skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Ask HN: Tierless web programming with JavaScript?
Parallel question on SO: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/4597167/tierless-web-framework-with-javascript

Links is a lisp-like functional web programming language/framework that makes it easy to write a single piece of code that is compiled to server-side code, client-side JS and HTML, thus making it much easier to write web applications. Since there really is no distinction between the client and server side, they call it "tierless" programming. With the advent of Server-side JS, are there any comparable frameworks with JS? Note that I don't just mean writing server side and client side code in the same language, but writing server-side and client-side functions that can call each other and generate the HTML. Have a look at Links or HOP to get a better idea for what I am talking about. Is there a tierless web framework for JavaScript?
[sigh] glutamate != monosodium glutamate. Those have glutamate but not necessarily MSG...
A single stage rocket can't possibly reach the moon. There's a reason why big rockets have 3 stages (actually more like 4 stages for the Saturn V).
You can run Erlang on JVM it's called Erjang [1].

The author of the project claim, that with time Erjang will be better/faster than Erlang, since JVM getting improved faster, than standard Erlang VM - BEAM.

[1] http://www.javalimit.com/2009/12/erjang-why.html
Of course. I thought that was implicit, sorry. What I don't agree with is the article's proposal to start over.
Because most people don't have their network provider with them upon arrest.

For instance if when arrested you had 1kg of contraband on you it would be admissible, for instance if when arrested you had 1kg of contraband at your network provider's NOC then they'd need a warrant to search it.
I wouldn't say it is not allowed, just that it is distracting and takes away from the article. I didn't find it relevant or poignant enough to overcome the initial shock. I skimmed the article afterward but the only thing I took away from it was how jarring the intro was. I'm not just being prude, in a different context the lyrics wouldn't bother me.

Of course, I'm not the arbiter of social conventions but many times you ignore them at your own peril.

As an aside, if you are well known for breaking certain social conventions or are influential enough you can usually get away with it without much criticism. Nobody is going to scold Steve Jobs because he wears a black turtleneck to a board meeting instead of a suit.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monosodium_glutamate#Health_con...

On one hand most of the linked studies were likely paid for by food companies. On the other hand, considering the wide variety of sources that MSG averse people don't react to, claims that it's psychosomatic seem fairly reasonable.
I don't disagree with that. Especially in a Private, Christian school for students who are sent there specifically because they want to excel in education.

Though my contrarian side would ask whether full laptops would be more appropriate for such an enviornment
Exactly. All the more reason that the efforts of Participatory Politics Foundation and Sunlight Foundation with OpenGovernment are needed. Even better, it's open source, so we can all dig in and do our part to help better prevent this madness from happening right under our noses.

We also plan to have them on a future podcast episode. Maybe later this month or early next after they launch the beta.
Just use the "submit" link above and don't include a URL: http://ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html
Poll: Ask HN: Would you Pay for a Chrome extension?
I've started looking into developing a chrome extension to help people visually analyze social data both passively and actively (this poll is not about the merits/value of my idea). I'm curious what others think of charging/paying for a browser extension. I'm not familiar with the history of Firefox extensions, but as a recent observer it seems Google's Chrome has a lot going for it like Google login, and checkout.

Simply put, if it solved a problem or created some value would you open your wallet (sorry I'm sometimes direct like that).
Not...yet
I've always figured it was, and consequently I've never really hated Microsoft. I've always been impressed with what they managed, and by extension impressed by the man. It probably helps that I didn't personally suffer the worst of their marauding.
Yeah I knew that. I was just trying to make the point that I wasn't biased against Apple. If you look at Samuel_Michon's comment history you'll see he comes out fiercely in favor of Apple even going so far as to attack pro-Apple people for not being pro-Apple enough. So I was making the point to him that I wasn't trying to push Android.
Really interesting
I'll admit to not having great command of the statistics, but I don't see how the numbers you posted refute any of my points, and I don't appreciate your little quip of condescension at the end.

