skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I'm with you on this one. If antimatter was just backwards everything then there'd be large conspicuous clusters of the stuff all over the cosmos because ordinary matter would be repelling it instead of annihilating it.

While there does seem to be a lot of dark matter out there, if it were actually antimatter and had opposite gravity to normal matter one would imagine there would be a huge discrepancy between cosmologists' models and observation. The high-end supercomputer simulations and regressions cosmologists employ have good predictive power, even though we lack a full explanation for the phenomena we can observe. Cosmologists deal with such far-out concepts to begin with (by definition) that it's not as if they'd be averse to a concept like antigravity if it had predictive utility.

toys idly with desk magnets while thinking about it

Then again, given that photons are massless maybe there could be such a thing as a gravitational dipole...

/timecube
Then you should say you are allowing any question (or don't say anything at all).

By addressing it in the FAQ and explicitly saying you allow it, you are implying that you condone academic dishonesty.

edited for clarity
Not sure if that conclusion is right. It probably wouldn't result in an explosion and the energy output would probably be in the form of light. Regardless, I'm going with Stephen Hawking on this one: "If you ever meet your anti-self, don't shake hands!"
I got the impression Skakes was asking for posting scripts.
"I have a Ruby script that converts X in to Y"
"I have a Python script that lets people reset Active Directory and LDAP passwords"
Skakes can then ask for however much money for those scripts.
What I am missing in this discussion: how do we develop a system that is not spying that way? Let's propose and find ideas.
Building the Send Button
So if it "reacts the opposite" to gravity, what does that mean?

I would see no reason for Newton's law to not hold true around our scale, so repelling means F=Gm1m2/r^2 which only makes sense if one of the masses is actually negative. Just the thought of it looks like fun.
MacDefender malware targeting Mac users
A good bet might be a Swiss hosted e-mail service such as Neomailbox which is what I use. Lavabit is another one which might be what you're looking for.
I was talking about sizeof.
And by trying to get the code to compile I'm yet again reminded why I don't like Scala:

The compiler is slow as fuck to get started and the syntax of the language is such that whitespace appears to matter. No thanks.

But I wish y'all good luck anyway.
Exactly, which is why I wrote this post. There is a lot of cool stuff happening here, and a lot of money floating around, but nothing comes easy.
A Built-In Eye Tracker Makes A Projection Screen You Can't Look Away From
Bogus MacDefender malware campaign targets Macs using Google Images
While the entire post is both cathartic and poignant, one line stood out for me because of its brutal honesty.

Am I jealous of other companies' success? I would be lying if I said no.

Thank you for saying this. I've always wanted to, but feared I'd be called out for it. In public. In fact, I think it's part of what keeps the fire burning inside - that constant hunger to try and figure out why some folks are plain better / more successful at the game, and then trying and internalizing / applying those lessons.

And it can get frustrating when you can't replicate / emulate what others have achieved seemingly easily. As a corollary, this is probably why Jack Dorsey and Dennis Crowley are enigmas unto themselves.

An important aside: Chad, I'm someone who has tracked (and may I add envied) the Notifo story. And I admire the work you've done, from fanout.js, to snagging Paul for a co-founder, to HN for Android, to PicAFight, to GramFrame, to Vorepad........I've found myself in awe of how prolific you've been (and you don't even know me).

It's possible you've been doing one thing too many (because you love APIs and can't keep from tinkering with them). What I'm convinced of, is that you have the talent, the work ethic and an incredible co-founder. All the best, I'm hoping I have to transition back into pure envy real soon.
The problem with these types of sites is that it favors the buyer. A quick browse of the questions posted shows one awarding a whopping $10 for some status screen thing. Sorry, but $10 barely compensates me for the time involved to even consider the question. I'm guessing that this is like any other Q&A site where the answers are effectively on spec. So you can't claim the question as being one you and you alone will solve... you have to compete with many others for a chance at being the one who gets the $10.

