skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
As a left-winger, here goes:

Yes, there are nut jobs. But, yes, you are engaged in a fallacious generalization. It's also called a prejudice. But here's a softer restatement of what you said for those of us who at least think we're not nut jobs:

"At the same time, many people (we'll call them "fellow humans") claim that there is sometimes wealth and poverty without agency and that those with means should help those without means, particularly in cases without agency or in cases with resistant intertia, because of the direct or indirect causal relationship between the source of the means and the reduced or diminished means of those living in or near poverty. This attitude is either selfish or altruistic on an individual level depending on the means of the proponent of this attitude and destructive in a society when taken to the extreme (some fellow humans tend to be extreme when you largely ignore fellow humans who do not fit your definition of extreme)."

How was that? I don't assume that all "right-wingers" like you might be are extreme. I'm related to many of them, friends with many of them. They have good ideas and a different opinion on fairness and entitlement. It's possible that everyone's partially right and it's a good idea to mingle more often.
It would be interesting to see what religions beget what wealth.

Our own preconceptions set aside, what is obvious is the relation between countries with a Judeo-Christian backgound that are wealthy. Even if many countries have abandoned many of these practises it is still the root of many bases of society (our law system, trust as fundamental to business e.g. contracts, money etc.). Societies stemming from Judeo-Christina values more often have a everyone-has-value society than non-Judeo-Christian based societies. Apart from the actual debate on where wealth comes from (slavery anyone?) it still is interesting to ponder.
Brad DeLong on trade and wages
I dunno how I feel about that - it depends on the size of the pool (# of companies). Could get distracting in the long run.
I work a couple of hours every few days, and try to get at least 8 in on the weekends. I've got a wife and kid and a FT job in a management capacity so it's tough, but I'm seeing progress.
Hacker Music
What songs/artists really get you pumped up for programming? What genres are generally the best? Thanks!
About the only way to make money without creating wealth is to steal it from somebody else. Typically when somebody pays you for something you did, it's because they'd rather have your service or product than the cash they paid for it. Typically this means you created something valuable (or that the dollar is depreciating so quickly everyone's eager to get rid of it, but more on this later).

The spammer created value to the companies advertising and more importantly created a whole market for spam filtering solutions (the same way virus writers created a huge anti-virus market, to the extent that some wonder if a lot of viruses are not actually written the AV vendors themselves).
Survivor - Eye of the Tiger

(cue coding montage)
wtf? How many people will write blogs about lions and cages? And how many times will it get featured on news.yc? Cmon .. there has to be something better to read. This is becoming like a literature class now where everybody is discussing what they mean by lions and cages. If you do have a comment just leave a comment on YC or reddit or something instead of writing more blogs. Sheesh.
all these ideas are a little experimental. how can we try them out without nuking this community?
OpenOffice 3.0 Promises to Bash Office
Vultures (John Mayer)

Lose Yourself (Eminem)
Fishbone and anything else similarly eclectic... Cherry Poppin' Daddies, Los Fabulosos Cadillacs... stuff like that.

Do a google search though, this topic comes up very regularly.
Shareware download sites is another thing Google has eliminated the need for.
Haha, it seems like a post like this comes up every two weeks, but I enjoy seeing the responses every time.
I've been thinking about this startup 2yrs and 1/2 ago now - started design & planning while i was student, then got a FT job, convinced a friend to join me in the meantime...

My teamate worked non-stop on it only 1yr ago, mainly coding the application - i was dedicating early mornings and late nights + weekends at it.
did you read where the sentence you're apparently replying to said "background services?" i wasn't talking about "android apps getting nuked from one minute to the next."

almost all the arguments here are on technical merits. me, gruber, and others seem unable to convince you guys that apple quite often doesn't make decisions based on technical merits, but rather on what will make a better experience for the user.

gruber, me, others, etc, certainly aren't arguing that background apps aren't possible. the argument is whether it's advisable, given the current limitations on memory, cpu, battery, apple engineering time, and backward compatibility.

one of the main things that makes windows suck so much is microsoft's slavish devotion to backward compatibility. there are things in the win32 api that got there because the 8086 didn't have memory protection, for crying out loud. apple doesn't want to commit to a public api until they know it's a good one.

