skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Yes, but you have to separate the protactinium shortly after it's created, or you end up with enough U232 to make a bomb impractical. And in a solid-fuel reactor, what are you going to do, shut down the reactor every day so you can melt the fuel rods, pull out the protactinium, and refabricate them?

A liquid-fueled reactor could be another matter, and we'd want to keep an eye on them in non-nuclear states. But another factor is the breeding ratio, which is barely over one for thermal thorium. If someone were to pull out much fissile, the reactor would shut down, and they'd have to go begging for more fissile to start it up again.

Another advantage for liquid fuel is very high burnup, so pretty much all you're taking out of the reactor is fission products, not leftover fissile that could theoretically be reprocessed.
Why It Pays to Create Your Own Market
He had probably previously encountered Cantor's diagonalization technique for proving the uncountability of the reals. He just saw how to apply the same technique to the question of describability.
For it to be Mengele's Auschwitz they'd need to perform horribly unethical experiments AND not give a rat's ass about consent.

The latter happened here, not the former.
> In particular, man made the real numbers to be complete which means that every sequence that appears to converge, that is, meets, the Cauchy criterion, actually does converge.

Indeed, but by the same argument as the author's, there are more Cauchy sequences than can be described, so it looks like the real numbers are much bigger than necessary to do mathematics :)
Previously, some criticism about the Downtown Project: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5895699
Europe and Japan Aiming to Build 100Gbps Fibre Optic Internet
Sure, but a client solution doesn't have the ease-of-use of this for the other party. I use Ghostery, incidentally, but your general point is that security on a live webpage is impossible, which I agree with. That's why I proposed that the app be made into a downloadable package as well.
Very interesting. I wonder if it's a new service by Google. Neat projects like Solar Impulse get exposure via Google platform. And Google, in turn, gets positive publicity and compelling event to recruit more data for NSA :)
>The original post was (in so many words) trying to claim that all of the web companies using FOSS software and claiming to 'love Open Source' are being two-faced because none of their own software is release under a GPL license.

This isn't about BSD/MIT style licences vs GPL style. The sources to most web apps are not available under any kind of licence. A few toy projects on github that nobody uses don't counterbalance spending all day working on non-free software. I do think a lot of these toy projects are motivated by a sense of guilt. You go in to work and spend all day working against free software, but you can tell yourself you are on the right side and 'contributing' if you share that script that downloads cat pictures.

Your criticism is the same one that has been made against the GPL countless times. History has proven it wrong: Linux is a huge success, thanks to the GPL.

The GNU GPL is not Mr. Nice Guy. It says "no" to some of the things that people sometimes want to do. There are users who say that this is a bad thing--that the GPL "excludes" some proprietary software developers who "need to be brought into the free software community." But we are not excluding them from our community; they are choosing not to enter. Their decision to make software proprietary is a decision to stay out of our community. Being in our community means joining in cooperation with us; we cannot "bring them into our community" if they don't want to join. What we can do is offer them an inducement to join. The GNU GPL is designed to make an inducement from our existing software: "If you will make your software free, you can use this code." Of course, it won't win 'em all, but it wins some of the time. -- RMS
Show HN: it's not a video, it's a console animation
What I learned from doing a Kickstarter
No, to "do mathematics", e.g., show that
the Riemann integral exists, that e and
pi exist, etc., we want completeness.
Then we are done: The reals are the only
complete Archemedean ordered field! So,
we have no choice!
Yes, I suggest using open-source clients that don't include ads (such as RetroShare). µTorrent is not open-source, btw.
The interesting thing here is that it's much harder to put this problem properly into mathematical terms than it is to solve it. The whole insight here is that you a "description" of number is just some finite sequence of symbols from a finite alphabet. Now, if you understand why cardinality of continuum is greater than aleph null, it's totally straightforward to show that there are only countably many descriptions, but continuum many reals, it's the kind of problem you give freshmen students on their first encounter with cardinalities. Thus, the big achievement of this guy is to actually come up with idea of indescribable numbers by himself and interpreting this question mathematically. In other words, the questions are usually more important than answers.

