Hacker News Reader

The energy was moving backwards in time, and was absorbed in order to reverse the electron's direction.

How do you do the profit sharing? Does everybody get the same percentage, or is it based on how "senior" they are?

dmoneyon Introducing a new data structure, streams, in Javascript

Doesn't "stream" already mean something like "unix pipe" or "queue"? What about calling them Sequences like Clojure does?

dmoneyon Seriously, stop with the booth babes

Other cultures can handle sexuality better.

Which ones? And how do they do that?

dmoneyon Android Tricorder Killed By CBS

They burned up in the atmosphere. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gene_Roddenberry#Death_and_lega...

dmoneyon NSA built a NoSQL database

But if there is a back door, doesn't releasing it as open source open the possibility that China's or Iran's equivalent of the NSA will audit the code and find it too?

dmoneyon Show HN: PHP does Meta Programming too

Thanks! Didn't know about traits [ http://php.net/manual/en/language.oop5.traits.php ].

dmoneyon Continuous Integration Failure? Use USB Missiles

The CEO of Aperture Science was torn up and thrown into a fire.

dmoneyon Why Arabic is Terrific

I don't know either language, but Modern Hebrew's regularity may be due to the fact that it was constructed (or reconstructed) less than 150 years ago.

dmoneyon Why Arabic is Terrific

That worked, thanks.

dmoneyon Why Arabic is Terrific

> For exmaple, here are some "words" consisting of a single letter repeated three times:

> ÙŠÙŠÙŠ Ø¹Ø¹Ø¹ Ù‡Ù‡Ù‡ ÙƒÙƒÙƒ Ù„Ù„Ù„

Which for me looks like (asciified):

> USUSUS 010101 UtUtUt UfUfUf UnUnUn

I'm guessing I'm missing a font or something? (Firefox 6)

dmoneyon Ask HN: Career Change to something without computers

There was a reddit AMA a while back from a guy who went from programming to being a lumberjack.

I guess that might also be affected by real estate prices.

dmoneyon Scientists find evidence of salt water flowing on Mars

How would Japan be different if they had developed wheat agriculture instead?

dmoneyon Who's your SSH buddy?

Why not have the IDS shut down the machine itself?

dmoneyon Coders Who Don't Job Interview: Zed Shaw

It seems like success as a programmer (or at least Internet fame) requires doing a lot of side projects. Do you ever find that doing the shit work at work saps your interest for side projects? Like if you have to look at another line of code you'll scream?

dmoneyon The Next Big Thing is Sitting Right in Front of You

If you kept saving them anyway it could have been del.icio.us.

dmoneyon NASA's Open Source Cloud

The advantage is probably just that it's owned by NASA rather than by a private entity. This could allow it to be used for sensitive or classified applications, or for space related applications (which could be classed as munitions, which [I'm not a lawyer, but i'm guessing...] means putting them on AWS could count as "exporting" them).

dmoneyon What is magic?

The author seems to say the formula for magic is imagination + determination. Turning on a light would be one kind (or level) of magic: the Harry Potter kind. Inventing light switches, when everybody thinks you have to rub two sticks together, or wire up electrical circuits by hand to get light, would be another. The kind I've seen arguments about recently are analogous to a new kind of light switch, with a built in light sensor, so when you turn on the light it automatically turns it to the "right" brightness for the level of natural light already present. Those against it would maybe rather have a dimmer so they can control the brightness, or maybe rather install the light sensor themselves.

dmoneyon What is magic?

I don't have a question, but I do have an observation. The "science and art of causing change to occur in conformity with the will" could be the definition of a lot of disciplines: business, hacking, engineering, painting, politics. It's unfortunate that you felt you had to register anonymously to talk about this particular form of magic.

Okay, I do have a question: how do you feel the "occult" type of magic is connected with what the author is talking about (i.e. magic = imagination + determination)? Are they completely different beasts? Is one a subclass of the other?

dmoneyon What if the Web never happened

What should they have done differently?

dmoneyon GitHub, Collaboration, and Haters

Here's a reason for SourceForge hate. At least as of a couple weeks ago, when you go to download a file, you are shown a survey (as a sort of ad). There is no indication that the survey is optional, and initially I thought it was required. If you ignore the survey you can still download the file, and I was able to figure that out eventually. A less experienced user wouldn't be so lucky, thinking that the survey is required, thus revealing personal or business information that they shouldn't have to.

dmoneyon Why should anyone ever use a Google API again?

The spammers would only have to translate each page once. Further, they could translate only the pages that users request in language X as needed and cache the results.

dmoneyon Ridiculously easy world times and meetings across time zones

It would be useful to be able to display 24-hour time for a given row.

dmoneyon Tagger: a library for extracting relevant tags from text documents

I found an article on making Ruby call Python: http://www.decalage.info/python/ruby_bridge

Maybe they'll go out and one thing will lead to another.

dmoneyon The Rise of "Logical Punctuation".

And another thing. Using "an" when a word starts an H is followed very inconsistently.

Is that a rule in American English? I don't remember hearing it in school.

dmoneyon Git is Inconsistent

Off topic, but the link to the shell script and the images in the article use Data URIs, which I didn't know existed: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Data_URI_scheme

dmoneyon Why the Popularity of Unit Testing is Waning

The article that the author links to[1] is talking specifically about unit testing in Java. I'm not sure it has ever been that popular in Java to begin with, although there may have been buzz about it for a while. The arguments for its waning hinge on the idea that unit testing is hard and requires training and books. Refactoring legacy code for testability can be tough (or at least scary), but writing unit tests themselves is pretty easy, and questions about how JUnit works can be answered by a web search.

[1] http://binstock.blogspot.com/2008/05/is-popularity-of-unit-t...

dmoneyon Evan Williams on leaving Twitter

Megablogging. No post can have fewer than 140,000 characters.

dmoneyon What life lessons are unintuitive or go against common sense or wisdom?

This appears to be the essay you're talking about: http://www.paulgraham.com/notnot.html

The other way to tell an adult is by how they react to a challenge. Someone who's not yet an adult will tend to respond to a challenge from an adult in a way that acknowledges their dominance. If an adult says "that's a stupid idea," a kid will either crawl away with his tail between his legs, or rebel. But rebelling presumes inferiority as much as submission. The adult response to "that's a stupid idea," is simply to look the other person in the eye and say "Really? Why do you think so?"