First, spending on social security, medicare, income security, and domestic programs is of a qualitatively different nature than military spending, bailouts, and the interest payments you mention in that it is inserted directly into the real economy instead of being diverted and for the most part removed for good. Yes, some small portion of the military budget really is for 'National Defense' and so would come closer to domestic spending, and perhaps some portion of the bailout funds wind up in the economy instead of banks in Zurich or Dubai, but the bulk of it is simply absconded. So you must strongly weight the impacts of these different types of expenditures in relation to each other to gauge their true comparative impacts, which you haven't addressed.

Second, the monetary base is only a small part of the picture since this only includes physical currency and highly liquid assets. $1.2T is an enormous expansion that constitutes a doubling of the base, but much more important are M3 and MZM since these include credit, which contributes exponentially more to inflation and wealth transfer due to fractional reserve banking, which is only possible on anything remotely close to this scale in a fiat system. This graph illustrates my point quite well, and it only shows up to M2, presumably since the Fed stopped reporting the even more damning statistics: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Components_of_US_Money_sup.... So again you have ignored or confused critical factors.

The last point you left unaddressed is opportunity cost, which is really the core of my argument. In a sound economy with sufficient resources available, the capital stock (wealth) increases on an exponential scale, not linearly, because the more capital that exists, the more that can be invested in creating even more capital. Therefore, interfering with this process of accumulation through wealth transfers and the instability caused by monetary manipulations has deceptively gargantuan opportunity costs. All the resources that are funneled into bombs and guns are employed in actively destroying capital when they would otherwise be accelerating its accumulation. Likewise for resources funneled into estates, yachts, and private jets for finance industry billionaires that SHOULD have gone into producing capital goods for the real economy. If you truly consider the full consequences of these policies and the functional relationships involved, the implications are almost unbelievably staggering.
Perhaps even better would be to download it, and then send a letter + payment to the studio and explain that you wanted to pay for their excellent film but also wanted to download it for convenience. If enough people did this it might encourage them to provide the service you want.

I doubt it. It's clear that the only thing the studios respond to is their bottom line. There is simply no way Netflix streaming, Spotify, etc would exist if it weren't for piracy. We'd still be buying high-margin CDs and DVDs.

Saying "Your product wasn't available in the format that I wanted, so I torrented it and gave you this money to compensate you" is hardly going to convince them to change their ways. They might sue you though: there's lots of money in that.
I don't think I am. I never said Aaron and the potential designers are in the same position. I was merely responding to sudont's notion that a person's time must always be compensated by an up-front, cash contract. In reality, people spend their time on many things for many different reasons.

My understanding is http://www.no-spec.com/ is a reaction to businesses exploiting designers through spec work (if that's wrong, please enlighten me). There is no one exploiting anyone here, just a developer who would like his open source, zero revenue, app to look presentable.

A designer who only opens photoshop for cash probably won't be interested, but a designer who also loves to design in their free time may.

In that way, Aaron and a potential designer may very well be similar. They don't treat their craft as a day job, but more as a lifestyle.
Salman Taseer Dies in Islamabad
Actually, it is very much a chemical. All food is chemicals.

That's literally true, but not the intended meaning. Chemical has become a synonym for "man-made". It's a useful distinction. If you were forced to choose between eating 100g of a random "chemical" molecule, or 100g of a random "natural" molecule, you would be much better off with the latter.

True, scientific studies can show that chemical X is harmless, but.... only if the study was done over a very long time. Only if it was done properly. Only if the scientists didn't receive their financing from BigCo.

It's perfectly reasonable to be wary of "chemicals", heuristically.

EDIT: To be clear, I'm not one of these people living in mistrust of chemicals. But I understand where they're coming from, especially if they have a poor grasp of science. A reasonable move for Kasparov (e.g.: sacrificing his queen for tactical advantage) might be a terrible move for me in the same situation.
Akka has a Java API, too.
I'm 100% with you on your goal, it's a noble act to mentor someone with the spirit that you appear to be applying.

