skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I don't know whether they shopped around VCs, but they have said that they aim to sell to the US army. The army has a well-publicised and pressing need for portable compact power sources in places like Iraq. They have also indicated that they would like to produce medical isotopes as a first step. However, the destruction of the US U 233 reserves by the US government may put a stop to that (if it isn't halted -- which seems unlikely, due to lack of interest).

The civilian nuclear industry has regulatory lead times measured in decades, and has a mindset heavily tied to the risks posed by solid-fueled reactors. For that reason, the military may in fact be the only opportunity for a company to develop liquid fueled reactors.
Ask HN: Feedback from hackers on unpublished articles
TL;DR: I need feedback on an unpublished article and I don't know where to get it.

I've recently begun writing again, and I'd like some way to get critique of my writing before it's published. Ideally, it would be something I could use in the future, as well.

I don't know any hackers personally (the tech scene in Alaska is pretty sparse), so I can't turn to personal connections.

To clarify - I don't need proofreading, I need critique. I'd like feedback on my structure, sentiment, and argument, not on my grammar and spelling (if issues with grammar and spelling were found, that would be fine, but I don't tend to have much of a problem with that.)

This could be a startup idea, if it's not already implemented, but I would like something that already exists, if possible.
You are looking at only one type of violence, murder, and then assuming that murder rates are affected by guns.

Then you turn around and say that one country is possibly just naturally more violent than another and it has nothing to do with the deterrent affect guns have on violent crimes of any kind.

Hmmm..
P2P banks, 1 line of code
That article felt like him saying "I don't like it" 10 times
Manti Te’o’s Dead Girlfriend Is A Hoax
Why just use one? Upload to YouTube for the traffic, and blip.tv or Vimeo for the reliability. And whichever you do, try to get as many people as possible visiting your site directly and not caring about the video host.
But hn is starting to look like yesterday's digg? invariably the top stories on digg make it to tomorrow's hackernews. I think it's unfair to say TC stole from hn. tech news just does the rounds..
Visualizing Towers Of Hanoi In Minecraft
That's true, but they are political appointees and most have been have pursued the path of running for DA or attorney-general in state and local elections. Sorry for the confusion, I suppose I should have said that the trouble was that the office of prosecutor is political (as opposed to professional) in the US.
In my experience, the more you engage with the system, the more willing you are to rationalize or even overlook its failings.
I think you're lucky.

Of course, my experience is with Python, and trying to get hired by a Ruby shop (no matter my experience outside of work with Ruby or any other language, or my experience with the rest of the stack) is impossible.

Perhaps it's a different world the lower down the language abstraction level you look.
Perhaps a way to configure it to work in that environment may be: Bug email gets sent to the dev it determines responsible, and if they 'sit on it' it gets sent to the whole team. With an appropriate sit-on-the-email period of a couple of hours, or a day. If it was really critical the dev in question could easily escalate it anyway in that kind of environment.

This should give you the contextual advantage first, and then collaborative advantage very soon after.
exactly why I stopped reading it about 60% in.
This is true. However, the article is about molten salt reactors. The Indian program, as far as I know, is focused entirely on conventional solid fueled reactors. Most of the advantages of MSR aren't shared by solid fuel Th reactors.

China already has an MSR program, but perhaps India could catch up if it switched tack quickly.
I think it's natural to say "oh, big high profile event involved people getting shot with a scary looking gun, so let's solve the problem by banning those scary-looking guns". Add to that that almost none of the legislators or members of their staff have any actual experience with or knowledge of weapons, and it becomes easy to push bad policy.

I actually think this is a brilliant plan by President Obama. Push a bunch of things (some of which no reasonable person could oppose, like the efficiency improvements in the EOs), and some things which the Republicans in the House will probably not let get out of committee or to a vote on the floor (AWB and magazine capacity limits).

