skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I live in Japan and I don't consider that the outcome was as catastrophic as the media said it was (they are always ready to jump on the apocalyptic trigger). Everything went wrong (even the backup generators as they were blown away by the tsunami) and it was still reasonably contained and the levels of ambient contamination are nowhere as high as they initially predicted.

EDIT:
> most tightly regulated and technologically advanced countries in the world.

Let's drop this kind of argument here, there are many things which are not technologically advanced at all in Japan. Like the fact you can't even use a credit card to pay in most places. This is really old.
This will be great for my Algorithms class next semester. I learn a little better when I have visuals I can correlate to an algorithm.
Wow.

I read Tentler's follow-up post on this, where he abruptly declares that what they're doing isn't unlawful. Presumably, he's saying that because a competent lawyer told him that. If that's not the case, he should retain one.

There are a number of problems with his logic:

* The fact that AV vendors have done things like this in the past (or even do them today) almost definitely won't inoculate this particular team from civil or criminal actions which will cost them a fortune to defend.

* There is no provision in CFAA, or in any unauthorized access statute I've ever read, that has a safe-harbor provision for scanners that do "opt-out". Providing a block-list is good, and neighborly, but it probably doesn't protect them.

* "But the server never asked for a password" is not going to be an effective defense. It's actually even less compelling in this case than it was in the Aurenheimer case, because a web server normally exists to publish documents to the world, but virtually all VNC servers do not.

* Most importantly: what they're doing is so non-minimal. They appear to really be pushing the boundaries of what it means to do an Internet survey. If they wanted to map open VNC servers, they could do that without screenshotting people's open servers.

This team starts that scanner process knowing that they're going to reap hundreds of screenshots that the owners of those systems don't want them to have. If you can describe your project reasonably in a sentence that includes the words "knowing" and "unauthorized", get a lawyer to sign off on it first.

Hopefully, they already did, and I'm just being noisy!
Feel free to email me (in profile).
I am pretty sure part of the whole patent trolling business model is the asymmetric costs. The plantiff's costs are amortized over a number of suits; the the defendant's costs are not.
This year's result: http://image-net.org/challenges/LSVRC/2014/results
Eh, what? Chile has 18 million people, The Czech Republic has 11 million. China has 1,356 million. I would expect the Chinese investors to comprise 98% of the three nationalities.
Everyblock pulls in Chicago public data pretty well, it's one of my favorite things about the site.
I may be naive, but are there really bad actors lurking the world that a) have the resource to pull off such a crime, b) be able to get away with c) not already have means to get what ever it is they want?

To take a stab at your hypothetical situation, the small town in Alaska has multiple armed guards 24/7 as well as centralized offsite monitoring. Protocols in place to alert local authorities which have protocols in place to alert state authorities, etc. The overhead will be covered by excess efficiencies in adopting such a system.
This is pretty great. Using modern brain imaging techniques will shed new light on what really happens when someone drops acid. I don't expect we'll see LSD decriminalized anytime soon in the US, but I'm glad someone has decided to do some clinical trials.
The concept is to start small to overcome cost and regulatory barriers more quickly and for less.

And yes, we kick start using thorium with low enriched uranium or spent fuel to build up U233. Then we just keep reusing the thorium fuel over multiple refueling periods without reprocessing or separations until it is depleted.
I drink three cups of coffee per day, and I have to say this about this:

yawn.
> code that was written years ago that has two size types: one 32/64 bit signed and the other 32 bit unsigned. This creates a bunch of issues when compiled on 32 and 64 bit architectures and there is a substantial amount of effort to clean it up.

Such things happen whenever an invalid assumption that is commonly true becomes not so commonly true, such as the 32-bit to 64-bit migration. That said, C/C++ provides you the tools: size_t is an unsigned type meant for storing array indexes and the size of objects in memory. If you want a real integer, then (unsigned) int. If you need integers of a definite fixed size, u?int(8|16|32|64)_t. Granted, I've encountered that not enough people take the time to understand the tool they're using. Honestly, I wish the default integer type was not fixed size, and especially not platform dependent fixed size, like Python; for non-[indexes/sizes], I feel like this is usually what you want.

