skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
"That's a piss poor understanding of history.
The only thing that turned the tide of the war for the Russians was winter. Stalin's kill 'em all approach had virtually no effect on the performance of his army. "

First of all, your "That's a piss poor understanding of history." is a pretty crappy comment for a forum like this that wants to stay civil. I hope you choose better wording and are not like this with your friends, and colleagues.

Second, attributing the defeat of nazis to weather, is trivalizing the whole history. I am not saying Stalin's orders to not surrender won the war, but it was a huge factor on the battle field, while you say it had no effect.

BBC - The Battle For Russia
http://joox.net/cat/44/id/1971071

The nazis caught almost 2 million soviet prisoners in the first part of the war. Imagine those people actually haven't given up, but fought to death, then the outnumbered nazi machine would have never reached so close to Moscow (16 miles).
One of the reason, after the war, a lot of ex-soviet prisoners, were treated really bad, almost as traitors.
From the article: 5. Larry Page and Sergey Brin have become gazillionaires who buy 757 and 767s as well as a party plane. It's hard not to shake your head at that kind of behaviour.

This isn't unique in Silicon Valley:

[Larry] Ellison is a certified pilot and has owned several unusual aircraft, including fighter jets. Ellison has been cited several times by the City of San Jose for violating its limits on late night takeoffs and landings from San Jose Mineta International Airport by planes weighing more than 75 000 pounds (34 019 kg). San Jose granted him a personal waiver from these regulations in 2001. -- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Larry_Ellison
The problem is, it's hard to determine what is going to be a really awful movie until you make it. Just like an idea can sound great and the execution bad, a movie can get killed by poor execution at any step of the process. And once a movie gets past a certain point, it has to be released (even if everyone knows it's bad) to recoup some of the money that's been put into it.
"as long as a few people continuously control how much money is in the money supply via banks, whether you realize/like it or not, the whole world is socialist in that respect."

I agree that is a problem with capitalism, specifically with fiat currency; but it can be corrected if we slowly move back to something akin to the gold standard. It's fixable. Not to mention this level of corruption pales in comparison to a non-capitalistic system. Capitalism isn't perfect, but it is the lesser evil.

"Do you think if you "do the right thing" and "work hard" [that you'll be rewarded]"

I live in silicon valley. I meet people all the time who have been rewarded for being clever (who come from lower class or middle class backgrounds). A lot of posts on YC have already disproven this point. You're ignoring a lot of data; not to mention you're just giving a lot of conjecture without hard facts.

No offense, but I can list a lot of examples: Paul Graham, Jerry Yang, Bill Gates, Sam Walton, the list goes on and I'm not even including foreign business men. Your argument is really weak.

Just look at China and the changes that occurred after they switched economic systems.

"First they'll see you as a threat and try to figure out how to get rid of you or control you. Last thing they want is to "reward" you for "smart behavior""

Yes, that called traditional communism, not capitalism. Again why do you think China switched? (even N. Korea is trying to switch) History has already disproven your argument.

O yeah if you actually believe in what you're writing WHY are you trying to do a startup?
Ooh! Ooh! My turn! Why Lisp?
I haven't voted you down before, but I've seen some of your jokes. Maybe this is weird, but I'd rather jokes not be made here.

I don't mean humor in general – which is great if you can include it – but the one-liners, puns, and feigning ignorance jokes.

I don't know. I guess I'm worried about that scenario that plays out all the time where someone puts effort into making a good argument hoping for deserved admiration, but then someone else can come along and crack a simplistic joke and in one second get promoted right past the first guy.

If that scenario plays out it not only discourages valuable discourse, but it encourages the opposite. Jokes are easier than thoughtful comments. So if they're rewarded just as well or better, than people will choose that route.

And a thread full of attempted jokes gets noisy fast.
+1 for cancon.
No kidding. Consider that as of April 2005, a Flex license had a $29,000 price tag (I haven't been able to find more recent numbers):

http://tech.groups.yahoo.com/group/flexcoders/message/12200

Then, two years later, they announced that the Flex SDK would be free and eventually open source:

http://developers.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=07/04/26/14024...

