skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
There are two types of DSLs, internal and external. External ones are the custom syntax you talk of, internal are DSLs that use features or quirks of a host language to appear different.

XML or SQL are external DSLs, much of the cool Ruby stuff like Rake and Rails are internal DSLs. The examples presented are all internal (presumably for a good reason). There are advantages to both approaches. Read Martin Fowler's discussion at http://martinfowler.com/dslwip/
I could see Microsoft buying B&N just because all the other cool kids are doing e-books and they're interested in getting into retail. No reason you can't sell Xbox 360 hardware/games and phones next to a bunch of books.
Not always. I went through an engineering degree and took exactly two non-engineering courses in my 4.5 years - and that was only because I loaded one of them on as an extra credit (damn near killed myself doing it too).

The way the college system works today, the "well roundedness" aspects are disappearing, and quickly. Don't blame the schools, blame ourselves - we're the ones balking at paying top-dollar for a hard science degree and then being forced to take "useless" liberal arts courses.
I can't see the video because apparently it's blocked on the iPad but in general isn't it well known that 90% of everything sucks to any one individual? I guarantee you that there's someone out there who thinks Fart Keyboard is the most brilliant must-have app ever made. If your shit warehouse is big enough you can make everyone happy.
Agreed 100%. I have a BA in history & religious studies from UVA -- I had intentions of becoming a museum curator -- but decided to follow a career path in technology instead. I parlayed my hobby & part time job into a Manpower temp-to-hire gig and, courtesy of a couple of tremendous bosses, was empowered to further my education on the job (trial by fire style). Now I direct a full stack (analysis, design, dev, ops, support, administration) of ~60 great folks and love my job. And it pays quite a bit better than $40k/yr....

I stopped trying to write code back around 2004. It's not my forté. I excel at dataset analysis & pattern recognition, and communication/soft skills. While it does not apply so much to the startup scene and bleeding edge tech companies, the corporate world has a dearth of competent technical managers, not being technicians are hard to find, but because it tends to be a lot easier for liberal arts majors to acquire a working competency of tech knowledge than it is for hardcore geeks to learn people skills.
Tesla 2050 (Fermi-based) versus C1060 GPUs on Jacket for MATLAB apps
We have actually done this a couple of times. I think the problem is that we each time sit there thinking oh we could just make it simpler. But in realty what our original idea was and what we need to be are different. it'd seem the market is not rich enough for what we want, and that we need to try another approach, even if it does abandon our original 'core idea'. I look at it like many of the start up stories which are we started with idea X and ended with A.

The original idea is sound, however we cannot find a way yet to engage the user enough to make it work. I stress yet, as we all agree there is a way, we just aren't sure the way to flip it so the user is engaged. it is a hot topic, just a difficult one to get people to act on.

We keep rethinking our idea, and is just apparent that at least while we try to get the original idea some spice, we need to deviate for a while to raise money. I understand this isn't optimal, but made need to be done.
Yeah, and they're wrong. That's why one of the main features of the campaign is a Constitutional amendment. People tend to forget that the Supreme Court isn't the Supreme Law of the Land -- they only interpret it.
I have a strange relationship with OmniFocus. I hate thinking about using it, but when I do use it I don't mind it. The Mac version is decent, but the slow startup time of the iPhone app really destroys its utility for me.

That said, after plunking down $80 for the desktop version that I use but hate thinking about, $20 for an iPhone version I never use, I just can't bring myself to spending $40 for the iPad version without being able to figure out if I'll actually use it first (I understand this is more a criticism of the App Store rules than of OmniFocus specifically).
I think that the non-original idea we can definitely get paid for. The original idea is different though, it requires a community before people will pay for it.
Rdio opens to the public (like Spotify for the US)
Breast Milk Sugars Give Infants a Protective Coat
SHOwnsYou is right - he is not showing sufficient dedication to job hunting.

