skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I guess I'm not the only person who, while studying (elementary) molecular biology, kept thinking of the Story of Mel:

http://www.catb.org/jargon/html/story-of-mel.html

Mel's design patterns are frighteningly similar to many of the ones used by nature.
For something like this to succeed, I really think you'd need to incorporate an innovative revenue stream or way of obtaining customers. The individual cost of producing each cookie is relatively low, but as many of the posters have indicated, most of your risk lies in being able to keep up with labor, real estate, and capital equipment costs.

If I were you, I'd be sure to have tested, killer cookie recipes, then consider...

-Integrating online ordering system for in-store pickup or shipping

-Cater to fans of vegan baked goods (definitely a burgeoning market segment)

-Work with moms and Susie Homemaker types to determine favorite cookie recipes or trends

-Perhaps use the store as a distribution channel for home-based bakers. I know a lot of people who think they bake "the best" cookies. There's a lot of different directions to take this; profit sharing, recipe licensing, etc.

-Develop an "open source cookie", modified by customer suggestions and input

-Keep a basic product line of old standby cookies (chocolate chip, oatmeal raisin, etc.) and have a secondary product line that's shuffled or changed very frequently (at least once a month)

-Publish an annual book of recipes

-Children influence how their parents spend money. Offer a free cookie on a child's birthday and seek distribution in local schools.

Just my thoughts...not sure if any of them align with what you had in mind. I think this is a very cool idea and could definitely succeed if executed correctly. Good luck!
The Lawsuit Yahoo! Doesn’t Want You to See
I could not help but thinking is she really that bad at logic and math, or does she think so little of her audience that we would let it pass?

Microscopic sample + delayed effect = no meaningful data.

PS: My sister was working as a plant geneticist for a while until she quit teaching yoga. Their might be an ongoing disparity but guessing from small samples is not enough.
Energy Shares Slip As Oil Falls
Tech Stocks Claim Early High Ground
That's an amusing idea, but it is not the case. I used Lisp extensively at the MIT AI Lab, at Symbolics (I was a founder), and now at ITA Software. The people worked together as teams very well in all places. The fact that you're using Lisp does not change the need to work together on design, conventions, architecture, etc, not to mention code reviews. The only top-grade hacker I ever worked with who could not work with others was using C++ (not that I think it matters).
Bernanke signals more rate cuts unlikely
Survey of VCs shows which regions have best technology
I hate to say it, but I think this is a very temporary fluctuation.
What are those "x" URLs blocked in the robots.txt for HN?
One Word For Zemanta: Useful
Writing an Interface Style Guide
C succeeded because it was the language of Unix, and it rode to success on Unix's success. C++ did indeed succeed because so many people knew C. Java has very little to do with C, except for the surface syntax, which makes it look as if it is similar to C, but its semantics are not like C at all.

You do not need to throw away everything you know to use Lisp. 90% of what you have spent your time on when you learn programming applies to Lisp just as well as any other language: variables, procedures, iteration, and on and on. At ITA, when we hire new hackers who don't know Lisp, we just give them a copy of Peter Seibel's excellent book "Practical Common Lisp", and they quickly pick it up.

Common Lisp, as it is used in real-world practice, isn't nearly as strange as many people think. (Yes, we have a job to do to explain that to the world.) It's not a new paradigm the way Prolog or Haskell are. You can get started, doing the kinds of things you do in Java, very quickly. Now, learning all the more-powerful stuff, like Lisp macros and how to effectively and tastefully use them, and more advanced object-oriented features of CLOS, does take some time to learn. But, then, learning all the useful stuff in the Java libraries takes time to learn, too, even if you're the best C programmer in the world.
cool didnt know. but i guess especially companies dont mind paying for good programmingenvironments.
Wall Street begins week focusing on inflation
In a free market it will fail, yes. Only trouble is that the Telecoms aren't really a competitive market. In each of the 4 places I've lived in my life I've had only one viable highspeed ISP option. Don't like their service? Too bad, I either deal with it or go without internet. Under those conditions I don't see how consumers will have much of a choice but to take it on the chin and pay the fees. I'm actually hoping somebody will comment on this and set me straight.
Very hand-waving maths... With that kind of rigorous mathematical model you could also prove that Microsoft is worth more than the entire world economy.

