skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Yeah, but Chris is just so damn handsome ;) I'd give him a pass
I see what you mean, but creating a DSL on top of a grammar like C's is more like creating a jargon than a language. Like when you catch two astronauts talking, you can't make out any of the nouns, some of the verbs, but the structure is still familiar - it's English (or Chinese, or Russian) with a new set of nouns and verbs. You don't have a domain-specific language - you just have domain-specific words.

Languages such as Lisp are uniquely well suited for that because you can redefine almost anything, including language parts that other languages consider reserved words. With it, you can create other language that's free to create not only its own verbs and nouns, but its own grammar rules.
http://reprap.org/wiki/Main_Page
Maps was an acquisition. Most every innovative product Google has in the marketplace was an acquisition.
Your basic facts are wrong. The cost of author royalties is about 15% of the total retail price.

Here's a good breakdown for you.

http://journal.bookfinder.com/2009/03/breakdown-of-book-cost...

Based on a list price of $27.95:

$3.55 - Pre-production

$2.83 - Printing

$2.00 - Marketing

$2.80 - Wholesaler

$4.19 - Author Royalties

$12.58 - Profit

Some costs other than printing also go away with ebooks. Pre-production becomes cheaper because the design and typography are typically discarded. Marketing gets cheaper when there are no books to mail or galleys to pre-produce for reviewers. Wholesale costs are gone, because distribution is streamlined to go directly from the publisher to Amazon, Apple, or whomever.

An $28 hardcover, sold exclusively as an ebook, could quite comfortably be sold for $15-$20 and still cover all the author, production, and marketing costs without losing any profit for the publisher.

When sold in conjunction with a hardback, as most ebooks are, the price can go even lower. Just as with paperbacks, the sunk costs are borne by the hardback. This is why a $28 hardcover becomes a $14 paperback - and why it could easily be a $10 ebook.
Here is my contribution to Unix friendly JSON command line tools (requires Node.js and NPM): https://github.com/zpoley/json-command. Here are a couple other good ones:
http://kmkeen.com/jshon/
https://github.com/micha/jsawk
It ocurred to me that this will be useful for things like Chrome extensions too, where the code is downloaded once and stored locally, and the user doesn't mind a longer download in this case.
Show HN: We're partnering with entrepreneurs to bring founders deals
Interesting side note:

Did you know the law or precedent being cited that allows customs to seize computers, cell phones, etc can be circumvented by just fed-ex'ing the device across the border?

Now tell me, if I know this than why cannot a suspect of illegal activities such as a Mobster, credit card phisher, etc do it? They already do it folks..
I've had blogs on LiveJournal, Wordpress, Blogger, Posterous and Tumblr, and here's my view on the difference:

Livejournal: The proto-Facebook, for personal blogging and sharing your thoughts/lives with your friends, with a personal connection with the people who follow you.

Wordpress.com/Blogger: Mainstream blogging, letting you share your opinion with the world. I switched from Wordpress.com to Blogger because they inject ads into your blogs. Neither have great editing interfaces.

Posterous: Mainstream blogging simplified, I switched from Blogger to Posterous because it just works. I can write a post insert images and it will come out looking decent (on Blogger/Wordpress I have to spend far longer tweaking layout, etc.).

Tumblr: Single media micro-blogging, Tumblrs support for mixed media blogging is very poor, you have a photo or a block of text, but not both. It's much more about community as well, it's closer to Twitter than to the other blogging platforms. It's all about followers and re-blogging other peoples posts.
Yeah, I definitely realize that I'm in the minority with my Ko2 love. It just seems to jive with how I think and arrange things. So I would never say that "Ko3 is terrible" (it's still better than most of the other php frameworks IMO), just that I personally was disappointed because I thought 2.3.4 was perfect for me and my projects and my tastes.