Firstly, why are his feet in a house and not on the pavement? The jobs available in a listing on a website are a vanishingly small portion of the total available jobs out there.

I have a friend who once needed a job (he was a qualified electrician a self-taught and fairly talented IT guy, in industrial settings not a terrible combination) but had no degree or shiny paper to back him up. What'd he do?

He hit the road. He drove down highway 401 in Ontario (the industrial heartland of Canada), hit up a number of factories and shops along the way. He would walk in, demand to speak to someone senior, introduce himself, talk about their need for someone of his qualifications, leave his resume, and move on.

He had a job within a week, after multiple callbacks. None of the places that called him back had the position externally open, much less on a website.

The vast majority of the world's jobs are unadvertised - if your only source for jobs is a website, you are failing yourself.

[edit] My friend is also the highest-paid high school dropout I know. Hell, he makes more than I do.
PyMC: Bayesian Stochastic Modelling in Python
Well, I'm pretty used to bold, profane statements from this guy now, to the point where they have no effect on me. Anyone else?
A lot of people that stay in dead end jobs either don't mind being there or aren't making the effort required to get out.

Don't make excuses for them or yourself. It is a matter of ignoring the negative things (or spinning them in a positive light) and not giving up. Change can happen if you let it.
Security Exploit Can Give Hackers Control of Your iPhone or iPad [WARNING]
There's one at a mall near me... that's definitely leased.
There's learning LaTeX, and then there's learning it. I think it's safe to say that most paper authors only need to find the appropriate template/example document and fill it out with their content. Once you figure out basic font modifications (bold, emphasis, "typewriter" (monospace)), tables (easy), and images (also easy), you're pretty much set--that's about the limit of my experience with it. Now, I've only had occasion to use it for some math-heavy crypto assignments, a few IEEE-format papers, and a thesis proposal, but in each case I was able to accomplish what I wanted in a short period of time and with minimal hassle.

For the most part, you're only typing stuff like this:

\section{A Section}

A call to {\tt open()} will {\bf return} an integer, which represents a {\emph file descriptor}.\cite{man-open}

Easy mode, plus bibtex is a godsend when you have more than a handful of references.
The B&N I go to has touchscreen kiosks. I don't know if you can order straight from it or only check local inventory.
> do cs majors really apply science? I thought it was almost entirely math and logic.

Yes, they apply computer science. Unless science needs to have flasks and microscopes involved.
I doubt Barnes & Noble would be a good fit for Apple, Microsoft, or HP; their stores are far too massive for a single-brand retailer. Perhaps some new competitor to Best Buy looking to swing for the fences?
The one thing that makes this kind of service a no-go for me is the need for me to disclose my password to a third party. What would it take for the financial institution to allow read-only access using a separate set of credentials? All I have here is that I have to take FutureAdvisor's word that their access is read-only.
Please make it possible to enter data directly rather than providing login credentials and having you download it. This would solve two problems: First, the fact that some people won't want to give you access to their money; and second, the fact that some people have accounts not with one of the three mentioned funds.
It's true, I can flirt in person at B&N, and Amazon.com provides no such functionality! I go there for the experience of getting out of my house and walking around in the presence of actual people (I work from home). The coffee shop isn't really as inviting as Starbucks or Caribou, though, in my locality, though it is nice enough. They just stopped charging for wifi a few months ago.
I'm honestly surprised that more sites don't use it. It's a really easy way to get some quick info on the poster / user.

We've actually incorporated it into our admin dashboard.
Valedictorian Speaks Out Against Schooling in Graduation Speech
I've been on HN much longer than I've used Twilio, so trust me on this one: the product they make is jawdroppingly awesome, transformative, and will upend industries. It is on the same rough scale as email: this (or something very close to this) is going to save tens of millions of people their precious time, and make a lot of companies stupefying amounts of money. It brings the Internet to people who can't use the Internet, it brings computers to people who can't use computers, it eliminates whole classes of largely unproductive jobs. If you're a bit burnt out on CRUD apps and want to do something with impact, this is a great job.