That way, the President gets to accomplish some things (and some of those things which have costs are things a lot of gun owners, myself included, support -- 100% NCIC checks on all transfers). The Republicans who block AWB get painted as obstructionists for blocking part of that, which hurts them from the center/left. Some Tea Party/etc. people push even wackier candidates in 2014 if the Republicans compromise on any issues at all, thus helping the Democrats in 2014, too.
The "poster"s for the three talking-head videos about halfway down are enormous .png files when they should be tiny .jpg files.

http://www.whitehouse.gov/sites/default/files/shootings/ANNE...
I'm also interested to hear how this happened.
> Central banks could burst this bubble easily by selling off their gold reserves.

Maybe the bubble is in fiat currency?

Imagine in 1933 you had locked one ounce of gold in a box, and 35 dollar bills in another box (that year, the gov valued gold at $35/oz, see: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Executive_Order_6102).

Unlock the box today. What would you rather have? 35 dollar bills or an ounce of gold which is currently trading at $1,680 ?

Gold has been a store of value for thousands of years, while during that time, paper currencies have come and gone.
The main problem I see nuclear having is its image, it is for that which MSRs could potentially provide a solution.
I want my phone to be that device. It has all that i do everyday that isn't code. Drop my phone next to a capable display and keyboard And I want to be ready to get my pics documents and the like.

To be honest this is what I thought/ hoped the whole windows metro was going to be between phone/surface/desktop. I guess I will wait and dream for apple to innovate this.
Well it sort-of works, just not all that well. I don't buy the size argument because the same pros and cons exist at the municipal and county level - some stupid propositions do well, some smart ones do poorly, too few people are clear on exactly what they're voting for.
I think we might get ST3 soon - there haven't been updates for half an year now.
Same thing happened to me. I had no choice but to re-enable it since I didn't want to reinstall Sublime Text itself.
Yikes, I am mixing my reactor breeds (pun intended!) Thanks for that.

My understanding of the danger in the thorium fuel cycle and the U232 specifically is the energy of its gamma radiation which is difficult to shield.
The post you're responding to doesn't even mention government investment; it simply says it's silly to be skeptical of a technology because you don't know that it will work at commercial scale before trying it at commercial scale, because this is true of literally every technological innovation ever, regardless of whether it's publicly or privately funded.
At the very least I hope they at least define it in terms of things that actually matter, not cosmetics.

Most of the criticism I hear about "assault weapon" bans, aside from the standard criticism of gun laws in general, are that the things used to define "assault weapon" are largely irrelevant to functionality and that the definition amounts to "guns that look frightening".

It seems to me this is a valid criticism that should be taken seriously by both sides of the aisle.
because proposing a handgun ban would be political suicide. It's a purely political move: makes it look like you're "doing something" without doing the something that would be impossible or at the very least, cost a lot more political capital.
I disagree, and I've pitched companies to Suster and other VCs who've held this viewpoint. It's unfortunately very widely held by VCs, and in some cases is rather extreme, with certains VCs demanding you not only be non-distributed, but that you be non-distributed in specific places.

I become a believer in distributed teams from my experiences working on open source projects. In those cases, it's not possible to coalesce the team physically except on rare occasions. They seem to work just fine.

Anecdotally, the best teams I've ever worked on were distributed, and I will continue to start companies with distributed teams and work with companies as a distributed team member.

I will say that I think getting everyone together on a regular basis is good and useful. It makes the social dynamics much better if everyone can be reminded that their coworkers are actual people every 6-12 weeks.

Hiring for distributed teams is both easier and harder. On the one hand, you can choose anyone, anywhere, and many people in non-name brand locations are hugely excited by the idea of working on small teams on cool projects. The downside is that it takes more discipline to be effective on a distributed team, and you must have vastly superior communication skills than the norm. Lots of perfectly smart and capable people can't or don't enjoy working that way. You often don't know until a few weeks in.
I think that "assault weapons" are basically just offensive to many people's aesthetic sensibilities. What makes an assault rifle different from any other rifle is that it looks bad-ass. I think that they should (with the smaller magazine capacity) be permitted as a 1st amendment thing instead of a 2nd amendment thing.
Google Earth Without Us
It's pretty common for someone to be fired when discovered interviewing elsewhere. Usually, though, they draw up one of those horrible "performance improvement plans" and you'll be able to move on before it closes.

