skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
With Java, it's surprisingly easy to load new classes and even dynamically generated classes via a class loader. Dynamically linking with C is very easy in Windows too, which is more prevalent than Unix.

I should have qualified that my statement was referring to statically typed functional languages, though; the strategies required for runtime parametric polymorphism are quite different to those required for just compile-time parametric polymorphism, and statically typed functional languages generally encourage flow of types throughout the forest of functional expressions, by which I mean that compile-time parametric polymorphism is very much sufficient before dynamic linking and polymorphic - runtime polymorphic - APIs have been considered.

I have tried neither xmonad nor yi, though yi looks interesting. The choice of testimonials for xmonad on their site is amusing, though - "I have to say, the greatest thing about xmonad thus far is its insane stability... I have zero issues with xmonad". Stability is the absence of certain kinds of defects, not a positive feature - I for one have never suffered from e.g. lack of stability in the Windows window manager.
And why do electrons not want to share orbitals?
Obviously the structure of an atom is affected by electrons not wanting to share orbitals. But isn't it electromagnetism that keeps atoms from passing through each other? And isn't it also electromagnetism that causes groups of atoms to clump in molecules, then the molecules to stick together in a crystalline pattern? (Update, the answers respectively seem to be "not entirely" and "yes".)
It might be awesome... at whatever it does.

But I have a real UX concern when I land at a site and... WTF: I can't even tell what it is about, what services it offers, is there any possibility that I might be a target audience?

Attractive landing page, but totally flumoxing.

[edit]PS: Okay, now I give in and click on "overview". That page has the phrase "a single place to collaborate..." A simple tag line like that is needed on masthead.

Plus [it's flash-based, is it?], I'd like to highlight copy and copy the phrase "a single place to collaborate". Well, that's not going to happen: text not in html :( ::something to think about UI-wise::
http://build.chromium.org/buildbot/snapshots/chromium-rel-ma...

That's a link to nightly Chromium mac builds. I've been using that for the past several months.
i'm trying this out now: http://gr.aiderss.com/
I can see it becoming useful
still a really cool logo.
Martin Gardner was a huge influence on me too - it's largely due to that early influence that I have a PhD in Pure Math, and now go out to schools to show how and why math can be fun, exciting, engaging, confusing and rewarding, all in equal measure.

I hope I'm carrying on his tradition. I still dip into his books for inspiration, and aspire to write as clearly, elegantly and above all effectively as he did and still does.

Happy Birthday ,Martin Gardner!
Given that Gemcutter is a relatively new service, my first guess would be the graph is skewed if they switched to gemcutter before other popular Ruby projects (more so if FXRuby is a dependancy for another popular gem which is hosted elsewhere)

Then again, their download page http://www.fxruby.org/downloads.html only mentions RubyForge..
Well in my opinion the graduates from the so-called elite Universities with a science or tech. degree are not at all supposed to found a startup at all. I mean they are trained in the finest art of making things possible by using science and engineering not giving a sales speech or making a marketing strategy. These are the things to be done by people from management schools.

Also if a engineering graduate is willing to start a start up he would first like to go to a management grad school. Like the example the author gave for the IIT students, they are not at all trained in even the nominal management skills. The sole purpose of an IIT is to make a promising engineer. The indian government set up these IITs to give india some quality engineers. Not start up people.If he had to look at the start up scene in India he should have taken a look at IIM grads. I dont exactly know about others but the best IIM, the IIM - Ahmedabad is in my city and I know definitely that there graduates are more inclined towards making a start up than getting a job. Also IIM also provides funding to make it much easier for them.
Can't find the post right now, but there was an issue to where rubyforge syncs were counting towards the download graph. This has been fixed but the data wasn't changed, so yeah, this graph is skewed.
YHBT YHL HAND.
Because that's just the way they are :-)

More precisely, no two electrons can ever occupy exactly the same quantum mechanical state. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pauli_exclusion
Handling User Error with Care
Hi,

As others have said, this is a web site for people interested in all sorts of things, but mostly on practical computing, making things, breaking things to make them better, and generally figuring out how to do stuff, and make it better.

