HN user

h34t

1,302 karma

http://matt.is [ my public key: https://keybase.io/mhuebert; my proof: https://keybase.io/mhuebert/sigs/LJgfwA_9HHY07kFqqkOvgnFdeYBExAfEI-uy_cm1w5c ]

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nousresearch.com 4mo ago

Hermes Agent

h34t
1pts0
nousresearch.com 1y ago

Taming LLMs with Sequential Monte Carlo

h34t
1pts0
hackernoon.com 8y ago

A Learnable World

h34t
3pts0
gigasquidsoftware.com 10y ago

Fairy Tale Word Vectors

h34t
4pts0
news.ycombinator.com 11y ago

HN'ers in Rwanda?

h34t
29pts0
www.fastcompany.com 13y ago

Auti-Sim, The Game That Startlingly Reconstructs Life As An Autistic Child

h34t
5pts0
www.matt.is 14y ago

Show HN: BrainTripping - language model comedy

h34t
283pts41
www.matt.is 14y ago

Fifteen Minutes and Four Hundred Trees

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2pts0
www.hackinghealth.ca 14y ago

Hacking Health: Join us Feb. 24-25 in Montréal

h34t
1pts0
news.ycombinator.com 14y ago

Channel the voice of Paul Graham with WriteLikePaul.com

h34t
12pts8
www.overlap.me 15y ago

More Relevance, Less Clutter (and other updates)

h34t
1pts0
www.overlap.me 15y ago

New feature: Sort users by most-in-common

h34t
1pts0
www.overlap.me 15y ago

Show HN: Overlap.me - a new way to meet people & share your identity online

h34t
112pts49
matt.is 15y ago

Hacking in Bogotá

h34t
1pts0
news.ycombinator.com 15y ago

Hackers in Bogotá?

h34t
1pts0
online.wsj.com 15y ago

The Big Spill Over 'Three Cups of Tea'

h34t
3pts0
matt.is 15y ago

Methods of Mattering

h34t
1pts0
ict4djester.org 15y ago

Talent is Not Universal

h34t
1pts0
matt.is 15y ago

Trying to Matter

h34t
59pts4
ofallpossibleworlds.wordpress.com 15y ago

Pacer, a ruby implementation of the Gremlin graph traversal language

h34t
6pts0
www.meetup.com 15y ago

Vancouver data visualization meetup

h34t
2pts0
news.ycombinator.com 15y ago

Ask HN: Fastest way to build live chat?

h34t
2pts4
popcap.mediaroom.com 15y ago

Casual video games demonstrate ability to reduce depression and anxiety

h34t
2pts0
lifehacker.com 15y ago

Make Time-Wasting Sites Less Appealing by Switching Your Monitor to Greyscale

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1pts2
matt.is 15y ago

An App to Change the World (and pry yourself off facebook)

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7pts2
matt.is 15y ago

CV using jQuery Isotope

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5pts1
hir.harvard.edu 15y ago

Machiavelli 2.0 — The Fundamentals of Network Society

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28pts6
www.edge.org 15y ago

Maps for the 21st Century

h34t
4pts0
news.ycombinator.com 15y ago

Ask HN: Hacker couches for Startup School guests?

h34t
4pts1
gizmodo.com 15y ago

Laptop stand for sitting/standing (Nottable)

h34t
3pts1

Developer here. We wrote Maria 6 years ago, and this fall I accepted a ClojuristsTogether grant to bring it back into active development. We hope to simplify/modernize the codebase to make it something people can hack on top of to add features & apply to new use-cases.

Repo: https://github.com/mhuebert/maria

ClojureD talk introducing Maria: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CUBHrS4ZzO4

Description of 2022 grant work: http://blog.maria.cloud/2022/09/30/Maria-and-Clojurists-Toge...

I'll be posting updates to twitter, @mhuebert.

Happy to answer any questions / hear ideas for improvement & extension.

I see an effort like License Zero less as an encroachment on existing "Free and Open Source" licenses and culture, and more as an alternative to behind-closed-door development.

I want to _sustainably_ write software, not for donations but by having people who want to use it, pay for it. If I have to go closed-source to do so, then that's what I'll do. I don't have a big company behind me paying a salary.

But I would prefer to make things in the open, sharing my process; I'd like to allow students and other individuals to benefit from my work, either freely or very affordably; and I'd like to charge for-profit companies a fair price for what they receive.

The open source community tried to trademark the 'open source' label, and failed¹, precisely because it is _too descriptive_: it sounds like a generic way of describing source code that isn't private, not a specialized term with specific ethical and legal implications. But nevertheless the 'Open Source Definition' campaign has been rather effective in limiting use of the term. So I'm not even sure what to call what I want to do: maybe "open-source-ish"?