Worst is when you're trying for internal transfer and get PIP'd because of it. Then you have to get a job elsewhere, because the PIP fucks up your internal mobility.
"32,367 died in automobile accidents in the US in 2011, but no one is trying to take away your car."

Plenty of new regulations related to cars and highways every year to make them safer.

"If the Newtown tragedy happened differently and the killer used his car to run over 20 children. Would you want new legislation to limit your access to automobiles?'

Are you really asking that if reality was completely different would I maybe believe different things then I believed in this reality? Maybe. The Newtown tragedy is not a singular event. It's just the latest event.

"how is this so difficult to understand?"

How is the empirical fact that gun control works and limits deaths in many countries so hard for you to understand?
Clever take on Product Tour Problem
Any plans on adding cryptographically signed PDF support? While this is nicely convenient I'd rather cryptographically sign stuff in Acrobat than just stick an image of my signature on it.
If you use a dark color scheme, you should install a theme that has a similarly dark background for the sidebar.

The "Soda Dark" theme goes well with the default color scheme. (The ui theme is separate from the syntax highlighting color scheme, you don't have to use the text colors seen on the github examples)

https://github.com/buymeasoda/soda-theme/

In terms of plugins, apart from the ones mentioned here, Quick File Creator is indispensable: https://github.com/noklesta/SublimeQuickFileCreator

Not a plugin, but if you haven't realised it yet, know that the multiple cursors each come with their own separate clipboard. Learning how to combine this with the move and select by word and the parenthesis-movement commands is what will make the vim users eventually respect you.

Oh and you can hack your language syntax definition files to make more things apart from function definitions turn up in the function browser. This is especially useful for ruby DSLs, sinatra etc.
Bring together elements in SQL by their transitive relationships
Revealed: why Gordon Brown sold Britain's gold at a knock-down price (http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/finance/thomaspascoe/100018367/...)

"When Brown decided to dispose of almost 400 tonnes of gold between 1999 and 2002, he did two distinctly odd things.

First, he broke with convention and announced the sale well in advance, giving the market notice that it was shortly to be flooded and forcing down the spot price. This was apparently done in the interests of “open government”, but had the effect of sending the spot price of gold to a 20-year low, as implied by basic supply and demand theory.

Second, the Treasury elected to sell its gold via auction. Again, this broke with the standard model. The price of gold was usually determined at a morning and afternoon "fix" between representatives of big banks whose network of smaller bank clients and private orders allowed them to determine the exact price at which demand met with supply.

The auction system again frequently achieved a lower price than the equivalent fix price.

It seemed almost as if the Treasury was trying to achieve the lowest price possible for the public’s gold. It was."
Jeff Atwood was having this problem, and finally hosted it with us at Vive.ly. We're a commercial CDN that made Vive.ly as a side project "Dropbox for Video" for small businesses or people who want to feel comfortable owning their content, and we are big supporters of "fair use".

Atwood mentions his fair use issues here:

http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2012/07/but-you-did-not-per...

Granted, Vive.ly isn't free. There's a small cost for uploading, encoding, and storing the video, but that's a one time charge, and there's a nominal cost for bandwidth (we call it "minutes" to make it simple). But it's a wallet system, so if you don't use it you aren't dinged every month, and you own the content so you can run your own ads, name the site what you want or embed it anywhere.

We've gone toe to toe with big content trying to do take-downs of fair use content, and won. The DMCA doesn't have to be handled the way YouTube does it.

You can try it out through http://www.getvively.com/ which explains the platform or direct at http://www.vive.ly/ which is the platform itself.

You can use the invite code "hd4yc" to try it out with 600 minutes of video storage, and 12,000 minutes of delivery.
It's a fork, but it's better: http://gyrovague.com/2013/01/14/free-travel-guide-wikivoyage...