Among other things that are discouraged are "Wow" and "Me Too!" sorts of comments. They don't add value. If you like something, up-vote it with the arrows.

If you want to gain karma, make useful comments that add value for the audience that's here, and submit items that people here will find interesting.

But first, you'll need to know what people like, so you'll need to hang around a bit and see what gets up-voted, and what gets down-voted. Read around - there's lots of cool stuff.
Because they are fermions, not bosons. Which has to do with their spin, not their charge.

See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pauli_exclusion_principle for more.
Why Adobe likes open source?
Practicing is also vitally important for timing your talk. Your first attempt will ususally take longer than desired/required, but you should be running shorter than the target on follow-up attempts. If not, you need to cut down the content.
If that were true, why doesn't all matter stick together in one giant gob?

If the structure of an atom is "obviously" affected by the exclusion principle, why would the structure of materials, made up of atoms, make any difference?

In fact, both Coulombic repulsion and the exclusion principle are involved in the hardness of materials. I believe the Coulombic fraction is larger than 50%, but the other part is certainly non-negligible.
The Pauli exclusion principle pertains, does it not, to electrons (etc) not wanting to duplicate QM states, but is it not still the case that one atom not passing through another atom is becuase of the repulsion of the orbitals?

Electrons in a single atom is a different question from electrons in different atoms.

Of course, I am probably wrong, and look forward to your pointers to further reading to help me understand more.
Excellent reporting and scholarship.
I don't know for sure, and speak only for myself, but I suspect you've been down-modded for that because it's just a collection of toys with no demonstration of scientific principles or cool ideas.

It's just fairly common stuff, although they're nice toys.
Thanks for posting; I've also been withdrawing from coffee, primarily because my tolerance has increased to the point where I no longer feel I'm getting significant beneficial effects from it. This article has me thinking about what the negative effects I may not have noticed are, and if I should extend my "tolerance-reset" period into something more permanent.
How To Escape The Internet Jungle In 5 Small Steps
I wonder what this guy thinks about Scala, which was named after this concept of a Scala(ble) language...
Nightly builds of Chromium have had that implemented for about a month now.
http://www.techcrunchit.com/2009/05/05/rest-in-peace-rss/

btw it has gained more importance after pubsubhubbub and rsscloud.
But that does not negate the competitive principle that he articulated. Many, perhaps most of the products we buy involve a chain (or tree) of producers, all keeping each other honest by the competitive principle. In the making and selling of the pencil, one company mines the graphite, another shapes it into the final form, a third makes it immediately available to the public, and there may be many in between. Similarly for the other components of the pencil - the wood, the rubber, the metal, the paint. It's a vast cooperative effort, and most of it is not directly connected to the final customer.
Not just electrons. Take a look at Fermions: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fermion
Most detailed explanation in the blogosphere is "Why Stuff is Hard" by Jim Pivarski,

http://cornellmath.wordpress.com/2007/08/08/why-stuff-is-har...

http://cornellmath.wordpress.com/2007/08/11/why-everything-i...

http://cornellmath.wordpress.com/2007/08/11/why-everything-i...

Complete argument is the Dyson, Lieb and Thirring's proof of stability of matter, http://projecteuclid.org/euclid.bams/1183555452 .
Play with Lush:

http://lush.sourceforge.net/

It has all the DSP goodness you crave in a simple interactive shell.
This surprised me:

"Take TCP for example. The TCP protocol is specified in a series of
documents. If you make a formally correct implementation of the base TCP RFC
you won't even make connections. Much of the flow control behaviour, the
queueing and the detail is learned only by being directly part of the
TCP implementing community. You can read all the scientific papers you
like, it will not make you a good TCP implementor."

- Alan Cox
Ask PG: Why not use chatbot interviews as part of application process?
Candidates would be required to submit a chatbot for each founder.

