skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
"Ideas are a dime a dozen" turns out to be true.

Someone else here pointed to oil companies. Rockefeller was going to drill for oil when he saw what was going on. But then he got a broader perspective and saw that refining the oil would actually be easier (he didn't have to hunt for the oil) and more profitable (middleman status). How much would that idea be worth if he hadn't done it? Zero.

The only thing that is "worth" something is what money can buy.

I understand your objection, but this is the way it is.
I still lol every time someone talks about CSS frameworks ... this article would have just been called an introduction to CSS a few years ago, before kids started feeling left out of programming with their mad HTML and CSS skillz.
I love LPEG for Lua. It usually takes me some time to write a decent grammar, but once it works it is rather straightforward to read it. (http://www.inf.puc-rio.br/~roberto/lpeg/lpeg.html)

Now seeing this for javascript makes me think if I should actually do more work with js.
Social media elevates the power of Nice
Actually http://canon./ (http://canon/ would also work in rare cases (No DNS search domain set and the browser also doesn't try to interpret it as a keyword.))
I say that vegetarians are deficient in creatine because this study showed that supplements increased their mental abilities. When they did the same study with meat-eaters, there was no such improvement, indicating that omnivores are not deficient in creatine.

Rawson ES, Lieberman HR, Walsh TM, Zuber SM, Harhart JM, Matthews TC (September 2008). "Creatine supplementation does not improve cognitive function in young adults". Physiology & Behavior 95 (1-2): 130–4. doi:10.1016/j.physbeh.2008.05.009. PMID 18579168.

I don't know why you're so defensive about this. It's well known that vegetarians are deficient in many nutrients. It's also well known that humans have an omnivorous past, so it should be obvious logically well.
The Big Mac index: Exchanging blows
looks cute but has anyone verified the exe is harmless?
I'm guessing the dominant animal (man) in prosperous places would get larger and stronger.
Yeah I'm sorry. It really is over priced.

http://www.engadget.com/2010/03/03/coby-85-smartbook-feels-l...
I don't see how that would apply. They're not offering a competing product with similar trade dress. They've also made it quite clear what the website is about ("We built Garmin Connect. We're for hire.")
They seem to be very management-heavy. I looked at the page at http://thegcteam.com/team . Look at how many people they have listed as managers or coordinators. Unless all the development is being outsourced, I don't see how a 1.5:1 ratio of developers to managers is efficient. Perhaps this has something to do with why the team was missing its migration dates in the first place?
Nifty. One suggestion: let me click on states in the image of the US instead of having to click on the image and then find the state in the list.
"Your BMI is lower than 0% of people from IL"

I'm a fat bastard!

I'm showing up as Windows 2003, but I'm on Windows XP 64-bit.
11 Places That Serve Your Pet For Dinner
If you can't get your ideal name, think about adding words onto it and coming up with some variation.

Many web properties started with less than ideal domain names, ending up with what they wanted in the end.

Facebook - thefacebook.com
Dropbox - getdropbox.com
Delicious - del.icio.us
Twitter - twittr.com

I'd suggest a tool like http://www.bustaname.com would help you out getting what you want.

I recently did this very same thing with a domain and got something incredibly close to what I originally wanted.
Most people know GoF DP _and_ practice more AntiPatterns so I have to agree with you here... the net result is a big negative.
Wikileaks leaks classified intelligence report about itself
Especially since, in my experience, you're more likely to come across anti-patterns than proper design-patterns. It is nice, though, to quantify the idiocy with succinct names.
Wow, a web page that shows text. Amazing innovation, and buzzword compliant to boot...
Full description: Satish Dharmaraj is a partner at Redpoint Ventures and lead investor in posterous, former angel and was CEO of Zimbra, which sold to Yahoo ($350M). Satish gives the investor perspective on getting traction and explains how Zimbra got traction through an open source community, PR and product/market fit. Satish also comments on idea generation, posterous and onebox.com.
downloaded the linux version, nice music and it seems like it mostly takes place through bbs conversations which is great but its a shame you cant type the messages, just click.

