skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
A “fast breeder” version of a molten salt reactor has fast neutrons in the reactor core. These neutrons easily interact with the actinides, transmuting them into fissile isotopes and then fissioning them to produce energy. In other words, molten salt reactors burn actinides. The same is not true for traditional uranium reactors because they have thermal (slow-moving) neutrons in the reactor core. Neutrons at these slower speeds don’t interact with the actinides, so you can’t burn actinides in a traditional uranium reactor.

This is no different from a panoply of fast breeder reactors which are NOT molten salt reactors, particularly liquid-sodium cooled (solid-fuel) reactors. The difference is that liquid sodium reactors have dozens of commercial-scale demonstrations, and hundreds of billions of $$$ of R&D investment -- whereas the molten salt fast breeders (chloride salt reactors) are nothing more than paper models to date.

As a side note, it looks like using thorium as a fuel is not actually critical. Thorium can be used as fuel in molten salt fast breeder reactor, which is a benefit for long-term sustainability, but thorium has little relation to the cost of constructing a new reactor today.

There's a plausible suggestion that liquid-fuelled reactors could be cheaper than LWRs. E.g.: they are far more compact (smaller), and the nuclear components apparently have less complexity. (Speculative)

But the point is an important one. The "big" selling points of thorium -- fuel efficiency, and spent fuel -- are very long-term issues. It's safe to argue they can be deferred. ("Thorium is premature optimization")

As of this past month, China now has a $350m institute with 140 PhDs plugging away on molten salt fast breeder reactors.

Actually they are thermal reactors (not fast breeders), and the focus is on solid-fuel reactors with molten salt as a coolant (although they are also considering molten-fuel reactors, as a lower priority).
I agree here, squinting to read the barely legible text to be condescendingly met with some word that made me do a quick Google query...meh.
Fair enough, and I guess I can't argue with free. Thanks for sharing!
On your two points:

In a currency crisis gold is naturally more valuable, since the problem is with gold's replacement (currency), so you're basically saying "the central bank system has screwed up let's go back to gold".

Holding currency has just as much counter party risk as holding gold. They're both currencies that themselves don't have counterparty risk. The institutions in which you keep gold or currency can be risky counterparties but that's the same in both cases. Your bullionvault example could just as well keep dollar bills in it's vaults.

As for your CAPM point I'm a little out of my depth but I don't think it holds. Gold isn't really an asset as it's mostly useless, it's really more of a currency, with which you can buy assets. And I don't see why you'd get any risk improvement by holding currencies that you won't get by holding diversified portfolios of the actual productive assets (real estate, stocks, bonds, etc) that those currencies can buy. That of course assumes rational investors, but then so does CAPM itself.
The main reason is that paper money is the biggest ponzi scheme the world has every seen. Every government in the world is coming round to printing more and more of the stuff. We just don't realize how bad the situation is because we are used to comparing the value of our paper dollar with a paper Euro or Yen, and they have all been devalued.

Gold cannot be printed ad infinitum. Each year roughly 2500 tons of the stuff is mined, which adds around 1.5% to the global above ground stock of gold. This 1.5% growth rate is declining, while the amount of new paper money that is created each year is increasing.

Bottom line is it the only real measure of value left in the world.
Yeah I believe it is up to 3. So basically 3 cries of wolf are enough to get any youtube account closed.

Seems fair. /joke
I just signed up for the trial. I hope to receive an invitation as we're actively using Galera on AWS-EC2 right now and experimenting with RDS.

We are a live event streaming company that expects several million viewers per event so something scalable/highly-available is what we're looking for.

fingers crossed for that 'invite'.
It helps you with timeboxing: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeboxing

It helps you get things done by setting aside e.g. 20 minutes to fix bug #123.