...which was within a month after Microsoft released Silverlight.
I think this seems like a really good concept. Sort of like the Web2.0 social networking version of how you could beam contact data Palm to Palm 10 years ago :)

The article also raises the question in my mind of who exactly is the ideal LinkedIn user? Someone with 20,000 "contacts", is, to me, probably not LinkedIn's best customer anyway.
PHP is the best web programming tool to start with!!!
Some DBAs wear Hawaiian shirts ironically. Its known as the Hawaiian Shirt Protocol ( http://www.regdeveloper.co.uk/2006/10/12/myth_legend_4/ ). Ironic or not, a Hawaiian shirt will keep you out a board room.
You're right, it's unlikely anyone would create a DirectX wrapper for the ActionScript VM. But really, who cares?
Ultra High Level Programming Language
Prrometheus, what's your email address?

I used to live in SD, but transferred to Orange County. I'd really like to chat and get together with news.yc'ers in southern California, the few that seem to be out there.
It's doable and been done, but it's just kind of pointless.
I love my moleskines and 3x5 index cards! Though I mainly use it for my todo items, notes and basically any idea that I would like to capture (tech and non-tech alike).

That said, I have been using MS Project for quite a while - At the game development company I worked for prior to my startup, MS Project was used by everyone. From the Devs, to the Producers and platform account managers (SONY, NOA, MS) - So I learned how to use it and have been using it ever since - Granted it is bloated with a ton of features that I never use, but IMO, it gets the job done and is used by a lot of people - I can shoot over an *.mpp file to to any of my colleagues to keep tabs on all aspects of our projects;
--
You need a license to sell whiskey. You need a license to listen [1] to copyrighted music. Both rules hamper behavior for no reason that can be explained by a physics textbook. Rather, they exist because the restrictions are perceived to add value to society. Maybe they don't. But it's not a philosophical dispute.

[1] Or, really, to use the music in a set of contractually defined ways.
From the article: Using rsync and hard links, it is possible to keep multiple, full backups instantly available. The disk space required is just a little more than the space of one full backup, plus incrementals.

That quite natty. I know many organisations which could benefit from this script. However, you'll have be careful not to exhaust inodes.
Thanks for the affirmation! It helps when jumping into territory with which I have no previous experience.
The link is broken!!
Taking a loss to kill competition was standard operating procedure for Standard Oil at the turn of the 20th century.
Perhaps you should try other ad alternatives besides adsense.
yeah, and I was on the second-to-last page too... great story so far.
Just deliver lisp, and take the money and run...
Seem like the author took down the story.. I was reading till page 4 and then its gone..

It was a great story though... Please put it back if you are reading this, Chris
I used DRBD to build a replicated PostgreSQL setup a couple of years ago: http://people.reed.edu/~lennon/scaling.html

It worked pretty well, but the write speed was probably about 1/4 to 1/5 that of a local database. We've sense moved to log-shipping as a replication model.

We do still use DRBD for some replicated NFS shares, and it's proven to be pretty trouble-free. (Knock on wood.)
You know...the guy did say he's accepting a Javascript implementation...

http://www.joeganley.com/code/jslisp.html.
I don't get it - posting xkcd is too "reddit". But complaining about how people are posting xkcd comics isn't?
There are other professors who recommend research and are actively pitching people to join:

http://www.cse.iitk.ac.in/users/braman/cut-edge-2005/slides/...
"To be successful startups will have to:

1. deliver completely new solutions or significantly improve existing services
2. compete with clones which provide low quality services and spoil the market
3. invest in some marketing to be faster than major companies that can easily copy ideas and optimize them "

And this is different than the current situation how?
Very interesting, thanks for this information!
Doesn't mean you can't give him lisp - he won't know the difference...

:-)
I used to time track using slimtimer. You can open it in firefox and change your active task by typing ' and the name of the task, which is really handy.

Though, I started experimenting with rescuetime and saw that although the logs weren't perfect as the ones created by slimtimer, not having to worry about them was worth it.