Fantastic music
I agree, I see some type of backwards "deRomanization" used all the time by foreign students in the West. I've noticed it most prominently among the Arab and Persian students who end up on University computers without the ability to type in their native script. So they flub it with Roman characters and get by pretty much okay.

For Army Linguists that speak Korea, there's a similar system they use to write Hangul on an English keyboard. But it isn't phonetic.
Yeah... I'm the fattest person in New York so far...
This is pretty cool. However, I recommend not ranking people in a weight class that equals their weight (IE You are % of people who weigh x lbs) because here will not be enough samples at a specific weight. Try using intervals of 5 lbs.
I don't like how the author of the article angles the irresponsible actions of those in charge of the factory, as being the fault of Apple and Nokia. There is a consistent tone of "Apple/Nokia uses illegal chemical n-hexane in factories". Simple sensationalism.
Got a little bug with location... For some reason, it thinks "Montreal, Canada" is located in Ontario, so I kind of warped your results without knowing.

Also, and I know this is probably not intentional, but most people outside the United States will cringe when they see "and the rest of the world" with only a map of the states on the page.

Other than that, I liked the results page and all the statistics it provided!
Cool, looks similar to something I made last month :-)

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1128574
http://github.com/jmhobbs/consume-less-create-more
http://www.consumelesscreatemore.com/
Ask HN: Founders from Non-IT/Programming Backgrounds
I am curious as to how many web-based startup projects have got off the ground by people whose software development/programming skills were either self-taught or were perhaps spun out of a hobby project.

I am never short of ideas, but I would imagine that as a self-taught programmer myself, there must be certain implementation practices that would be obvious to a professional, but not so much to an amateur like me.

What are your thoughts?
If you become curious and want to know more about Stallone, this is worth digging up:

http://ebooktest.wordpress.com/2010/01/19/note-to-self-sylve...
Writing in the Times of London in 1894, one writer estimated that in 50 years every street in London would be buried under nine feet of manure.

Human civilization evolution is faster, then natural evolution.
What kind of customer service are you expecting for a phone? Help inserting the SIM card?
YC-style Indian incubator accepting applications
Its unlikely to run Android because Android is ARM based.
It's true, Chrome is the lightest browser: http://obesitynearme.com/browser/

And Vista is indeed significantly heavier: http://obesitynearme.com/os/

Also people from reddit are apparently fat: http://obesitynearme.com/referrer/

(All results correct at time of publication)
Lazy Food
"Sorry, the Nexus One phone is not available in your contry or region" message at google.com/phone

And the Droid doesn't have this problem?

no one is going to get phone for 600 euros

Except all the people that do? The original iPhone was this expensive and didn't even have 3G. And yet people bought them in droves.
Note that this link comes from the discussion of Feynman - "You Just Ask Them?" -- http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1196928 .
The Eclipse Update system is horrid (especially when your copy of 3.3 is ancient). Nice work - it is one of the better Eclipse plug-ins I have used.

Some points - since you are hosting this in Eclipse, it seems that you are focusing on developers. Most graphic designers won't touch Eclipse. Also most developers once they experience another IDE (IntelliJ, for example) find it harder to return.

Maybe nitpicky but when I drag an object like a container or button into the screen canvas, it messes with my flow when I get an immediate edit box for the text attribute. I'd rather double-click to edit.

Comparing with Balsamiq, one thing that I don't like about Balsamiq is you can't yet have named groups of items (e.g. all the navigation elements). Being able to have a reusable user-defined library of custom groups - e.g. new "Edit screen for editing Foo in module X" would differentiate mockup tools from the spawn of Visio.

Grouping logically would be the difference between bitmap type editing and Illustrator-type editing. It would be nice to be able to have an outline tree view of elements organized in a hierarchy by UX intent.
These datapoints are a little scary:

- Your BMI is 26, which means you are Overweight

- Your BMI is lower than 42% of people who submitted this survey

- Your BMI is lower than 63% of 27 year olds

- Your BMI is lower than 39% of people from news.ycombinator.com

Sounds as if the people sampled skew young and overweight.