And I will admit that the Ko3 docs are now much better than they were a year ago (well, that unofficial wiki is -- the official docs are still severely lacking).
Big fan of heroku for months, I've just became big fan of nodester in only a couple of days :) Screen cast is really good. Nodester is a real cool stuff, it's a real pleasure to do everything in command line. Good job Chris.
Get ready for a new economic era
[Concept] Mother of Startups - part 1
I wrote the majority of my startup's code in Clojure using compojure et al. and that is indeed the way you end up doing it. These pieces that you use together, however, didn't require any glue for me. Like all functional programming, you use the pieces that you need in your application. In general, compojure and hiccup will take care of just about everything you need. If someone wanted a full service rails-like package, though, conjure can give that to you.

The benefit of not using a one sized fits all kind of framework, is that you have immense flexibility. Want to write your templates in more of a PHP style? Use string template instead of hiccup. Want to do it like JQuery on the server, use enlive. You have tons of options.

That being said, it's definitely new territory and not for the faint hearted. You will have to feel your way around a bit, but at the same time there is an extremely active and helpful community. The guy who works on compojure, for example, often responds in a matter of hours.

Now having written a fairly sizable app in clojure, I'll happily say it's by far the best experience I've had writing a web app. Once past the rough edges, there's just something to be said for generating your html in manipulable clojure structures that can be mapped over and all sorts of other fun things.
There are games that make more then a million dollars a day through the two major platforms. At this moment.

Minecraft is incredible but the mobile platform is actually giving the blockbuster console titles a run for their money (literally). Let that sink in. Console blockbusters have seen 300m+ opening weeks.
sure, musical notation is not enough.
> what happens if building a filtration plant is a better choice than conserving a watershed? Is this thought unspeakable? If that is never a better choice, than environmentalists having nothing to worry about; and if it could be a better choice, than refusing to consider it is irrational and destructive.

In any case, the worry of environmentalists is far in the future. Today, we generally make our economic decisions by pricing the ecological value of the environment at $0.

Say a developer wants to buy forested land for $10m and create a housing complex worth $30m. We consider that an economically beneficial transaction, resulting in $20m in net benefit.

But that's not the actual calculus. What if the forest is providing $50m in ecological services? Carbon sequestration, groundwater purification, prevention of soil erosion, etc.

Our error results from treating the $10m price of the forest as the actual cost of constructing the housing complex. That is, of course, not true. The $10m is simply the value of one slice of property rights: the right to exclusive possession of the land. It's not the net value of the land.

When the developer comes in and builds that housing complex, it does so not because it's economically efficient overall, but because it is advantageous to the developer. It yields $20m in net benefit for the developer, even though it costs society as a whole $30m.

Environmentalism, in my opinion, fails in not couching its arguments in this manner. People aren't sympathetic to arguments that a $30m housing complex should be stopped in order to preserve the beauty of the forest. They are likely much more sympathetic to the simple fact that in return for that developer profiting $20m from the destruction of the forest, the surrounding community will have to spend $50m in air and water purification, wastewater treatment, erosion control, etc.
Immunity from liability (or limited liability) is a fundamental reason why governments and corporations are not to be trusted. When government officials, financers, and corporate (stock) owners are shielded from liability, they tend to take on more risk. An easy way to make them consider the risks is to take away their immunity.
41 Things I've Learned By 40
The Simple Follows App
X11vis — a new, visual and interactive tool for debugging X11 clients
Man, judging by such mythical stuff as the "Courrier Tablet", that cool "Surface" whathchaisit, and a host of other theoretical stuff i hear all the time, i would venture, as weird as it might sound, Microsoft Research...
See those type declarations? Those are comments. Comments that are automatically checked.
Thanks! Nodester is also opensource which allows you to run it on your own Amazon EC2 instance or sent us pull requests if you have any ideas how to make it better!

https://github.com/nodester/nodester
As interesting as Tumblr is, I'm extremely wary of switching to it because of the downtime issues they've had:

http://royal.pingdom.com/2010/12/17/the-most-reliable-and-un...
$ cat foo.json
{ foo:"bar" }
$ js -e "var doc=`cat foo.json`; print(doc.foo);"
bar
Ask YC alumni/HN: Please advise on strategy.
We have applied for S11, but we were not invited for interview. (Our product has just reached pre-alpha stage for the submission deadline.)

