skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
There's multiple definitions, so what follows is not authoritative, but IMHO it will help you understand the field better, as well as why so many people seem to be talking past each other as they silently adopt one definition while arguing with someone based on another.

A strong DSL is a specialized language designed for a specific task, with its own parser and syntax not directly based on another language. Ideally, it is not Turing complete, because that opens a huge can of worms, and much of the point of a strong DSL is to avoid this can of worms. The DSL should be carefully designed in conjunction with the eventual users, who most likely will not be programmers. I've heard of impressive results with this approach, but I've never witnessed them firsthand. This definition is favored by Martin Fowler, and much less importantly/impressively, me.

Weak DSLs are basically APIs written such that in their target containing language, the calls into the API read conversationally and with minimal boilerplate not directly related to the domain of the problem. In general (and I emphasize that I am generalizing), they can't be used to their full power without understanding the containing language, so you still need to be a programmer, albeit perhaps with less experience. You may see demos on the home page for the DSL about how it is possible to use without knowing the containing language, but it tends to be demoware; much of the gain is intrinsically that you still have a full Turing-complete language backing you up.

People will bikeshed about punctuation and claim that Ruby can build better weak DSLs, but in my experience, like I said, you still have to understand the containing language to really use the language, so the virtue of dropping off punctuation marks is oversold; the syntactic constructs are still there and you still need to understand them, so whether you actually see them in source is much more a matter of taste than a matter of "goodness".

Mixing people who use different definitions of DSL is a recipe for much heat and no light. It should also be pointed out that the strong DSL people make certain claims about why DSLs are good, along with the reasons why these things are true, and these claims should not be carelessly translated to weak DSLs.

While I use the terms "strong" and "weak", they should be understood as descriptive, not a claim of goodness, much like "strong AI" and "weak AI".

If you look at a weak DSL and wonder what the deal is, it is because rather than a magical technology, it is merely a style of API... there really isn't much "there" there, but it can be useful in some cases. I would never write a weak DSL for a DSL's sake, though; just evolve the API and see what happens.

Personally, I think it is a continuum between "API" and "weak DSL", not a binary distinction, but for "strong DSL", I would say that if you're backing to a full Turing complete language like Ruby, you do not have a strong DSL and should not expect to reap the benefits. (Which is good, since you're not paying the price, either. Nothing is free.)
Professionalism among time travellers has gone downhill since the Temporal Cops got unionized and stopped doing their jobs in 6700 A.D….
Have you read the guidelines here?

"Resist complaining about being downmodded. It never does any good, and it makes boring reading."

http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
FoxIt (from PDF fame) readies ebook reader. $100 less than an Amazon Kindle.
...and you're not bothering to tell us who it is, so someone from HN might get suckered into working for them next month.
KPSS Tercihleri Resmi Açıklama - KPSS 2009
Lately I have wondered about the "arms race" as Susan Blackmore calls it, between the gene and the meme. The genes want us to have small, efficient brains, capable of survival but not much else, whereas the meme wants us to have big brains because the bigger the brain, the more memes can get into it. This study, if confirmed, would seem to provide an interesting example of how bigger brains do not necessarily correspond to greater survival advantage. When viewed from the gene/meme perspective, this makes sense. The mortality associated with bigger brains is good for the gene, albeit bad for the meme, but not all that bad, because memes are not dependent on their host's surviving to make offspring. In short, memes don't care so much about our survival, only genes do. Genes, in turn, don't care so much about big brains, only memes do. Accordingly, that a bigger brain seems not to afford survival advantage in warfare is no surprise. When the war is finished, there will be plenty of smaller brain people out there left to continue to copy the gene. And as for the meme, as long as they were written down/persisted somewhere, they will get copied along too.
Things can evolve into their opposites. For example, those annoying persons who know Monty Python sketches off by heart and recite them have turned Monty Python into the kind of 1950's cozy cliche that the Pythons were rebelling against.