There's one minor, but nevertheless important mistake made by the author. Author says :

>The infinity just a step bigger than [aleph null] is Aleph one, the infinity of real numbers: The infinity of an impossibly dense line of numbers

While cardinality of reals is certainly larger than cardinality of integers, it is not true that it's just one step larger. Funny thing is that it's not false either: it was proved by Cantor and Cohen that it's impossible to prove or disprove that aleph one is cardinality of continuum. This is the famous continuum hypothesis.
It would be interesting to create a self sustained WebRTC client that can communicate with the web version.
Product smells and sniff tests
Busy Beaver numbers are perfectly describable. They are just not computable, and (for sufficiently large inputs) larger than any computable value.
Lincoln’s Surveillance State
Much of the discussion in previous comments has to do with the generation of true random numbers. Does this need to happen on a client or on a server? If it's on a client, then isn't a cell phone an ideal source of randomness, due to all of the sensors on board?
Why I switched to Google Adsense asynchronous ad code type
I'm not buying the answer Matt gave. HN was "banned" because of the anti-google comments expressed on this site.

Google doesn't want other people (who are unaware google is selling their privacy to the NSA) to accidentally stumble across the comments on HN.
Undo instead of confirmation would be a better approach when most users would want to take the action. Here is it not established yet that the default to clear all the cookies is the acceptable choice for most users.
Soccket: The soccer ball that generates electricity as you play
They are real numbers, for which we have just proven it is impossible to find a description that will match them. We have proven that no description will ever describe them.

Of course you can describe them. But describe them in terms of what? I think that's the key. Let's say you have a pencil and you want to describe its length, which will be a unit multiplied by a number. If I were to try to describe the true length in meters it will be: 0.0178(...) * meters. This would be an "indescribable" number the author talks about.

However, I can just describe it in terms of itself and call it one pencil long - we use the pencil itself as the basis of the unit so the number we multiply the unit to is just: 1 * pencil long.
The problem with mchurch that

He is obviously a big-time asshole; but
He is not completely wrong
It is easy to dismiss total morons (like the employee-book guy.) It is also easy to argue with nice, intelligent, articulate people (like all of us on eng-misc.)

But mchurch is a problem.

(See also the ingenious http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0117318/ on the topic.)

Joseph Janos - Arrogant Googler
Designing with Forces (Ryan Singer)
> A single app isn't a company in the long run.

This depends heavily on the single app in question.
The problem with Michael Church that

He is obviously a big-time asshole; but
He is not completely wrong
It is easy to dismiss total morons (like the employee-book guy.) It is also easy to argue with nice, intelligent, articulate people (like all of us on eng-misc.)

But Michael Church is a problem.

(See also the ingenious http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0117318/ on the topic.)

Joseph Janos - Condescending asshole at Google
I'm getting a blank page on Safari. http://mikemcbrearty.com/climate/search?q=Vitória
Here in Brazil, the last attempt to print its way out of a crisis resulted into 2000% inflation.

The government in late 1993 and early 1994 then created a new currency, that would be pegged 1:1 with USD (later the pegging was removed, now it is about 2.2:1 ), and with limited supply. Also a bit time earlier, a president REMOVED money from people savings, literally (ie: he told banks to set the saving accounts to zero, and that is it).

This, along with some new laws about government spending fixed inflation and allowed the economy to run smoothly again.

Then around the 2000s, when the leftist government arose, they decided to solve poverty again by printing money and giving to the poor, at first it seemly worked, with GDP growth peaking at around 8% in a year, and millions of people leaving poverty and entering what here is called "lower middle class" (actually, in US that would still be considered poverty... here "lower middle class" is if you can rent something, and pay your own food, but rely on government services to education, health and transportation).