We think we have what (according to YC) is the most important to build a successful startup: we (the founders) get stuff done, we have the brains, we have a great friendship, and are used to working together.

However, we are not that great in selling ourselves (or our stuff), and we suspect that this might have been one of the main reasons we did not get in this time. (Of course this might be just wishful thinking: it's also entirely possible that we are simply not good enough, but since in this case, we are doomed anyway, we are planning for the other possibility.)

Now we need to decide the strategy for the next steps. We see several possible courses of action:

A) Progress with development in our spare time (with no funding), and retry YC for W12.

B) Try to get an other mentor/investor, possibly from Europe. (This would probably exclude us from future YC batches.)

C) Put the project on hold, and try to get a (developer) job in the Bay Area. Then move there, and (while working on a different project, for someone else) try to do some networking. Apply for YC W12. (The rationale for this plan is this: we are based in Eastern Europe (not the best place for startups, anyway), and we don't really know anybody in the Bay Area, or in the startup world, in general. Changing this might help us seeing ourselves with your eyes, and thus presenting ourselves better. Developing our English would not hurt either.)

D) Something else.

What do you think would be best course of action?

Thank you for your help.
It's also stupid. If anything it probably made him more determined to do what he's doing, and convinced him even more that what he's doing is right and necessary.
That's certainly one aspect of it.

But you have to remember that the market will not factor in the value of externalities. If a wetland is providing $100m in water purification services to a community, the market won't price it at $100m, because the benefit is non-excludable. The price of the wetland ends up being the price of the only protectable property right (the right to exclusive possession) which is a small fraction of the net economic value of the land.

See: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Externality
You just need more masters. It works fairly well in Germany.
I dont think there are many downsides to letting in more people. If you want to keep the quality high, maybe crowdsource and let the YC community vote on who gets in. But 30-40 just like YC is a good idea. It also increases the odds that someone coming out of the group will actually be successful

I suspect as the person organizing you wont have time for your own startup as you will need to keep the thing organized, get speakers etc. but you may be able to get funding.

maybe a name like abiogenesis - spontaneous formation of life would be better than yc rejects

Also I suspect you will immediately be able to get press as everyone loves the underdog
Find out if one twitter user follows another. Dead simple, deadly effective.

I'd love to hear your two cents.
Trek has always had two important elements which explain its continued popularity.

On the one hand there are rich, deep characters that we come to care about, become interested in, and become invested in. Just about every character in TOS fits this mold. They are all iconic in various ways. Later series did nearly as well, the characters in TNG and DS9 are also largely iconic, Voyager and Enterprise somewhat less so with a few exceptions. This creates the opportunity for rich story telling and character development and also greatly facilitates people becoming attached to the characters and the show. The last season of DS9 is an excellent example of this phenomenon with long running story arcs rich in development of multiple characters.

This in turn facilitates the flip side of Star Trek. A cast of characters that viewers are heavily invested in and a setting that viewers are intimately familiar with creates the opportunity to put on one-off stories that are more engaging than they would be otherwise. In this way most Star Trek shows become a kind of science fiction anthology. So the show can explore various standalone stories within a familiar context, elevating the emotional investment in the story.

This combination elevates Star Trek to an amazing level and many other SciFi shows have adopted a similar format to attempt to recreate Star Trek's success. Many of people's most memorable and favorite episodes of various Star Trek shows are one-episode short stories founded on their own unique premises (Inner Light, City on the Edge of Forever, Hard Time) rather than stemming from pre-existing story elements or being part of a multi-episode story arc.
It seems like there's an opportunity here and I'll see what I can do to piece something together to help folks get started. I will say that aside from the pieces being split apart, compojure/ring/hiccup haven't really changed all that much since I started using them about 5-6 months ago. The main difference being that instead of compojure being a one size fits all framework, it's now in pieces. That should generally just mean a couple extra includes, though.