I wanted to put this up on website originally, but then decided I just want to keep it simple: http://sht.tl/jJ0J6
You post this every time, and I want to decry the astro turfing..

but it's good information, well referenced, and I don't have the background or time to refute anything you've said.
What is open access? - Wikipedia Commons Media of the Day
Ask HN: What is the best way to look for a job while I am currently Employed?
Guardian &gt; Economist &gt; NYTimes &gt; WSJ &gt; Xinhua
thanks for the correction on china, will update!
Or you could look at the US and UK murder rate and conclude that gun control radically reduces murders even when one country is possibly more violent than another.
Aaron's Law: Don't do the crime if you can't do the time.
Thank you, I think it's quite helpful. While I work on the website some more, enjoy the 2x version of the screenshot: http://rinik.net/zonebox/images/preview@2x.png :)
In Which Our Intrepid Author De-sugars a Monad by Hand
Assigning in a conditional is a very Perlish feature of Ruby.
Sure, but the value is over the total available, not the amount mined per year. I don't have the number now but I'm pretty sure most of the gold ever mined is today sitting in central bank vaults, we just keep mining small amounts to use as the central banks like to sit on their reserves.
Chuck could you provide an analysis of how this article ends up on the front page of here, specifically what value it adds to the situation and how relevant it is.

To me I'm struggling to figure out how it relates to Aaron's case , is it purposefully being obtuse? Is it not obvious to everyone who's ever read anything to do with the case that the only reason spoofing his MAC address mattered was his intent to circumvent blocks placed on his connection?

Actions by themselves are mostly meaningless it's the context and intent that matters...
FB Graph Search Reveals Horrible Things That People Share About Themselves
Or even worse, say it was a BC Rich, or a Dean, but only certain models that would require the package being just a tad bit wider?? :)
Hack Design Teaches Design To Hackers
My Top Sublime Text 2 Plugins
I like the simple website. Having the download as a .zip may be a little suspicious to some non-technical users but maybe I'm wrong.
The point is that the guy who can fix wiring in distributor caps might be able to do that specific task. But maybe it took him 5 years to learn that and a much better candidate who has no clue how to do that could master it in a week and will be fixing those caps at a higher quality.

It's also that it's incredibly short-sighted to seek such specific skills in the technology industry with the rate of change in tech.

Further, maybe the guy who can fix distributor caps came from an agency that coached him on writing his resume to emphasize this and what to prep for in the interview. I've experienced that first-hand.
I only made one this year. To finally solve a murder on a train!
Hi, wjhirsch, where did anyone claim they have a right to have their videos on YouTube?
Object#try should work in plain 1.9 too, although I'm not sure I'd have reached for it in this case. This was more about showing the DRYing up a (visual) pattern across two lines into a different construct though, so perhaps I would've used try if it was just one line somewhere in my code.

That said, I didn't know try could take a block instead of a symbol, so thanks for sharing :-)
Gold has value because there is generally plenty of willing supply and demand for it. The US dollar has value because it has plenty of supply and demand for it.

Gold has certain attributes which make it very useful under extremely rare circumstances. But those circumstances can't be completely ruled out or discounted so we still have and use gold.
E-mail in the early days also prevented users from communicating with users of other servers (most notorious examples were AOL and Compuserve). Eventually under pressure that wall was broken. You can compare it to IM services which use XMPP but don't allow federation, which is one of the main points of XMPP. And Facebook does exactly that with their IM service - they use XMPP but don't federate, thus not allowing their users to communicate with other XMPP networks. Kind of expectable from Facebook ;)
How to get featured on the App Store
This isn't a commercial product, it's an open-source project. It solves a real need and people who need it tend to be more interested in the quality of the product than that the splash page communicated maximum clarity of information in 5 seconds.
Is there any company that doesn't reserve the right to terminate a free hosted email account without notice?

If you want an SLA, you (almost always) have to pay for it. And if you pay for Google Apps, you also get phone support...