"I prefer Android's approach: laissez faire ..." spoken like a hacker, rather than like a typical user of a mobile phone. apple is always going to prefer thinking about these things from the point of view of the user.
I think this starts off with voracious reading of other subjects that may have interested you as a kid, but that you never had the time or inclination to learn.

In order to stave off the slightly depressing feeling that your original childhood passions are waning, you pick up new subjects or skills to learn so that you can re-kindle excitement. This is certainly what has worked for me. It helps that you're probably naturally curious about almost anything to begin with (apologies for the gross generalization).
The article says that he "had a third party submit his file to just about every software aggregation site", it would be handy to know how many that was, so that we can divide 16 by it.
"optional office space"
And how did your company do ? :)
Sadly, this can very easily happen to companies that sell hardware. There are so many factors at play, including changing manufacturing costs, changing component costs, regulatory compliance for FCC and safety compliance where applicable... it can be very easy to get low-volume stuff "out there" at the start to get initial sales and users, but you soon realize that there are major changes required to actually build it into a business. That doesn't explain the licensing change exactly, but I can at least appreciate the price change.
There's an economic principal on how specialization can increase output for the same amount of work. Otherwise, clearly some failed startups can tell that they're doomed before they finally give up and this might give them something more valuable to do?

Will be interesting to see this strategy tested.
Note also the correlation: startups get to choose their tools, so they usually go with cool "new" languages (yes, I'm aware that Ruby and Python are technically older than Java, and that C# is technically newer than any of the three, but here I use "new" to mean, "not the next COBOL" ;-).

Bigger, older companies tend to be more conservative, or simply have a large legacy codebase, so they tend to use Blub more often.

Languages can also stagnate and become Blub, compared to newer languages. Think of a 10-year-old dot-com-era company who used Perl 5 because it was the best thing around at the time, and now, 10 years later, has a bunch of legacy Perl code that seemed like the coolest thing ever, but somehow looks like Blub now...
Me and my business partner are planning to go to Startup School on the 19th (if we get in). If our travel dates sync up we'll try to meet you out there.

Anyone else going to be in the area?
I'm just sick of hearing about it. This is like the OJ Simpson trial of hacker news.

Or I should say Reddit. The responses here were fairly normal until someone pointed out that reddit-ers were freaking out about it. I really hate to beat the old 'reddit is teh dumb' dead horse, but it kind of seems like it sometimes.

I think someone read into that essay what he wanted in a search for controversy, and then a lot of people jumped on the bandwagon in order to grind an axe with PG or YC, or to appear politically correct, or any number of other reasons.

It's just like when the whole world had a cow over the (lack of) unicode support in Arc0.

I am currently a caged lion, and I feel like one. I dream of nothing else but the open savanna and a tasty gazelle. How is that for taking a metaphor too far? I understood the whole thing as "startups are liberating to hackers" ... not "hackers that aren't doing startups suck" as others have suggested. I think his points about giant organizations not being natural make sense, and I really don't see why everyone took it personally.

Sure, people can enjoy their big company jobs. But you have to wonder... I have yet to meet an (ex)entrepreneur that hated running his own business. Just because you happen to like your company job doesn't mean you wouldn't get more done and feel more free in a startup. And just because you would get more done and feel more free in a startup doesn't mean you should quit a company job you are happy at either. It's up to the individual. It's not like we are arguing over religion here.

Or are we? It sure sounds like it lately.
But the chicks are AWESOME.
how about this gets done monthly? I'm going to be in SF May 1-8..
I'm at http://twitter.com/Stammy
I've wondered if one could arrive at a good decision using no evidence or facts, but only based on how the different sides debate the issue. The idea is you could determine which party is right based solely on how they say things, rather than how strong the evidence is. You look at how different parties debate. You then compare their styles or types of arguments with debates from the past that have since been settled.

