skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
When nuclear research was first being developed, it was for the specific purpose of building the bomb. When the war ended, and the industry switched to civilian applications, they decided to go with Uranium because they had already worked out many of the issues.

Still, the US Airforce wanted a nuclear-powered bomber shortly after the Navy showed their nuclear sub and before ICBM's deprecated "end-of-days" long-range bombers. A water-contained reactor wouldn't work in an airplane, so they funded the development of the MSR (molten-salt-reactor).

Unfortunately, when they shuddered the project after the implementation of practical ICBMs, industry politics discredited MSR's in favour of the reactor-types we have now.

After fukushima, a grassroots campaign has been undertaken to resume research of MSR's as a replacement of fossil fuels for scalable carbon-free energy creation. If you are interested, you can get a great overview here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P9M__yYbsZ4
Also: they're "only" raising $100-$200m? They raised $150m a year ago when they punted on the IPO then, I believe. Is their burn rate so high that they need the money? If so, the IPO won't really buy them much time. If their burn rate is low, is right now really the peak of the market for them? It's already a "down" time to IPO, so why not wait? Are they worried that the price is going to cave in more and more? If I were looking at their stock price, that's what would scare the crap out of me.
It mostly depends on what the users do. If the interaction is minimal and most pages can be rendered once and then served from cache you can run this on a laptop. If interaction is intense and everything has to be generated on the fly it could tax a mid range server. It all depends on the use case.
It's $50.
Every single article on Israel.......

But actually the PA should use his software. They waste FAR more water to leaks than Israel.
Cynical people grossly over-estimate the value of their criticism. People either take pride in their work, and are self-critical, or they aren't, but if someone worked hard developing something, you complaining about the features you don't like just lowers their opinion of you. Focus on the positive, let them see the negatives on their own (everyone does).

Developing open-source software is an instant cure for cynicism. Having your software torn apart from strangers who've contributed nothing is a quick fix for criticizing others.
This seems like a no-brainer for Google.

In fact, I would expect them to offer own insurance directly in the near future, for several reasons. First, insurance is one of the big practical hurdles facing their self-driving cars – in an accident, who is at fault? By offering their own product they can potentially circumvent this hurdle. Second, if they begin to offer homeowners insurance, they can tie their rates directly to Nest data, which should allow them to offer more competitive rates and more accurate pricing, similar to what Progressive has done with Snapshot [0]. And lastly, this obviously gives Google access to more, and potentially better, personal data.

[0] http://www.progressive.com/auto/snapshot/
>I think of it kind of like being in the military. Enough money gets spent on the military, TONS of money gets spent on the military, and for much of it, the public sees minor benefit. But you know that when you join, that at least while you're serving, you are going to be guaranteed to have a place to stay, food to eat, health care, education options. Nearly anyone who is fit can join.

When I was doing my PhD, that is all I was really asking for. Honestly, I would have been okay with making the $40k salary per year for the rest of my life if I got to do the work I loved. But even that was not even remotely guaranteed.

Fortunately I had some good software skills from my bio phd so I could land a job.
> 1) Grants already exist for those who cannot afford college.

The big difference with this proposal is that while it has generally similar kinds of requirements for students as existing grant programs, it has more stringent requirements for the schools and particular degree programs covered. From the fact sheet [0]: "Community colleges will be expected to offer programs that either (1) are academic programs that fully transfer to local public four-year colleges and universities, giving students a chance to earn half of the credit they need for a four-year degree, or (2) are occupational training programs with high graduation rates and that lead to degrees and certificates that are in demand among employers. Other types of programs will not be eligible for free tuition. Colleges must also adopt promising and evidence-based institutional reforms to improve student outcomes, such as the effective Accelerated Study in Associate Programs (ASAP) programs at the City University of New York which waive tuition, help students pay for books and transit costs, and provide academic advising and supportive scheduling programs to better meet the needs of participating students, resulting in greater gains in college persistence and degree completion."

[0] http://www.whitehouse.gov/the-press-office/2015/01/09/fact-s...
Giant diagram of how Haskell (GHC) works internally
"Why do we do this to ourselves?" She asked me. "We train forever and ever, live in near poverty, work insane hours—all of it to get jobs that don’t exist, as tenure track faculty. Why do we suffer this way?"

Because it's fun and fulfilling. My lab has had people who left banking and consulting gigs, at extraordinary financial cost, measured in dollars. Neither seemed to regret the switch much, but many who go the other way feel the same.

Planning on a tenure track job isn't very reasonable, it's like planning for a successful startup, I suppose. But right now I get to do exactly what I want to be doing. The 'premium' economists would say I pay is worth it to me, for now.
Intel seems to have decided RealSense is their Next Big Thing. Judging by http://www.theverge.com/2015/1/7/7507045/intel-ces-2015-keyn...
it was involved in just about every main point of their CES keynote.
Grad school cost me close to ~$100M... My bad...