Calculations in terms of fictitious dollars are rarely useful for anything other than getting yourself excited.
Where is this person getting "10% of total sales"? Sounds like an overestimate to me. I personally don't use the ratings or recommendations on Netflix.
Staples Ups Corporate Express Bid As Sector Shares Inch High
Note how a friend of MagLev devs points out that it's "up to 60x", which technically could mean anything including "60x for one specific case and 1x for the rest of them"

No; you're intentionally distorting things. "Up to 60x" is a quote from Sho's piece, and I just pointed out that he uses this claim inconsistently.

Later in the piece, I note that I don't know if MagLev will be even 10x faster when released.
I was one of the designers at BEA for four years. (BEA made WebLogic, a leading J2EE server.) Indeed, J2EE requires a lot of annoying boilerplate. Yes, you have to let the IDE handle it for you, which is fine for writing code but not so great for reading (someone else's, or even your own) code.

I will assert, though I can't demonstrate it, that had this been done in Lisp, the boilerplate problem could have been substantially alleviated by using Lisp macros. One piece of evidence: J2EE has improved this problem substantially by using Java's relatively-new "annotation" feature, which, broadly speaking, has some of the same mojo as Lisp macros, when used properly.

On the other hand, you can do a lot better even in Java. Look at Spring and the other new post-J2EE frameworks. The experience with J2EE has led to learning and improvement in these new "dependency-injection" frameworks, which is definitely a good thing for the Java world.
This is the thing.. My experience dictates that I'll pick up RoR pretty quickly, but what really makes or breaks a framework is what happens when you try to do things outside of basic CRUD administrative interface stuff. I find it takes at least a couple of months of serious coding before you REALLY get to know what a framework's about.

... or is that just because cakePHP is badly documented? :)
Mine is an MVNO that sells mobile phones to kids. There are web application components, but there's a lot more to it than that.
Exactly. If your IDE can just generate it, then why is it needed at all? And, as I said, it makes the code harder to read. You have to look over all the boilerplate and see if it's all exactly the usual boilerplate, or whether one or two methods in there were manually improved. If the IDE has to generate it, it means that the programming language is expressing your wishes at too low a level of abstraction, rather than more-directly reflecting what you were trying to say in the first place. So you have hit the nail precisely on the head.
Why? The time to search a three entry vtable (or whatever) is still an order of magnitude lower than the time to fetch the thing from main memory in the first place. Performance optimization stopped being about instruction cycle counting a few years back.
Free access to the AI Journal
I'm not going to disagree about Blender's interface; I don't like it much, either. But I am used to other 3D programs, so perhaps I am not the best judge.

UI is a tricky thing, especially in graphics applications, where once you're used to one application, the others feel wrong. And especially in 3D applications, where there's no standardization -- look at Max and Maya, both now from the same company, or look at ZBrush, whose interface is equal parts brilliance and lunacy (although version 3 is much improved).

This is not merely an open-source vs. proprietary thing; Blender's interface was at least as bad when it was a proprietary product. Wings3D, on the other hand, has one of my favorite interfaces. It's open source, but its interface is inspired by Nendo, a defunct commercial product.
Yes. That's why you want a multi-paradigm language, in which all of those methods of writing code are available. The trick is to figure out how to provide all of them in a way that is well-integrated. I feel that Common Lisp does this very well. For example, when you want a method to get called, you don't use a special "send message" operator; you use a generic function. It looks just like a function call, to the caller; the fact that this call is doing a method dispatch is part of its internal implementation, rather than part of its externally-visible contract.