If you have any specific questions, I'd be happy to try and answer them. Also I'd love to get a sense for what you think is missing. I've recently started on some ideas for creating a more solid starting point for people, basically a simple framework for rapidly prototyping websites in clojure. The more I can get a sense for what needs to be in there, the better it'll be.
I don't think you're going to find a lot of Europeans pining for smaller denomination bills to replace the highest denomination coins. Especially if you show them how disgusting a random 1 dollar bill looks like. I say this having lived through one full currency redesign and one instance of a dozen countries switching to another currency entirely. People had complaints, but replacing notes with coins was not one that I heard.

Apparently there's a difference in priorities. Some people prefer an illusion of no inflation with a greenback as strong as ever. Others might prefer making the high velocity currency units durable and easy to handle.
A new model for online learning
Piet: programming with pixels
Sparkmuse is a new startup community for people to share ideas, engage with one another, and collaborate on projects. Beta started in early March and we've been doing everything in our power to create the best place for founders on the net. 99% of startup people do not live in the Valley so we're going to bring the Valley to them. We want to create an environment where you can find a cofounder, get feedback on your ideas, get help from some of the biggest and best entrepreneurs and startups in the game, or simply hang out.
The site of the firm described in this press report:

http://www.sophia.org/

It's interesting that that is a .org website rather than a .com website.
I'm a few chapter's into Hartl's book now. I really appreciate how it explains most things on a few different levels, i.e. both the concrete and theoretical workings of a piece of code. I don't understand much yet, but instead of frustration (I've had a few programming books whose learning curves have turned vertical), I feel excitement.

If the start of the book is any indicator, it's a great resource.
It may be worth mentioning that, while $11/hr apparently is the wage at some McDonalds in Tokyo, the people cleaning up the radioactive stuff are being paid significantly more and rotated in & out to avoid having too much exposure. The article I saw yesterday quoted a wage of a few hundred dollars for a couple hours of work and mentioned people with stopwatches measuring how long they could be safely exposed, in addition to their dosimeters.
Bash one-liner to play sedtris:

wget http://uuner.doslash.org/forfun/sedtris.sed && curl http://uuner.doslash.org/forfun/sedtris.sh | bash
Putting a price tag on nature is crucial. As it is, the debate goes:

A $100m mining project versus the beauty of a forested mountain.

People go "protect people, not plants!" and build the mine.

If it becomes a debate about:

A $100m mining project versus a mountain ecology that provides $120m in ecological services to the surrounding community, then the public reaction is different.

People have to understand that environmental protection isn't just about protecting aesthetic value. It's about the very real fact that when a land developer fills in a wetland to make a condo complex, everyone in the surrounding community has to spend $$$ to replace the water purification, flood control, etc, services the wetland was providing. It's literally about private parties being able to make a profit at the cost of the public.
Yo dawg, I herd u like rejects,…

[Alternatively, dream-within-a-dream reference]
Well, you may have a different experience.

I've also noticed a new trend in complex applications, eg JavelinJS and Yahoo's "Minty" mail app, that moves away from jQuery's or YUI's model. They feature a centralized controller/arbiter and a separation of CSS classes and event markup. Instead of jQuery + MVC it's a little of both.

See also http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2430271
I mentioned this in another comment.

http://groups.google.com/group/php-standards/web/psr-0-final...

Was 'ratified' by some of the bigger framework developers out there a while ago.
in an ideal codebase, such as might result from vertical-slice features being added iteratively plus thoughtfully designed features, feature groups and permissions, could a mature product like wordpress not present different levels of simplicity? "enable simple blogging only" v "enable full cms"

I have first hand experience with this and I think it is not only possible, but a reasonable goal for any well designed product. (the advantage of dynamic feature walls is already a huge win)
Is this still true? How long ago was this?