No I am not exaggerating. I would have been #3 at a very successful tech company had I chosen it over grad school and that's about half what #1 and #2 are worth these days.

That said, over a decade after I tripled my salary in a day by fleeting my post-doc for the dotcom boom, everything I learned in academia suddenly became relevant and continues to increase in relevance every year.
Too bad we missed our chance to demo the new ($2,499) edge-cadence eliminating audiophile quality PCI-E cache (with pure gold connectors) SSD at CES. It's all point-to-point wired with 12 gauge cryo-treated OFC solid conductor wire sheathed in Techflex for the best possible quality. We also have a balanced model coming out which uses three separate 1x PCI-E slots for L/R/ground to decrease cross-talk (and obviously jitter).
The study's final authors may not be human. As such, they will clearly be biased.
Are they already in production, is it being sold, do they need funding, are they going to do a Kickstarter? (half joking, I can imagine it happening) This tech sounds cool, but the site doesn't say anything about implementations.
Well, it's been imminent since the summer of 1956 ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dartmouth_Conferences )
Each tenured professor produces PhDs way above replacement rate. A tenure spot only opens when the Professor leaves academia, but during his career he produces dozens of PhDs. The system can't work out like that.
Crash into Bitcoin
Typography in Email
> I think a lot of these post-docs could make a lot more in industry, no?

If you are in a programming heavy field, yes, else no. If you did biochemistry, developmental biology, etc, you are SOL.
I feel the same way, but I think it is wrong to consider that style bad. We shouldn't have to contain our natural exuberance and energy all the time. A true diversity would provide some place for it.
What two player games do you know and like already?

I love to play Coloretto, Battle Lines, Hive, and lately Innovation.
It all depends what you're using it for. If I'm writing code that's going to be around awhile and can tolerate some dependencies, I'll totally use, say, requests. But I use urllib2 from the repl all the time, especially if I'm on a machine that isn't mine. The fact that any Mac already has the tools on it to grab some JSON from an API, parse it, and do something useful with it from the command line, without having to download or install anything, is immensely useful, even if the API is a bit suboptimal. The same applies to quick and dirty things I'm shoving into a Gist to share with colleagues. Not all things have to be elegant to be useful.

(That said, those kinds of usecases aren't really in Rust's wheelhouse, so I still think in Rust's case having batteries not included is probably the right call.)
snowdrift.coop
My guess is that Intel doesn't want a generation of hackers (some of which will go on to create "The Next Big Thing") getting used to using competitors' chips... e.g. Arduino (Atmel), Raspberry Pi (Broadcom), and BeagleBone Black (TI).
Yes - I always hear it mentioned in connection with PR for "wearable devices" and the "Internet of things".
You forgot to mention that the likes of Elsevier then make more money off their research than they do.
You have to stop graduating useless PhDs. Graduate students, and often postdocs (though more justifiably), are recruited primarily in the expectation that they will provide work for their advisors/Profs.

If Profs could no longer benefit directly from the labor of grad students, in the manner that teachers don't directly benefit from the work of students, then academia would be less inclined to churn them out. Supply would go down and both average quality and salaries would go up.
I can think of three things that you'll really really really want to be on top of while scaling up

1. your architecture must allow for vertical scaling. this means upgrading your hardware to beefier, stronger, faster machines with more CPU power and more memory. vertical scaling is often a very cost effective of improving performance.

2. your architecture must allow for horizontal scaling. this means being able to provision and deploy new instances of your application servers very easily, using an automated process. more servers running in parallel is a very effective way of handling increased load.

3. you must be able to monitor and protect your systems. https everywhere. highly secure passwords everywhere, and you should rotate your passwords on a regular basis. log everything and set up services to monitor your logs and notify you when weird/bad shit happens.
Write a blog post on the mistakes you make, and I'm sure this will appear much higher in HN. Then stick some ads and make some money.
I hate to say it but RMS comes off as a bit petulant in this exchange. The "I'd advise you to stop 'pressuring' me or else" bits in particular.

The other developers are trying to show him that he's keeping GCC crippled by design in order to preserve freedom. They argue that in doing so, the affect will be to drive people away toward more wide open tech, achieving the exact opposite of what RMS hopes to accomplish.

When they cite examples of this already occurring, RMS responds with either a shrug ("it's already happened, so we can't stop it") or with the aforementioned "I'm offended."

Stefan asks point blank:

"Are you saying that if David writes this, and writes code for Emacs to make use of it, you're going to use your leverage to try and make sure this code doesn't make it into Emacs?"

To which RMS responds:

"We do not want to promote that sort of plugin."

