skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
DSLs are great when they bring the code closer to being a description of the problem / logic / assertions. One example of a highly successful embedded DSL is regular expressions.

A DSLs made by using a language’s features for operator overloading, magic constants, and similar, has the advantage that the “code” in the DSL is part of the original source, but it also has the big disadvantage that it tends to show many compromises due to limits of the host language, so the syntax will be arcane and non-standard.

Though this isn’t specific to Ruby/Rails. I think the problem is twofold, 1) the advantage of having the DSL embedded and 2) the advantage (for the creator of the DSL) of not having to build an actual compiler for the DSL.

Something like Ragel¹ solves #1 by being a preprocessor.

¹ http://www.complang.org/ragel/
Some people get a lame thrill off of making sure that someone else doesn't get money.
That gets into a different argument: should people be allowed to do things that don't have a demonstrable health or safety benefit for them? Should unhealthy foods be outlawed? Exercise mandated?
They don't enforce .msi any more than debian (or ubuntu) enforce .debs. The lack of centralization just means almost nobody bothers to use msi and just rolls their own self-extracting archive.
John,

I'm surprised this surprises you. Egregious violations of freedom and privacy have been going on in the UK for years now. This is just another step towards a full-on totalitarian form of government. It's time the UK broke into civil war, or at least blew some shit up, and put an end to the corrupt government's stronghold on their rights.

That's just my opinion, speaking as someone who only sees the UK from an outsider's perspective. The US states are likely to tolerate much less before throwing a fit...at least I hope.
A couple questions...Why would i buy more points when i can re-register and get points for free? And what if i made referrals to myself to accumulate points?
This is awesome.

Surely there's some ROM in there. I can't imagine the microcode is in an FSM.

When I was at CMU, my capstone engineering class was to build a machine that was capable of a small set of tasks (One that I remember was multiply two 16-bit numbers.) We were to optimize for some specific thing -- ours was "most sleep" (that is, least work) and "least wire wrapping." So it was as simple as possible; entire control path fit in a PLA for example.

Anyway, one of the other groups apparently optimized for AWESOME. We were there with our single board and a multicolor cloud of wire-wrap; they showed up with a multiple board computer. The boards had a pair of 68-pin IDC connectors and two huge wide cables as a bus.

The machine basically was fully asynchronous and had no clock. One board was an ALU, one was the control unit, etc. For their demo they both ran with one or two ALU boards and got different performance.

This was 1995 or so, so quite progressive for the time.
Making filthy water drinkable for 1/2 cent a day
If your generation of the new phrases is considered to be a purposeful act that you performed in order to obtain the copyrights for them, then the generation of existing copyrighted phrases would also be a purposeful act, and hence would be copyright infringement.
Spotify and the great leaps of faith
A Guide to Finding Security Problems on OS X
Google says they try to avoid serving ads beside tragic emails. So...they put tragic phrases in emails to avoid ads.

The threshold for the terms "clever" and "hack" must have dropped.
Custer scheduling is a huge area. I used to work on MPI clusters and it is an art to balance CPU, Bandwidth, propagation time to pick the optimum number of processors for a particular algorithm.

Especially on commodity ethernet based MPI, it doesn't do broadcast so shipping a Gb common dataset to 64nodes can take a lot longer than actualy doing the calculation.
I'm not so sure - I think having 3rd party apps at all is a concession from Jobs. ISTR (but don't have any references, so this could be an urban legend) that his original vision for the Mac included buying all software from Apple, and making the entire widget from the hardware on up. The iPhone pre-SDk was that kind of vision realized.
Not an urban myth - that little joke was pulled more than once in US grammar schools in the 70/80's
Ask HN: edit history for HN comments?
I've noticed a couple of incidents recently of people editing their comments to preemptively respond to replies, and in some cases completely change the meaning of comments that had already been replied to, rather than continuing the conversation. I can't help but feel that this is a dishonest tactic of discussion, one that drives away those who aren't looking to score points.
At one point a comment that had been edited was marked with an asterisk. I also seem to remember that it used to not be possible to edit a comment once it had replies (I am not sure on that). And there has at various points been an informal practice of adding a tagline when an extensive revision was introduced describing the reason for the edit.