P.S. After you get there, if you can zealously advocate for first-class Japanese support, you will be my best friend for life.
Ha! I'm no iPhone fanboy but increased competition->(slower growth,market share)!=dying. They just sold like 18,000,000,000 of these things in a month, did they not?
gimp will run just fine on your current box. My first linux box was a Pentium 133MHz box with 4MB RAM and a 2GB hard disk drive. I had a 14" CRT monitor. I learnt almost everything I know on that. I could set it up as an HTTP server, DNS server, SMTP server, DHCP server, run ethereal (now wireshark), study protocols, program in a myriad of languages, set up a database server, simulate multiple hosts in a virtual network and much more. You're only limited by your imagination.
It's been observed that once any organization reaches a certain size or age it acquires so many institutional rules and traditions, and has so many layers of staff, that it effectively lives more to serve itself than to serve the outside world. It also acts increasingly not to fight the problem it was meant to be a solution for, but to actually preserve and continue that problem, thereby maximizing the chance for future job security for the institution itself. It will increasingly not want to cure the problem, but to temporarily alleviate it -- alleviate it for only as long as the institution's services are purchased. Once that happens, the organization has become a bureaucracy.
It's not a ponzi scheme, because additional wealth is created by the investment of the capital. That capital buys factories, jobs, and marketing.

In a ponzi scheme, the investment goes solely to pay off previous investors -- that's it.

Wall Street is not a ponzi scheme.
I just started listening to "The History of Rome" podcast, and I love it. He tells a story rather than deliver a lecture, it's great fun.
Even better, use LaTeX watching (ctrl-cmd-w) with a pdf viewer that supports pdf sync (like Skim) and the output updates every time you save.
World police? Earlier you alluded to leaving Saddam Hussein in power. Was he the only source of wrongdoing in the world? The only person we needed to police? Do you know what atrocities continue in Saudi Arabia -- our close "ally"? As for being qualified to make a judgment on how many countries we need to be in, the U.S. is the the most powerful nation on the the planet. We can vaporize anyone we choose within hours. What else must one know besides that?
Just my opinion, but I think that even this may be striking at the root. I've long thought that what we really need is a constitutional amendment dictating the separation of economy and state, just as we separate church and state.

There should be no tariffs, since those economically benefit some while hurting everyone else. There should be no subsidies, as those economically benefit some while hurting everyone else.

Congress shouldn't be allowed to make complicated tax laws. If there's to be a tax, it should be simple and described in 1 paragraph. No exemptions, no breaks, no deductions. Those things are all trying to encourage or discourage some sort of activity, but it just ends up helping some while hurting everyone else more.

Congress shouldn't be allowed to redistribute wealth. It just helps some people while hurting everyone else and has negative secondary consequences. It as also not a necessary role for government.

Every way that congress dictates that the economy should go ends up helping some group by some amount and hurting everyone else by even more. That's sort of by definition, because if it helped everyone involved, it would take place naturally without the need to legally dictate it.

The domain of government is ultimately force, and when it tries to act in other areas, its monopoly on force corrupts its actions in those other areas, so it really needs to be restricted to the very simple act of protecting our rights as originally spelled out in the constitution. Things like tariffs, tax exemptions, redistribution of wealth, etc, have nothing to do with the protection of rights.
> It looks to me like the author was building a point about evolutionary bootstrapping of brain growth by eating meat

He actually spoke to 2 separate anthropologists who had different views about our evolutionary diet and he chose to weave them into his own narrative. The second anthropologist, Richard Wrangham wrote the book "Catching Fire: How Cooking Made Us Human" and as you can see below he strongly contradicts the notion that we ate much raw meat

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/05/27/books/27garn.html?_r=1&...

Instead of writing about the differing opinions the author choses to strongly favor one view hide the fact that other is even in disagreement.

> Nothing to get bent about.