"Mind only" versions of Buddhism strike me as exactly the attachment to views that the Buddha is warning against in the <a href="http://www.accesstoinsight.org/tipitaka/mn/mn.063.than.html">Cula Malunkyovada Sutta</a>. Notice the entirely mundane ontology of the <a href="http://www.accesstoinsight.org/tipitaka/sn/sn36/sn36.006.nyp...">Sallatha Sutta</a>. The Buddha is offering a system of mental training. His response to <a href=" http://www.katinkahesselink.net/tibet/mustard-seed.html">Kisa Gotami</a> is compassionate, shrewd, and above all ordinary. He teaches no metaphysics beyond opening your eyes and seeing for yourself what kind of world we live in. It is clear from the parable that the world Kisa Gotami is being encouraged to see is the ordinary, mundane one.

I've had my own go at explaining what Buddhism is getting at when it says that <a href="http://www.hulver.com/scoop/comments/2008/3/10/21816/6428/19...">the world is an illusion.</a>.

That still leaves the Buddha's teaching of anatman - no self. Surely that is metaphysically extravagent? But that brings us back to the original posters question. Reponding to a thread on Overcoming Bias, I've framed the traditional Buddhist answer in a reductionist, materialistic context, and written it in the language of shock level four. Notice the ordinaryness of the ontology and metaphysics beneath the <a href="http://www.hulver.com/scoop/story/2008/12/14/10333/990">the sci-fi shiny.</a>
The parallelism of this guy's porn consumption must be truly breathtaking.
Free millionaire dating and vip club for successful, wealthy and beautiful singles
It would have taken longer to get working in C, which would have dramatically increased the probability that the project would have gotten killed before it saw users (it sounded like a pretty stupid site to me at first!), and it would be harder to rev the UI and features as often as they did before they hit the scaling problems.

But a message server in Ruby with Eventmachine wouldn't have been that hard, would it?
Yeah, as much as I agree that it's important to be aware of the negative effects of having so much information readily accessible, I also think it's important not to forget the positive ones. Sure, it's bad when I find myself checking myself checking my RSS feeds every five minutes instead of working, but when I think about all the interesting, entertaining, and truly useful things I know now that I didn't know about a year ago, I realize I learned a lot of them from reading my RSS feeds.
For anyone interested on this topic, another good read is here:

http://www.polarbearfarm.com/blog/

We were making good money off our Jailbreak apps selling them for $10 a piece, some people liked them so much they donated over $80 a piece for them. We invested countless hours developing them, not only because it was a fun challenge, but because the support was there from our customers to be able to live off this and be able to develop them full time.

The reality is that we barely manage to match the money we were making with our Jailbreak applications through the App Store. Even at the peak so far, where “Record” was Top 10 paid downloads in 22 countries, and DuckShoot in 10 countries, sales barely reach those seen in Jailbreak.
I think it is important to note that the title should have read "MP3.COM founder"... as my first impression was "the guy who helped invent the mp3 compression algorithm." That would be: Karlheinz Brandenburg.
I work in finance (trading) so from my perspective, I have seen many people come into this field wanting to "get rich." They soon find that the most successful investors/traders are not those who want to get rich, but rather love financial markets. So I am in complete agreement with you. The equivalent, I think, would be me joining a web app startup to "get rich" because I want to be "rich", rather than I am passionate about exploring the problem space that I will solve with the web app.

As a side note, the reason this is always the first site I visit when I am on the internet -- because everybody is exploring their chosen problem space passionately for the fun/excitement of it.
Chicago's Alt Weekly Puts Foot Down over Huffington Post's "straight stealing"
I hear there's this material called "flint" that works well for that kind of thing; if you hit it at the right angle with a rock, it forms a sharp edge, very similar to your teeth, and you can use the edge to cut all sorts of things.
Engine Yard's Vertebra Released
Interesting...
Vertebra is a framework for orchestrating complex processes in a Cloud. It is designed with an emphasis on security, fault tolerance, and portability.
I'm a skeptic. I don't believe in the idea that everyone will do their little piece and sometime this magical thing will emerge. Deriving benefit depends on the use of logic, but the web is an illogical mess. The semantic web doesn't scratch any itch that I have. Sure I would like something better than Google to bring my info to me. Right now I am finding the collective smartness to be more relevant than the semantic web. It will have some local success like Linda or Corba, but in the end something else will be the next great answer.
Programming: A difference in attitudes (static vs dynamic)
You mean AI. :-)
My questions:

1. Youtube positions itself as a service provider and therefore hides behind the DMCA when it runs illegal stuff. The Huffington Post's employees are actively stealing content from other people. Do they have the same protection? They seem to think so: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/terms.html

2. Why haven't they been sued yet?
On the other hand, here's a thought about why checking his Google Reader RSS feeds constantly might be rotting his brain: intermittent rewards. Here are some links:

http://therawness.com/the-compliance-recipe-part-3-intermitt...

>Intermittent rewards are as addictive as crack; human nature makes them impossible to resist.

http://headrush.typepad.com/creating_passionate_users/2007/0...

>One of Skinner's most important discoveries is that behavior reinforced intermittently (as opposed to consistently) is the most difficult to extinguish. In other words, intermittent rewards beat predictable rewards. It's the basis of most animal training, but applies to humans as well... which is why slot machines are so appealing, and one needn't be addicted to feel it.
A more likely scenario is that Microsoft will bow to pressure not to break people's crap old intranet software, and its version numbers will asymptotically approach 10 without ever reaching it...
And why are they anywhere in proximity to each other in case something (a ship?) runs into them? If they aren't in proximity ... hmmm.

We talk about redundancy all the time. Many of us are experts in redundancy from the software level all the way up to the infrastructure level.

It's seriously hard to believe this type of thing can occur, on accident or otherwise.
True. IBM have basically solved messaging with MQseries running on OS/390. All that remains is do that, only cheaper.
I don't fully understand how the math works out, particularly how the opportunity cost factors in. What does an opportunity cost of 10% mean and how does that factor in to the valuation equation?
Someone should fix the title.
Tips on working from home
There used to be lots of little declarative DSLs. Think make. Now they have been co-opted by XML. Ant uses XML, but would be much prettier if it had its own DSL.

XML is orthogonal: it is just another way of expressing the syntax of a DSL. Ant's build file format may be ugly, but it is also a DSL (it is just syntactically encoded using XML).
If you'd grabbed "celtics.com" do you think you would have a legal right to it? What about McDonalds.com? Why is this different than general brand trademarks as they relate to domain names?

It seems to be a conflict if you're in the same "domain". i.e. If I grab @celtics and talk about Celtic language and culture, it shouldn't be a conflict. If I grab it to build a following about the team, I'm piggybacking on the effort/expense of them building that brand and deserve to have it yanked.

IMO, it's very similar to the Nissan.com case - the owner of that domain is named Nissan and has a business with that name. He got there first, and he's got rights. However, if it was some random guy who put up a splash page or a nissan car site, it's trademark infringement, no?
i like www.hunch.net
Radio OneLlama Goes Public
Greetings, HN! Couple of changes we've made recently:

- You no longer need an invite or registration to use the site
- API is available at http://company.onellama.com/section/labs/api/
- Feel free to experiment with the API (no keys necessary for now), if we really like what you build, our connections with the North Pole enable us to send you a free iPod Touch
- iPhone version is in the works
- Flash widget is in the works
- Improvements made to search (added a location search), with more info given on results

Have a Happy Holidays! Cheers, -The Llama
Gaithersburg Maryland News
Your local news source for all things Gaithersburg, Maryland.
100 Websites with outstanding artistic design
Yea I agree with you, I just think that overzealous "ideas are worthless" people are annoying. Sure, if you are trying to start a business on an idea that hasn't been implemented at all, that's not a great idea. But if you are just going to talk about ideas who cares?
Changes:

[1] No longer need an invite or registration to use the site
[2] API available at http://company.onellama.com/section/labs/api/
[3] Feel free to experiment with the API (no keys necessary for now), if we really like what you build, our connections with the North Pole enable us to send you a free iPod Touch
[4] iPhone version is in the works
[5] Flash widget is in the works
[6] Improvements made to search (added a location search), with more info given on results

Cheers, -The Llama
Totally disagree... And I believe the law does as well, when it comes to domain names (the best precedent I can think of).