YC could have a chatbot of its own to interview the founder chatbots. What the YC chatbot will/may say would be kept a secret.
Hulu’s Obituary
I'm considering quitting coffee for another reason; my wife tells me it gives me a wicked case of bad breath.

Oh well, it was fun while it lasted.
I love the tracking of productivity idea. It's interesting, I also frequently use coffee to 'concentrate', but a little differently than you. I'll have tea or sometimes coffee in the morning (one cup) and if I'm not sleep deprived, that's it. If I need to work or focus on a task in the afternoon, I'll get a large coffee, clear my area of all distractions, get comfortable and try and crank through for as long as it takes. This is sort of a different way than you use coffee.

For a while I went off coffee completely because it was causing mood swings and serious blood sugar problems. Green tea changed my life, and I frequently felt it was almost all upside as compared to coffee. I wonder why I got off that bandwagon?
FWIW: I use caffeine to help cope with allergies and as an albuterol substitute because I am allergic to albuterol. I have noticed that some folks who consume a lot of coffee make remarks that sound a lot like they are self-medicating for some issue without consciously realizing it. This might be why the author of the blog keeps coming up with some excuse to go back on coffee. I find that addressing underlying health issues has cut my consumption of caffeine without me having to do anything to intentionally try to curtail caffeine specifically.
This is a press release masquerading as an article. Why is it here?
Caffeine is a mixed blessing. It is a stimulant, which helps you wake up. But your body compensates for the expectation of stimulation. Which means that a coffee drinker after coffee is about like a non-coffee drinker without coffee.
I really don't like it. I don't want to see which of my friends' status updates are "hot". That's not how we use the site. Maybe my friends are attending some event, and I miss it because nobody commented on the status or "liked" it.

Social filtering is great for interacting with strangers on the internet. Strangers are weird and noisy. However I don't want to filter my real friends.
People will talk about all sorts of things. If they talk about it but don't do it, then that's evidence that the talk is impotent, and that's even more reason not to regulate.

The relative lack of competition introduces many problems aside from net nonneutrality (which is currently a "vaporware" problem, like Duke Nukem Forever). One problem is relatively high prices and relatively low bandwidth compared to what appears technically feasible (judging by other countries). Net neutrality regulation will not kill this bird, but one stone stands a good chance of killing many birds: de-regulating the cable providers, ending their local monopolies. Provision of cable television is one of the many examples of a non-free market in the US. Other examples are medicine and banking, and in America today our major crises are in... yup, medicine and banking. Computer manufacturing is highly deregulated, as I think is clothing and (for the most part) food (though there are some subsidies and protection for certain items, like sugar and corn). There isn't, so far as I know, a computer crisis, or a clothing crisis, or a famine. The main computer crisis I remember was the Y2K bug, and that is famous for being a non-spectacular crisis, if it was a real crisis at all.
It's visualisations like that that help me keep otherwise apparently random facts straight.

Are there any similarly nice visualisations for biological features? How do bacteria, viruses, cells, DNA, mitochondria, molecules, proteins, fatty and amino acids compare in size? (Without resorting to rote SI unit memorisation, I mean)
Candidates would be required to submit a chatbot for each founder.

This would greatly disadvantage those of us who are smarter than the current limits of AI.
Windows 7 Got Touchy On Japanese TV Show
Windows 7 Got Touchy On Japanese TV Show - see video
It would only be part of the application. And it would make applying more fun.
This is a short list of the computers and their makers who have broken from the herd:

Microsoft XBox

Sony Playstation

Nintendo Wii

Apple iPhone

Palm Pre

RIM Blackberry

HP digital cameras
For all you comp-vision folks: provide a service where you can do an image-matching search on a proposed logo, and get a list of similar logos.
But if one atom "tries" to pass through another, the electrons from both atoms will be spatially very close to each other, and consequently, they will be occupying very similar states. Coulombic repulsion certainly also plays a role, but it's not the only force at work here. I don't know the relative magnitudes for single atoms bumping into each other, but for bulk material, I believe it's about 40% exclusion, 60% coulomb.