TL;DR: Works well on mobile, has web maps, exports to PDF/EPUB/printed books, provides data dumps, is more active (pretty much the entire Wikitravel community jumped ship) and doesn't suck.
You're being That Guy. You know what I mean.
FACEBOOK GRAPH SEARCH: EXCITING OR FRIGHTENING?
The fine article addresses this point:

Before further flight, operators of U.S.-registered,
Boeing 787 aircraft must demonstrate to the Federal
Aviation Administration (FAA) that the batteries are safe
and in compliance

So is it a "U.S.-registered" aircraft? And even if it is, it sounds like there may be a flight delay of hours at worst.
I wonder if this use of very advanced web technology is calculated to limit who can view their message. Perhaps they only want affluent, urban, technically savvy liberals to view their message, while excluding lower income rural people who use IE 6. This may seem like a paranoid theory, but the Obama campaign would certainly have the data and expertise to support such an effort.
Relevant: http://infohost.nmt.edu/~shipman/org/noel.html
"They sure are apples to apples."

I just told you why they weren't.

http://blog.skepticallibertarian.com/2013/01/12/fact-checkin...

the definitions for “violent crime” are very different in the US and Britain, and the methodologies of the two statistics he cites are also different...

First, it should be noted that the figures Swann gives are out of date...

Second, and more importantly, the FBI’s Uniform Crime Reports defines a “violent crime” as one of four specific offenses: murder and nonnegligent manslaughter, forcible rape, robbery, and aggravated assault.

The British Home Office, by contrast, has a substantially different definition of violent crime. The British definition includes all “crimes against the person,” including simple assaults, all robberies, and all “sexual offenses,” as opposed to the FBI, which only counts aggravated assaults and “forcible rapes.”

When you look at how this changes the meaning of “violent crime,” it becomes clear how misleading it is to compare rates of violent crime in the US and the UK. You’re simply comparing two different sets of crimes.
Partially it's a sop. From what I hear, gun control groups are more pushing for the background checks, and the assault weapon ban is more of a cherry on top that can be given away during negotiations.
One issue with the review of previous nuclear disasters: Chernobyl was qualitatively different than Three Mile Island and Fukushima. The latter 2 designs were both water cooled and water moderated; both suffered loss of coolant (LOC) events which resulted in the core melting from residual decay heat as described in the article, with Fukushima experiencing subsequent detonations of hydrogen gas formed from reactions with the heated fuel rods (some have claimed that this happened at TMI as well, but clearly not to the same scale). The Chernobyl design (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RBMK) is also water cooled, but is moderated by graphite, which is much more dangerous (and scary that there are still many of these in operation). Instead of a loss of coolant event, Chernobyl experienced an exponential power spike which pushed operating power up to 10 times normal, resulting in a series of steam explosions in the coolant lines that blew off the 2000 ton cover of the reactor, sprayed part of the core out the top to contaminate the immediate vicinity (i.e. large chunks of the graphite moderator lying on the ground outside the reactor building), and set the graphite moderator on fire. The fire then spread many more fission products into the atmosphere with the smoke to share the fun with people in a much wider area.

Despite what has been written about Fukushima recently, I expect that it was a couple of orders of magnitude worse than Three Mile Island, which did not result in significant amounts of radioactive material escaping from the site (depending on whose analysis you believe); Chernobyl was between 1 and 2 orders of magnitude more severe than what we know about what happened at Fukushima at this point as far as I can tell.
Cockpit wiring issues will likely take more than just a few weeks to fix and be re-certified. There are miles and miles of cable in the front of an aircraft, just figuring out what went wrong, engineering a fix, fixing all the planes and getting the fix certified for passenger flights is a fair sized job. Nobody is going to take any chances with stuff like this.
I think that as the technology (i.e. software, testing, etc.) improves that people expect more reliable product. It makes sense to hold the aircraft to higher standards as they are flown less and less by humans.
This isn't an area of my expertise. I was only trying to summarize the response to my earlier question. I think I understand the issues generally, but please look at the linked conversation for more details.