Tangentially, is there a better metric for something like this besides BMI? I recall some people having issue with BMI as a measurement, since it doesn't account for what your weight is composed of (fat vs muscle content).

edit: for anyone else interested in the shortcomings of BMI, wikipedia seems to have a good summary: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Body_mass_index#Limitations_and...
Try visiting on an iPad, iPhone, iPod Touch, Droid, or Nexus One for the installable HTML5 version. It will then allow you to view both text and images without an internet connection _even in a darkened room_.
Also, http://www.nxdom.com/ is good for searching for domains.
Honestly, I wish this is how it was from the very beginning (minus the huge cost of entry).

If you think about it, what really was the point of .com, .net, .org etc... Does it really make sense that you can have both twitter.com and twitter.net? In both cases, you recognize "twitter" as the name, with .com and .net as fodder. And considering that twitter does not own twitter.net shows how meaningless that .net domain is.

So you currently have twitter.com/yourname, when it could be just yourname.twitter. Or yourname.facebook. And instead of yourname@gmail.com, it would just be yourname@gmail. blahblah@hotmail. whosit@yahoo. mikeymike@doodad. stevejobs@apple. pg@yc.

Furthermore, the ".com" has always been a blemish to branding. You have this beautiful simple brand name (Nike, Apple, Cisco) but then you have to advertise the url (nike.com, apple.com, cisco.com), both decapping your name and sticking the .com on the end.

I know this whole .com, .net, .org, .ly has been ingrained into our structure and psyche, but just consider the above to see how much simpler it could be.
Installing and using Apache Cassandra With Java Part 1
#Cassandra
That's pretty cool. What they do is, it looks like, create an app that first and foremost makes it so kids can't mess with your phone (calls, opening other apps, whatever), and also adds some fun stuff.

What I'm thinking of, though, is a dedicated device. You don't need a smart phone for kids games; all you need is some audio/graphics and whatever it is that runs Java ME in these things. Given the price of cheap Nokias, it should be doable for less than $100, especially since you don't even need the actual phone machinery.

A large part of the reason for a dedicated device is that most kids are not going to accidentally make calls, they're going to accidentally drop your expensive phone or something else that will physically damage it. A 'toy phone' could be made a bit more resilient...
It's more than that. Firefox, for example, cannot display an ePub eBook without an extension. This permits ePub display without any such additions.
> Your BMI is lower than 97% of people who submitted this survey

And I'm much bigger than a few years ago...
If this is to raise awareness, you might want to reword the stats. I found them slightly hard to parse.

"Your BMI is lower than 37% of people who submitted this survey."

This might be better written as, "You are fatter than 60% of people who submitted this survey." Ouch.

Also, if obesity is an epidemic then over time won't these results normalize? So I'm fatter than I should be but so is everyone else, so I don't look so bad in these results.
I am not sure that this is bad. 200,000 people are walking around with a $600 unlocked Linux phone. This is a major, major change in everything; open software, carrier freedom, etc. Selling that many is quite surprising, in fact.

When Google starts advertising and the price goes down to $99, and it doesn't sell then, then you should be worried. But right now, Google is doing everything possible to prevent people from even knowing about this thing -- and it's still selling well. When Google starts putting Android billboards on every open space in a major city (as Apple does with iPhone advertising), then you can start comparing it to the iPhone. But right now, this is an ultra-niche product that normal people don't even know about.
I can't seem to select any location from England, UK. Typing "England" gives me various options in the US and europe. Typing "London" gives me options in south africa and US. "london, england" returns no results. Similar issues trying my small town or county.
In the future, metaphors will be even thinner because bloggers keep stretching them...
http://treetop.rubyforge.org/

Im writing a programming language in Ruby at the moment - and after playing with that for a few days I've gone back to "hand coded lexer plus Racc for grammar". It's probably personal preference but I find that a little more tunable.
You might look at OMeta/JS: http://tinlizzie.org/ometa-js/#JavaScript_Compiler

OMeta is based upon PEGs and is worth a look because it has some great meta-meta ideas from the 60's that were ignored.

