skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
She wrote several followup answers in the comments thread, one of which addresses your question (though it might not be satisfying!): http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/fjwkh/why_exactl...

Someone else wrote my favorite answer: "Basically, the way to think of it is not that light is the fastest thing, but rather that there is a speed, c, which the geometry of space and time demands is the fastest possible speed.

One can also work out that anything without mass must travel at this fastest possible speed c. Light is one of those things, therefore light travels at c. It's only an accident of history that we call c "the speed of light": that's the context we discovered c's existence in.

As for why it's the speed it is, well, it's the speed in our universe. It's actually much more natural to say c=1 and all speeds are then unitless numbers between 0 and 1. From this point of view c is 300 Mm/s because of how we chose to define the meter and the second." http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/fjwkh/why_exactl...
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I noticed nearly the exact same thing, but from the Android Market perspective.

I too have a top 5 app in my category.

I too don't see any change in rank on a day to day basis.

I too have a top 50 paid and free app.

I too have seen no significant change in sales volume since the iPhone launch on Verizon.

Maybe he's right. Maybe the largest percentage of change has come from iPhone owners switching networks, but it certainly hasn't affected sales of my apps in the Android Market which are staying good and strong.

And to be honest, I really thought the Verizon launch of the iPhone was d-day for Android Market sales. I'm HAPPILY wrong.
Chicken feels like a local optimum of pragmatism and flexibility to me; Racket is larger, to be sure, but somehow overwhelming.
I have created a programming language that is written in XML. With a decent editor (I use oxygen xml) and a good schema (I use Relax NG) there is almost no way to make syntax errors and typing is a breeze (auto completion). With schematron you can even make clever (semantic) error checking before compile time. So it always depends on the case.
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In this example, the earth isn't in an accelerating reference frame, only the astronaut is. There isn't a "master reference frame", but that doesn't mean that acceleration is relative.

Despite the upvotes on reddit, this really is a topic that can only be done justice by good book or instructor. Any self-respecting library should have a copy of Relativity: The Special and General Theory by Einstein, it's written specifically for the layman. Come to think of it,... I should probably pick it up again myself.
Would you elaborate on what you mean by scalable content generation? How is this different from writing content or landing pages directly, how does it become scalable? I find the content bit hard with my own side-project because I'm having to learn to be a great writer on the side of my side project (not a bad thing)!
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Actually that question is easy to answer.

The universe is Einsteinian because otherwise e could not equal mc2.

And if that were the case then stars could not shine, and a TON of other things would not work. Atoms could not exist either.

The reason is that as you go faster you have more energy (obviously) and since you have more energy your mass increases. Since your mass increases you need even more energy to increase your speed (since now you weigh more).

Take that to the limit and you find that as you reach the speed of light your mass goes to infinity.

So it's necessary that it's impossible to exceed the speed of light - for example if you had two objects each traveling at 51% of the speed of light (relative to third placed in between them). Then relative to each other they are going faster than light - which means they have more than infinite energy.

Can't do that.

So relativity is necessary if you want mass to be interchangeable with energy.
I'm pretty sure he explained that he was talking in terms of general relativity and his simplifying assumption of absolute directions and a stationary viewpoint. As far as I can tell, you haven't explained why that's wrong — merely asserted that there's another viewpoint that can describe the same thing.
I'm working on a spec similar to this, but using TXT records (as they're URLs, not just servers). I wonder if anyone would be interested in me putting up what I have on this already?
I really just enjoy not having to change languages. Whenever I want to do some basic syntactic stuff like substring for example, its the same everywhere.

That alone makes it enough for me without its other benefits.
Ask HN: What is/are the best documentation(s) you have ever read?
It can be for a tool or language or OS or software etc.

My favourite is for an ETL tool called Informatica (It has got awesome help and documentation that comes with the tool, which made learning such a complex tool lot easier)

I also like Python's documentation.
There are circa 75 million iphones in use. AT&T activated about 4 million phones in q4 2010. The Verizon iPhone has been available for just a little over 40 days.

If Verizon iphones sold at the same rate as AT&T models (which includes the 3G and 3GS at much lower prices) we would expect the total installed base to have increased by... about 2%.

Even if Verizon iphones sold at say 3x the typical rate the resulting 6% increase in installed base would still fall down into the noise on these graphs.

In short, this data is not even remotely conclusive.
I'm just trying to wrap my head around the concepts discussed here.