One reason Lisp has survived so long because it is capable of absorbing so many of the good new programming ideas as they come along. (No, it's not perfect this way, but it's pretty darned good.)
The universe is expanding at an ever-increasing rate.
It's true that when people learn object-oriented programming, and they learn about inheritance, they tend to think that inheritance is something you should be using heavily all over the place. It takes some experience to learn where inheritance is proper and where there are better ways of doing things, such as delegation.

I don't think OOP is that hard to learn, but I do agree that learning to use it very effectively in the best and most tasteful way takes time and experience. But that's true of so many aspects of software design; I don't think OOP is all that different in this regard.
How are you 'destroying your customers[sic] health'?

Cookies and Milk are perfectly healthy in moderation - and if a customer chooses to over-indulge, that is their business alone.

Remember personal responsibility?
Does anyone have experience with recommendation services like MyBuys?
I guess so, but actually I don't think that Java and CLOS have such a different idea of what OOP means. They just have different specific features. CLOS has multimethods and multiple inheritance; Java has explicit interfaces.

Frankly, multiple inheritance, and multimethods, are nice tools when you need them, but I'd say that most of the time, you don't. (Let me clarify that. Doing what Java does with multiple inheritance of interfaces IS very important, and it would be very bad to leave that out. What Java cannot do, namely multiple inheritance of implementation, is much less crucial. And you can very often get around it by using delegation. See "The Treaty of Orlando" which asserts that multiple inheritance and delegation have the same inherent power. (This was formulated at an OOPSLA conference in the 80's; Henry Lieberman was one of the main authors.)

Anyway, my point is that Java does indeed have limitations, but the fundamental concepts are very similar to those in CLOS.
Why bother, if you're on the up and up?
"Irregardless" just sounds ugly. It forces too much of a stress on the r and creates a sort of growling sound.
I think he took the quote of a netflix guy saying that they can make "some" movies perform like they were doing $1M at the box office to mean that they can make all 70,000 movies earn $100,000 in rentals. I find this hard to believe. This means they can make $100,000 renting, for example, Seamless which has an average rating of 1.535 stars.

All of hollywood did no more than $10 B last year at the box office - I suspect all revenue is no more than $50 B.
Uh, not borderline, friend. Posting announcements like this on elance.com and the like would most definitely be spam, and most definitely unwelcome.

Why not announce to various blogs and tech-news aggregators? TechCrunch, TechMeme, Slashdot, Webware, AppScout might all be good places to announce a new app.

Buy an ad on Facebook. Start a group on facebook. Get your friends to sign up and promise to invite at least 2 other friends that don't know anyone else already signed up.

But don't, under any circumstances, post your announcement where it will be OT - that's what makes the internet suck.
Thank you for your suggestions everyone.

I was expecting much different answers, so this is interesting. It sounds like there probably isn't any real reason to not continue with PHP, which will be quicker to get up to speed with current standards.

I'll do some more research on the options suggested though.

Thank you,
John.
Well I was really thinking about twitter replacements, as I said - what if the whole net would work like twitter? I update my blog and I want it to be known instantly. Google does not provide it yet.

But I have also thought about mail, perhaps it would be easiest to replace Twitter with "micromailing", and use existing software solutions. Difference is of course the "only receive messages from people I subscribe to" thing, but that should only make it easier.

Edit: also, google mail doesn't do polling, so maybe it is very different after all. It's a completely different architecture. Maybe Twitter would work better with an inbox-per-user model, but I wouldn't bet on it.

Another difference: most emails don't go to dozens of recipients at the same time. Tweets often have several hundred recipients.
It's good to see a lot of the techniques proven useful by the Lua interpreter showing up for other languages. The author states that he's no longer convinced of the importance of JITs. I still think that they're going to be an increasingly important advancement for dynamic language implementations. For example, the LuaJIT developed by Mike Pall shows speedups of 3-5x over the (already very fast) reference Lua interpreter.

http://luajit.org/luajit_performance.html

Thank goodness for open source. The best ideas and techniques will propagate until we have multiple high quality implementations readily available.