If I bought toyota.com, nissan.com, honda.com, etc when domain names first came available, that doesn't mean I have the rights to keep them unless I had legitimate interests in those domain names that didn't compete with the trademark holder (as was the case in the Nissan.com situation).

Certainly, a lot of people benefited from those early buys, but if they got greedy, they generally got sued (and lost). Even typosquatters have successfully been sued.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trademark#Trademarks_and_domain...

I've enjoyed some of Steve's writings in the past, but I think he's dead wrong here.
Roger Penrose and Frank Wilczek lectures now available online
This is a good thing. Ideally, companies wishing to sell their wares will compete like this. Consumers should have this type of knowledge rather than the supermarket style selling.

The problem occurs because no other industries are being forced to scrape the bottom like this. These people (iPhone devs) are earning the type of money you'd get from close to perfect competition, but they're having to buy things (food, TVs, etc.) at prices that aren't anywhere near that. The problem isn't that they're having to price down so much as all the other industries aren't having to do likewise. Their prices are being squeezed down by consumers having good knowledge and lots of competition, but they're having to buy things from people who aren't under that price squeeze.
HTML vs. XHTML: Why HTML Wins
The real problem seems to be that nobody has yet found a good way to market apps outside of the app store.
http://www.martinfowler.com/bliki/DomainSpecificLanguage.htm... distinguishes between Internal and External DSLs. Internal DSLs are a style of programming, usually non-idiomatic. External DSls require parsing.
I've really enjoyed using PyParsing. O'Reilly has a ShortCut book on it that is worthwhile. http://oreilly.com/catalog/9780596514235/
Ask HN: IDE versus Text Editor?
My question is this: if you invest the time in getting very proficient in a Text Editor like Emacs or vi, what type of return do you get? Please include an estimated number in your answer(ie. I am 10%, 50%, 500% more productive developing Python/Java/Ruby/other using Emacs versus IDLE/Eclipse/Arachno/other).

I continually go back and forth between using an IDE versus using Emacs/vi. I keep giving the latter two a few hours each here and there but haven't invested the time it takes to make it worthwhile. Most of what I write is Python, followed by PHP, JavaScript & SQL.

EDIT: Also if you've written your own editor/IDE, please mention that(it's one option I've been prototyping with).
if other app developers are selling themselfs short, the only answer is to wait until they go out of business and if they don't then they probably weren't selling themselves short.... Or they have deep pockets..or until apple changes something ( but I'm pretty sure they don't mind having cheap apps)
Digg has always been overrated. People voting on news stories was never a great business and the quality of the user base has significantly deteriorated over time. The smart people have moved on and the site is dominated by spammers and trolls. No legitimate brand is interested in being associated with that level of maturity, so Digg is stuck with bottom of the barrel advertising.

I just wonder how they blew through so much cash. All the new features have sucked. I guess it all goes to biz dev guys...

On the bright side, maybe the founders will silently pass into obscurity.
Wouldn't it be nice if everyone were faking it? If all you needed to excel at anything were some gumption and a ready lie?

Instead, in the real world, the good people have dedication, have put in the hard work, and have been blessed with abilities and the right environment. Education and experience are a part of that. Some people know what they're talking about and others don't, and at times it's very obvious who is who (especially in highly technical fields).
So, opportunity cost is what you could get doing something else. For example, if I put $15B into an S&P500 index fund, I'd probably get returns around 10% per year. Since Facebook is a risk greater than an index fund, 10% is definitely fair.