I used to think about it as I explained in my previous comment. But now that ars is making these comments, it seems like I'm grasping something new.
This is not a matter of semantics, if you ever want to understand relativity the FIRST thing you need to do is get rid of the concept of absolute motion. As long as you think in those terms you will never be able to understand it.

And addressing something in a followup is no good - fix your initial post to be correct in the first place. Reddit allows you to edit your post.
That the Ovi Store is pulling in more revenue than the Android Market is insane. :)

That says a lot about the sorry state of the Android Market, though.

Would have been nice to see some Windows Phone Marketplace numbers in there too.

Those Ovi Store numbers were probably quite encouraging to Microsoft. :)
Less silly than someone standing on a corner using a laptop though.

That's no small feat for new tech. Imagine a world in which people riding segways looked less silly than cyclists.
As far as I could tell from that conversation, she is anonymous and wants to stay that way. So RRC could be somebody massively well-known in the science world using this as a non-tenure approved outlet, or is masquerading as knowledgeable but is a patent clerk with no scientific credibility.
Anyone with the chops to pull and compile C# code from Github is technical enough to understand the implications of trusting their privacy to this tool. Please don't be so dramatic.
OpenBSD's manpages are fantastic.
If you don't understand that there is no such thing as absolute direction or motion then you don't understand relativity at all.

And for him/her to explain things in such a way is a MASSIVE disservice to you and makes it very hard to learn it correctly later.

And it's not even your clock that ticks slower - it's theirs.
>I think that might be an ambitious guess regarding Riseup's intentions - they don't make any such distinction.

Perhaps, although I've never met an anarchist calling for a centrally planned economy. Most anarchists have jobs and use money and some even run businesses. They're primarily against coercion and abuse perpetrated by the state and corporations rather than against people buying and selling things per se.

>the US has an extraordinary high standard of living, far better than 20 years ago

We're a few years into a global recession, with massive job losses and unemployment. It seems counter-intuitive that this leads to an increase in the standard of living.

>Nobody is using capital "against" anyone - I'm not even sure precisely what it means, yet I'm quite sure it's false.

I would say the recent economic collapse is a fairly good example of the use of capital agressively. Those who introduced derivatives into the market did so by more or less paying government representatives to remove legislative barriers.

A less dramatic example would be the stereotypical Wal-Mart using its capital to dominate local markets, wiping out existing local enterprise.
the 30" display is 2560x1600 (16:10), also, it's now supposed to be superseded by the 27" display (2560x1440) which makes me hope my 30" doesn't break down any time soon as I want my 200 extra pixels.
My wife, a non-geek by all measures, uses her Acer netbook for browsing / reading or watching movies in bed.

That netbook is not optimal for work either, but she can run Office on it, she can plug a real keyboard and a bigger monitor to it, and all the software she ever used is compatible with that netbook.

iBooks? How about Windows Explorer + whatever PDF viewer you'd like?

Laptops are big and heavy, but tablets compete with netbooks, not laptops.

There's only one thing for which I'd prefer an iPad ... technical books. The Kindle is too small for that, and Kindle DX too expensive. But as soon as Amazon drops the price on DX, I'll buy one.
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Argh - fat fingers, ipad, morning - downvoted by mistake!
The important part of relativity is that there is no absolute reference frame, all motion is relative, thus the name. The mathematics behind time dilation is an aspect of that. Teaching someone about time dilation without teaching about the fundamental nature of relativity is a disservice, in my opinion.
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> I have to say that I've never considered using an XML for a DSL. Most of the reasons I've written DSLs usually involve a desire to avoid writing more code.

I'd like to ask a favor as a fellow programmer: pretend you never saw this article. The fewer XML-based DSLs, the better.
It's not the installed base that matters, but rather new users, since they are presumably the ones who are more likley to buy an existing app. At least that's my take based on reading Marco's post where there are spike events that cause sales to go up.
That's usually the interesting question for a project. That said, the general sketch of making landing or content page generation scalable is figuring out all the work it takes you personally to make one unit of content and then automating, eliminating, or outsourcing all of it.

I talk about this a lot on my blog. In my example, the content is bingo games on pages dedicated to any teaching activity you can think of. It scales because the bingo card, images, and PDF can be 100% automated, and the actual captivity can be written by someone much cheaper than me.
Or the flowers you've been sending to their publicists. Or the dead pigeons you've been leaving out of love (and to send a warning message to others) on their front porches.
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I live in Los Angeles, and I've seen several people using iPads on public transit or in cafes.
I'll do my best to help.

