if a young 37signals had taken that advice they would have had trouble becoming 37signals!
So much for staying stealth(http://techcrunch.com/2012/08/22/shhh/)

I'll take the liberty of releasing it now just because it was so easy to gain access to the site. Just use FB to connect and your in. This is exactly why staying in so called "stealth" is ridiculous. Sorry but this reminds me of Color.com's release.

"As in stop being in stealth mode. Stop asking for advice. Stop doing your start-up. You're not ready."

htt://Plair.com

http://bit.ly/PZuZcq
http://bit.ly/MNfZNB
http://db.tt/39VifwBv
http://db.tt/kkPiZMNk
http://db.tt/NbPNRAXO
I'll go one recommendation further. Just don't couple user and account. When making a factory named after a model, only set model attributes and never set relations.

factory :user # sets only user fields, no relations
factory :account # sets only account fields, no relations

factory :user_account {creates both}

When you have a large # of tests/factories, it's nearly impossible to keep track over time what the :user factory creates. Today it's one relation. Years from now, it could be 10 other tables relations. Someone later on decides they want to reuse the :user factory, but they don't want the account to be create, so then they do :user_only factory. Yada yada. Shenanigans ensue.

If you stick to the above strategy, things are much faster, but more importantly, there are less unintended surprises, like associations doing a create instead of a build, etc.
Interesting. Am I mistaken or were you an intern at a YC funded company or at YC?? Thanks.
I think you've completely missed his point.

His point is that inside of his family there were too many liberal arts degrees and not enough agribusiness folks. The reality is that if you want to grow organic, all natural, heirloom plants on that type of land good luck! That's the type of production liberal arts degree majors tend to favor.

A person with an agribusiness background would come in and say, "Throw up the irrigators, spray the fertilizer, and lets try to get some organic matter into the soil".

All he is saying is that his family didn't have the right people in the right places to make the right decisions at the time.
Announcing support for App.net
Shameless, following tptacek and borski's examples: Having fun finding broken code? Want to get paid without going to the effort of writing exploits? You might want to look at the Tarsnap (or scrypt, or kivaloo, or spiped) code and see if you can win some bug bounties: http://www.tarsnap.com/bugbounty.html

(Or, you know, ask Stripe or Matasano or Tinfoil Security for a job. They'll pay you far more than you'd ever get from Tarsnap's bug bounties.)
Hrm. You're right about software quality. Either their software works extremely well or the publicity is not signifiant.

However, I don't think their next 10,000 customers will be made up of majority rails/ruby/coder people. I think it'll be from the "Fortune 5,000,000" they are always writing about. To reach them, they must get ink in inc. Oh yeah...pun intended. :)
Perhaps the difference is that the population of people reading HN who have closed a funding round is so small relative to the general population. Start ups are by their nature a few founders and many more employees, so unless someone actually goes out and tries to get funded they don't understand what is at stake. Sort of like saying "Woo hoo, you got through hell week in your Seal training, didn't 20 other guys get through too?"
That was my first inclination as well, but I'm not sure that it's any better for getting the job done than the solution described here. This way seems a bit easier, if you don't care about sending input back to the phone. Also, Veency/VNC can have some visible tearing/lag that I doubt the Airplay mirroring experience has.
My understanding is that there is an editorial meeting once a week in which Apple decides which apps to feature. I'm assuming that bigger companies have contacts in the editorial group. Can anyone speak to this?
If you can, update the HN title as well. If you do that, also mention iPad 2+ in the title.