(Also, there are several ports of OMeta to other languages)
My location was auto-populated as "Middletown, RI, US" - I manually changed it to be correct (Chicago, IL, US), but when I submitted the results page showed my % in terms of Middletown and in terms of RI. I was confused as to whether it was comparing me to RI for a reason, or if my Chicago input didn't stick.
Looks like there are a few other Canadians trying this out. I would definitely pass it on to friends if it showed a provincial break down as well.
How High Frequency Trading Benefits All Investors
I'm confused about the grammar example.

How does: multiplicative : primary "* " multiplicative { return $1 * $3; }

return the product of two integers?
Everything in that screenshot is doing too good of a job competing for my attention. The message gets lost easily.
I had to do some digging for myself to verify that, yes, PEGs are a recent concept distinct from the kind of grammars I'm already familiar with. See Bryan Ford's paper, Parsing Expression Grammars: A Recognition-Based Syntactic Foundation from PoPL 2004: http://portal.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=964001.964011
Turst me, I know what I'm doing...
its the best easy measurement. if you just want to track your own weight loss (and not compare to others), you can take waist measurements once you reach the point of gaining weight while still losing fat.

you can measure body fat % with calipers, but you need to go to a doctor with experience to get a reading with reasonable margin of error. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caliper#Use
What exactly you didn't like?
only three things. I draw a line on a calendar and try not to break the line.
1- what I eat. Have I eaten at least 1 meal raw?
2- writing. Have I written for at least 2 hrs?
3- additional item. Last month it was learning colemak (done). Doing 2hrs of company promotion was another month's goal. This month, it's learning scipy well (2hr day)
Huge Garbage Patch Found in Atlantic Too
The same as you gain by using something like Foursquare, or by telling "i'm @work" in your Facebook status?

It's not exactly just "Facebook" you are sharing your location with, it's your friends.
You have a choice in the US between AT&T and T-Mobile, and Rogers now in Canada as well. It's coming soon to Vodafone and Verizon as well. Carrier choice is coming.
This video just came up:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dDnrLv6z-mM&feature=playe...

It blew me away.
Even as Congress continues to extend copyrights in order to prevent Disney characters from entering the public domain.
Just personal preference: I prefer the grammar structure for parsers like Racc
The 'Great Doubling' helps explain why jobs are so hard to find
The Coming Rebound in Consumer Credit
On an individual basis waist-hip ratio http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Waist-hip_ratio is a better metric. BMI is a tool for populations as a whole.
I have a friend who is in his 30s with stage 4 colon cancer and it's pretty hard to get excited about the progress that's being made. They told him when they started that 5 years ago he would have been expected to live under a year and now it's 3-5 years. That's great but still not what anyone hopes for. He has kids who are all under 10.

I wonder if early screening will become more of a normal thing for people who can afford it. I'm not sure my friend could have afforded it but for cancers where the first signs of it indicate that it's too late it might make sense for some people.
Review My experimental site. Do Not ban, this is not Spam
I just set a small twitter monetisation experiment for my twitter fan community on the account http://www.twitter.com/lewis_hamilton ,please review and give me some feedback. I submitted it a couple of minutes ago, and for reasons, I still don't understand, some people kep claiming it's Spam, I think it's a very interesting experiment as everybody could buil something like that as a personal advertising platform, no middle-man. I hope this will generate a discussion, and I will appreciate all critics, If you have questions, just feel free to ask, do not label it as Spam, here is the previous discussion: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1198485
You touch on a good point. I think our copyright term in the US is far, far too long. But, until the copyright term is changed, it is the law and we should respect that, especially since most of the audiance on this site makes their living through IP of one kind or another.