No thank you. Might as well have branded this ProgrammersAreCheap.com.
How I Met Your Mother Season 6 Episode 22
Boring things that keep production apps reliable.
Over the years, Freshbooks has grown from a monolithic PHP application to a complex ecosystem of numerous Pylons and Sparkplug apps that support the main app our users interact with daily. As the FreshBooks application, “FreshApp”, matures, so do our development practices. Here’s a small list of some of the simple, yet, crucial things we developers do to make FreshBooks more manageable and reliable.
My take away was essentially: "if you try, you can write non-portable haskell code". I don't really get the significance.
ANTLR is one of the parser generators that makes Yacc obsolete. So you're doing something right. (I personally think ANTLR is too complicated.)

I've tried working with other parser generators, but I always keep coming back to hand-coded recursive descent. The biggest advantage IMO is that they're both easier to debug, and can be made to report errors in input much better than parser-generator generated ones.
Hmmmm. I feel I may be proving the OPs entire point rather too well with this line of enquiry. I don't think I've ever trolled myself before. How embarrassing.

This kind of thing is trickier in places like HN though, because a statement is only showing off to people who already have the knowledge. There are millions(?) of people reading here, so statistically most of them probably wont know some obscure piece of knowledge about the problems of the key hashing function under random access in numerical PHP arrays. It may be showing off to the couple of people actively engaged in the debate, but to everyone else its educational.

That's most of the reason I come here, to be honest. Crumbs of insight casually discarded during the debates of much cleverer people.
I'm not Zach that you replied to. Just in case this was mistakenly posted, and Zach doesn't read this, I don't want it to get missed.
I like the idea, I'm unsure of the pricing strategy.
"How much do I get paid?
code4cheap.com keeps 30% of the question's price. For example, with a $10 question, the best answer will receive $7."
What if you changed that around, with something like a question posting fee. When I go to the site as a coder, I want to get the $50 I see, not $35 after you take your cut. It's inflating the payment that I would actually get, assuming I read that right. Presumably you could adjust the posted price to be $35 to do X, not sure how receptive your audience would be to that.
So who is bootstrapping the first startup right now to make hoverboards?
That reduces the number of string appends, sure. But it is well known (see either "The Good Parts" or "High Performance Javascript" that appending strings is quadratic in JavaScript, and that the best way to assemble a large, multipart string is arrayOfStrings.join('');

* And by quadratic I mean "copies the whole string every time" such that an append loop is N^2 while a push+join is linear.
>I believe HN's plain design is actually an intended feature, not a bug.

I agree. Though I've read several comments that suggest adding to it, and in general, I think doing that would make it less useful.
What specifically ties your system to "code"? It seems anyone can ask any question. Aside from the monetary award, how are you differrent from Yahoo answers?
Our Google Success E-Book: Discount Alert
I had an SSD fail after about a year. It completely ceased being a functioning device. I could not boot my computer at all with the device attached.
blhack: I can't reply to your comment so am posting here. It would work like this:

1. You need to have a solution repository.

2. Developers post solutions there. For instance, find numbers less than n where the sum of divisors is greater than number but none of the divisor subset equals the number. And the solution is tagged with the implementation language.

3. Before posting a question, someone can look into the repository and get the solution from there if already there.

What problem it solves:

1. Developers can post their solutions without someone asking for it.

2. Solution seekers will have a smaller turnaround time if the solution is already there in the repository.
Hey Tim, good idea. We did something along the same lines at Spottiness.com. Yours is more specific to instant feelings while ours is more about anonymous communication. Good job and good luck!
I think the nobody/somebody line is oftentimes: "were you a part of a team/company that made money for investors". If you are, it seems like funding often falls like rain-- people think whatever alchemy that company had might have rubbed off on you.

