skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
>The problem is that if something arrives at B before B sees it leave A, then there is a way to arrange for a message to be sent from B to A, and a response back from A to B, such that the response arrives before the message was sent.

No, you're changing your terms in that sentence. If something arrives at B before B sees it leave A, it doesn't imply it hasn't left A. B could send a response that similarly goes faster than B sees, and the whole system could end up with A receiving a response from B before A sees B receive the original message. B still sent the message after A sent theirs.

That's not a paradox, that's just faster communication than sight. Similar to how two people can jog towards each other, and receive a response before they reach the other person, much less reach each other's starting points.

---

As I have in another reply in this main thread, I understand that this is what special relativity says. But I also thought special relativity says it's impossible to travel faster than light, so is anything outside what it claims is possible even within its rule-set? How does special relativity apply to the apparently-contradictory world of quantum behavior? Even Einstein didn't think quantum mechanics was correct and didn't fit with relativity, but we deal with quantum behavior on a daily basis, so it's very definitely real.

edit: perhaps more clearly:

Special relativity claims that anything faster than c goes back in time. (I think/thought) it also claims anything faster than c is impossible. But it's an easy thought-exercise to cause instantaneous transmission without causing a paradox, an easy solution being things happening faster than sound not causing paradoxes. Just because you haven't heard it doesn't imply it hasn't happened yet.
Thanks... I think? I'm a programmer by trade, and perl is but one of many languages I use with regular frequency.
I'm an amateur bladesmith. This guy posts regularly on one of the forums I participate in. He's chronicled his research there in very accessible, but rich detail. Really brilliant stuff (from my layman perspective).
To turn it into something that isn't a lump of steel.
I'm with you - I'm pretty tired of hearing the tired arguments about how developers are the lynchpin in every single thing that's even remotely related to technology.

Programmers have some of the biggest egos I've ever seen out of any profession. We give Wall Street bankers a run for their money when it comes to how self-absorbed and how self-aggrandizing we are.

So very sick and tired of coders belittling the role of everyone else in this society - 95% of coders out there wouldn't even remotely be able to cut it on their own without the umbilical of a stable, sizable employer. There are a lot more skills one needs to survive in their own business than simply the ability to implement software.
Ask HN: How many programming languages need to learn?
So many popular programming languages out there. Would you saying knowing one scripting language and one compiled language is enough? What would your choices be?
I believe that my homepage doesn't properly describe the purpose of this app. Have you ever heard of healcam.com or seshroulette.com? Those are random-chat (chatroulette) apps for patients and stoners respectively. Our goal with chatthrough is to allow people to create their own 'chatroulettes' for any topic or community. Our purpose in creating this was to give different communities an easy way to randomly meet others from the same community who share the same interests.
The new (90-degree) Magsafe connectors are a step back, in my mind, because if you pull in-line with the cable direction, they will not pop out. There is no leverage to torque it out of the socket and the force is taken up by the edge of the socket. I bet that if you pull in just the right direction, you can pull the cable off the connector before the connector comes out (if the laptop is kept stationary).

It looks nice, all shiny and aluminy though...
True but Microsoft does roll their technology fronts every decade or so. MFC, COM+, VB, ATL, etc. Still around but not the forefront strategy. C# is locked in for good though, declarative/markup UIs same thing. With every new technology there is more opportunity to those that enter it early.
Personally I feel that even stuff like this should not be patentable and that all patents should be abolished but I know many here disagree.
Or use a service that has client side encryption built in like Oxygen Cloud (disclaimer I work for them)
The document is pretty easy to navigate if you know which instructions you want to look up.

On page 488, PDEP and PEXT are Parallel Bits Deposit and Parallel Bits Extract. They are essentially scatter/gather instructions for bits.

PDEP uses a mask in the second source operand (the third operand) to
transfer/scatter contiguous low order bits in the first source operand (the second
operand) into the destination (the first operand).

PEXT uses a mask in the second source operand (the third operand) to transfer either contiguous or non-contiguous bits in the first source operand (the second operand) to contiguous low order bit positions in the destination (the first operand).
I've found #3 doesn't actually work all that well. The resource you need to draw on to actually finish things is "executive function", the ability to make yourself do things even if they're boring or unpleasant. This is drained by all jobs - that's why you get paid for having a job.

I find that I still have energy to think about programming when I get home from work - that's why I'm on Hacker News or Proggit. I just don't have energy to actually program. Those are two different skills, and it seems actually programming draws from the same pool of energy as keeping customer's orders straight, not from the pool of talking about programming.
Solving the "not going to bed so late" problem(cause) helps tremendously, not just with waking up (that's not really the problem), but with being energized and not god awful tired during the day (that's the problem(symptom)).
Keep in mind that many C# MVC devs are well accustomed to this. The default MVC project template includes jQuery.
Experiments that show that you can communicate faster than light using quantum entanglement?