In the meantime: IMAP backups. If that's too much of a pain, there are also a ton of services (free or otherwise) which will do automatic backups for you, though you should really (really) make sure you trust them and their security procedures before you hand off access to your primary email account to them.
Hacking for Fun: Programming a Wearable Android Device
He was a fellow at Harvard, with an office there, and had legitimate access to JSTOR.
On the other side of the coin, I used them and got to interview with several awesome (and some not so awesome) companies, and all I had to do was post my resume and a picture.

That seemed like a pretty good deal to me, but then again, all the recruiters I know work for single companies. What's the best way to meet some that are more like "freelance" recruiters?
I couldn't trace the origins, but I believe it comes a long way from C. In K&R it was used quite freely in the form of

while ((c = getchar()) != EOF)

In this particular case it's necessary because of operators precedence, although I can't remember whether they used extra parens when it wasn't necessary.

In ruby most style guides, including github's[1], are forked from bbatsov's[2], which had the bullet point about using assignment return value.

[1] https://github.com/styleguide/ruby

[2] https://github.com/bbatsov/ruby-style-guide
Forgive me for not reading the entire thing. I searched the text for HTTPS and SSL and it found nothing. So dotcloud can load balance WSS (SSL websockets) right?
And on a custom domain?
Agreed, this is an example where returning true or false would be more useful. I presumed the point was assuming a situation where a method returning either a value or nil would be desirable.
The bold plan here is probably way more about the service of doing hosted PCs than this particular piece of hardware which is IMO a niche product at best. It's probably a safe bet people will continue to do more of their computing on SmartPhones, tablets, and other non-PC devices but many will still need access to a PC for different things. They may not really want to buy a PC they only use 10-20% of the time. Paying for access to one available in the cloud on any of your devices is a great solution. Not a new idea of course but if they make it a mainstream service it's something that could be successful in the post-PC world.
Strange. Personally I used StumbleUpon quite a lot early 2012. But I'm not exactly sure what happened, but I started using it less and less.

If I think about it now, I think I get almost all of the relevant contents via HN and the trust ole' Google Reader.

StumbleUpon (I think) is really for just "randomly" going through the contents which I 'might' like.

Plus, I think getprismatic and bottlenose came into the scene and totally crowded my content discovery methods, in the end I had to filter out all the noise. I concluded HN was the best source of the contents relevant to me.

What do others think?
Impressions on web2py vs Django and why I switched to Django
Concurrency is not parallelism
You're a developer and don't know what TimeBoxing is? You must not have a CS degree?
Thanks for that. A good read. Assuming they had evidence to back that up (which both legal teams would have been privy to and would have been presented at trial), it seems pretty clear to me that he knew that what he was doing was not exactly above board there. I have little doubt Aaron knew what he was doing would get him in trouble if caught. Sure he probably did not expect that much trouble. We can be upset that he was possibly facing 35 (or what ever) years as that seems a bit excessive... but let's not pretend that Aaron had no clue that he was doing something he shouldn't be doing.
Just downloaded and gave it a minute. Mute doesn't work. Reproduce: start app, hit mute, start game, and this tremendous gong noise rings out when the round starts. Would uninstall right there.

Also, on the Play Store, it's "Empire Of Sudoku - Single", while in my app list, it's "Sudoku Empire". I had to look for it after installing it.
Outsourced: Employee Sends Own Job To China; Surfs Web
Looks cool but I'm on OSX 10.7.5 and all I get is "application quit unexpectedly " whenever I try to launch unfortunately
Show HN: Making any HTML form work by changing a single tag
Link: http://www.webpop.com/blog/videos/build-forms-easily-with-a-single-pop-tag

Quite a while ago in a meetup, while describing Webpop, to a web designer, I got the comment that "if we could just make getting a form to work, really easy, we would have a client for sure".

Since then I've always wanted to find some really dead-easy way to get a custom HTML form to work, and now I pretty much think we nailed it.

Replacing the <form> tag with a special <pop:form> tag on any form will let it store results to a database with a nice UI, handle validations and even process file uploads if there's file fields involved.

Hope you like it.
Not sure if trolling.
"12 guys killed 3000 people with nothing but box cutters. Obviously we need less boxcutters as well."