So, all of my time tracking is done through rescue time now. It's a very good tool (and yc backed if I'm not wrong).
Is BricaBox the first Universal Social Content Platform?
Twitter-Free version of how to get plants to ask for water - $1.50
What would happen if a comment could only be downvoted to 0 and no lower?
I saved it on my delicious to read it later, and then I found it was gone. I really what I read on the article first so now it's a pity if I can't read it. I wish it'll be back soon.
Lol. I just wrote the blog entry about this. How the hell did you find it?
Both of you have points. This leaves me wondering about the process by which submissions make it to the front page. Is this described/written-up somewhere?
how about flash that I can run outside proprietary adobe players? This move is unimpressive, unsurprising and totally self-serving. It's goal is to suck more code into vendor-locked adobe space.
I sure hope I am dead by then.
walking away from VC

(walked away from VC, after failing with 750k in grants) and the VC deal was only if he could find matching investors.

deceptive title.. decent story
yeah not yc material (Although my commenting on it probably helps it stay here) (paradox)
Polluting the front page is a bigger deal than polluting the comments thread for a page that's already noise anyway.
I sure hope no one cares, when estimates vary by 1-2 billion years; no thanks.
"For instance, someone who wanted to make an online auction site might write the line 'Clone eBay.'"

Maybe I'm missing a self-referrential joke here, but this sounds exactly like what elance is designed to do. Maybe elance.com is the ultra high level programming language.
I'd be interested to see how this pans out. The GNU compatibilities in OS X were what originally drew me away from using Windows.
It mystifies me to see clocks on news & customizable websites like this -- the abundance of chrome was mentioned, and I've always thought cute little clocks fall into the same category. It is perhaps "computer administrative junk" or whatever Edward Tufte calls it. Who looks at a clock on a web page to tell the time?
Of the two bids on your elance project, one is from a German company and the other is from a US student. I suppose now you'll stop berating Indian firms? :-)
Remote detonation via signal wire is replacing cell-activated IEDs.

You can counter a radio signal, but not a hard wire that is inactive till it is tripped. Think of those old TNT levers that set off some old movie explosion, with the wire coiling away from the bomb.

Those lines are buried for kilometers. Someone on a phone calls the person who is going to trip the bomb right as the convoy approaches.

It is a really hard problem to counter. The best detection rate will likely be from a vision algorithm that can detect changes in the dirt around some garbage pile used to cover a IED. That kind of vision algorithm is extremely hard to make.

Either way, bombs are already automated. Even third world countries make use of the most vicious robot in the world, requiring no recharge, and lasting for decades: land mines.
The main reason: Google is on top
The parent might be seen as draconian, but is actually talking about a good example of vote-for-the-community-you-want. Don't let "el oh el" posts go unmoderated -- If you don't want them here, vote them down. You aren't saying the poster lacks all virtue, just that you'd prefer a meatier discussion that doesn't devolve in to puns being the highest ranked posts.

A high signal/noise ratio is very important for some. I'd bet it's very important for most here. Tokens of information (a post, an article, etc.) often make it to the top of the heap in many user-driven environments simply because they are (1) super-easy to digest and (2) appeal to most. I left digg because that content won out, and then the same with reddit. I don't want to see a funny picture of cats when I come here (I have rss feeds for that), I want articles that are difficult, and comments I have to chew on.
What is the advantage of "network raid-1" over raid-1? It seems to me that block replication is best left below the OS.
This is just a definitional argument (http://www.overcomingbias.com/2008/02/disputing-defin.html). The original poster said "It validates in Opera, that's beautiful (read: appealing to my respect for systemic rigor)".

You said "Merely validating doesn't mean that the site is beautiful (read: visually appealing)", but chose your words to make it appear as if you were correcting the original poster.

You both have made valid statements, please try to dig a little deeper when throwing around very general labels like that or you wind up appearing arrogant.
To a certain degree this is true for me as well. However, the (IMO) other horrible user experience in Windows was probably an equal or greater motivating factor.