Brilliant post, Chad. Many thanks.
Should the last sentence be, "You were very kind to unkill this."?
Startup Workaway: 20 founders. 10 days. 1 beach house in Costa Rica. Apply now
I'm pretty sure Go at least aspires to "systems programming" in the classic sense, since its designers include some Unix and Plan9 veterans. Whether they'll succeed or not is another question, but they do seem to have a genuine C replacement in mind.
All the three problem areas you identified are reasons why I would not move to SF until we are ready. If I see that the idea has traction, and revenue, and I didnt care about finding investors and talent, then I would think of moving to SF. Today, what we have built and is currently building, is still a pet project. We are keenly watching where it goes from here, but simply cannot move mid-sentence to the other coast.

Good luck though. You are much better positioned due to the YC framework and which should open doors far more easily than to a couple of outliers like us.
Pakistan Killed Osama, The US Just Swooped In At The End
Somebody on here built http://impossibility.org/, which I've found to be fantastic. You give it a word, it sticks other words around it. I found about half a dozen better names in just a few seconds worth of work.
Yes, but now you're getting deeper into requirements for context-sensitive grammar; go far enough, and you might as well go all Van Wijngaarden. A context-free parse is free to create an AST like (sizeof (parens (ident "x"))) for one, and (sizeof (ident "x")) for the other, and disambiguate based on the symbol table lookup of "x" later.
I think this response sold me on learning Racket first (though it was definitely a cumulative effect of hearing people's good experiences).

I don't have a project in mind for either dialect. Basically, I want to learn lisp because I've heard learning lisp has certain mind expanding properties. This feature sounds like the mind expanding-est of all. And whatever skills I learn with Racket will probably be easily translated to Clojure, so it's not like I'd have wasted my time if I ended up working in a Clojure shop or on Clojure project.

Thanks to everyone who responded.
I didn't downvote you, but if I had to guess, it'd be because people perceived "at least you have a glimmer of hope" as downplaying or minimizing their struggle.
It's only a game-changer if one of the governments recently learned something new about the other. This idea that some in Pakistan's services support OBL and are not so helpful to the US isn't exactly news.

The official US statement went something like "we got a tip back in August".

Which means the important question is how long did each government know OBL was in there? Was Pakistan holding him for the right moment? At what level did they know they were holding him? When did the US learn about it with any confidence? My guess is that the US wouldn't be willing to wait on the info indefinitely given the risk that OBL would give them the slip again.
Some people on this discussion mention that they simply run their own mail servers -- that's dandy for incoming mail. But how do you guys make sure your outgoing mail is not blacklisted/ignored/considered spam? That's been a non trivial problem for me in the past when I was running a mail server (and spam was not such a big problem back then).

Also, is there any mail server you can run/recommend that has gmail-speedy searches and tagging? (And maildir support would be a super-extra-plus?)
I've been pretty lucky with my uni, for the most part the profs and students are all very level-headed and don't care about gender much. There are maybe two somewhat-douchey but bearable guys and one prof who's always saying weird, stereotypical things about women during lectures, but mostly the guys just want to talk shop. Between 2nd and 3rd year I switched from wearing mostly jeans & sneakers to wearing mostly skirts & dresses & pretty flats and the way I was treated didn't change noticeably. The most atmospheric douchiness was during 1st year. For several months there was a man sexually assaulting dozens of women on and around campus, and I remember some idiots who kept talking about how it was sooo sexist that female students were being offered free rape whistles and self-defense classes as a result, and how the guy just had needs so you couldn't blame him, and how rape was just so much fun. It wasn't straight-up harassment, I guess, because they weren't talking to me, but being alone with them late at night in the computer labs made me feel very unsafe. It was a frequent and rather unavoidable occurrence and I can see how a woman considering CS as one of multiple possible majors would have been seriously put off. I was pretty put off and CS was the only major I'd even considered since I was 13; that year I worried a lot about what I would do if the guys in the working world were like that, too. (Never saw them in the second year labs, guess they spent too much time chatting and not enough time doing their homework, haha.)