¡Viva La Revolución!
The future of technology: why Turkish delight beats the nanobots
Some blog software, like wordpress, will ping services when you post something new. http://codex.wordpress.org/Update_Services
Really? For the majority of human history, it hasn't been.

For the majority of human history, there has been but a tiny fraction of copyrightable material compared to what has existed over the past, say, 200 years.

It is? To whom? Surely not to people enjoying music - infringing copyright has made more people listen to more music.

It's harmful to the producers. It's not cheap or easy to put together a professional music recording. Producers wish to both recover the costs of production, and have funds available to live on and produce more.

In a government based on the US Constitution, only if such regulation and law "promotes the progress of useful arts".

Yes. If you allow the producers to profit from their works, then they will have both the funds and more motiviation to continue producing more.

U.S. copyright law began with discussions between educator Noah Webster and lawyer Daniel Webster. Noah had completed new textbooks for use in the public school system, which he had based on existing works. Nevertheless, his books were new productions, and he wanted to have control over how they were copied; he wanted to be able to profit from the production of his works. (Noah was never a very rich man, by the way; don't get the idea he was insanely wealthy and scavaging for more.)

Daniel Webster agreed wholeheartedly, that authors should have the right to how their works are copied and should get royalty payments for a limited time. He claimed this was so obvious it was like "natural law"... as obvious as laws against murdering and theft.

Some people in recent history (e.g., the RIAA and other big corporations) have taken copyright law to absurd and abusive levels, and that is wrong. But the basic principles of it -- to allow the author of a work rights over who copies it and rights to limited royalty payments -- are not absurd and do contribute to the furthering of more and better works.
At least cookies are addictive (sugar), in general, I would not agree to the "perfectly healthy" notion - I am not a physician, though.

Also, I think as a cookie shop owner, you will want your customers to eat as many cookies as possible. I want to see the shop owner deny entry for everybody who is too heavy? Don't think it would happen.

How many cookies per customer would be ok, you reckon? Because that number could be factored into the business plan nicely.
Actually, I live in an area with Comcast, Charter, and reasonable DSL. Holy moly! Yeah, they'd still get away with it.
Mayor Bloomberg Unveils New York City Venture Fund (NYC Seed)
I agree. it is incorrect. Quantitatively it is the high sigma in Gaussian distribution.
It doesn't matter that the target audience works on Windows. That's no excuse to make hideous looking software.

The argument he uses for creating a great environment for his programmers works the same way regarding his software-- creating a really nice place for his customers to work will hopefully make them happier.
Hmm, that is already done extensively in the marine and aerospace industry? Maybe since you are talking about the mold itself rather than the plug it is new, but take a look. This is hardly an authoritative link, just something I saw about an hour ago, but that is basically the way all boats are made today. http://www.49er.org/images/stories/pdf/49erforward.pdf
“Management" is a Dirty Word
It's not "my" startup, but I work at Bug Labs (buglabs.net), we are trying to make an open source mobile hardware platform.
Google Sites. All open. Now what?
However, Tamarin has a much better name.
Why would they pay when there are perfectly good compilers already available for free, such as GCC?
Jimmy Wales: Wikia Search Finally Doesn’t Suck
Quick summary:

"Unveiled on Monday evening as part of New York’s Internet Week, NYC Seed will provide up to $200,000 of investment into New York-based technology start-ups."

http://www.nycseed.com/

"We encourage first-time founders. There is no set formula for why we invest in a company, but there are some qualities we would like to see. We are looking for a team with a compelling idea that makes sense today. Your team should be technically savvy, with members that possess a proven record of completing complex technology projects. We will ask to review a prototype of your product. "

Note: Must be in NYC.
The Plight of the Ad-Technology Startup
Why should one person always pay for shared meals?
Don't use mod_python
You should probably stop spamming the 'new' page with business stories.
I can only guess this is an attempt to make NYC startup scene more competitive. I think this is a really cool thing for a city to do, maybe more cities need to take note?
It is not a C++ compiler, it is a compiler written in C++. It compiles XML Schema to C++ but other target languages are in the works.