The popularity of the socialist government soared (it reached around 70% at its peak, that also peaked during the 8% growth year)...

Then we have currently 6.7% of yearly inflation (year to date data), 0.9% of GDP growth (2012 data) and most of the inflation drivers is housing costs and food (exactly the things that the "new middle class" could afford). Now the government approval is 30% and we have already 5 weeks of protests and strikes that never end, totally widespread, even to some crucial sectors (ie: several states have the police threatening to strike, and there are also threats of a military police strike, that is kinda ludicrous, because as military they cannot legally strike, and more than one high ranking officer of the army threatened a coup, with a general writing a anti-government text and all)

Printing your way out of crisis, only result in a sort of roller coaster economy, it booms and suddenly bust, at first, people with the influx of money start to spend a lot, and people build business to attend to them, then all this influx money result in inflation, suddenly the economy start sputtering, as inflation rises faster than GDP growth, and particularly food and housing inflation rises faster than wages and government welfare, and you have a vicious cycle of needing to print more money to save the population that spends this money and generate more inflation, and your real wealth creation sink.

EDIT: Oh, striker truckers are awesome too, because they are just parking their trucks in the middle of the highways and fucking up everything... Never piss off truckers when your economy rely completely on them because your trains are shit or non-existant.
Nearly everything that matters is a side effect.
> Banach-Tarski

Yes, but in that construction, not all the
sets are Lebesgue measurable. It's a
curious fact, already true just in
one dimension, i.e., the reals, that
we can't have a nice way to assign
a length, area, or measure to
all the subsets. Instead there have to
be some subsets to which we can't
assign a length, etc. Here the usual
proof on the reals does use the
axiom of choice!

With measurable sets, which already
can be wildly bizarre, can't do anything
like Banach-Tarski.

So, suddenly in this thread, instead of
hackers, we are
all turning into undergraduate
pure math majors!
Those are excellent resources. I started a new screencast yesterday -

http://pycandy.com

Do take a look.
The amount of radiation in those tracers was no more than 0.15µSv. That's five times less than what you get by eating six bananas a day.

And I highly doubt that there was no consent beforehand. Perhaps there was excessive legalese or the parents were not notified of the tracers, but that doesn't constitute the assumption that no consent was given.
It's not so much a question of better or worse, it's more about mindshare. Especially with beginner developers.

In the web world the onus is on MS to justify why they have advantages over Open source solutions rather than the other way around (as it was with desktop software).
All three (four?) of your points are irrelevant since you literally suggested using publicly accessible breakfast cereal as a replacement for the equivalent of a controlled experiment.

Using developmentally disabled children for research BECAUSE they can't consent is a horrendous breach of basic human rights and not once did I disagree with you that it was unethical. I appreciate your argument but so far I've only been going after your rhetoric, which could be a lot more informative since you claim you studied this case.
Academia reaches out to the common programmer and student all the time; they write books.

Academic research papers are aimed at other researchers, i.e. people who are up to speed with the concepts and terminology, if you or I don't understand the latest research on machine vision, then though luck, we just lack the necessary background, and that's discounting the fact that we are different audiences and seek for different content and form from each other.

How often are we programmers interested in detailed proofs? Or even sketch proofs? If you decide to helpfully include code samples and they are full of boost::this or ApacheFooXMLFactoryThat, would that be of help to an academic who only implements his algorithms in isolation and doesn't know of massive APIs, or to researchers 20 years from now?
The lack of consent, or the lack of even the ability to say no, is kind of what makes it unethical.

And hey, it's not like anyone even brought that up other than in defense of MIT, to dismiss the question "why would they do X and not Y".
Using ImageMagick to make sharp web-sized photographs
It looks awesome but they don't seem to have an x64 build for Ubuntu :(
Interesting.

As far as I can tell though, it doesn't seem to account for humidity, pollution or wind patterns. The former is especially important for hot climates (or times of the year) since when it comes to comfort, hot dry >> hot humid.
"describe them in terms of what?"