> "well that's just bad API design".

Well…

> But my biggest problem with the C-dialects is pointers. Namely if you return or receive a pointer, it's not necessarily clear who owns it. The way this is handled is comments like "DO NOT delete this" or "you MUST delete this".

This is true; in C++, your use of pointers should be minimal, though this can be a problem with references just as easily. In the (special) case of std::shared_ptr, ownership is clear. That said, this is a problem not unique to C++: it exists in Java, Javascript, Python, and many others as well. For example,

some_list = [1, 2, 3]
some_obj = MyObject(some_list)

If some_obj expects to own that list, and it's constructor is:

def __init__(self, some_list):
self._some_list = some_list

which I see a lot, you've got the same problem. (I'm also interested to see how well Rust tackles this, as I agree it's a problem.)

> My other big problem (and this applies to Java too) is directly dealing with low-level multithreading primitives like threads, thread groups and mutexes. I really like that Go has taken a different approach here.

Honestly, I've never thought multithreading was "hard". There's a set of rules you have to hold yourself too, otherwise, yes, you can make your life very hard. If you limit shared data as much as possible, and what data is shared has a well defined locking order (preferably behind code that enforces it) — often this is just a single mutex — then I don't see the problem. Thread-safe queues ("channels", I think Go calls them) are also useful to establish "service" like threads.
We're trying to do something similar but a bit more narrow at https://peerby.com/ . It's specifically for items you want to borrow. We're based in Europe but the SF community is picking up pretty well right now.
I learned a slightly more elaborate version of the rule -- tekamolo (Temporal, Kausal, Modal, Lokal). This rule adds reason (Kausal) in between time and manner, so for example I expect if you were taking the bus because of the rain, you would want to say morgen wegen des Regens mit dem Bus zum Flughafen gehen.
Could you name a book that focuses on Modern C++, that isn't one of these 1200 page tomes? I ask because sooner or later at my job I will probably have to code in C++. It will undoubtedly be a greenfield project, so I don't have to worry about anyone else's horror show (only my own).
This article is a bit strange. Complex initialization in a constructor can make it more difficult to unit test a class. Copy constructors aren't prohibited, it's just recommended that you remove the implicit versions when your class shouldn't be copied. Some of the C++11 features were blacklisted because Google has had its own implementations. In some cases these C++11 features are now allowed and the previous implementations have been deprecated, it's just that the conversion process took time.

In general if you're going to work with other people I believe you need to be a bit flexible on coding with them rather than trying to be hard headed about your own style. It's important that people not be surprised when they work with your code.
Again, I think you're mischaracterising me a little bit.

I can't code. I'm not a technical co-founder. My first business was not a software business, it was an IT infrastructure business.

In my first business, I discovered a need in the Japanese market for a good invoicing/document management software. It came about through me building a crappy invoice management system, and showing it to other Japanese business owners.

It was a little scary to work seriously on this, since there were no competitors, hence possibly no market.

However, I went out and did the following:

a) Designed and had built a crappy version of the software that was functional, but not elegant or scalable.

b) Talked with nearly a hundred potential users of this software to find out how they're currently solving this problem, and to try to get a sense of the market and the potential demand.

c) Found a group of people who were very interested in buying this software.

So by the time I found my co-founder, I had already invested hundreds of hours, and tens of thousands of dollars. However, I had a working prototype, many potential customers, and a good feel of the market.