I think that deliberate twisting the of truth is something to legitimately get 'bent' about. The sad thing is the more than 50% of the people who see this will come away thinking they are basically saying 'meat makes you smarter' when neither of the views presented suggest anything of the sort.
Instant Feedback From Your Site's Users with Feedbackify
I'm hitting some major slows during registration. Two 504 time outs. Good problem to have. :)
Are you against a group of people forming an organization around an issue and then spending money they raise? How about 10 guys who pool their money to take out an tv ad for candidate they like? Is that ok?
ReturnPath's stuff is a bit more advanced than that. They give you a large list of email addresses to send to (consisting of a number of webmail clients and ISPs). They then pick these up and provide stats on which have and haven't been delivered. They also ran your content through a number of spam filters (including, but not limited to SpamAssassin).

They also provide a whitelisting service (previously the "Bonded Sender" programme) which helps deliverability in a lot of cases, but the primary benefit is that it's pretty much the only way to guarantee delivery of large quantities of email to Hotmail.

So, they are closely involved with deliverability, but you're right in saying that it's down to Mailchimp to keep their sending IPs reputation clean.
Ask HN:  Small personal mailing list?
I'm thinking of working on a small personal mailing list, what software/webapp should I use? I've looked into MailChimp and while it looks good, I'm not planning to make money on this, so not going to pay.
Okay, I'm very impressed. I work at a financial research company so I approached this with a very skeptical eye and was worried that this was going to be "The Idiots Guide to Index Investing" where it just pushed advice without explaining what the methodology was, all wrapped up in some Web 2.0 gradients and rounded corners.

What I found, I'm happy to report, was a lot of technical depth just underneath the surface. When it told me to consider investing in Real Estate, I first scoffed and then clicked the "why this model portfolio?" link and saw all the reasoning, complete with references to original sources.

In short, they managed to strike a nice balance between being user friendly vs overwhelming the users with financial theory.

Great work guys.
I was alarmed to discover the same a few times -- the contract had wide claims on IP, and then there was a separate part which said "of course, these are the enforceable limits according to this particular California law."

It seemed like they were pulling a fast one, but basically they were compartmentalizing so they could claim the maximum rights should the law be struck down or repealed (or the business moved outside California, I guess).
If you'd rather use a webapp, I've been using Nirvana (http://nirvanahq.com) -- basically Things in the browser -- pretty happily for the past couple of weeks.

I was previously a Remember The Milk-er, but was never 100% satisfied with it. Nirvana suits my organizational style much better.
Austin Tech Geeks - New Blog from ATX
Thanks for the feedback, this is in the works. For the second issue, we are planning to push out additional financial institution support in the near future even with the current download method. For the first, you're right that entering manually or even uploading from a standard file format (e.g. csv) will help reduce friction. -Jon
Experimental flaw? The other shirt should have been black or white perhaps.. not a bright sky blue for sure.. may be women dont like that blue color.
If you use Vim, the Align plugin handles this quite well: http://vim.wikia.com/wiki/Align_text_plugin
There are plenty of services around that are capable of this sort of throughput. But I suspect you'd be better off with one catering to larger companies (rather than the Mailchimp/CampaignMonitor type that primarily deal with large number of smaller clients).
MailChimp has the "Forever Free" plan for anyone with up to 500 subscribers and not more than 3,000 emails per month.

How small is your personal list? This seems sufficient.
Indian Celebrities on Twitter
TweetIdol is one stop place for watching all your favorite Celebrities Tweets. TweetIdol shows only Verified Twitter Accounts.
We had problems with Digiums vanishing from lspci and never working again (mid operation). Tech support vanished as well.