That's kind of sad.
That's just not true. Standard library components are not better maintained, not more secure, and not easier to deal with. There are too many examples to even count of each of those -- you can take a look at PEP 476 for just one recent example.
I think the downside of no PhD is that you're much more likely to hit a glass ceiling.

I would agree in the context of staying within the R&D field. However, I know more than a few people who used the extra years not spent doing PhD post-doc to develop their careers in a different direction (sales, biz-dev) that allowed them to stay in their field and shattered those glass ceilings. You can still do these things with a PhD, but it will be more difficult (people pigeon-hole you, and you're playing catch-up time-wise).

In the end I think people in hiring positions use the PhD letters as a screening tool for how strong a scientist the person is, without necessarily really evaluating the individual.

This is key. I've actually found that a PhD. is a relatively poor predictor of how well a person might function in an industry R&D role. Please note that I'm not saying it's a negative predictor. I've just found there's little to no correlation. I've worked with incredibly smart and capable people with PhD's and others who could not function outside of a low-consequence lab setting.
For things that the standard library can do, it is usually the best choice. It's code that's already sitting on the user's machine, why use something else?

And also, those are generally relatively straightforward things whose design are hard to get wrong (but there are exception, e.g. Python's urllib). Being a standard library and not a standard framework helps.

For what it's worth, I use Java's standard library whenever possible. It's quite extensive and the fact that the documentation is top-notch makes it a joy to use. That being said, there are still a lot of supplemental things you might want to do, which is what things like Google Guava or Apache Commons are for. But they are to supplement, not replace the standard library.

By the way, some parts of Apache Commons would be a good example of how not to design a standard library, I don't want to piece 10 objects together to do a simple utility function call.
I should have said "there's no data you're presenting to support this claim."

The problem I have is with phrases like "I would bet there is" or "I assume those blacks [with white sounding names] are more likely to come from families that are wealthier and better educated."

It seems like an obvious correlation to make, but they're not based on data. I think it's in our best interest, intellectually, to take a few minutes and look for some information. The internet means it can take fifteen or twenty minutes to find a decent chunk of data to start working with. It won't make you an expert (and I'm by no means one either), but it can help highlight a lot of the nuance that exists in issues like this.
Or what happened to Java. And probably other ecosystems.

IMO a "softer", "recommended" packages approach is better longer term.
Medical ethics are also very patient focused - it's hard to deal with situations that are good for this patient but bad for hypothetical future patients.
Yeah. Implicit bias is tough. For anyone interested, there's a quick rundown here:

http://med.stanford.edu/diversity/FAQ_REDE.html
Show HN: Appbase.io – Build realtime apps/API with search, collaboration
This test obviously could benefit from a Blackbody Ambient Field Conditioner (MSRP $1,323, now discontinued)

http://www.lessloss.com/blackbody-p-200.html
Ask HN: What are we doing wrong with our first paid mobile game?
We just released our first paid mobile game "Anna & Fumbles" on Google Play.

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.pgs.anna

But the game is yet to get any visibility or sales. What are we doing wrong? How can we rectify?

Anna & Fumbles is available only in USA, UK, Canada, Germany, Netherlands, Australia, and Bangladesh.
Background: I'm a future student at a dev bootcamp

So it seems the general concern for these bootcamp graduates is that they know the basic skill to do entry level work but lack the foundation to progress to harder tasks? If anyone can speak from experience, what are some of the subjects that aren't taught in depth enough at these bootcamps?

Last summer, I successfully applied to both a graduate program as well as a bootcamp. I decided a graduate degree would probably be better in the long run so I decided to pursue that instead. However, because my undergrad degree was in biochem, I had no CS background. I was self studying for a little over a year but hadn't taken any classes so they told me I had to take some prereq courses. Long story short, they wouldn't let me take them out of order so just those 8 prereqs would've taken me 5-6 quarters, almost two years. And that's before I would even begin the master's. So I dropped out and contacted the bootcamp to see if I was still admitted and am now waiting to join the April class. I'm just wondering if anyone out there has any experience similar to this and has any advice on what I should do before and after the twelve weeks?

TL;DR Bootcamps aren't the only ones just looking for tuition money and could drag out a degree long and expensive enough to make it not worth the investment.
In spite of the name "ThorCon", there's no mention of thorium on the front page.

http://thorconpower.com/features/clean says:

> And ThorCon obtains about 25% of its power from easily mined thorium which requires no enrichment.

http://thorconpower.com/design/thorcon-can says the "fuelsalt" is "a mixture of sodium, beryllium, uranium and thorium fluorides called nabe".
Hey, I wanted to offer the perspective of an instructor at General Assembly - I guess take my response with a grain of salt, but I'll do my level best to be objective.