Pretty sure they used large aircraft to kill people and no one is crying tyranny over the idea that large aircraft need a bunch of regulations to ensure public safety.
Yeah I think there is a good chance we'll see the iWatch by 2015. FaceTime + iWatch = any kid who grew up with Dick Tracy's geek fantasy come true.
> "With Clustrix, you never have to worry about database scalability again."

That's a huge claim. My two super-basic questions, which I can't find answered on the site, are:

1) Let's say I need to join 100,000 rows in one table to 100,000 rows in another table, all matching ID's and indexed, and then SUM certain values in the second table. If Clustrix has distributed the rows/tables across different machines, how long is this going to take, compared to a single-machine solution?

2) How do transactions work on a single table? If four people are doing INSERT's with an AUTOINCREMENT on the same table, but on four different machines (because it's distributed), how is this going to wind up being faster than on a single server? How are the four new ID's not going to collide? And since presumably one machine is responsible for preventing collision, how does that machine not become a bottleneck?

I'd love to know what kind of advanced techniques can solve these problems.
It says quit unexpectedly, not working for me. I'm on LION
It's not so much that wearing a ski mask is illegal (though that's true in some cities) but it demonstrates you are deliberately committing the real crime, not an accident. You can wear a mask. You can tell a bank teller "I'm here to make a large withdrawal." Doing both at the same time? Good luck convincing the jury you were just trying to hide from your wife while getting some cash for a friends bachelor party.
Reactor designs are licensed by the NRC, new reactor designs require quite a long review process (as people really have a lot of "What if a ... happened?" questions that need answers) So funding a new reactor design is a multi-decade process. That is pretty far outside the "VC" range of funding since their funds want to be 'done' in 10 years, not just "almost approved for considering to build."

And the thorium folks, much as I love them, do themselves a disservice by not addressing the fuel cycle problem. If a uranium 'water' reactor leaks the radio-isotopes in the water decay rapidly, and are easily blocked by modest shielding. So that steam that escapes into the big containment dome? Well its radioactive initially but a couple of days later its not. This is not true is U233, a necessary byproduct of a thorium reactor fuel cell and present in the molten sodium leaks out. As sodium reacts violently with water, and molten sodium leak will cause an explosion and disperse highly dangerous, and difficult to shield U233 contaminated with U233 [1]

So when a thorium reactor does have a problem, it will be very serious very quickly. Not a lot of understanding on how to protect against that yet.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uranium-232#Uranium-232
I (and I'm sure many others) wrote something ugly in this space years ago in php and have spent much time since attempting to drown the remaining relevant neurons in whiskey. Good luck!
Lori Drew case basically ruled that interpretation is a no go.
My understanding is the reactors currently under construction in the US are being built with passive fail-safes that make them much safer than the 1960s/70s reactors. Is this incorrect?

Modern passive heat-removal systems are limited: the ESBWR mentioned on that page -- one of the most "advanced" -- has about 72 hours of heat-absorption capacity. [0]

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economic_Simplified_Boiling_Wa...
...Until a gold-rich asteroid gets towed into mining range.
The basic problem that nuclear faces is that it's too dangerous to allow private companies to develop. Normally, having private companies engage in dangerous activity is not itself a problem. Since the legal system (theoretically) forces the company to bear the cost of any harms, the company has an incentive to take precautionary measures proportional to the risk-weighted potential harm.

When you get to situations like Fukushima or BP, this breaks down. The real economic cost of a nuclear disaster can stretch into the trillion dollar range when you factor in not just cleanup and direct compensation, but disruption of life.[1] A private company could never compensate the public for such costs, and as a result a private company has no incentive to exercise caution proportional to the risk weighted cost, but rather only an incentive to exercise care proportional to the risk weighted expected payout.

Of course the flip side of this is that the potential cost of disaster being so high blinds people to the fact that the probability of disaster is low. So the regulation tends towards more stifling than warranted.