I know there is a timelimit on editing, which limits the scope of historical revisioning.

Would adding a history of edits to a given comment make egregious revisions less likely?
Bingle (bing + google) - 2 in 1 results
Boarding School: Scientist on Wheels
Post your idea. Some people are willing to work on ideas they find interesting (myself included).
(Wowza, if this guy completes his proof of concept, it would rock the foldable bike world.)

I just wanna jump in here, while our brains are thinking about foldable bikes, and say I have a foldable bike, and in less than 3 weeks it has already changed my life for the better.

I don't even have the nicest foldable bike, and I'm not what you would call a bicycle enthusiast.

I just completely get off on the extra independence the foldable bike gives me.

Basically foldable bikes allow for a lot more spontaneity than regular bikes:

* They are allowed ON Amtrak (US train system), like regular luggage. (If you have a full-sizes bike, you need to check to see if there is a special bike car, or worse, a box you need to use that requires removing some bike parts to make it fit.)

* They are allowed on every public bus system that I've tried in Oregon and California. Usually buses make you put your bike on the rack in front (oh yeah, check to make sure your route HAS a rack, and there aren't special rules.)

* They can easily fit into your friends' small cars without disassembly.

* You can bike yourself to exhaustion without worry if you have the energy to make the round trip, just put bike on any of the methods of transportation listed above.

* Depending on the bike you get, you can carry it into places that you'd never get away with.

* (This one is good or bad, depending on how you look at it. I'm more introverted, so i wish it weren't so true.) Foldable are bikes are quite the conversation starter, young and old alike.
30 isn't old.
Ads keep the sites I'm looking at funded and available. However, obnoxious ads (flashing, disgusting, NSFW, etc.) are rude, and I will filter them.
Great idea. Though let's not deny that there's some rock star ego involved here too.
Disgustilicious: food that will stop your heart...
How to write better jquery code
The thing is that I do have flash installed, it just had some sort of error. If I didn't have flash I would get the little blue box with a ? in it.
I especially like the explanation provided in the comments:
"This was done as a passive-aggressive motivation to get someone to create the linux close/min/max/restore buttons, I believe. And the message got through, and the work was done. ;)"
Flying At The Right Level As An IT Leader
entertaining is one word for it. I think its ridiculous, and really offensive. Sam is a human being - and people are tearing him apart all over the internet - who cares if he deserves it, is disgusting.

I don't believe writing public letters about how he has mental health issues helps the issue. think of the consequences if he did

less scene more startups.

gets off soapbox
I think it is more about the word "vice" than creative people mimicry. Something probably doesn't deserve such a strong word if it doesn't preclude success, and in some cases encourages it.
Keep on hoping. As long as there are ballgames on TV and McDonalds is open I highly doubt anybody would get off their chairs to do anything. And that does not just go for the US.

Not that that's necessarily a bad thing, it's just what's expected. As long as people have 'theirs' why revolt ? The barrier to revolution is about as high as the satisfaction level of the majority of the people will allow it to be.

Piss off too many people and there is trouble for sure, as long as most people can do what they think they want you can get away with lots.
This does not bode well for Hacker News.ipa...
Seeking Nominations: Best U.S. Entrepreneurs 25 and Under - BusinessWeek
procrastinating...
beagleboard?
Impressive! Except there is no actual calculator. I'd also question the "business plan" category. Maybe as a side-project I could develop such an online calculator.

However, I have a gut feeling that the computer should not be the one telling you how to split the pie. Can it really be automated (even if only to give you a starting point)?
I think this was semi-confirmed by a London paper recently as council parking surveillance vehicles; several defendants in a parking-fine case successfully got their fines overturned as there were no signs nearby warning of CCTV or Traffic Cameras, etc.
This is a terrible article. Everything is either old, well known or old and well known (with the possible exception of the screen lock by USB feature).