I think, perhaps unsurprisingly, the statement that

> "GA seems to not really give a shit about actually educating people or getting them jobs, just about making sure they pay tuition"

is flat wrong. We have a large, dedicated "Outcomes" team whose sole job is to educate and prepare students for the workplace and find them positions after they graduate. Unlike other bootcamps, GA does not act as a recruiter by taking fees from employers for placing candidates, nor do we take a percentage of students' first year salaries as tuition. I think this is great, because it means that our Outcomes team is only concerned with finding the best fit for each student, rather than placing them with a "partner" company or in the highest paying job, which may not be suitable for them.

We also integrate workplace related programming throughout the entire course by bringing in developers from other companies to talk about what it's like to work in the industry, taking students on tours of potential employer offices so they can see what a typical dev environment might look like, encouraging students to participate in meetups and local dev events to grow their own development communities, and more. Also, GA has an excellent (90%+) success rate in helping our students get relevant (i.e. something that uses the skills they just learned) jobs post graduation.

As far as the curriculum: frankly, most of the bootcamps (including us) are teaching on the same stack (Ruby, Rails, Git, and obviously HTML, CSS/Sass, Javascript, jQuery and some JS framework). I would be very surprised if the curriculum was wildly different amongst bootcamps. What we've found is that the quality of instruction and an emphasis on problem-solving techniques is more important to long term success than particular technology stacks. I'd be very interested to hear if Flatiron has some groundbreaking new way to teach the Rails stack.

Finally, on instructor quality: I'm obviously very biased here, but the other instructors I've met and worked with at GA have been some of the best I've seen. I suppose it could be argued that I must not have seen great developers before, but if that's true then I have been faking my way through the last several years coding at prominent VC-backed startups. My co-instructors are experienced, knowledgeable, and most of all they take pride in their craft and care about their students. I have a lot of respect for Flatiron and think they're a great bootcamp, but I wouldn't trade the developers I get to work with on a daily basis for anyone.
Sorry, but UML provides enough definition to accurately describe any process... you generally need two graphs for any interaction though. Most people don't think in these terms. Some can keep it in their heads, others cannot.

It's easier for most people to reason about a simple task. Not everyone can also see how that simple task will interact with the larger whole. I've seen plenty of developers afraid to introduce something as fundamental as a message queue, which is external to a core application. It breaks away from what they can conceptualize in a standing application.

Different people have differing abilities, talent and skills regarding thought and structure. Less than one percent of developers are above average through most of a "full stack" for any given application of medium to high complexity (percent pulled out of my rear). It doesn't mean the rest can't contribute. But it does mean you need to orchestrate work in ways that best utilize those you have available.
Another useful thing to study along with Markov chains is stochastic matrices. They are useful and come up in many situations such as NLP, combinatorics, etc.
Can you elaborate on MD/PhD? What positions are these exactly and what qualifies as "insane" pay?
I not too sure about emails with ten lines.
No no no no no no no no no. THIS IS NOT TRUE. See the discussion with binarycrusader on this very page.
Azure is now bigger, faster, more open, and more secure
Homophobia has not been eliminated and nearly everyone here expressing disgust has also stated that they realize their disgust is irrational.
Exxon sells a commodity in a highly competitive market and still one of the top 2 companies by market cap in the world.
What became more relevant that you learned?
I too have had interactions with academics I don't think society is benefiting from. I think it's important to say out loud - maybe we need less research scientists and when we do that we might work on more important areas with slightly better funding.
It's amazing the amount of high-quality material there is out there. However, as a programmer who is currently going back and attempting to master the fundamentals of an undergraduate CS curriculum through self study, what is lacking is:

1. A comprehensive list of the topics covered in the fundamental CS classes (that is, the topics covered in data structures, algorithms, etc. as well as the required math), ideally with links to related online material. Actually, ACM's Joint Task Force on Computing Curricula publishes a report that is an excellent resource (starting on page 59)[1] for this kind of thing. This resource just need to be distilled down into a list of general topics, each with an associated list of the best online education materials for that particular topic.

2. A nice flashcard program to accompany each topic, ideally with SRS, that could help students learn the terms and other concrete facts related to those topics.

3. A way to systematically evaluate and analyze a learner's mastery of these topics. That is, tests. I'm sure there's a lot of great test material out there that could be auto-graded, but it's scattered about.

4. Oh yeah, and a pony.

Does anyone know of a resource like this? I've actually thought about building it, and have started on very minor parts of this vision [2]. But it's a big task, and I'm not sure if there's any demand for this kind of thing.

1. http://www.acm.org/education/CS2013-final-report.pdf

2. https://github.com/esbullington/canonicalcards
I remember watching Prince of Darkness, the students were in science.

[Walter is studying quantum physics]
Walter: Why do I want a Ph.D. in this?
Catherine: Particle beam weapons, research grants...
Walter: A millionaire when I'm forty! Now I remember!

That is what I thought as well, I guess science doesn't pay.