It's Bayesian spam filtering, applied to debates. I don't know how accurate it would be, or if it would be easy to game, but it seems useful for educating guesses.
Reminds me of web hosting review sites stuffed with affiliate links. Of course they're ranked in order of highest to lowest commission.
The Lost Art of Caring
We're planning on having a Private Beta launch party in April at our office (with a keg of free beer) in SF especially for Hacker News fans. Any suggestions on the best date will be appreciated :) (Would the 16th of april work for people coming to the startup school?)
You are not staying for Startup School?!

(Apr 19)
This is the broken window fallacy. Making a "market" in window repairs by smashing windows doesn't create wealth.
A translation from CEO-speak to English of the recent comments from the CEO’s of Mozilla and eMusic
How about having a leader board like page, listing users sorted by votes cast + submissions?
Let me help you with that: Apple. The c2 wiki was inspired by Hypercard.

Ward Cunningham invented wikis. Apple didn't. The c2 wiki was inspired by an app he had written in Hypercard, which was itself inspired by Hypercard. But inspiration is not invention.

As fabulously successful and widespread as wikis have become, Ward's name is rarely mentioned in connection with them. That strikes me as a shame, because this is one case where there's a clear and unambiguous inventor.

http://c2.com/cgi/wiki?WikiWikiHyperCard
Ask YC: Any hackers who can provide advice on scaling (esp database)?
Particularly, how well symfony scales(using Propel ORM layer)? We've built our startup using Symfony, and it allows us to iterate quickly, but when it comes to scaling, especially database connections, are there any best practices out there that we should be aware of now?

I'd rather hear about people's experiences and tweak now rather than get screwed later! Thanks!
What chicks? Any chicks!

PS: spent 5 years in an engineering school = a campus with ONLY engineering students.
Yes, I know they're talking about background services.

> apple doesn't want to commit to a public api until they know it's a good one.

> "I prefer Android's approach: laissez faire ..." spoken like a hacker, rather than like a typical user of a mobile phone. apple is always going to prefer thinking about these things from the point of view of the user.

Well, I am a hacker, and I'm not going to apologize for it:-) I'd rather have that freedom, and see what happens. I get your point, and think it's a sensible one, but when all is said and done, I'd rather have a more open system. I think that Apple has certainly demonstrated that their approach is a good one for certain types of users, but it's not one that I prefer.
Of course they're math problems. I'm not sure I'd like the idea of working with Elec. Engineers or Civil engineers that don't know the math they need and just guess at everything.
Live and work in San Francisco, HN meetup sounds like fun. Happy to help with local logistics too, jbyers at gmail.
I was thinking the same thing. We're getting too much reinvention of the wheel without new things like tires, studs and chains for traction. Jaanix (http://jaanix.com/) is the only one I've seen recently that adds something new to the table (or fixes what's broken about another site).
"Deja vue" I thought and lo and behold - http://successfulsoftware.net/2007/08/16/the-software-awards...

August 2007. How lovely of Watchguard to repackage the article, stamp its own copyright and publish it as "news".
Fine-tuning and growing
For me it's ok with the 16th. It might be the best date so that people going to the Startup School can get on board.

I'm afraid that the app form for the Startup school is closed already so can't stay even if I wanted :(

Anyway, I'm sure we'll have plenty of cool conversations the 16th :D
Sorry, I guess I took the slavery example to mean that this was a means to have the deck stacked financially against you in the context of rich vs. poor. Yes, being born a slave has historically been an insurmountable barrier to wealth.

It's not exactly a stretch to say that the enslaved have typically been poor on account of their being slaves, is it?