It was a LOT of work. When people dismiss business co-founders as not doing a lot of work, or not doing meaningful work, it's both very irritating and also leads me to believe they've never worked with a 'real' business co-founder.
Exactly right. Reactors are not attractive targets and this is very robust.
Yeah it's the dialect of my hometown - that's def not standard Finnish :)
Jellyfish Use Novel Search Strategy
Wasn't there a story just a few days ago about the huge oversupply of lawyers right now? Why isn't this driving legal costs down?
Except that a dirty bomb is designed to maximize the hazardous effects of such an event while a reactor is designed to minimize the hazardous effects of such an event.
I can understand the few controversial design choices in Go which limit it's use cases, but would be interested to hear why you claim Rust isn't saner than C++.
I would use the Google Coding standard. The best book to read is Effective C++ (get the latest edition, since they have changed a lot.)
Yes it is fission like the article says.
Can I ask what a HOA is for and what it does? I don't think they exist in my country. We have body corporate entities for strata title blocks, but freestanding houses pay rates to local government directly for services.

Does a HOA provide garbage removal, street maintenance, etc?
In C++ parlance ownership of pointers is dictated by how they are stored.

Raw pointers are only views of the object passed around, these confer no ownership.

std::unique_ptr owns a single unique instance of the memory.

std::shared_ptr (and std::weak_ptr) confer ownership of the memory amongst several other entities.
This is definitely an interesting discussion. However I think a startup requiring no business co-founder is very rare.

At the very least, if there are two technical co-founders, one has to spend a lot of their time doing business activities.
Wrong, perhaps, but 'badly' wrong? Despite the accident, building Fukushima saved lives and reduced atmospheric pollution relative to other power sources.

Part of the reason we haven't improved reactor designs as rapidly as we should is due to irrational fears surrounding nuclear power. In other words, such fears have to some extent been a self-fulfilling prophecy.
I'm just interested in people who are interested in things, if that makes sense.

I dabble in a variety of things... was generally into technology all my life (at various times being light or heavy into programming, hardware, software, any number of things); have a degree in math; work as an editor; freelance doing technical helpdesk work for Wordpress plugins; and just generally like reading new things and hearing from smart people, which is why I'm here.

Also, I've read HN for a couple years now, and this thread is the first one that prompted me to comment. I've really enjoyed reading it!
'It can burn any fuel' is just code for 'we have no real core design yet'. But it doesn't matter, because no nuclear fuel is significantly better than any other, and they're all thousands of times better than alternatives.

Thorium is always used in mixed cores. An accelerator-driven thorium reactor will contain uranium from breeding even if no uranium is ever loaded into it.
This clearly had to be the best: https://twitter.com/pmonks/status/500421703441199106
Shortnr: https://github.com/felixmc/shortnr

it's a service written in node.js that you can deploy to run your own URL-shortening service

it works fine, but I wrote it my second semester in college, so the code is kinda bad, needs a ton of refactoring
For the most part they say "North American," South American or "Latin American" even "Anglo Saxon America" for North America not including Mexico, go figure.
I think so! I work for https://peerby.com , which does something similar (but more narrow, only for borrowing things from neighbors), which started in the Netherlands but it's picking up rather quickly in the US now as well - I think we have many more members in the US now than in some countries where we tried much harder.
Yep and it seems to make sense for them at the prices I'm seeing but I can't help but feel there's something else there. Also, the word "Blackstone" is an immediate red flag to me after going through a corporate merger with them.
Knockoutjs 3.2 release
He makes a good point that in the US the police departments and the district attourney's office work too closely together to expect the DA to reliably investigate police officers.
Right, the goal is to start very small, and off grid. Then we scale and grow to grid size.
They're aiming at niches where they won't be competing directly with more conventional power plants. Their web site claims [1] that it's intended "for remote and distributed generation where energy costs can exceed 30 cents/kWh, and power is needed 24/7".