Decimal system :)

Interesting philosophical point though.
Where is INSTALL.md and MANUAL.md ?
Sharing files is a major feature of Google Drive.
I will just assume the continuum hypothesis is true until someone shows me a set with cardinality between Aleph 0 and Beth 1...oh, wait...
I still have lots to add, but so much of this was alien to me previously. Would love to know your thoughts/additions/subtractions.
Blowhard Techie Cheapskates
- Congress may impeach the Chief Justice.

- Congress may revoke the power over the FISC, so it isn't irrevocable.

But the FISC Chief is a lifetime appointment, by definition, since the Chief Justice is a lifetime appointment. It is exclusive, because he has executive authority, he does not have to take advice from anyone before making a decision. Whether it is unaccountable is a matter for debate since the operation of the court, and its activities are carried out in secret. It is certainly unaccountable in the normal sense of the word.
There are some great Photoshopped photos showing how much more fun the Las Vegas strip would be with narrower, pedestrian-friendly streets:

http://narrowstreetsla.blogspot.com/2011/07/las-vegas-strip-...
http://narrowstreetsla.blogspot.com/2011/07/las-vegas-strip-...
Personally, I don't see a better platform than RetroShare. That is why I believe, we're better off if we all get behind RetroShare:

Developers can extend this platform with as many plugins as they wish - as an open-source solution, it's totally open. (I believe fragmentation, more specifically increasing the number of less advanced solutions doesn't help...)
The question to ask is does google allow you to make informed and rational decisions.
Nice. Seems like a great project to learn bash.

Also, I wonder .. how efficient/correct can be the included JSON parser. Anyone has an idea?
So if the issue is tracking regardless, why not use a non-tracking web app?
I tried to search for my city and got back:

EAST LONDON, SOUTH AFRICA
LONDON AIRPORT, CANADA

I would have thought London (UK) might have got a mention.
something missing from the title "some cities"
Heh, as I saw some people commenting, Evo Morales incident only would push the entire South America to end giving Snowden Asylum...

In fact this whole thing is being very interesting, because one guy is managing to create multiple diplomatic incidents, I would not be surprised if this end in some sort of war, or a breakup of alliances or trade zones.
It already can, the web version is just an HTML file with some JS too.
That's the nice thing about browser technology... alleviates the pains cross platform
Thanks, I was just looking for something like this!
Regular segments of the TechZing podcast
Useful software takes a lot of time and effort to write, and there is a lot of investment in learning required to get to the point where one can do it.

Unless a person is independently wealthy, a significant portion of ones time and energy must be devoted to efforts that will be paid.

Therefore open source is either subsidized directly by other paying ventures e.g. corporations for whom it is strategic, of it is engaged in by individuals in the time left over after their paid work.

Until the world changes so that people don't need money to live, developer hours will flow preferentially to the ecosystem according to the available monetary rewards.

The ecosystem that makes it easiest for the most developers to get paid will attract the most developers.

This could be the "open source" ecosystem at some point depending on what business models prevail, but I see no reason why it should automatically be so.
I am on the same boat. I think you also want to take a look at Python challenge: http://www.pythonchallenge.com/
I agree there are rough edges, and for specialized use cases like yours, you might have to walk that extra mile. But when I hear that a framework/library/tool is worth nothing just because it is written in C++ and not in the hip Ruby/Python/Go, it makes me sick. This guy wrote CppCMS taking inspiration from modern frameworks hoping to make life better for himself and for people who care to write webservices/apps in idiomatic C++ and NOT C. Imagine if someone had written a had a well designed, idiomatic C++/Lua API(like, say, boost::python) and open sourced it, would we not have commended their efforts?
Constructivism is significantly more fundamental than AC. AC is notable for being famously perplexing, less foundationally perplexing. For a more graspable investigation of the perplexities and arbitrariness of our choice of foundational set theory, take a look at Vicious Cycles where the author investigates what happens when set theory does not assume a terminating world (and thus introduces a lot of things that we use in CS often, try to model on sets, and are left dissatisfied because we really wanted costa, not data).

