It seems that in the anonymous email that was sent to me, the user's apostrophes weren't formatted correctly, and turned into "'". Otherwise, I like the service!
One minor problem I found is that when commenting, the submit button shouldn't actually submit if the captcha is blank -- otherwise the entire comment gets lost as the page is reloaded. Otherwise, the site looks great!
This doesn't lower the temperature of a nuclear reactor or any heat source. The new material will still experience an increase in temperature, and the same amount of heat will still be released into the environment.
I find it interesting how the theorist says "The finding does not constitute a discovery of dark matter", the journalist titled the article "Signs of dark matter from Minnesota mine", and then to_jon posted this on Hacker News as "Evidence of Dark Matter Found in Minnesota mine".
Interested in the code for a Firefox extension that does the same thing as your Chrome extension? I made this exact service two years ago, while also saving visual snapshots of every webpage. The database which stored text from webpages quickly became massive, but nobody was willing to pay for the service so I shut it down.
Fiscal facts aren't all that matters. Investors' perceptions can also have an impact--if California is perceived to be in trouble, investors demand higher premiums on bonds, and the costs for California to borrow money increase. This can lead to a detrimental cycle of destruction, akin to what happened to Lehman Brothers.
Anyone know how many AWS instances (and what types) are being run? Are these the same servers that account for up to 20% of downstream bandwidth in the U.S.?
The biggest limitation I had was while writing to the database, the database would sometimes return an error for no apparent reason. I'd then be forced to catch these errors, and resubmit. But if you had lots of traffic and resubmit too quickly, Google App Engine would throw more errors back at you. This was all over a year ago, not sure how it is now, I would never go back to using it.
There is an expected failure rate on writes as Bigtable tablets are sometimes unavailable, for example, when they are being moved or split. The presence of more indexes increases the probability of hitting an unavailable tablet as an exception will be raised if a write fails for any of the indexes.
In those situations, your application will need to decide how to handle the exception. One option is to add a task to the task queue to retry the write at a later point in time. Another idea would be to respond with an error from the app and have the client retry. This tends to work with things like AJAX requests where there is client side logic which can handle an error message from the server.
The "object you use to contain the antimatter" is not very large, it can be wheeled around in a lab. The "energy required to contain the antimatter" is not very significant, liquid helium cooled inside a liquid nitrogen shell, and some rather ordinary (in terms of power usage) electric and magnetic fields. 100 grams of antimatter has a yield similar to a 4 megaton hydrogen bomb.
I call bullshit. The cost is not "very high", it's astronomically high.
(Comments like this make me want to stop reading Hacker News.) Just because the "gunpowder" is expensive doesn't stop the production of containment vessels or delivery mechanisms:
Additionally, "antimatter" can include positrons, which are much cheaper to produce than antiprotons.
My advisor also worked on creating antimatter traps at government labs, but none of the projects had any kind of defense related purposes.
Your advisor may not have been involved in all imaginable projects related to antimatter.
There are only a handful of interesting research questions about antimatter that exist at reasonable scales. Most of those are either fundamental physics or medical in nature.
Although the cost to create antimatter is very high, our government is actually working on creating antimatter munitions. (I've worked on creating a portable antimatter trap, which was funded by the U.S. government.)