This FIRST thing to remember is that you can only measure speed by comparing with something else. There is no such thing as the concept of "I am moving", but rather "relative to them I (or they, it's interchangeable) are/am moving".

Now when you compare speeds you can also compare clocks, and the same principle applies - you can only measure time by comparing to someone else.
An interesting question would be how many Android phones did they sell at Verizon over that same time period. If Android at Verizon sold neck and neck with Apple during this time period, that probably bodes less well for Apple. But if the iPhone is selling much better, that's a good sign, especially when the iPhone 5 comes out.
> One is if the language you would otherwise be writing in is Java. (Or WCF in the MS stack)

I admit that I've never done any serious Java development, but that's jumping from the kettle into the fire, is it not? As verbose as Java is, it seems to be less so than XML would be.
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You may be asked about using Unicode strings. What the interviewer is usually looking for is:

- each character will be two bytes (so, for example, char
lookup table you may have allocated needs to be
expanded from 256 to 256 x 256 = 65536 elements)
- that you would need to use wide char types (wchar_t
instead of char)
- that you would need to use wide string functions (like
wprintf instead of printf)

Unicode support involves more than just the minimum number of bits used per character.

Say you're writing a method to truncate a string to a certain length. What if your text contains a code point outside the basic multilingual plane, and each character can't be represented in just 16 bits? If you truncate in the middle of a character, the result will be an invalid string. What about combining characters? If you truncate in the middle of a combining character sequence, you'll end up with half-formed output (e.g., letters missing a diacritic). If you work with text, you should know this stuff!
Agreed, isn't <meta http-equiv="X-UA-Compatible" content="IE=7" /> just for people whose website breaks in IE8, but works in IE7 and they can't be bothered to update it?
Here’s a sketch of how you could write a toy lisp in forth:

Let’s use “(* 4 (+ 5 6))” as an example input string.

1. Drop ( and ): “* 4 + 5 6”.

2. Tokenize on whitespace and reverse the tokens: 6 5 + 4 *

3. This is forth. Execute it.

There’s at least one class of bug here (that “(- a b)” != “b a -”)), but it shows a sense in which they’re very similar languages. From 40,000 feet, lisp could be called a syntax hack to add variadic functions to a backwards dialect of forth.

To put it another way, forth really is trivially tree-structured just like lisp, but the trees are implicit in the number of arguments the functions take. This allows tricks that depend on the AST being easy to work with, just like lisp macros.
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Seriously rather than moving python 3 forward why can't they put in the effort to upgrade the most common libs so we all can go 3.0 first?
The qualifier is that Facebook Ads are like setting money on fire if you're trying to sell something. Facebook users are simply not in a buying mood. If you're doing lead gen or have a short sign up, Facebook can be tremendously effective.
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I think it is true in certain cases. A successful founder has that 100% commitment to the idea / company. He or she will do anything it takes for it to succeed and will hustle it until it does. Sure, employees can write the code that makes the company run but they don't have that extra drive to have made it a success on their own. On the flip side, some founders are just super-well connected people that just get oodles of money and hire a team to make their idea come to life and have no real ability beyond that.
If you're going to generalize like that, it's best to cite some evidence to back it up.
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foaf+ssl ? :)
I may not be representative of most people, but I rarely read outside. I find myself reading more on plains, trains, and at home curled up on a couch.

Given that usage pattern, the glare makes little difference (but the iPad's increased utility makes it a worthwhile "upgrade").
You did nothing wrong and should carry on learning, coding and sharing. Thanks for sharing your project with HN.
"should try" sounds pretty vague and unenforceable.
I don't doubt that you could write a DSL that someone would be productive with. But then you'd need to keep a psychiatrist on staff to make sure the people using it don't go crazy. If we're talking about a full on, general purpose language, then you might as well start them on Thorazine ahead of time. Otherwise, you risk a programmer going postal.