What I really wanted to drive home is that slaves are neither poor nor rich. These concepts are based on the ownership of property. Slaves are property and are forbidden to own property. Within the framework of the law, it is possible to escape poverty, not so with slavery. When politicians say that the poor are "slaves" to the rich or that poverty is a new kind of slavery, its a clean miss and usually indicates a rather ugly agenda hiding beneath.
It loaded just fine for me. But I dont see anything that differentiates your site. Also, UI is a bit underwhelming - too many ads everywhere.

On the other hand, I agree with davidw - the revenue sharing is potentially interesting.

Either way, keep going and good luck?
jbyers that's greatly appreciated. I used to be at Berkeley so I don't know too many venues in SF. Any recommendation?

gibsonf1 how many people can we fit in you offices?
I suspect that most good hackers can do well with the financial and legal aspects of a business once they decide that it's an important system to understand. Hacking a contract and hacking code are not all that different in the skills required.

Still, having partners you can trust seems very important to me, too. Money can either unite people or tear them apart. You have to know that your partner has got your back.
I'll come.
For throwing up a Wordpress blog and uploading files, it's perfect- you have effectively unlimited space, and the Grid server will scale no problem if you get onto Digg or Reddit. Speed is fine, the admin user interface is excellent, and it just works. Think of it as the iPod of hosting.

Now, for music, the iPod's all I need- I don't need FM radio and eight buttons for various functionality I'll virtually never use. Simplicity is a good thing when I need a basic feature set. And, if you're looking for personal web hosting, that makes (gs) perfect.

If you want to be able to customize every facet of your server, dive into the internals, and get something complex working, a distributed hosting service really isn't the way to go.

But for a blog or file hosting? Highly recommended.
MediaTemple - they host some of the big guys. They also take care of the little guys like us!
Ask YC: focus / knowing what to stop working on ?
I love creating new things. Here's a list of some things I've worked on lately:

Leenooks.com which is backed by an open source wiki I created, DedaWiki

Linuxsi.com - hack to showcase linux friendly stores in Italy.

Hecl (hecl.org), which is getting lots of stuff for Android.

Langpop.com - programming language stats

SqueezedBooks.com - business book summaries

All in addition to paid work for clients.

How do other people deal with staying focused, and dealing with past efforts? Something like Linuxsi.com or Leenooks.com is a nice idea and people find it valuable, but it's not startup material, and it takes up a bit of time to run them. I don't like the idea of getting rid of things like that, but maybe it would be the best, so I could focus on things like Hecl. How do other people deal with offloading the less important things in order to concentrate and focus?

I think having a cofounder and working on something full time, 'for real' would definitely be one step, but unfortunately I don't have that right now.
Hudson CI, 1st impressions
I've always held that the person that is the most angry is the one that is least sure of his position.

It's not useful as the only predictor, because people's emotional involvement in ideas can vary, but I find it to be useful meta-information.
Justin.TV: Lots Of Users. Revenue?
I'd help out too if it's needed.
Influence is great. I think the fear is that TC commenters might show up. Maybe we could ask Arrington to stop crediting HN with a link when he mines it for stories?
I work some weeknights, plus large chunks of the weekends. I get maybe 10-20 hours a week on the project. I find this approach quite frustrating, though: you get totally in the zone and then it's time to go to bed because you have work the next day. Also, I find that I no longer have so much energy for volunteering or writing music or socialising. I knew that doing a start-up meant saying goodbye to your life, but I didn't realise that sacrifice would have to be made so early.
Are You Maximizing Your Product Blog?
A thoughtful essay, I agree with its spirit. Nicely written.

The arm-waving stuff about evolution disappointed me, tho. Supposedly, the genes humans have are in aggregate woefully ill-suited for success in modernity, at least this is what I hear from people who make similar arguments relating to evolutionary psychology. Programming computers post dates by at least 100K years the environment in which our genes were supposedly selected for reproductive success. On theory, everyone of us ought to be clumsy at best around computers, tho the evidence is all to the contrary.