As for who would pay for this, manually parsing any substantial XML vocabulary using DOM or SAX is a major PITA so there are always people willing to pay for automating this task.
Tech Jaws Feeding Frenzy Week #1 | Tech Jaws
Ask HN: tutorials on using the file system for storing data?
I have to admit it, I am always extremely scared of simply using the file system for storing data. What if something happens in the middle of a write operation? How to avoid data corruption?

Another thing is I am not sure how to write data effectively, or is that covered with random access files? Like say some data item in the middle of the file changes, can I just change it on the spot?

Just saying, I am clueless about this. Maybe there are some tutorials for people who want to understand this alternative to using databases?
I'm trying to make micro-organisms that make fuel and drugs.
After a successful interview, both sides know whether the answers to all of "can, will, fit" are yes.

The other mistake that companies make is in the description that they use to find people. If a description says "{framework}" and nothing else, folks are going to assume that {framework} is your problem and that you don't have anything else. If you're developing {framework}, that's reasonable, but if it's just a tool being used correctly, it isn't your problem and you should talk more about what you want folks to do with {framework}.
Have you considered using Amazon SimpleDB? Its a very simple and fast way to persist data. Avoids the scaling and implementation headaches associated with a typical database.
Avoid taxes. It's legit. I'm sure there are catches and that I don't understand all the dynamics.
Apple and Google's awkward mobile marriage: Why Apple needs Google
8 Things I Wish I Knew When I Was 22
"I used Lisp extensively at the MIT AI Lab, at Symbolics (I was a founder), and now at ITA Software. The people worked together as teams very well in all places."

That probably tells more about the people and environment of MIT AI Lab, Symbolics and ITA Software than the team dynamics of Lisp.
It isn't the shop owner's problem to stop customers from eating too much. It's the customer's.

The health risks of over-eating are fairly well understood; I think the person eating is best qualified to do the cost benefit analysis for themselves.

You may have a case if he were selling to unsupervised children who can't make these sort of decisions for themselves - but adults can. Even if sugar were physically addictive, and I doubt that it is, that doesn't magically absolve a consumer of their responsibilities. We're still humans with free will.

Frankly, if a restaurant tried to figure out how much food I 'should' eat I would refuse to do business with them - it's just insulting.
There are a million reasons but let me give you a simple one: if it can produce faster code.

Giving 10% performance improvement in some fields (games?) is worth a metric buttload of money.
For offshore incorporation, get a lawyer. Worth every penny.
Detractors of UTF-8 often point to the "inefficiency" of counting characters as a reason not to use it for Unicode. I'm glad to see that this is not a valid concern.
One Laptop per Child & Corruption: A Tale of 2 Cities
The idea behind the OLPC project is quite laudable but in Africa, to be specific, in Nigeria, the project is being frustrated by corrupt government officials who it is rumored have taken bribes from Computer manufacturers who intend to introduce their ultra low cost PC's into the country and also subtle pressure from the "Red Devils from Redmond". Also, due to the gross ignorance of the Minister of Education who said this "Children are not supposed to use computers, only adults should, so we are planning to introduce compulsory computer education to universities and colleges". You might ask, what do african children need computers for, in the light of hunger, war and other things plaguing the continent, but i dont think this is so, technology can be used to leap frog the continent into rapid development, and also increase the standard of living of africans. I wish this to be taken as a petition to people of this forum to mount pressure on the Governments of 3rd world countries to do what is right.
Coda Slider Effect using JQuery