However, it sounds like you are giving them preferential treatment. You say it's just different, but then if those differences aren't available to others they might also advantage it is a preferential treatment.

I guess one could argue it's not preferential in that you'd give the same assistance to another ex-addict.

Personally I don't think you have to help everyone just because you're helping someone, ie preferential treatment doesn't seem wrong to me a priori.
Can they compel you to give your phone's password? Otherwise, when in Cali I'm just going to use a password to lock my iPhone
He's only ever really had to answer to himself, right? From what I know of him, he probably likes that a lot more than having to answer to a bunch of shareholders.
Interesting Startup Idea: Photo Sharing (etc) for Couples...
Warning: Facebook Scam & How To Avoid It
They could do it twice. Buy before unblocking it and then short before blocking it again.
For reference, the link to Whole Foods "Unacceptable Ingredients" list is here: http://www.wholefoodsmarket.com/products/unacceptable-ingred...
I give a Facebook Phone 1000:1 odds. More likely is that they are banging their heads against their desks trying to figure out how to make money off 500 million users.
Also, DMB got famous from the "old" music industry when you could still make some money by selling CDs. I'm tired of the "now that the label has made me famous, who needs labels" and "now that I've had N platinum albums, who needs to sell albums" stories; I'd like to hear about a new artist who succeeded without help from the industry.
I have been living and working here in Chile for the last 11 years. From my perspective, the biggest obstacle is the shaky, scrabbling middle class (to which I belong). The class separation here is rather pronounced. There's the rich class, which consists of a small share of the society which concentrates obscene wealth (compared to the rest) and is attainable almost exclusively through birth or marriage. Then there's the poor class, which is full of people with scarce resources; they excel at poverty because there's little or no "credit culture" (or whatever it's properly called) here, so they live in debt.

The rest of us belong to the middle class and are being kept on our toes, lest we suddenly join the poor. Any bill that gets passed usually favors either the poor or the rich. If you default on your debt or anything like that, your name and info will end up in Dicom (the local Equifax), which is often enough to bury your prospects of employment indefinitely, even after you've paid off your debt and normalized your situation.

So you see, that's where the fear of failure comes from: if you have a stable, well-paid job, there's not much incentive to risk it for a startup.
It's troublesome if you want to invest in facebook. Facebook has 10x as many users as myspace, and they've translated that into a great deal of hype. But they've yet to translate it into sizable revenue, let alone into profit.
>You are being disingenuous btw -- this is not like the gender question at all.

I beg to differ. Could you provide some reasoning?

>but there would be good reason to be wary

If you're not discriminating then it doesn't matter if they're a current drug addict, a past drug addict, partner of a drug addict - you judge them solely on their performance at work.

I say discriminate.
Be available outside the US.
I've never understood 'gone missing'. Wherever the money was last is where is it right? These are numbers, not poofs of air.
Anyone know how he handles scheduling with Erjang? That's where Erlang's advantages come from, mostly.
Startups: Need a voiceover for a video? Hire this homeless guy
Right. I understand the legality of it, however I was more referring to the moral case.

Since a court order has to be argued for, it should also hold true that a search of an electronic data store would also require more than just plain-sight standards, especially given a scrap of paper in my pocket feels to me not 'plain sight' equivalent to a text message on a phone, or an email on my computer.

I think this is just one more instance of our collective false understanding in the legal system as to how data, electronics and the like truly work - and we're going to have to wait it out longer before this stuff is all better represented.
The only thing they got wrong in these commercials is that they weren't the ones to bring it to us.
It's harder than it appears...

http://www.fastcompany.com/node/47593/print

"The gallon jar reshaped Vlasic's pickle business: It chewed up the profit margin of the business with Wal-Mart, and of pickles generally. Procurement had to scramble to find enough pickles to fill the gallons, but the volume gave Vlasic strong sales numbers, strong growth numbers, and a powerful place in the world of pickles at Wal-Mart. Which accounted for 30% of Vlasic's business. But the company's profits from pickles had shriveled 25% or more, Young says--millions of dollars.