It's not so much that I'm "anti-Windows" as I am pro nix. For me personally, I can get more of the things done that I want to do in a nix environment. And, for me, I can do them cheaper and more securely. I know plenty of people for which the opposite is true though.
I like how the post focuses on the practical aspects of using Lisp first. I'm just a novice autodidact when it comes to Lisp, but the thing I absolutely love when learning or playing with the language is the interactive top level. I use SLIME on emacs when playing with Lisp at home. It reminds me a lot of the interactive top level available with most good RDBMS manager apps for use by DBA's and developers (TOAD, SQL Navigator, etc). It makes the work go by quickly and you manage to accomplish a lot. In contrast, when at work developing mostly Java web apps, web services, and stand-alone apps, progress comes seemingly much more slowly.
My reinforcing reply:

http://www.pchristensen.com/blog/articles/lisp-is-great-beca...
It's certainly chrome, but in the BBC's defense that particular clock has a special place in the hearts of its viewers. It's the one that used to be used in the run up to "Programmes for Schools" broadcasts and is therefore very familiar to everyone of a certain age.

There's also the fact that the BBC is a broadcaster with schedules, so while you might not care if you know the time, the BBC wants you to know it so that you don't miss broadcasts.

For these reasons I think it's superfluous but in-offensive.
What may help with being energized (outside of consuming substances) is subdividing the day's activities into defined tasks and taking breaks in-between. This gives the work a flow and helps to concentrate and be "in the moment."
San Francisco proper and the middle of the Valley (Palo Alto, Menlo Park, etc.) are very different -- from San Mateo down to San Jose you pretty much need a car since everything is very flat and spread out compared to, say, Manhattan or Boston.
Have a link that exposes a text description of the puzzle called "Text Description of this Puzzle" or somesuch. If you use CSS to hide the div, Google will index it. This technically is considered cloaking, of course.
Offtopic: Suggestion to the tip guys: Can you take me to the tipxxx page on the second click. People might want to know how the button works. Or was that a conscious choice?
pg mentioned it once but I can't find it. It's some combination of votes and comments, with an exponential decay function to lower it over time. So if gazillions of people vote it up, it can stay on the front for a while, or if several people start commenting on a new article, it can jump to the front page even with only a few points.

Incidentally, this means that all of the people who complain about xkcd comics are ensuring that it gets on the front page, where more people will look at it, vote for it, and comment on it, prolonging its time on the front page!
Ouija: A Scheme Interpreter in Flash
For a team, I recommend adding "sticky notes on posterboard", to your low tech regime. Best issue tracking system I've used to date.
(Wish they would open a door) free open access to the site
As of a few days ago, you can just RTFS :-)

(= gravity* 1.4 timebase* 120 front-threshold* 1)

(def frontpage-rank (s (o gravity gravity*))
(/ (- (realscore s) 1)
(expt (/ (+ (item-age s) timebase*) 60) gravity)))
It's time to get to know your relatives better...eat dinner at their houses, they usually don't charge.
Suprisingly, you can find meals at local eateries that may not be at all more than the ingredients, let along the additional costs of time, electricity, supplies, and wasted food, when you have to throw it away, at least at the beginning. So, get to know your relatives and your local food places (you'll easily find ~$3 filling meals, depending on COLA).
The internet is not an accident (a refresher on Motherhood and Apple Pie)
I assume you mean it's pointless because C++ sacrifices ease-of-coding for performance, but when C++ is compiled to bytecode it won't be appreciably faster than other languages.

While it would be odd for someone to write new C++ code solely to target bytecode, I think that a C++ bytecode compiler would still be useful in situations where, for example, you have an existing C++ codebase that you would like to reuse in a web client.
Ask YC : Could Rails build the Semantic Web?
This is just an idea that I wanted to throw out to the community. Everyone talks about how to build the underlying structure into the web to allow the Semantic Web 'flourish'. What if web app frameworks, like Rails or Django, could build in the structured information in the same way that Java Docs build out documentation for Java Code.