Even granting your evolutionary premise tho, it has some problems. For one, I think you overlook a number of notably spectacular successes in eusocial species where size matters. Instead of lions in Africa, for instance, spend some time observing an ant mound. I also wouldn't expect that reproductive success and professional success would necessarily track each other. Or maybe I misunderstood you.

My $0.02: I think fulfillment of the individual and the success of the organization is more the result of the nature and motivations of the actual individuals involved with it than, per se, the size of the organization. Personally, I've worked as a programmer for big and small, but my best experience was as a private contractor. The evolutionary equivalent of the lone hawk if you'd like. (I'm now doing something ENTIRELY different).

I think most young programmers are well advised to spend some time in the box before they can learn and appreciate thinking and working outside it.
Hi, I am the author of _Overcome Email Overload_, and I watched a LOT of people use email and interviewed them about their practices. I have distilled what I think is needed into http://www.emailoverload.com/philosophy/PerfectClient.php

If you want to check out my book online, see
http://emailoverload.com/eudora/html/index.php
for the Eudora 5 version and
http://emailoverload.com/outlook/OEO-O.complete.pdf
for the Outlook 2002 version. (They are very similar, but use different terms and reflect the slightly different features of Eudora and Outlook.)

IMHO, the most important part to read is the beginning of Chapter 2.

I have also written some email clients. I would agree with dazzawazza that you should not try to write your own POP/SMTP/IMAP code. It is really easy to write a simple POP/SMTP email program, and incredibly difficult to write a good email program. (For example: attachments can be recursively nested, yuck! For example: IMAP clients must be able to accept input from the server at any time.)

All the popular languages -- C, C++, Java, Python, Perl, PHP, and undoubtedly Ruby -- have robust email libraries. I wouldn't be surprised if even some of the lesser-known languages like Erlang and Squeak have good libraries as well.

I would suggest building on top of Firefox, GMail, SquirrelMail, or Evolution, depending upon what your goals are. You might also think about contributing to the Chandler project.

Good luck!
As someone with a computer engineering degree, I think this article is totally lame.
I'm just going to have to address each point:

Point #5: Some textbooks are indeed awful. This is probably the most reasonable point here. But I don't think this is specific to engineering. And it's possible to learn the material in different ways, thanks to the net.

Point #4: I don't think it is a professor's job to 'create excitement'. I'm happy with a professor when they do a great job explaining things, not when they sound like a Pontiac ("we build excitement") ad.

Point #3: This stands out as particularly awful. Engineering programs don't exist to hold students' hands while they search for work.

Point #2: This point manages to be arrogant and incorrect at the same time. In my experience, the brightest students are often the ones with the best grades. Yes, some obviously talented students will slack, but the author is totally over-generalizing.

Point #1: Every assignment feels the same. He makes this statement, and then fails to back it up. Yes, many assignments were based on math. This does not make them the same. I don't think many engineers would agree that deriving the Nyquist theorem is the same as solving an RLC circuit network. Engineering is totally about creativity - but like anything, first you need to learn the basics.
i would work on the project for which i (and my team) have strongest passion ... and if it is a commercial startup then i will also see whether it can generate revenue right away ...
Google Traps Zenter in Coding Zoo
From employee to entrepreneur
Please, please, please eliminate the ability to post duplicate links.
Ask YC: Should "Hacker News" be renamed?
Should "Hacker News" be renamed to "Web 2.0 News" so that the "Hacker News" moniker can be freed up to be used by a site that provides news of interest to hackers and the intellectually curious in general?
+ 1 vote for making this happen the weekend of Startup School (especially for those of us who would be flying in to the Bay Area)
thanks :) i am looking for a collaborator for sonification.
fyi i have monetized electric sheep: http://hifidreams.com
this is just taking off in the art world: it's now permanently
hosted on moma.org and i just got the cover of Leonardo.
if you sell your startup, you might even be able to afford it ;)