The great misunderstanding about quantum entanglement is that while it seems like the two parties at the other ends can get the same information about the entangled system simultaneously, they can't actually push any information of their choosing through the system. Which makes it useless for communication.

Could you please point us at papers/experiments that show sending information through quantum-entangled particles? If that's true that would be a huge thing.
Learn all of them. Yes, even Brainfuck and Piet.
List experiments please. :)
#1 itself is a stretch. A great developer may bring more value to the firm than they are paid, but that does not necessarily mean that they are worth much more when considered outside the firm. Let's take a brilliant kernel hacker as an example. His value is great to a company which specializes in low latency hardware, but may not be so much in a small web startup (in fact, may be less valuable than a mediocre web specialist).

I think that a lot of people confuse "value to the firm" with "intrinsic value"
No. You'll use different languages for different things depending on what you're developing for. And to improve on your programming as a whole, the more languages you explore, the better understanding you'll have about how to do things differently. There's a ton of threads on here already on recommendations but Python is a good starting language to go with.
If we were to discover that light accelerates to c when it is first released, the next step would be to discover that c isn't actually the maximum possible velocity of light at all, but rather the maximum naturally occurring velocity (terminal velocity) and that through some as yet undiscovered means, it actually is possible for light to be artificially accelerated above the value of c.

The terminal velocity analogy makes sense to me. It would be pretty interesting is it turned out to be more than just an analogy.
How would you suggest society repay the guy who invented the material? I can't think of any way except a temporary monopoly on its use.
Some developers spend each day having questionable ideas pushed at them by people who have acquired organizational power through politics rather than technical/strategic knowledge. These developers should either strike out on their own, find new jobs, push back in the organization.
I want to use them for speeding up some critical code for compression/decompresison, the current code is not straightforward.

How to implement the instructions in software is covered in Hacker's delight, and has some additions in the latest revisions (http://www.hackersdelight.org/revisions.pdf).

There's also a chapter in Matters Computational (http://www.jjj.de/fxt/#fxtbook) "CPU instructions often missed" that mentions them:

> Primitives for permutations of bits, see section 1.29.2 on page 81. A bit-gather and a bit-scatter instruction for sub-words of all sizes a power of 2 would allow for arbitrary permutations (see [FXT: bits/bitgather.h] and [FXT: bits/bitseparate.h] for versions working on complete words).
Is it OK to have a blatantly false slogan?
If you're well-versed in C and Javascript, there's not much you can't do.
CafePress files for $80MM IPO
Why can't the sender of a message just turn his system on and off to represent 0s and 1s?
Amway, la reina de la industria multinivel | Blog Oficial de Nestor Riba
I work without shoes. It takes a while for your feet to toughen up to the strain on your arch, but they do.
You may want to check and see if those apps work on WINE. WINE will work on most apps for most uses. :)
Yes and no. It predicts the impossibility of travelling faster than the speed of light and predicts which kinds of impossible you'd get if you did.

The first level of impossible is that you can't accelerate a body past c no matter how hard you try since continued acceleration will just get it arbitrarily close to c (in every reference frame). The second level of impossibility is that if you did find a magical way to do that then you'd wind up with time travel.
First half of the 'Ripple' (Grateful Dead) riff:

3345809086568868568865
Depends on what you define programming language to be. In all seriousness, some dont consider perl or bash or awk programming languages.

For every task, there are multiple programming languages suited for the task. You can get away with knowing one language (ie C) to do everything, but it's a pain for all but the most simple stuff.

Python and perl are nice languages in that they can do most things that you would use a compiled language for, and most things that you would use a higher level scripting language for.
For better or worse, Silverlight is still the best way to play back video in the browser. The performance of the Flash video player is simply appalling and HTML5 video playback has its own problems as well (codec issues, buggy implementations although that improved a lot recently.) If you want nice, smooth playback in any browser, on Windows or OS X, you need to use Silverlight. It's not a coincidence that Netflix uses it.

I have to agree though that it doesn't really make sense to use Silverlight for anything else, although Bing Maps is pretty impressive.
While it's impossible to send information at speeds that exceed c, it should be possible to bend the spacetime (e.g. using worm holes) so that the information would appear to have traveled faster than light.

Wormholes, it should be noted, are "possible" in only a rather remote sense. If you put a wormhole into the equations of general relativity and say "Hey general relativity, is this a valid solution to your equations" it'll say "Uhhh, sure!". But then if you ask it how to arrange masses in order to actually get that solution it'll say "Haha, you can't do that."
It specifically imposes the collection of taxes from consumers on sales by online retailers [..] even if those retailers have no physical presence in the state.