[1] http://www.upowertech.com/p/technology.html
If you're interested, Peerby is something similar which is open in many parts of Europe right now.

https://peerby.com/
> But Marc Andreessen, a Facebook board member, was also on the board of Oculus VR, paving the way for the deal.

exactly. he came under a lot of fire for similar conflicts with they Ebay/Skype deal.

http://www.businessinsider.com/marc-andreessen-carl-icahn-eb...
They didn't give any reason for closure. Simply "invalid activity". The site is PrizeGrab.com
>with some processing

Weasel words. Reprocessing spent nuclear fuel introduces a MASSIVE regulatory boondoggle.
From the "Experiment Design" section of the paper, emphasis added:

"The subjects were randomly divided into two groups. On the first day of the experiments, six subjects were sent to a forest site, and the other six subjects to a city site. On the second day, the subjects were sent to the other type of site as a cross-check."

To me, that suggests 12 total subjects, and 280 "trials".
I'm 31, and my daughter is 14; we're unschoolers and I'm often sharing cool stuff with her that I find on HN. I'm glad to find other teens here, because I keep telling my daughter there ARE people out there who are like her and not into the same dumb mass-market crap. You rock.
There are core designs for low enriched uranium loading, mixed thorium loading, and spent fuel loadings. Have to make sure a fuel design works before it's claimed to work.
John Comenius and the First Children’s Picture Book
Not that I disagree with your real point about writing maintainable code rather than "clever" code, but if you have a single codebase that is maintained by thousands of engineers then I would argue that you're probably doing something horribly wrong already, and using exceptions is hardly exclusive to so-called rockstars.

I don't really understand organisations that still use C++ in 2014 but then knock out such fundamental parts of its functionality, but then looking at the design priorities for Go, clearly at least some people at Google have very different preferences to my own, so YMMV etc.
When I say "the expansive sense" I am not referring to the specific case of security audits. For an example of what I mean, in terms of an audit intended to build confidence in a large audience, this was published in last year's annual report for News Corporation:

The Board of Directors and Shareholders of News Corporation:

We have audited the accompanying consolidated and combined balance
sheets of News Corporation as of June 30, 2013 and 2012, and the
related consolidated and combined statements of operations,
comprehensive (loss) income, equity, and cash flows for each of
the three years in the period ended June 30, 2013. These financial
statements are the responsibility of the Company’s management. Our
responsibility is to express an opinion on these financial
statements based on our audits.

We conducted our audits in accordance with the standards of the
Public Company Accounting Oversight Board (United States). Those
standards require that we plan and perform the audit to obtain
reasonable assurance about whether the financial statements are
free of material misstatement. We were not engaged to perform an
audit of the Company’s internal control over financial reporting.
Our audits included consideration of internal control over
financial reporting as a basis for designing audit procedures that
are appropriate in the circumstances, but not for the purpose of
expressing an opinion on the effectiveness of the Company’s
internal control over financial reporting. Accordingly, we
express no such opinion. An audit also includes examining, on a
test basis, evidence supporting the amounts and disclosures in the
financial statements, assessing the accounting principles used and
significant estimates made by management, and evaluating the
overall financial statement presentation. We believe that our
audits provide a reasonable basis for our opinion.

In our opinion, the financial statements referred to above present
fairly, in all material respects, the consolidated and combined
financial position of News Corporation at June 30, 2013 and 2012,
and the consolidated and combined results of its operations and
its cash flows for each of the three years in the period ended
June 30, 2013, in conformity with U.S. generally accepted
accounting principles.

/s/ Ernst & Young LLP

New York, New York

September 20, 2013

I do not believe the lack of a public security audit of OpenSSL, SChannel, NSS, PGP or LUKS indicates anything other than that either no-one cares enough about building public confidence in those projects to fund such an audit, or that anyone who has is sitting on the results because they weren't good.
Oracle reveals 32-core SPARC M7
I note that you have a personal interest in Sweden and are German. I am glad that you are able to tell me about what questioning means in English. Thanks for telling me I'm wrong, and to go and look up why. That was really useful and added a lot to the conversation.

Unfortunately, the New Statesman article you point at is an extremely well refuted one. To summarize (someone else's words, not mine): Even though Assange has broken no international law in seeking asylum from Ecuador, some, including New Statesman columnist David Allen Green, have portrayed him as a fugitive on the run.