[1] What's the real cost of something like Fukushima? Is it just the cost of cleanup? The cost of paying for destroyed houses? The cost of paying the families of people killed? It is partly that, but it's a lot more in fact. Consider: what would I have to pay you to get you to live in an emergency shelter for six months? Disaster payouts almost never compensate for cleanup and health bills much less for disruption to one's routine, but in economic terms it's a very real cost.
Yeah, I haven't tested it on Lion. Sorry.
In Hungary I heard the same saying, just with streetcar instead of wheelbarrow. Funny how these things tend to spread.
We dont currently offer any long-term discounts because a customers usage is variable based on how many servers they spin up/destroy.
For everyone who doesn't have the option to get one of these, you can experiment with a HUD in ski goggles from RECON Instruments:

http://www.drdobbs.com/tools/hacking-for-fun-programming-a-w...
hold up -- you are confusing molten salt with liquid metal. molten salt reactors do not contain liquid sodium metal. in a molten salt the sodium is chemically bound to Fluorine or Chlorine, etc. the explosive fire danger you're talking about applies to "Liquid Metal Fast Breeder Reactors" which is a different animal altogether. but yes, those are scary! and have had lots of accidents/fires in the past.
"Our job is to stop you getting hired. If we get 100 people applying for the job, then our job is to not employ at least 99. So we are looking for anything that identifies you as being one of the 99."

If you have only position to fill and 100 people applied for that position, yes, your position makes sense. But if you have 100 positions to fill, will you still insist that you must interview 10000 people to fill those positions?
First, HyperDex is well-optimized C++ code. And second, they take issue with the standard benchmark we used to evaluate both systems. While we recognize that Redis may have an impedance mismatch with the benchmark, we were hesitant to create our own lest we inadvertently introduce bias toward our system. Thus the numbers reported are accurate, but the generic nature of the YCSB benchmark may not be exploiting all that Redis offers. We'd love to work with the Redis team on a standardized benchmark we both can get behind but that has not yet happened (and may never happen).

In the grander scheme of things, the two systems are very different. In my opinion, Redis is very well suited for inter-process communication where extremely low latency is necessary and data is ephemeral. HyperDex, on the other hand, is great at storing persistent data. The configurable fault tolerance setting makes it very clear how safe your data is, and the strong consistency is very convenient when building applications. Further, HyperDex is built from the ground up to operate in a clustered environment and does so quite well.
You made a game. Youre competing with every other game and other forms of entertainment. Id say regroup and refocus on writing software that solves pain points. Read patio11.
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I have a 15' Mac book pro and this is almost exactly how I have it most of the time. Three finger swipes to change window is more effective than alt-tabbing for me.
What's the source of this data? USPS? Fedex? UPS? Google? A hamster with a video camera?
Sure it does. "auction" reminds me the last time human beings were sold like stuff.
In your words, he can "move the needle" and...that's it. He can't eliminate the law, he can't change the law, and he if he were to order the DOJ to stop enforcing the law, the Republican-dominated House could impeach him (because the impeachment is a political process).

As for the other comments...I stand by them. My reasons are laid out in those comments and others on the same threads and if you choose to cherry-pick phrases from select comments instead of reading them together then there is nothing I can do to stop you.
Flickr celebrates Commons’ 5th year and 250k photo galleries of most viewed pics
Forbes skipped part of the original quote from the Deustche Bundesbank press release. The full quote is:

"With this new storage plan, the Bundesbank is focusing on the two primary functions of the gold reserves: to build trust and confidence domestically, and the ability to exchange gold for foreign currencies at gold trading centres abroad within a short space of time."

I read that as Germany strengthening domestic trust & confidence (via gold repatriation), at the expense of exchanging gold for foreign currencies: specifically, the US Dollar, since that's the only currency where gold reserves are being reduced (ie the amount of gold in Euro & Pound countries remains unchanged).
The impression I got was that the machine has USB ports.