I agree that engineering inexperience with thorium isn't a reason to dismiss it. I just find it a bit telling that thorium boosters like Reinhold don't address that discrepancy, in the same way they tend to be silent on the issues with U-232/233.

Regarding gamma radiation, by "deadly at a distance" I mean that they're a coherent threat to health at a much greater distance because gamma radiation travels further than alpha or beta radiation because it's much higher energy. Likewise, that greater energy imposes a much higher cost on shielding: a sheet of paper blocks alpha, heavy clothing blocks beta, but you need significant amounts of dense material like lead or packed earth or granite to block gamma radiation. Presumably, this imposes a significant extra expense on a thorium reactor that's breeding U-232. My source to back up my vaguely recalled knowledge is this: http://www.epa.gov/rpdweb00/understand/protection_basics.htm....
the article is difficult to understand for a layman as myself but an important fact (among others) is that the uranium reserves on earth are considered to last for 100 years at 2008 levels of consumption.

An even more important fact is that uranium nuclear power is a couple of percentage points of 2008 energy consumption, and energy demand itself is growing exponentially. The metrics the DECC bureaucrats are plodding through are no-growth extrapolations of past trends. If clean energy is to be a reality, and if nuclear power is that clean energy, then we must scale it up by three or more orders of magnitude, and sustainability within the century is (potentially) a critical issue. DECC bureaucrats aren't considering this in that report; they are being conservative, in a bad way.

Don't look to government bureaucrats for revolutionary vision ;)
Leave Your Cellphone at Home: Interview with Jacob Appelbaum
Well, it is helpful, if you didn't grow up in the US listening to NWA and thus eren't aware that Compton's synonymous with "inner city ghetto".

But yes, there's a fair bit of useless "advice" on the site. It's human nature to try to be helpful, even when much of the advice offered is common sense. Hence this policy:

http://en.wikivoyage.org/wiki/Wikivoyage:No_advice_from_Capt...
Reasoning from analogies is like tying your shoes with laces made of butter.
Manti Te'o's dead girlfriend: The ultimate twitter hoax?
You're making some gross assumptions. Firstly:

"in the US"

There are a lot more people, you know, elsewhere. Further, applicants typically take a scattershot approach, and apply to hundred to thousands of companies in their course of finding employment.

100,000/365 = 273/day. You don't think the most reknowned consultancy in the world can garner that?

Second you assume that only white collar workers will apply to McKinsey.
All existing nuclear reactors were only developed because the government lavished your tax dollars and mine on developing it. What's your point?
An astute analysis - I disaagree only insofar as I think the magazine limits will prevail in some form. The AWB rpobably won't and is a political sacrifice as you say, but I think the manufacturers o such weapons are on the cusp of a long-term decline - this ad by Bushmaster [1] exemplifies what many people find repellent about gun culture/ Although gun sales are high right now and will surely rocket higher in the short term in response to these proposals, I think opposition to more regulation will decline over the longer term in the same way as opposition to gay marriage - because the sky never does get around to falling, and people get used to the idea and accept it.

Incidentally, I was surprised to be reminded by the President's speech that the BATF hasn't had a full-time director the last 6 years.

1. http://cdn03.cdnwp.thefrisky.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/12/...
https://github.com/titoBouzout/SideBarEnhancements/issues/18
I've got to remember this marketing spin. "A curl to an http endpoint with a plethora of parameters" == Only 1 line of code!
Murder provides a nice apples to apples comparison because, as noted elsewhere on this page, violent crime statistics for the US and UK is an apples to pineapples comparison.
He earned a 6 month holiday considering the workrate he put in on those early builds, and the amount of cash he must have made in the intervening time.

It's not like the thing is riddled with outstanding issues.
This is very very good. I only wish I could paste/drag a list like this in and out of it:

- bla bla do one thing
- bla bla do some other thing
+ this is done already

Because right now it has my information hostage. And then destroys it altogether.

Thank you.