I have heard Facebook turned their backs on affiliate marketers once the big corporate branding campaigns became ubiquitous.

I have had several ads rejected for attempting to sell Clickbank products (I know, I know - just testing the platform). I had an ad approved, made a sale, and the next day, the ad was disapproved.

It seems they only care about big corporate dollars or local mom-and-pop stuff. No place for affiliate marketers.
I wonder how much of this it would take to get him to seek asylum in another country?
Show HN: Play Lemming - an open source side-scrolling platformer made in 7 days
WTF is an Army officer doing intergating an American civilian at the airport? They have no jurisdiction or authority off base. Military activity in a civilian context should sacre the shit out of everyone.
Gumroad: Sell digital goods with a link, no storefront needed TNW Apps
Microsoft Research != Microsoft

MSR does a lot of very wild, interesting, off the wall, crazy things. They also do a lot of incredibly practical, pragmatic, evolutionary things. It's a large organization, filled with researchers of an incredible range of skills and interests. Any projects coming out of MSR should not be perceived as commitment or desired focus from Microsoft. Some projects simply inspire project teams, others grow into products, but most just die on the drawing board.

That said, they are a gravely under appreciated research body, especially by both the open source community and the Microsoft rank and file.
You should be piping that into bash instead of sh.

With sh, it infinitely prints out

[: 48: unexpected operator
read: 48: Illegal option -s
I work at a university and that quote has adorned my office door for few years. I love the quote. However, I've learned to be wary of 'ought' statements. The quote is really saying that humans ought to be different from insects but that doesn't mean that we, as a society/species, can be.
David S. Rose from Angelsoft discloses which blogs early stage VC's read
That is processing payments for Facebook, not third-parties.
I can't speak to what else you missed or didn't miss, but you do seem to have missed that he is a she, so ...
I actually built something like this as a startup out of Rails & Flex... but, after ~12 months of being unable to solve some UX problems and pursuing the wrong business model, it's now just sitting online. URL = http://youphonics.com, behind a beta-wall.

Since some of you actually seem to be into the idea of Github'ing music (ericb, baddox, asarazan, xpaulbettsx, mrspeaker, zcid, JoachimShipper, johnny22, beaumartinez...), it'd be neat if any of you want to help me package and open source the code base!
> It's a pretty big jump from coding quality to inability to run a startup.

Would you say that the general cluelessness of the people at MySpace was totally coincidental to the fact that they were probably the largest user of ColdFusion?

You mised my point: it was not that code quality causes startup fail but that poor technology choices are symptomatic or correlated with fail. For one, it impairs their ability to change the focus of their product.

Take, for example, the ability of their platform to support user-specified data models instead of simply posts, pages and comments. This was an ability that many users were requesting or implementing themselves (or working around) for many versions. It was only implemented in version 3.0, not even a year ago.

This is something that is trivial to support on any system designed around proper MVC principles. A well-designed competitor could have had this years ago.

From all this and more, I conclude that WP is vulnerable to disruption by a technologically superior product.
Why not just use Rhino or any other stand alone javascript interpreter?

http://www.mozilla.org/rhino/

a simple example

echo 'x=[1,2,3];x[1]'|js
A Javascript lexer in Python, and the saga behind it
I downloaded and played it. It didn't disappoint!

I was left wondering whether the game speeds up, though, and if so, how it works. Anyone know?
Uh oh, you threw the stone in the proverbial argument well again:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2420509
How much does this much use of the type system's invariant enforcement increase compilation time? (still just getting into Haskell)
'Do the Yellow Pages Make Businesses Any Money?'

'Do TV commercials Make Businesses Any Money?'

'Do Postcard Mailings Make Businesses Any Money?'
You know what's really sad? I met a programmer the other day who works in a related field, and he categorically states he never wants to meet or correspond with Jake. He couldn't deal with the level of harassment that Jake is getting.

And it is straight up harassment.