So, if I just took that money and suck it in a stock index fund, in 100 years I'd have over $206trillion at the end. So, it's not enough for Facebook (or anyone) to make money off of money invested. It must make more money off that investment than the investment could get at a standard investment rate. If Facebook is worth $100trillion in 100 years, it doesn't justify a $15B valuation because that $15B would become over $200trillion in average stocks.

Specifically, the math is: sigma[1,100,$profit/1.1^k]

Sorry for the notation. In plain English, for year 1 through 100, add the profit for that year ($profit) divided by 1.1 raised to the year number.

In python:
value = 0
proft = 100000000
for i in range(1,100):
value += (profit/pow(1.1, i))
print value

To summarize: Facebook needs to be able to beat a blind investment by their valuation in order to justify that price.
Why Your Man Checks Out Other Women | Passion Promises
I thought it was amazing when it came out. Now I think it's a crock of shit. I think mammals are conscious and self aware enough to distinguish between themselves and their environment. I doubt that even thoughts are unique to humans. I would be interesting to find out if chimps can think chimp sounds without verbalizing them.
I thought this blog post sucked until I came across the phrase "If you take a play from P Diddy’s biography..."
I would recommend taking a quick look at how SCons and Conary use python. You may also want to consider implementing your DSL using a python parser generator such as Ply.

SCons - http://www.scons.org/doc/HTML/scons-man.html#lbBB

Conary - http://wiki.rpath.com/wiki/Conary:Recipe_Structure

Ply - http://www.dalkescientific.com/writings/NBN/parsing_with_ply...
The vast majority of software is written for businesses and runs either on an intranet or is available on the internet to the users of that business.

That doesn't mean a thing in terms of scalability. One user can max out a fast machine with OLAP cubes or other DSS. Or any sort of simulation or modeling. Think in terms of datasets, not in terms of users (all many users are is a large dataset with a requirement for a quick turnaround of each computation).
His example applies, as does yours I think I agree about some degrees; computer science is something you will need and use as a founder or Cto but does anyone really need a "business managment" degree when you get that job; you'll get more than enough on job training
If this sort of thing interests you, take a look at PyTables http://www.pytables.org/moin - it uses similar python constructions instead of SQL. For some kinds of things it beats SQLite. Only downside is it requires the HDF5 libraries.
EA joins Steam
In fact, if you were to ask a handful of the most successful people in this world what their secret was they would unanimously say, in one form or another, that they learned to play the system (read: fake it).

Unverified. Why should I believe that random-guy-from-Internet has any credibility or perspective on what the world's most successful people would reveal as their "secret to success"?
Depends. Looking from a "soft" point of view, he might find having all that kit motivational or pleasing in some way.

My productivity was certainly lower when I was a PC user, as compared to the Mac. I really enjoy using my Macs and don't find work to be so grating when the system keeps out of my way and the hardware is solid.

Could I produce just as well with one machine and a smaller monitor? Sure, but I probably wouldn't be as jazzed or enthusiastic about getting started.
I hope Pandora realizes how much people love them. It would be such a tragedy if they died. I'm sure they've considered it, but it seems to me that a freemium model would work much better than their current ad-supported service: something like a few free hours of music a day, and unlimited music for $10/month. I for one would be happy to pony up the cash---especially if it meant that Pandora would survive.
So Twitter making money by getting the Celtics their @ name is more worthy than letting a guy run fan information using that name? Sorry, but that doesn't make any sense.
I think marketing outside of the AppStore would be a lot more viable if there wasn't such a significant pressure to down-price your application. There's just no ROI to be found at .99 + marketing expenditures, IMO, unless you're realizing something on the backside like a subscription service, etc.. but then you might as well price your app for free and use iTunes for its marketing benefits in that regard.
Eight Ways to Unwind from Work and Relax
Facebook fails for business networking because it is facebook, people in general don't want to use their facebook profile as their professional profile.

As for the ad thing I think we're not quite on the same page, I'm talking about a system which gives publisher a bunch of ads which the publisher can then run as they see fit (presumably using their inside knowledge of their users).