In short, don't risk your or your coworkers' safety. Just say no to XML as a programming language.
I'm not sure if that's entirely fair. She did shed light on the nature of the limit (the how): it's not a quantum speed limit, where suddenly more energy input to a body moving at c has no effect (as would probably be a classical interpretation), but rather that the very geometry of our universe constantly revises our notion of time as we move about space, such that the idea of a body moving "faster than c" is a violation of that geometry. I call that pretty insightful, for all that the idea of a universal speed limit could possibly imply.
Based on the comments from the site, there's a Streisand effect looming.
> good interview(er)s will try to determine how you think,

I can say up front: I don't usually do my thinking at the interviews.
Well what if the coordinate system is in reference to one of the objects. That is what I had imagined in my head, I never supposed an absolute frame of reference. The faster the two objects accelerate from each other, the more the time vector (that she mentions in her explanation) rotates for both of them relative to each other so the slower the relative passage of time.
Actually that's just flat-out wrong. Light has an absolute speed. It's the only absolute thing in the universe. It's not relative. And -- this comes directly from Brian Greene -- the speed of light always looks like the speed of light, no matter how fast you're travelling. The speed of light never looks like 10% of the speed of light. It's always the same -- a constant.
I have a post I made before I registered my account. How do I tie that post into my existing account now, or can I only "import" old posts during registration? That's a disappointment. :/
—There is a standard library function for that…

—Nah, too easy. I'll implement my own.
I'm torn. At what point do we say "these people are not competent to make decisions for themselves, this is just suicide"?
Come on. Apple directly markets to the latte set - it's their target audience. It'd be as silly as saying that MS has the best OS because that's what all the high-end gamers use.

Also, on the hardcover thing, we must live in very different areas, because even excluding novels, most books people have lying around are paperbacks and while there are a few hardbacks, they're not used with anything like the regularity of e-readers.
Velocity is relative, but acceleration is not. The earth-dwellers and the astronaut will both agree that the astronaut accelerated and the Earth didn't.

Similarly, rotation rate isn't relative. Acceleration and rotation rate can both be measured against absolute states of no acceleration and no rotation (respectively). This is why our phones have accelerometers and gyroscopes which are entirely internal, but determining velocity, position, and direction require the external references provided by GPS and compass.
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I know several people that are productive with that language without a psychiatrist.

Take for example XSLT. You are saying that all XSLT programmers are mad?
1. Default output is PDF (DVI is a port on my computer :) )

Pdftex (the default Tex engine) supports this. Both Xetex and Luatex do as well, and both of these additionally assume UTF8 as the input encoding and allow you to use True Type and OTF fonts directly.

2. Optional DOC/DOCX output (even if it supports just a subset of the program's capabilities)

igneous4 mentioned Pandoc, which supports RTF as an output format, which is as good as doc/docx for importing text with basic formatting into Word. Pandoc also supports Context. If you want to move the other way, there is docx2tex, which is the best Word to Latex converter.

3. Bibliography management built-in (no separate ancient BibTeX)

I think there's nothing satisfactory here for Latex. You might like to look at Jabref. With Context, the automatic build process makes the invocation of Bibtex invisible. There are many make-like tools for Latex, none are seamless.

4. Command-line searching and importing from Pubmed / Google Scholar / etc. built-in

Again, nothing built-in, but Zotero will do what you want.

5. Bibliography styles can be created/edited by normal humans

Again, nothing adequate here. Try looking at Biblatex. I hand/regex edit .bbl files if I have special bib style needs.

6. Syntax closer to Markdown or reStructuredText, to enhance readability of source file (and maybe shrink the learning curve)

Tex's markup is actually nice. I often wish I could use Texisms when I am editing Markdown, etc. Pandoc allows you to convert between all of these.

7. Program is smaller than 1.6 GB (the size of the default MacTeX distro).

Most of which is fonts. If you have less than voracious font needs, or use TTF/OTF (via. Luatex/Xetex), you can get away with a small fraction of this. Try a more lightweight Texlive installation, and find out what you need.

The hardest part for me has been dealing with bibliography data - No surprise. Bibliography management used to be a relative strength of the Tex family, because the competition was so extremely shoddy. Now it is a weakness; Word 2010 with Endnote is actually very nice here. It's a shame that relatively few Latex hackers appreciate how far behind Tex&co have fallen.

Makes me really appreciate Knuth/Lamport/Patashnik - Knuth is inspirational, his code keeps on rewarding those who read it. Patashnik doesn't get much love from me: he held so many wrong opinions vehemently.
I didn't say the speed of light - I said 90% of the speed of light.

I was refuting the idea of the speed of light as some sort of master clock.

But yes, the actual speed of light always looks like the speed of light.