Why would electrons in different atoms interact differently than electrons in the same atom? They don't, as far as I know. Furthermore, if electrons from different atoms only interacted Coulombically (repelling each other), molecules and solids would never get formed.

These are difficult questions, not addressed in the clear-cut cases often presented in introductory QM textbooks. I can't think of any must-read references right now, but if you're interested in this kind of thing I know of two books on molecular quantum mechanics; one by McWeeney (methods of molecular quantum mechanics) and one by Atkins (molecular quantum mechanics), which I haven't read myself, but I hear it's good. I don't know of any free online sources for this kind of stuff, but it's probably out there, I just haven't really looked yet.
> have you tried chromium

That's what he was talking about.
That's what I am saying. It just seems like they want to make money.

They're opening it to anyone next year to claim anything. I can do ha.ny if I want.
Twining's loose-leaf Earl Grey (the square yellow can) is the perfect coffee replacement. With honey and milk, it pushes all the right buttons with minimal sugar/caffeine bounce.
Ask HN: Soft failures on CPUs ?
There have been many studies that look at error rates on hard disks and in DRAM, are there similar studies about how often CPUs hickup ?

Given the amazing clockfrequencies of modern CPUs and their incredible complexities it stands to reason that CPUs will miss a bit every now and then. Even if their error rate was only 1 in 1 trillion that would mean a soft error every 15 minutes. (so, either errors are happening or the rate is much much lower than that).

I think this matters because we are looking at data corruption issues on disk and in RAM and we have solutions in place for those (checksumming, ECC RAM), but if something goes wrong in the cpu then all of that is moot.
Some desktop apps yes, actually many of them have been already replaced. Other (data/processor intensive: graphic arts, multimedia, etc...) don't think so.
Why not wxRuby?
I am not sure if this is a sharply pointed piece of satire critical of how YC does business, or if it's another "Ask HN" from amichail that's just beyond my modest IQ to grok.
This logo was chosen by a vote of the community. Here are the other choices.

http://www.haskell.org/logos/poll.html

Multiple people came up with this same design independently, because its meaningful: a combination of a lambda and the bind operator, >>=, two of the most fundamental operators in Haskell.

Anyway this was months ago. And if you want to point a fail-finger, point it at the guy who chose >>= for the bind operator. "LOL yer operater looks like the train logo!" (And I'm being facetious. That operator is awesome.)
I saw it as an 'Ask PG' so I wasn't going to jump in but I can't resist. Writing a chatbot is not 'fun', it is very hard work, if you want to do a half decent job of it.

HN is as far as I know not recruiting chat bot programmers (though plenty of the YC alumni and current partners could certainly do this), they're recruiting people that are on the verge of starting or have already started a company.

To have those people do all kinds of 'make work' because it is 'fun' would put YC on the map as a frivolous party, not a serious one.

Think about it, if you had to go and interview with a VC and they told you 'you have to go and write this chatbot first or we won't hear your application', at the 'seed' level the overhead of doing that (especially one for each founder!) would be enormous compared to the size of the investment.

I think this is a bad idea.
I am equally torn between thinking this is a somewhat-good-but-very-original idea and that it is a completely idiotic idea. (grin)
Are those mutually exclusive though ?
"In the midst of this pickle, along comes a fellow named Adam Englund. He’s a local lawyer..."

I wouldn't trust 20 billion of the taxpayer's money to a lawyer's vision. Give half of that to the Dyson vacuum cleaner guy. He'll come up with a design that works.
Coffee is, on the average, good for the health for most people. (But tea is an ok replacement.)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coffee_and_health#Benefits

Do make your coffee with paper filters. [Edit: If you don't want to read the reference... paper filters removes some chemicals which are bad for cholesterol levels.]
> at least within the limitations of present-day instrumentation

At least that gives a maximum size for the electron while it is interacting like a particle, though true, it is probably quite a bit smaller.

The fun thing to do, would be to draw the full s orbital, noting that the electron can interact with anything inside (and a bit outside) the full 11 mile radius sphere.
God forbid someone would charge money for a valuable service! Blasphemy!