Truecrypt with keys on a USB key will ensure that your systme can only be booted with it around (or the recovery CD)
On a related topic: what do people think about ad blocking technology from an ethical viewpoint?

I don't think I've clicked an ad since I was first introduced to the internet at around age ~5 (maybe with a few exceptions for accidental misclicks), and I don't intend to click on one in the future either. As a result, I am saving them bandwidth by blocking their ads.

Activating an ad-blocking device is equivalent to stating "I do not intend to click on your ads," and as a result it cannot possibly be losing the advertiser money.

(If the site charges per impression instead of per click, that's another thing, but those are rare these days.)
It is reusing a standard OO mechanism, just not as well as it could. If all the Rails security tutorials feel they have to mention this point, then it's an indication that the design isn't quite right.
It depends. It's not uncommon to have clauses like "if you want W, the top grossing summer action flick, you have to also support carry X, Y, and Z crappy comedies".
I don't block ads because I like sites being free, and I want to do my small part to help keep them that way (and to encourage others to put out free content). So I guess you could call it ethics, but it's the self-serving sort.
There was a run on investment banks after Lehman's failure. Merrill Lynch was on the edge of the abyss before Ken Lewis made the deal of the century - for John Thain. Morgan Stanley was next. Their CEO John Mack successfully lobbied the government to institute a ban on short selling, much good that did. Goldman was next. Without the government backstop, Goldman would not exist today.

And if Goldman was entirely populated by "geniuses", why did they need $13 billion from AIG? They made all the same bad bets as everyone else, but they "hedged" them with a counterparty unable to pay out. And once AIG was downgraded to AA in 2005, everyone should have known that they'd be unable to pay out the ridiculous CDS contracts they guaranteed on subprime bonds. It'd be like buying volcano insurance from a homeless guy - and you live next to a volcano. Goldman isn't run by geniuses; its run by people who control the government.
I think some of you guys might be missing the overall point of the article. Creative people tend to do things that make them feel good in the moment (as creating things does) and think less about the future. The least creative people are too preoccupied with thinking about what is going to happen to create. That is, what other people will think or what will happen to their health down the road.
Great post. What I'm wondering is: It's been nine years...where's the book already?
Strange -- I always just sort of assumed that since they are making big clusters, they could spend the extra $$ for a good multicast switch, and that MPI did ip multicast. (a quick googling shows me to be wrong...).
Seems like a waste of time. Enough people do this, and Google will adjust. It's just cat and mouse from there.
Objective-C 2 could be quite nice for this too. It's a nice mix between static and dynamic languages, and a function of this nature can be implemented as a property or as a receiver of a message.
Although I do see the point, I wouldn't advocate strict adherence to the author's propositions. I think the following has been said on HN before, but it bears repeating: balance is key.

Please, let us know how it goes with the intensified debauchery. Maybe I'll change my ways if your experiment's results prove to be enlightening. =)
I have no problem being told face-to-face when I'm doing stupid things, even in front of my peers if it happens that way, but someone blogging about the stupid things I do would definitely piss me off.
Definitely belongs to reddit. :)
Something of a Theseus' ship paradox.

Neat, I'd never heard of that one: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ship_of_Theseus
Reminds me of the joke about the highest bandwidth available being a truckload of drives barreling down the highway. While true, not necessarily useful.
Wow, this feels so surreal -- I thought the article was satirical at first, and now here it's changing people's lives.

Anyway, I'll keep this short:

1) It's your life.

2) Taking risks is wonderful. So is breaking rules, particularly the invisible ones, like social norms.