Sangoma was a completely different animal. Techsupport wrote patches just for us to help us get going on our wacky custom kernel for embedded devices. I think if you called sangoma and told them what you're up to, you are quite likely to get a steep discount or even free gear.
Writing the "which fds are ready" check twice would be crazy, if neither version were markedly more efficient than the other. Optimization is the only reason to make this particular design decision, and measurement is definitely the right way to go about it.
Hi Jon here from FutureAdvisor. Thanks for the feedback. We're working on allowing you to enter your investments manually which would solve this problem somewhat. A bit less convenient. I'm with you, it would be great for banks and financial institutions to do a read-only password. Quick question, what are your thoughts about using Mint.com?
The massive thing that you're ignoring is that he's trying to make mongrel2 useful as more than a standard web server.

Sure, if you ignore that massively obvious piece of information, you have a point. But if you take it into account, you really don't have one at all.

As so often happens, you've spewed a lot of words, but said absolutely nothing of value.
I personally like Ars Technica as a neutral media outlet with skilled writers and editors.
Looking for feedback on Startup: Buddify
Hey guys

So we launched our social networking site Buddify into public beta about 3 weeks ago, and we've received a lot of positive feedback from our userbase of about 40 daily active users now (~230 total). We got bumped by a few websites including killerstartups and thrillist a few days after we launched and we were absolutely stoked to see people actually using the site, it's a really great feeling :). Now we're in that nice quiet period after the influx of sign ups from a bump has mostly died out, which has given us a chance to quietly fix a few of the silly bugs that managed to get through alpha testing, and also change around several parts of the site. So far so good.

Here's what we've been trying to do to differentiate ourselves from the competition:

- Develop a clean, simple, easy to use interface
- Give the users clear, concise privacy options and choices
- Make it so profiles that actually have a degree of customization
- Implement a private comments system instead of yet another inbox to manage
- Create a very simple sign up process
- Give users the ability to completely hide every trace of your profile from the site temporarily
- No annoying applications, ever.
- Badges (Because everybody loves badges, right?)

Our future short term goals are to implement syndication with Twitter (Once I can get my head around OAuth's processes) and facebook and get a mobile version of the site up and running. We also want to see what else we can do with comments instead of just plain text. Is there anything you guys think we should do/shouldn't do?

I'm a long time reader of hacker news and a first time poster. I'm posting here because I'd love to hear your feedback, insights, suggestions on how we can improve Buddify.

http://www.buddify.com/

Thanks guys,
-Steve :)
we are planning to push out additional financial institution support in the near future even with the current download method

You're never going to cover everything. Also keep in mind that even if you're targetting US users, you're going to have non-US users -- who have non-US investment accounts, and often e.g., pension plans which don't have online access at all.
If your users are moving their data over to another service, then a) it's their prerogative to do so, and b) maybe it says something about your service. "We IP block competitors" is not a bullet point in your defensibility strategy.
I tried to make sure I gave lots of reasons that justify your work; I do think it's cool.

I just wanted to say that it is not an unquestionable design decision.

Rock on with the superpoll, I hope it's awesome and very successful.
Twitpic's solution was to block Rackspace Cloud entirely? I don't know much about their conflict with Posterous but I do know that they're taking a wholly terrible approach
That author is a douchebag.
I used to prefer OmniFocus, but I've lost enough data using it that I have switched entirely to Things. Makes me sad as I am a huge fan of OmniOutliner.
If Appstore is warehouse of shit, then I am sad to say Android Market is a POS.
How would you summarize the state of current research on it? What looks promising? What makes it difficult?
Jon here from FutureAdvisor. Thanks, we're thrilled that people are excited about investing the right way for the long-term. Thanks for being patient.
Perhaps they move out of NYC to a state that doesn't enforce non-competes for years, and then possibly move back.
I love it when a statement begins with "Research shows ..."
Wow, the cottage industry that is Linus Torvalds keeps churning out the goods that make empires (Red Hat, Android) and up-and-comers (github).

"I'm not a businessman; I'm a business, man!" --Jay-Z
the most overpriced for the value they deliver.

For some values of 'value'. Because you can't put a dollar sign on everything, right? I feel much better about the value I got from my humanities classes than I ever did about my computer science classes, whether or not that translates directly into money-earned.