Some of my work belongs under OSI-approved licenses, but not all of it, and I appreciate that people like Kyle are working, creatively, on alternatives.

1. https://opensource.org/pressreleases/certified-open-source.p...

I can see how that is true for some kinds of software. For many examples, network effects don't matter.

The first license I can remember paying for was Metafizzy's 'Isotope', a jQuery layout plugin. Great documentation and performance. I can't remember the price at the time, maybe $40 (now it ranges from $25 - $320). It was totally worth it, I was making money and clients were happy.

https://isotope.metafizzy.co/license.html

I agree that price discrimination can be a useful thing, but question the idea that only very large or wealthy companies should pay anything at all. What if licenses are low friction and affordable?

If we had a nice repertoire of flexible licenses available to play with, developers could experiment and try all sorts of ideas, including what you describe.

Non-FOSS-licensed software isn't going to play the same role in the ecosystem as FOSS software, but it doesn't have to. Plenty of room for different kinds of people/companies/software to co-exist.

Many companies have no problem paying reasonable fees to license software they find useful. I don't see why they should stop paying, on some kind of ethical principle, if a developer decides to publish some or all of a product's source code on GitHub with a restrictive, noncommercial-use-only license.

Why should a developer be accused of greed for publishing code openly, but with paid licenses for commercial use? How is this not better, in absolute terms, than remaining closed source?

I figured that if devs don't want software used by companies, they could use the CC-NC licenses.

From what I can see, this is exactly what L0 provides, with the added _option_ that if a company _does_ want to use the software for commercial purposes, they can pay for a license with a credit card.

I believe L0 makes your second option painless:

Customers who want permission for commercial or non-Open Source uses can identify, price, and buy licenses for all License Zero dependencies of their Node.js projects, in one checkout transaction, using a free command-line tool

[dead] 11 years ago

Source code: https://github.com/mhuebert/instaparse-live

I built this because I was totally new to writing parsers, and I liked Instaparse but wanted a faster feedback cycle. I was also excited to use CodeMirror with ClojureScript, two of my favorite tools. More broadly, I'm interested in the future of browser-based coding - I think there's a bright future in small, problem-specific coding environments in which the language, editor, and UX are carefully mapped to a particular problem.

Just as Excel is primarily graphical but allows power users to write formulas, with CodeMirror and Instaparse one can imagine designing a small language and mini-editor to expose advanced functionality within an app. (Here I expose options as an editable Clojure map instead of with a GUI.)

I spent last summer at Recurse Center and it was the most fun I've ever had programming. The team deeply understands how to create an atmosphere in which you can try things that would feel impossible on your own. After I left, I tried working from coffee shops again, and the difference was crushing. It suddenly felt terribly wrong to be surrounded by dozens of people, not one of whom understood what I was working on or cared. Yet outside of RC this has been my default mode of work and the reason why I've often felt like doing something else.

The one thing I felt lacking at RC was a greater sense of challenge: the emphasis was on personal development more than pushing the limits of the field itself. Building a research lab means that, with luck, RC can become a place where the world's best programmers will want to come to do their most interesting work - and all the better, in an open atmosphere where you can show people what you're building. I'm excited to see where this goes.

Thanks! I took a screenwriting course a couple of years ago, and the first exercise was writing dialogue as a 17-year-old girl. It was rather mind-bending. While developing BrainTripping I was often surprised by word combinations that are second nature to me, but other people never use (and vice versa).

An illustrator helps me out on those. That was a happy accident; I was going to use photographs, but found that getting permission for all of them could be impossible, so the only way to make it graphical was to come up with original portraits. I didn't realize that they'd change the entire character of the site in a really good way.

YC Facelift: EXEC 14 years ago

The positioning works for me. Pricing ($25/h) is prominent and makes it clear that it's in my budget.

It's what Zara and H&M do. High-end design makes customers feel important; low prices let them know they're shopping in the right store.

What annoys me about typing on the iPad is that I can't take my eyes off the keyboard, because there are no physical cues to keep my hand positioned correctly. The iPad is the first keyboard I've had to look at since I was 8 years old. It totally changes the way my brain works while I'm typing, in a negative way.

If this means I can type on the iPad without looking at the keyboard, that's an awesome use case. It means I can type 100+ wpm while taking notes in a meeting or class, just like with a laptop. I can leave my external keyboard at home.

Ways FF should improve the reading experience:

- Support normal scroll behaviour (swiping my trackpad scrolls but only very slowly; I can't press spacebar to page down; clicking underneath the scroller should advance a single page, not jump ahead to another part of the document)

- Show diagrams by default (no reason to require a click)

- Add a place for comments

- Narrower line length