Young remembers begging Wal-Mart for relief. "They said, 'No way,' " says Young. "We said we'll increase the price"--even $3.49 would have helped tremendously--"and they said, 'If you do that, all the other products of yours we buy, we'll stop buying.' It was a clear threat." Hunn recalls things a little differently, if just as ominously: "They said, 'We want the $2.97 gallon of pickles. If you don't do it, we'll see if someone else might.' I knew our competitors were saying to Wal-Mart, 'We'll do the $2.97 gallons if you give us your other business.' " Wal-Mart's business was so indispensable to Vlasic, and the gallon so central to the Wal-Mart relationship, that decisions about the future of the gallon were made at the CEO level.

Finally, Wal-Mart let Vlasic up for air. "The Wal-Mart guy's response was classic," Young recalls. "He said, 'Well, we've done to pickles what we did to orange juice. We've killed it. We can back off.' " Vlasic got to take it down to just over half a gallon of pickles, for $2.79. Not long after that, in January 2001, Vlasic filed for bankruptcy--although the gallon jar of pickles, everyone agrees, wasn't a critical factor."

(Fascinating article over all, well worth the full read.)
Your entire argument boils down to casting deflation as a boogie man. Prices decreasing is a GOOD thing. It allows you to afford more and better stuff. Exhibit A: the consumer electronics industry.

Yes, deflationary collapses that are preceded by artificially induced inflationary booms cause massive pain. This is why we shouldn't have artificially induced inflationary booms. They massively misdirect resources and create a necessity for a massive restructuring, which is painful and destabilizing, but necessary and inevitable to return to economic viability. You are confusing the heroin with the withdrawal, the alcohol with the hangover, the sickness with the cure.
Many, many posts on HN from people who think that with all the newbies posting irrelevant content and Reddit links, HN is definitely going down the drain.
Routers that run Tor software
will check it out, thanks
Well if he wants to pull more stunts like Beacon, being a public company may well be the best thing for Facebook.
Ben Horowitz's "ben's blog" always leads off with a thematic rap lyric; it works pretty well in some cases, but fails in others.

Ok. This is something I touched on in another comment: if you're known for breaking a certain type of social convention than you can often times get away with it, without much criticism.

So this was probably normal to his blog readers but confusing to those of us who were exposed to it for the first time.

Thanks for the explanation. It made me reexamine my initial knee-jerk reaction.
As a longtime Lisp observer, I can't say that I've ever seen Jon Harrop conduct himself as a "heavyweight" in forums unrelated to OCaml, Mathematica, or F#.
Mellow Out or You Will Pay: Satire Now a Crime in California
You touch upon a very important point. For some reason we are very bad at Bayesian reasoning. Sometime it leads to unsubtantiable opinions http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1909576 but could be very damaging if faulty reasoning is used by a jury or a judge...."the person can be guilty or not guilty so the probabilities are 50:50".

I would be a lot more relieved if people with the power over other peoples lives grokked Baye's rule and priors.
Mixpanel - Internships. A story.
Mixpanel is looking for summer interns.

In 2008, I interned at Slide, Inc and it was one of the most valuable summers of my life. I went from college hacker interested in starting a company to learning deeply about product design and what it was like to work on a team.

That summer I was fortunate enough to work with an awesome PM, Adora (who taught me the essentials of product development) and Max Levchin. I am still not sure why Max ended up working so closely on the product we working on. Our product was new and had the least business value of all the things Slide was working on but it was still exciting. If I had to say, I think he just liked that we worked so hard on it.