In fact, on Feb 13, 2013 Justice for Assange published an in-depth analysis entitled “Extraditing Assange: Why The New Statesman is wrong about Julian Assange”. It fully addresses many false claims surrounding Julian Assange’s case, including those perpetuated by New Stateman’s David Allen Green. This comes as Mr Assange had his 800th day detained without charge.

I wonder if you will read it?

http://justice4assange.com/extraditing-assange.html
Yes, yes they are. I have a problem with this, as I don't foresee a hockey stick growth business model that doesn't also involve false claims, but maybe I'm just that guy who didn't get it.

As previous poster said, focusing on something like pre-natal would be a viable and honest model, but I'm not sure it's a hockey stick model.
Doesn't the Google coding standard use uppercase function names (like Microsoft)? Brrr. Classes are nouns -> uppercase, functions are verbs -> lowercase. Well, alt least if you speak German that is the logical choice.
The term "nuclear battery" here refers to the operational model: the modules are shipped out from a factory, hooked up on-site, run with minimal intervention, and then shipped back after several years for refurbishing and refueling. This centralizes construction and maintenance, which is important when the reactors themselves are so small.
I really dislike the attribution of this stench to one nationality. It's a mix of dirtbags, foreign and domestic, from all over the world. The only thing the pattern has in common is that dirty money is flowing into real estate in the world's top cities: London, New York, San Francisco, Paris, Singapore, Hong Kong, and many more.

In New York and London, it's "the Russians" who are blamed, as if they were the only one; in San Francisco, it's "the Chinese"; in parts of Southern Europe, it's "the Arabs". In reality, it's nonresident dirtbags from all over the world, including the U.S. Attributing it to one nationality is racist, unfair, and misleading. Really, the problem is dirtbag global elite speculators (and, likewise, the average Russian or Chinese isn't a dirtbag, and the average American ultra-HNWI is one) but that's too many words so people just shorten it to "foreign speculators". (By the way, speaking as an American, I am totally fine with Londoners and Parisians calling American nonresidents "dirtbag foreign speculators". It's not racist to hate the global elite of all stripes; it's patriotic no matter where you are.)

Is it "the Chinese"? No. It's corrupt ultra-HNWIs from all over the world. People just blame "the Chinese" because a fifth of the world's population is Chinese, but it's really unfair because most Chinese people (like 99.9 percent) aren't the dirtbags buying up Palo Alto, and many are the victims of the dirtbags buying up Palo Alto.
Think our next frontier -- Martian colonies.
You know that you can run an entirely non-.NET stack in Azure? 100% linux servers, PHP, apamongoDB, postgresSQL, mySQL, etc. You can even leverage a lot of the PaaS offerings with PHP/node.js.

I don't know that anyone should take what you have to say on this matter seriously.
True, but you can always use a once-through fuel cycle at first.

EDIT: It turns out that the article was inaccurate, and they won't be reprocessing. Consider this comment happily retracted!
Uber Wins a Reprieve in Berlin
The above translation should probably just be "belongs in" rather than "belongs to" then. Your clarification helped, thanks.
Precisely right. Traditional utilities want something with a long operating track record, something hard for new designs to do off the bat. But going where the reactor is 5x cheaper than the next best option changes that. Plus many of these places want combined heat and power, so the design needs to be flexible on the thermal end.
The amount of security etc. required per site is subject to change. But even a 1GW site can be more cheaply assembled from 300 units coming off an assembly line than from one unit built in-place. The economics of this were discovered in the 18th century.
Ah. I misread that, then. A much weaker stat to have cited, in that case.
> Everything wrong about software patents is summed up in this patent.

The cited document is a "patent application". It is not yet a patent.

The application was rejected on 2014-03-24 (look up the publication number [20130093828] here: http://portal.uspto.gov/pair/PublicPair then click the "Image file wrapper" tab to open up the document that rejects the application.
Can you answer the question?