This is my all-time number one gripe about the Internet. Users too often feel entitled to getting things for free.
Overblown. It will likely move to a freemium model. Everyone made fun of Hulu before it launched, but it ended up being quite good - there's no reason to think they don't understand the impact of making it pay-only.

http://gizmodo.com/5387909/hulus-glorious-free-days-are-offi...

Don't worry, Hulu's mission has always been to help people find and enjoy the world's premium, professionally produced content. We continue to believe that the ad-supported, free service is the one that resonates most with the largest group of users and any possible new business models would serve to complement our existing offering.

Thanks,

Betina Chan-Martin

Hulu
Written by a Yale professor:

http://www.theamericanscholar.org/the-disadvantages-of-an-el...

The article is long but it's a very good read. I like to reread from time to time.

A point I liked especially:

They [his graduate students] were talking about trying to write poetry, how friends of theirs from college called it quits within a year or two while people they know from less prestigious schools are still at it. Why should this be? Because students from elite schools expect success, and expect it now. They have, by definition, never experienced anything else, and their sense of self has been built around their ability to succeed. The idea of not being successful terrifies them, disorients them, defeats them. They’ve been driven their whole lives by a fear of failure....
CNN Relaunch
I like the data as well but I'm not so sure it disproves anything. As he said in his blog the game is currently climbing the charts which would be consistent for a game worth playing that wasn't released with a lot of pre-release hype. It's only one week's worth of data so far but definitely worth keeping track of.

Also if the pirate types are still the same as in my Atari ST / Amiga days then these people really aren't interested in buying your software anyway. They generally just collect and hoard all the software without using much of it.

It would be very interesting if he's able to find out from his data how long a pirated version is played as compared to a bought one. (And also the age of the users but that data's probably way out of reach.)
Ever since these recent updates started, I've been running into what seem to be caching issues.. I'll see old content on the "live feed", and it doesn't update until I refresh the page
Searching for Patterns in Pascal's Triangle With a Twist
If that were true, why doesn't all matter stick together in one giant gob?

A typical atom has a net charge of 0 with minor local variations. Therefore its attractive force drops off much faster than 1/r^2. And so electromagnetic attraction between atoms effectively disappears at any significant distance.

If the structure of an atom is "obviously" affected by the exclusion principle, why would the structure of materials, made up of atoms, make any difference?

It is possible for both rigid and non-rigid materials to satisfy the Pauli exclusion principle. Therefore the rigidity of things around us cannot be caused by the Pauli exclusion principle.

In fact, both Coulombic repulsion and the exclusion principle are involved in the hardness of materials. I believe the Coulombic fraction is larger than 50%, but the other part is certainly non-negligible.

Are you talking about volume or hardness?

You are right that the exclusion principle results in volume. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pauli_exclusion_principle#Stabi... for verification. (That effect is much bigger than I had realized.) However it does not necessarily result in rigid things that are hard.

Consider, for example, dropping a bucket of fresh water into salt water. Does the fresh water stop quickly upon impact? Obviously not. Now consider dropping a rock in the dirt. Does the rock stop quickly upon impact? Obviously it does.

What is different between the two scenarios? The answer is the structure of the materials, which are held together by electromagnetic forces. Therefore it really is electromagnetic forces that quickly stop falling solid objects that hit solid things.
Touche! I am really easy to dumbfound, haven't had my orientation session at Singularity University yet.
0.63% of the total
Maybe that should be a requirement for YC application too ?
1996 Charlie Rose interview with Marc Andreessen [video]
They can and will get things for free because information goods' prices tend towards the marginal price, which is 0, not the cost of production. Or at least that's my understanding of Varian and Shapiro's "Information Rules".
And this is why I gave up coffee. Nowadays I have absolutely no caffeine tolerance - so I can have a coke when out dancing and it keeps me going. Unlike ye olden days, when it had no effect whatsoever.
Famous Curves Index