The wording of this implies that Amazon now has to charge sales tax to customers in CT. If so, isn't that a massive gain for the state? Or will Amazon just ignore the law?
I've done this. Started to wake up at 5:15 in the summer. Then, in the winter, I wouldn't wake up until 9, if not 10:30, because in Cleveland you're lucky to get one sunny day every 2 weeks in the winter.
I've had several two MagSafe adapters break at the adapter side rather than the notebook side of the cable in the last 4 years. Apple uses the same sort of strain-relief on that end of the cable too.
Issued patent != patent pending. Patent pending has no legal standing and is non-defensible. It just means something was submitted and may or may not be approved sometime in the future (possibly years from now). Talk to a lawyer, but I'm pretty sure they'll tell you to ignore him. If the troll in question hasn't actually submitted a patent you could sue for damages.

If you were hit with an actual patent claim, the first question you ask is what is the patent # and which specific claims are they referencing. Then go back to any referenced patents and see if the claims are unique to the new patent. Of the unique claims then you can make a case if your product infringes or not.
Bilderberg 2011
Some smaller microcontrollers don't have any RAM, so C doesn't work too well with them.

For example: http://www.nongnu.org/avr-libc/user-manual/FAQ.html#faq_tiny...
Dual-booting. Sometimes you need linux to develop in. And when you don't, you can use OS/X.
Downvoted because there is no reason to start a patents discussion in a materials science article.
Enjoy, if you like conspiracy theories.
Thanks for posting this. One of my favorite clips of Andrew Mason is this one w/ him before Groupon (when it was ThePoint): http://thedreaminaction.com/2010/07/17/my-interview-with-and...

My favorite line from him is around 3:20: "I wasn't trying to be a tech entrepreneur or anything like that, I didn't know about any of that stuff. I was just a developer."
I knew someone would call me on this and chose my words carefully --- "LALR parsers modeled on Yacc" --- but am glad for the response. ANTLR is a pain in the ass to integrate; you can get a totally respectable PEG parser in 2k lines of C. What would you use for LL parsing?
Have you read over the afore mentioned patent?
What about servers?
The Reduceron, a CPU designed for functional programs
No, I suspect it is a deeper fear. C# and Java devs have always commanded higher rates despite the HTML devs producing better looking apps and cheaper rates. With HTML being a first class citizen, I'm afraid this heralds the end of the .NET gravy train.
Anyone tried out RazDog.com? It's basically an entire site as a JavaScript carousel - if anyone can dig up info on the pending patent it should be incredibly easy to shoot down with prior art.

Horrific usability, too.
Steve Jobs: Thank you for disobeying me
I've long been a PEG skeptic. All three of these benefits have issues:

(1) LL parser generators have had zero-or-more and one-or-more operators for a long time (see ANTLR for example [1], as well as the venerable Parse::RecDescent [2]). They're very easy to implement in a recursive-descent parser.

(2) In practice, lexer-free grammars are very difficult to maintain in the presence of things like comments and whitespace rules. You sacrifice the ability to reason about layers of the grammar in isolation by binding the two layers together. Try to write a PEG grammar for, say, Java and you'll see what I mean; you end up wishing you had a sort of preprocessor that could get rid of comments and such in advance, which is precisely what a lexer is.

(3) PEGs are unambiguous in the sense that the system specifies how to resolve ambiguities (by taking the first option). But backtracking LL grammars and LR grammars provide this too. LL parser generators typically accept the first rule that matches: what could be simpler? LR parser generators are a little more clever and resolve shift/reduce conflicts in favor of the shift, which is a bit more magical but basically means that productions act "greedy". The key is that grammars always specify how to resolve ambiguities in some way, and this is really no different from what PEGs provide.

[1]: http://www.antlr.org/wiki/display/ANTLR3/ANTLR+Cheat+Sheet
[2]: http://search.cpan.org/~dconway/Parse-RecDescent-1.965001/li...
If I had to pick the most bang for the buck, it would be Python + C. One scripting language, one compiled, both work well together. You can easily cover shell scripting, 3D graphics, computationally-intensive algorithms, webapps, GUIs, network programming, and most other problem domains with it. The only weak area of this combination might be compilers, and it's still not bad for that...

A lot of people will tell you "all of them", and it's true that every language you learn will (probably) teach you something about computing. But that ignores opportunity cost: learning your tenth programming language will probably teach you less than learning a new problem domain and a new set of algorithms.
Don't forget, WPF held up LongHorn and they had to reboot their development. By taking care of the windowing framework deep within Windows (presumably the underlying code is unmanaged) and removing the dependency on .NET, Windows division is ensuring that they will never suffer the humiliation of delays because of DevDiv.
It's amazing how far the logos have evolved. I used to work with the original doodler of the logos and I always thought his work was great, but the dedicated doodle team lead by Ryan and under Marissa's wing have made them 10x better. Designing logos that engage the audience is brilliant. Kudos to the new doodle team.
Do you believe that an international banking conspiracy is deceiving us about Italy's debt standing at over 120% of GDP?