3) Nevertheless, taking up smoking because you read a bad article about the habits of highly creative people written by somebody who clearly isn't highly creative is fucking retarded.
I feel the same way. Why not just save everyone some hassle, admit to ourselves we never click on ads, and employ an extension or userscript.
well what do you mean by writer? Do you mean someone to write "Click here to do blank" ? or do you mean someone to write the "FAQ"...either way its something you should be able to do yourself.

And if you need to get a copy writer, those guys are cheap, there is no reason to give up equity over a $100 contribution
The discussion doesn't though
I get the impression the best analogy for Spotify is Hulu for Music.
I'm in Vancouver, Canada and on the advice of my accelerator / VC partner in the SF Bay area, decided to try to find a developer who could become a co-founder in my venture on a part-time basis. I used Craigslist and ended up moving forward with the first person to reply that fulfilled all of my criteria. He's a hacker (I'm not), but he liked the opportunity I presented, and both of us are over 30 and really not able to quit our jobs to pursue the project full-time - yet.
Well, these EDS old-timers can always look elsewhere for more pay. They're not slaves, you know?

My guess is that they're lucky to have their jobs at all, given current economic circumstances.
Computers constructed from solely logic gates have an impeccable pedigree: Apollo's onboard flight computer

"The Apollo flight computer was the first to use integrated circuits (ICs). The Block I version used 4,100 ICs, each containing a single 3-input nor logic gate. The later Block II version used dual 3-input nor gates in a flat-pack, approximately 5,600 gates in all. "

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apollo_Guidance_Computer
Neat!

I just wrote a post about why I'm still using Google. I don't want to plug, so I'll use this website to give you the summary of why:

http://bingle.pwnij.com/results.php?query=how+I+won+the+waer
Tax leins, other troubles hit founder of Art.com
From observation, this is often done in job postings for startups - several that I've encountered will contain an innocuous line something like "include an Italian sonnet in your cover letter to guarantee that your application will be forwarded to the development manager", presumably as a way to make sure that applicants read the entire posting and associated administrivia.
Currently, the government certainly is 'printing money from the air', ie borrowing and monetizing. We shall see whether the result is consumer-level inflation or not.

It's not always true that injecting money into an economy simply result in visible inflation. Such an injection is indeed essentially a wealth re-distribution but if such a re-distribution causes more productive investment when you would have otherwise have people hoarding money, then you have economic expansion. And even more, if such an injection successfully causes the economy to grow, you don't have the same degree of inflation, since a larger store of money is now chasing a larger store of goods and ... it's all good.

But this is a hypothetical discussion between the Keynesian and Classical positions. In the case of Cash for Clunkers, I think both schools would agree that we have a Bad Policy. The Classicals would evoke your Broken Window Fallacy while the Keynesians would point out that this is not really increasing socially useful resources.

And further, we currently don't have obvious Germany-1920's-style inflation but the real enemy that lead up to the crisis was asset inflation. And the current program is really neither monetarist nor Keynesian but rather simply a process of propping up the same asset-inflationists that organized the previous bubble.
Microsoft plans to use Windows 7 to raise netbook prices
I must disagree with the OP's justification:
"this recent push for transparency has ignored government’s central function, to pass and enforce laws."

It is not the government's central function to pass and enforce laws, nor is that the goal that legislators set for themselves.

From a philosophical perspective, the function is to government is to govern. There is no reason that this must necessarily entail laws. In many cases simple speechifying and arbitration might suffice. Very often, it would be more appropriate to repeal a law than to pass a new one. Internal consistency is not required (or is a moot point) if there is no code of laws. And while that seems a huge leap from today's situation, it is in principle a possibility.

From a more practical perspective, the role that our government has taken is to be seen to do something. For example, the CAN-SPAM law certainly involved passing a law. But that law had no basis in reality; it's utterly impractical and unenforceable. Assuming that our legislators aren't stupid, there was never any requirement that this law be used to prosecute spammers. Rather, the intent was to demonstrate to the public that the government was "doing something about the problem". Thus, there was no need to ensure that it was consistent with anything, or even that it had any actual meaning.