At Slide, I was determined to work hard. I wanted to know if hard work paid off so I worked from 10am to 12am. It did: Slide offered me a full-time but I declined.

At the end of the summer I had huge takeaways:

- I knew I wanted to start a company. Immediately.

- I knew grad school didn't matter out in California

- I didn't realize it at the time but I grew a huge network of fellow Slide people ("Slide" mafia). Some of these people are my closest friends now.

- I learned so much about product, working with others, and how real companies "do it."

- I learned smaller things like: git, python, vim, etc.

- I could've never built Mixpanel without having been at Slide first.

If you're looking for a similar experience to my own, Mixpanel can provide this.
Apply for an internship: http://mixpanel.com/internships/ or jobs@mixpanel.com

Sincerely,

Suhail Doshi

Founder
I love the site. Awesome. However, I'd love to be able to understand the video... please put some captions on it for people who can't hear too well. :)
I do ... one of the nice things about HN is the quality of its human filter!

But to address the cumulative comments made by 10smom below, here's the snippet from her profile - "I am a Female, self funded, Startup Entrepreneur". From what I've seen lurking around here for a year or so, you're best bet is to ask for feedback on your start-up. You'll either get accolades or at least constructive criticism but I strongly doubt you'll get into an argument like this one.

If you're thick-skinned enough to be an entrepreneur, I'm sure you can forget about this thread ... let's just start over as though we'd never met you.

And if you're worthy of karma, people will realize that over time and you'll get it. I started following patio11 a long time before he was a rising karma star, but if you read his comments here and his blog at http://www.kalzumeus.com, you'll realize why he has (and deserves) so much respect.

Pleased to meet you 10smom!
Ask HN: what about the law of 500? Is it a good law ?
Maybe DMB and DHH should do a startup tour. DHH could do a parody called "Cash into me"
Hand-held gaming device with MSP430 launchpads
Then they should do many round-trips:

1. Long $FCBK
2. Unblock facebook.com
3. Sell $FCBK
4. Short $FCBK
5. Block facebook.com
6. Cover $FCBK
7. go to #1
letscrate.com <- Currently on appsumo.com for 7$- lifetime membership. Which is nuts. Unlimited individual file limit, 10gb cap limit. It looks like an easy fix for you in this situation.

www.appsumo.com

Note*- I'm in no way affiliated with letscrate, or appsumo- just sending things your way!
Can someone please, please explain this to me? I've never understood why the oft stated line "extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence" is anything other than a clever saying. Why should it be that things that follow your intuition require any less rigor to prove than those that do not, and vice versa? Presumably there should be no subjectivity to cold hard science; evidence is evidence, and a certain quantity of evidence should reflect fact equally well regardless of how unusual that fact is.

edit: just to note, nowhere in constructing a statistical test is it required that the creator decide how "extraordinary" the null hypothesis is.
Well let's see, the choice of license is a starting point. The EPL is, per se, a bad license (intentionally incompatible with the GPL and with the showstopping choice-of-venue clause), but it's ubiquitous in Java land so we'll let them off.

In case you hadn't noticed, Oracle is widely considered to be an enemy of open source, so pointing out similarities with their processes isn't hugely helpful. In fact, contributor agreements are reviled by a large segment of the open source community (see the fights that go on whenever this subject comes up on LWN, one of the less flame-infested pro-OSS sites). This example is a particularly bad CA because it is effectively a full grant. The only way it could be worse would be a total transfer of copyright.

Finally, unlike any other projects I'm aware of, Clojure requires the agreement to be printed out, signed, then snail mailed to a foreign country. There is no reason for this other than to deter potential contributors. I've accepted one CA in the past - after fixing a crash in a little-exercised part of Ogre3D I figured the change was so minor that they could own the copyright on it as far as I was concerned. Would I have submitted the fix if I had to post a letter to New York? Not bloody likely.

Other projects (Android is a notable example) are widely derided for this sort of approach to open source - why does Clojure get a free pass?