Even with a decent school environment it's nice to have some female profs around as role models. I have male role models too, of course, but it's so awesome to get to see hard proof that hey, that awesome woman I want to grow up to be is not only attainable but standing RIGHT THERE in front of the classroom. Two in particular seem so fulfilled, well-rounded, and passionate about their fields that it makes me know that I made the right choice. I think if all my lecturers were male, or if the few female profs I had were the grudgingly-teach-from-the-textbook variety (of which I've had in both genders), I would feel a lot less secure. I could honestly see my alternate-universe self switching over to math or econ if the comp sci department at alternate-universe uni was as bad as the school you're talking about. Comp sci is great but it's not worth crushing your soul for, especially when there are so many other fields these days where good programming skills can give you an edge.
My baby, the finite state machine (2006)
"facefook" - I'm gonna remember that one.
This looks very interesting. Quick question, as far as I can tell, one of the iOS devices has to function as the database server. Is this reliable? If so, that is extremely exciting...
Unpaid internships can work out quite well for everyone involved, but not everyone can afford to work for no pay.
Mike Tyson's iPhone app sent a push notification of Osama Bin Laden's death
It is true, anyone could potentially ask anything. I'm simply trying to target the code market.

It is not different aside from the monetary award yet.
This discussion from about a year ago might be relevant: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1382566

(Not endorsing or dis-endorsing anything in it, but a possible point of reference to see if anything's changed.)
Well, that took me only 5 minutes, a refreshing experience after getting a webstack up on OSX consisting of memcache, oursql, CherryPy and MySQL for the first time ever ;-)

$ cd /usr/ports/lang/scala
$ sudo make install clean
$ rehash
[fire up an editor and paste the code into test.scala]
$ scalac test.scala
$ scala ApplyTo
scala-dev@gushhq.com
$ cat test.scala
object ApplyTo extends Application {
val k = "gWU`UAXYjT[ig\\\\eBWca"
println(k map {c => (c - k.size).toChar toLower})
}

Hmmm, do I get the job? ;-) Oh wait, I see I maybe should have saved the source code in ApplyTo.scala instead of test.scala.

I really should look into Scala some day Real Soon Now, interesting that it runs on the JVM, I was messing around a bit with Clojure, which also runs on the JVM. I haven't worked with Java recently, but I used it some years ago and I remember the interesting FileStreamBufferedReader class hierarchy which you needed to read a simple file. My personal blog is mentioned in my profile.
I feel like MySpace never quite penetrated the mainstream the way twitter has. It was always something people were largely aware of, but outside of the segments it did really well in, people rarely engaged with it.

Twitter seems to be a bit different in that regard.
Well that's definitely worth a look.
Thank you for this.

I was doing all that "one thing too many" stuff during the "crap, what are we gonna do now" phase where we weren't super productive and just played around with prototyping some ideas.

Not shipping anything made me feel terrible, so we spent some time making random side-projects to stay sharp. All of them were good learning exercises, too. I made sure that each project had some part of it that I didn't know how to do, so it would force me to learn new things.
I believe they are aiming to be the framework for other apps to build upon; I think that was their original statement--Singly I think would be their user friendly tool on top of the Locker they are working on.
My point was that you can do this, not that it would be profitable.
> browsing the sample code (maybe with annotations?)

At present, even from the home page, source code is only 2 or 3 clicks.

Who would write those annotations? Currently there are 1100 programs, but they change as new programs are contributed and others removed.

Who would do the work to create a series of blog posts discussing the development of each and every program?

http://adventuresinmercury.blogspot.com/2011/04/shootout-spe...
splice() might be able to help out, though how much depends on whether the copying really needs to overlap or not. There's some benchmarks at:

http://jsperf.com/backreference-copy

I couldn't actually get Safari to complete; FF 4.01 is fastest by a long way.
Ohloh has a new open source project comparison tool
Ohloh now has a new project comparison tool that shows comparison based on interesting code/repository stats. Try it out at https://www.ohloh.net/p/compare and let us know your comments/feedback.
> I think there are different degrees of Nobodiness and Somebodiness

Indeed. You now at least you know a Somebody or two. Many folks don't get that far.