From there please take a deep look into topos theory and you'll discover again that AC is just one choice of properties that make for a meaningful "foundation of mathematics (of a kind)" and a not particularly remarkable one at that.
Community funding for Pakistan schools
I would hope at least Mozilla would not comply with such a request..
so docker is mainly a json parser to command lxc i suppose. the bash json parser is the main part of this project - the rests are just wrapping lxc/btrs functions.
Shock diamond
I couldn't find Kathmandu, Nepal on it. Thanks, pretty cool site!
Walks And Walking - Way Marked Trails in Epping Forest
I have all cookies disabled by default, and whitelist the sites I need cookies for.
Periodically I look through the cookies and revise my decisions, or make the whitelisting more specific.
...and Al Gore???

Guderian insisted in 1933, within the high command, that every tank in the German armoured force must be equipped with radio- and visual equipment in order to enable each tank commander to communicate and perform a decisive role in blitzkrieg.

Guderian Kenngruppenheft, Funk in jedem Panzer -> Hut 6 -> SAGE -> SRI - > Cerf "inspiration" --> Edward Bernays.
I bet something funky was involved with getting this to the front page
It's so good that at least two states have the balls to stand up to the USA and offer asylum against what is obviously a political manhunt.

As a Norwegian, I'm ashamed that our government and bureaucracy is too scared to stand up for our moral values. If Snowden was from Somalia, we would have granted him asylum with no further discussion. It's ridiculous that a (former) "banana republic" is the only nation that dares take this issue seriously. They may have their own agenda, but facts are facts.
True. If you can present a browser-based solution with this feature set, no ads, no tracking, and source code available, I'm definitely sold.
| Your criticism is the same one that has been
| made against the GPL countless times. History has
| proven it wrong: Linux is a huge success, thanks
| to the GPL.

I'm curious how "my criticism" is proven wrong by Linux. While Linux does prove that the GPL can work, it is not proof that a hard-line approach to the GPL is useful (especially when it comes to advocacy). Have you ever switched to veganism because of the animal rights activist shouting, "Shame! Shame on you!" on a street corner? "Getting the message out there," isn't very useful if everyone is just ignoring you. At that point, you're just tilting at windmills, and putting in useless effort.

Even your example, Linux, has a leader that is more pragmatic about software licenses than some FOSS hard-liner.

| I do think a lot of these toy projects are motivated by a
| sense of guilt.You go in to work and spend all day working
| against free software, but you can tell yourself you are on
| the right side and 'contributing' if you share that script
| that downloads cat pictures.

You're missing the point here:

1) Many people working for companies that don't open source their product contribute significantly to open source projects. E.g.:

- GvR worked for Google which is 'closed source' but I don't think that anyone considers Python a 'toy project on Github.'

- Kenneth Reitz created the awesome Python Requests library and works at Heroku, which doesn't release it's code as open source.

2) Not everyone can create some significant piece of open source software, even if they would like to. What is your dividing line between 'toy project' and 'serious project?'

3) Statements like these don't win people over. You're attacking people and making giant assumptions about their motivations. It pushes you so close to the troll territory that it becomes hard to distinguish if you are a troll parodying a FOSS hard-liner, or an actual FOSS hard-liner.
"Closed as too localized"

I have an ever growing contempt for over-eager stack overflow editors.
Open source is not a magic security bullet.

It does allow many eyes to inspect source code - which is certainly important in developing cryptographic software.

However it currently does nothing to ensure the timely delivery of patches to consumers. Also, usability of open source security solutions is terrible, and unless people understand cryptographic signing, and the web of trust, and build all their software themselves they have no guarantee that their software isn't compromised.