Do you believe that Italy's debt is that high because Italy overleveraged itself on mortgage-backed securities?

Did you read the other comments on this thread, where Italy's central bank director complained about Italian wage stagnation and its two-tiered employment system, and its poor tax revenues?
How do you host an app on DotCloud? Is that functionality built in or did you arrange it with them?
Reminds me of this from a while back:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2131550
The problem is that as it stands now, someone like Intellectual Ventures will have a patent like "cooling metal with water", and either force him to sell for a few hundred bucks or just interfere with anyone else who actually tries to do this. It'll be 20 years before anyone figures out a way through all of the legal mess and starts production. Even then, it will cost more, not less thanks to this.
I don't know anything about this, so yes I'm naive. But when I read this, I think about the Wright brothers

Perhaps if you did know something about this you'd understand why this is an annoying sort of comment. Nothing personal, this kind of thing happens a lot.

General public: Hey scientists, is it possible to communicate faster than the speed of light?

Scientists: Gee, I dunno, let's go figure that out.

[many years of hard work]

Scientists: Whew, well we've gone away and done a lot of hard work and it turns out that it's impossible. Here's a twenty-page pamphlet with a few equations which summarises the most relevant points.

General public: Hummmph, well, I haven't bothered to read that pamphlet, but I can't help but think you're being closed-minded and that in fact it might be possible but you're just too dumb to figure it out. [goes back to watching Star Trek]

The most annoying thing about this line of argument is that it's impossible for the voice of conventional wisdom to actually win it. We can't prove that faster than light travel is impossible, nor that there isn't a dragon hiding in your garage (carefully hiding from every observation), nor the nonexistence of ghosts or body thetans.

If you want to start an argument with Every Physicist In The World about whether it's possible to send information faster than the speed of light, it's nice if you familiarize yourself with the arguments as to why it's impossible first. I think you might agree that it's less like the Wright Brothers and more like King Cnut.
Related to parent: It seems KDE's is a bit limited. Chrome does not get tiled. And it seems to be impossible to say make a 2x2 grid of tiles. Anyone know how to fix/do these?
I don't care enough about this stuff to have strong opinions on (1) and (3). Until this year, I wrote my parsers (I end up doing 2-3 a year) in Lex/Yacc.

But (2) is a red herring. Nothing about PEG tools force you to do all your tokenizing in the grammar. If you want to strip /++/ comments out, you can use exactly the same code you'd have used in your handrolled recursive descent parser to do that, and then parse the real stuff in PEG.

But that aside, we use a PEG grammar for Javascript, which has (I assume) all the annoying comment syntax you're referring to, and it doesn't seem like a big deal.
KDE, a good choice.

I see they've utilized KWin decorators to display green or red windows, nice idea.
He can't. It doesn't work that way. I'm not sure what you think the reciever would be able to detect if the sender did that, but there's no detectable signal.

If you provide a more detailed picture of what you're envisaging then I can probably explain exactly what's wrong with it, but please read and understand

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bell_inequality

and

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bloch_sphere

along with any subordinate articles you'd need in order to understand these two, before proceeding.
Triunfo del Amor Capitulo 165
While Maximilliano on Triunfo del Amor Capitulo 165 narrated are enjoying proximity to Maria. Even at Triunfo del Amor Capitulo 165 we will see a fairly intimate scene where Max's lips crushed Maria with passionate romance. Prior to this kiss scene, before Max to surprise Maria with adorned the room with red roses.
I'm a little hesitant about trying new hosting providers, because I've been burned in the past.

Generally ,it's pick 2: cheap, reliable, good support

How long have you been using Hetzner, have you had any down time, and if you did, how was the support?
When is the time then? This is a very good specific example.
I don't understand the claim that adding new data force you to recompute everything. What requires re-computation will depend on the algorithm, but for most simples cases I can think of, at least the map part will not require computation if you record its result. I believe that's how couchdb view work, for example
The smart thing to do is build it yourself, learning whatever you need to learn as you go along. You don't need anyone's permission or expertise to get something up and working. At the very least, try to build just enough of your idea to get the right people (developers, designers) excited.
I think this is where the discussion comes in about whether or not to abolish software patents. It is disgusting that patent trolls go after OpenSource.
WPF exp wanted in Microsoft's latest WinDev job ad (6/9/11)
I'm sure you'd like to think so, but unless you have a blast furnace in your garage you're not as cool as this guy, sorry.
I actually think it would help in teaching about the key combinations. I think I will use this story next time I do an intro to the Mac class.