Thus, it's perfectly feasible for a functional government to have inconsistency in its legal code.
You can store MP3 files on your USB key to play off Windows Media Player from ANY MACHINE? Man, this is THE FUTURE.
I do everything on that list. Why am I not famous still?
If one person wrote Apache, you'd probably know his or her name.
Gotta wonder what HP's thinking here. Laying people off is one thing, but you can do it cleanly. Put together a decent severance package, ask for volunteers, it's all over and you can draw a line under it (until next time, anyway, but even so: if people know they'll be looked after, the organization copes). I don't see EDS recovering from this.
Certainly useful when you don't care about latency.

http://aws.amazon.com/importexport/
Has anyone used this? I'm interested in hearing how it compares to Hadoop streaming + Python (+ Dumbo?).
India's Desertec
Gives me a great idea for a portable mp3 player that's basically a headphone jack, battery and usb outlet. Plug in your usb stick and BAM! instant iPod Shuffle.
One of the coolest things you can do with a USB flashdrive is to stick Ubuntu NBR on it and make it bootable. That way you can always have your computer in your pocket wherever you go. Best thing since sliced bread, just hang it off your keyring and you're good. Borrow a computer somewhere for 10 minutes, reboot when ready. Save all your documents on the flash as well.

I think something like this will soon be used for internet cafes and schools as well as libraries. You may not be able to afford the computer, but $5 for a stick is within most peoples budget.
Toyota Plans a Sport Car, With Passion
The net's hunger for power
Having implemented a web app framework using a preprocessor, I found it was a bit of a pain to write and use. So using the language features makes sense to get the job done.

But I was trying to question whether or not a DSL was the right way to go for a web app. If you use as many of the standard features and keywords as possible, there's no ambiguity over what a special keyword means.
I don't understand why he's calling any of that "magic". There's nothing magic about it, not even a little bit. He doesn't comprehend how the libraries he is using actually works internally, and that is all there is to it.

Is this what passes for "magic" now? Simply not understanding, or caring about, how the libraries you use work internally? That's "magic"?
Kindle’s Rival Is an E-Paper Tiger, for Now
Nice. I've got a 4-bit one built from relais by a German guy: http://www.relaiscomputer.de/kurz6.htm
Really?

How do you deal with rollover menus and seeking with a video player (on youtube and such) without a mouse?
The thing that bothers me most is that Google's obviously trying to be sensitive in not displaying ads to people who might be in mourning and this "hack" exploits that. It's like hitting on women at a funeral.
Online Scammers See an Opening in the Jobless
Do Seattle VCs Suck?
The point of the FPC is to provide framework for having a discussion and make sure nothing is left implicit. You can assign zero (or negative:-)) weight to the business plan if you chose so, but at least this implicit assumption will now be on the table for both of you to see and discuss.
This is not necessarily that unusual. A lot of novels that we consider classics today were written in installments for the publications of their time.

Charles Dickens, for one, did it. I think it's a great idea for writing something.
But the ads only pay if people click on them. I don't click on ads, EVER. I never have, and have never even been close to. Some people do click them, obviously. Since I'm not clicking them, anyway - me using an ad blocker only saves the advertiser bandwidth money.
If your "framework" is only meant to run a single custom application...it's not much of a framework
I was asked a related question during an interview at Google. As an example, the interviewer told me of a time their ads drew an especially vile reaction: they had placed luggage ads on a news story about a serial killer who chopped up his victims bodies and stuffed them into suitcases.

The interviewer said they'd be happy to just not show any ads on such pages and asked me how I'd go about detecting them. Apparently they've (mostly) figured that out by now!
Gym killer was a .Net Developer
"I am okay at what I do, a .Net software developer"

see page 4: http://i.cdn.turner.com/cnn/2009/images/08/05/sodini.pdf

Perhaps if he was more flexible with languages, he would have been more flexible in his thinking.