Also, for this particular book, remember that the coauthor is alive, the primary author died fairly recently(1988) and this book wasn't published all that long ago(1985). So even if you agree with me that copyright terms are far too long, this one would probably still fall within one reduced to a reasonable time frame (I personally think the right number is around 25 years from first publication).
I'd like to add http://sourcemaking.com/antipatterns as another place to learn about anti-patterns. Recommended read.
URL Shorteners Slow Down The Web – Especially Facebook’s FB.me
I just resubmit this after the previous discussion: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1198485 was labelled as Spam for some reasons, so this is not spam, check my profile, I'm behind the project and it's on beta stealth mode for the account www.twitter.com/lewis_hamilton . I think it's a very interesting Idea, but of course I should write more about me on the site, it may otherwise looks like spam.
On Internet relationships
Good idea, I will make it work with 5lb intervals
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Waist-hip_ratio is more useful for most of the obesity risk factors.
To hack: mettere mano
According to many who worked on that movie, the story told here about Stone's refusal of huge sums for _Rocky_ and insistence that he be the star is a "near-total fabrication": http://www.hollywoodtoday.net/2006/12/20/rocky-story-reveale...
Amen on the easy to read part. I'm the author of clj-peg ( http://www.lithinos.com/clj-peg/ ), and the main reason I wanted to write it was to have grammars that were human readable.
I've heard there's malarkey to do with how they account for deaths and cures. If you survive a diagnosis for five years or something they count you as cured. In a lot of cases what we really have is a lot of technology that give people six extra years of life, at high cost and a lot of discomfort.
Bolden's speech yesterday is (IMO) worth reading, especially the middle section regarding Constellation:

http://www.nasa.gov/pdf/434022main_bolden_WSBR_20100316.pdf

Note also the $6B increase in NASA's budget.
After reading the article, there seemed to be one factory manager that started using this solvent because it dries faster than alcohol, allowing him to shave a few seconds off the production time of each flat screen.

They said this manager was fired, and based on the number of employees spending sick days in the hospital, I'm sure the company ended up losing a lot of money on their medical bills.

This is hardly newsworthy. It happens all the time in China. Someone unethical wants to skim a little money by using cheaper chemicals, or wants to make a few more cents by producing faster using an unsafe process.

You can't blame Apple or Nokia. They likely dictated exactly what solvents were to be used, but the supplier decided they can hire fewer workers if they use the faster drying solvent, so they decided to cut corners.
I am not talking about popular reporting of science. I am talking about science.

Recently a paper went by on how something like 90% of medical studies are not able to be replicated in follow-up studies. If you really understand science qua science (as opposed to science-as-religion-substitute), you should understand this isn't a minor interesting tidbit to be discarded, this is a dagger to the heart of the field. Other fields seem to be having similar problems.

I reiterate, science is still the best we've got and I don't anticipate a replacement. But the evidence strongly suggests that the quality of the real science being done is a lot lower than it may appear at first glance, or what some people would have you believe.
Flowdock On Your Desktop
very nice! but why isnt there a tooltip for the hn posts?
HN formatting messed up your asterisks. The whole rule is:

multiplicative : primary "*" multiplicative { return $1 * $3; }
/ primary

"primary" refers to another rule in the grammar, which is defined as integer or a parenthesized expression. This snippet defines "multiplicative", which is either a primary, or a primary followed by an asterisk followed by another multiplicative. (This recursively expands to allow any number of primaries, separated by asterisks.)

The value of the multiplicative expression is the value of the first term times the value of the third term. (The second term is just the literal string "*".)
Quants, System Developers, and Traders
What are your thoughts on this academic paper?<p>http://lfe.mit.edu/media/JunPan-INFO.pdf<p>Mark Hulbert wrote a piece on it in the NYT.<p>http://www.nytimes.com/2006/08/13/business/yourmoney/13stra.html?ref=business<p>My main question to the HN community is the following,<p>"Is this a strategy worth pursuing?"
I knew that 60 hours was going to get dinged from someone. Trust me, I know there are many out there that would dream of only working 60 hours/week. This is my bill paying job, not my business. I'm not able to find the time/energy to to pursue that area.

While your points are seemingly applicable only to the startup crowd, I can directly translate everything you shared here into my bill paying job.

For that, and the embedded sense of hope, thanks.
Linux Torvalds named most influential open source voice