Maybe there is a very good reason why this won't work but I'm sitting in a meeting and wanted to throw this out there. What do you think? Could you build in Semantic Web structure at development time, or DB insert time, etc. Instead of trying to build some program that infers it from existing web pages?
I'm sure you'll get downvoted for that because of the l33t crowd here, but I'd have to agree that if you don't know conventional programming, a super straightforward language like PHP is better for learning web programming, as opposed to languages like Python/Ruby that are general purpose languages suited to programming.
Bet... what?
When I read comments, I see basically three levels:

0 - one person disagreed - possibly an anomalous bad comment

-1 - two people disagreed - confirmed bad comment

-more - a trolling comment where the writer was baiting downvoters

Doesn't always work but I'd definitely lose information if there was a floor of 0.
Killer militant robots. Please relax
http://lemonodor.com/images/norvig-at-web20-s.jpg

He did ok with his shirts.
How to Resize Your Parallels Drive, and Get Windows to Recognize It
Everything you ever wanted to know about advisors: Part 2.
So what is yc material? Well, I don't know, but I do like submissions that I wouldn't otherwise see. For the submitter, that requires time, research, and perhaps thought.

I don't like stuff like this. It's the hacker version of email forwards from distant relatives.
Give Charles Simonyi at Intentional Software a call, he should be in a position to bid for the elance job;-)

http://www.intentsoft.com/
How To Write A Takedown - Ted Dziuba
Navigation Menus: Trends and Examples
Ask YC: What CRM do you use?
I'm looking for a non-sucky, cheap CRM software/web app to manage several hundred contacts. Any suggestions?
What in a Unix environment makes you more productive? The GUI of OSX is quite different from Gnome or KDE. Is it the command line with tools like grep?
There's also the fact that about 99% of us here probably already have xkcd bookmarked (and checked twice daily) and thus don't need every new xkcd comic submitted here too.
OK, that is impressive.
Some people don't want to pay for dual-controller hardware RAID, so DRBD is the software equivalent.
Public Domain Donor: donate your IP to the public upon your death
Too bad companies own most of my IP.
Wow lots of unwarranted assumptions and generalizations here.

Not gotten enough sleep? :D
Lately I have had some issues with rescuetime. It seems to not track some of my days...for example I currently have no entries for tues/weds. It could be my laptop, my network connection, etc.
At Electric Cloud we use SalesForce.com. It works.
and they expect to build the next Google in Europe. Not in a million years
Intellectual property is neither.
Why Google Buys Companies
I talked about this back in December of last year at a conference. They actually announced this at an EU conference back then. The original plan was for Windows 8 to allow a genuine Unix stack to co-exist along side the Windows kernel.

In a way, this would bring Microsoft full circle. Anyone remember Xenix?
I'v been amazed by the way that Etsy and other sites like Hyenacart have queitly been growing in the background, with not much significant media coverage, but well known and adored within their own circles.

From personal, anecdotal evidence (meaning not good evidence) I'd not expect many people to walk away from corporate jobs for new small businesses facilitated by these websites. However I know of many people turning hobbies into small businesses as a supplemental income. I've seen this trend led by stay-at-home moms.
Scoble cries over a telescope?
Robert Scoble announced the other week that he saw something at microsoft that made him cry. Today was the first time he was able to publicly talk about it.
GNU compatible framework?, Nix environment? Embrace Extend Extinguish ?
we use dokuwiki with SQL plugin in conjunction with flyspray and webcalendar.

since both webcalendar and flyspray use a database. it's very easy to make dashboards.
Command-line is a big part of it.

I grew up on DOS and edlin and pre-mouse days.

I do a lot of different things but a lot of my time is spent on/with mailservers, web servers, db servers, network sniffers, perl/shell scripts, etc. With the exception of the network sniffers almost all of that stuff is better/easier/faster in some sort of "hi res text" (ie: a terminal on a high-res 24" monitor). And of course I use a browser and an email client, but those things are pretty much OS agnostic these days.

Windows also just feels "heavy" to me, and it feels to me like the OS is "hiding" too many things from me. I know what I'm doing, I don't blame anyone for my own stupid actions, so please don't hide files and subdirs from me. Don't require upteen mouse clicks to edit a simple setting...
Sir Tim Berners-Lee: Semantic Web is open for business
I...DECLARE.... BANKRUPTCY!
Tcl already does this:

http://www.tcl.tk/cgi-bin/tct/tip/131.html
If you can sell 2% of the company for $1,000, doesn't that imply a $50,000 pre-money valuation?