A misquote from the article (my perspective):

> Am I jealous of other companies' success? I would be lying if I said no. I am slightly jealous when I wake up and read another story about some company getting into YC when I didn't even get an interview.

I'd also be lying if I wasn't genuinely happy for every company that gets any sort of success, because I'm now getting a taste for how hard it really is.
My feeling was that as a questioner, I don't want to pay $50 to have the number "35" show up. I think people will get comfortable with the pricing scheme over time.
Interior glass doors
Our glass interior doors are designed with triple pane glass and solid wood construction for elegance and durability.
I'm not sure what sophomore-level was for you, but the next step or refresher would be Quantum Mechanics. Griffiths is the standard introductory text, though I'm partial to Liboff. You'll want to work through a higher level textbook of QM after that; Sakurai and Shankar are two popular ones.

From there, you'd have a good basis to study some particle physics. The two introductory texts are either Halzen and Marten or Griffiths (same author, different book). Either of those will give you a pretty solid understanding of particle physics, including QED. You could supplement that by studying some Quantum Field Theory (QFT). At the moment, Peskin and Schroeder is the classic text.

Depending on your interests, you could continue in QFT with P&S. That text probably covers at least 3 terms of graduate QFT. You could also study GR. Carroll is the most popular text at the moment, but I like Schutz and others swear by Wald. If you're interested in experimental stuff, you could learn about detectors using the text by Green.
This seems like it could be a really powerful idea, especially if the solutions were ranked well on Google. As a wannabe hacker, I often find myself searching for solutions to particular problems I need to solve within a larger JavaScript or Python or whatever script only to find some large project that I have to spend tons of time dissecting just to see how that one thing works. If I could spend $5 to save that time, I surely would. And, sometimes seeing the solution in another language could even help find an answer in the language I'm trying to use. Of course, depending on the language, there may be an active community on the web or IRC that can answer my question in real-time.
My big concern is always implementing a solution and not seeing an otherwise obvious problem. Hence the question. =)

As a PHP guy, setting up optional params are easy, so I like the solution.
Ptolemy saw the earth go around the sun every day his whole life. So what? This guy didn't "expose" anything because he didn't know what was going on himself. All he heard was helicopters and an explosion. All the rest -- starting with the fact that one of the helicopters was not Pakistani -- was just gossip he heard nth-hand from eyewitnesses. If Obama had not held a press conference, he still wouldn't know what happened. What's historic about that? It's just the standard excitement and local gossip when something dramatic happens. If he had credibly detailed a piece of information that wasn't officially released, or if he had reported something interesting before it was openly announced by the U.S. government, that would have meant something.
Maybe someone just spent a week writing an ecommerce integration and would like to sell that script for $250 a pop to as many people as would like to buy it.
email delivery fails !!! ?
I don't get it - why are there only four questions and no answers? What happens to my code after I've posted it? Can it be used by the site (as in re-sold)?
Nicely done. I especially liked "We let them [the investors] dictate our path with their negative signaling instead of listening to our guts."

This trap is something that is so easy to fall into and so painful to pull out of. My first startup had a 'star' VC fronting it, he loved the concept but didn't really understand that his vision was often in conflict with the founder's vision. That really hurt as the company was ripped too and fro trying to achieve a couple of really orthogonal goals.

Tom Lyon once told me that really it takes three startups before you 'get it'. One which is a somplete disaster, it helps you see what you did wrong and what can go wrong. One which isn't a complete disaster but exits sideways, which is to say you work at it day and night but when it exits you find yourself exactly where you were when you started. Then the third one where you know what to expect, you have a solid idea of what not to do and you keep laser focused on getting in, getting done, and getting it shipped.

It is very hard though, always.
That's basically http://codecanyon.net/

I have great respect for what the Envato guys have built, and think it would be extremely difficult to compete with them head-to-head.