skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
From 1957: "The latest prodigy of the chess world is a fourteen-year-old ... Robert Fischer"
Sitting in the San Francisco airport because it is snowing in Atlanta.
How next billion will shape net
Dangers of remote Javascript (perl.com becomes a porn site)
Content carve up of net begins
Watched "The Terminal" on television, along with what seemed like a good hour of mostly-prescription-drug commercials. Sorted through some digital photos. Cleaning some no-longer-interesting files off of my iPod.

Saturday night tends to be a night off, which I think is a good thing.
Went to a Greek-food dinner party with karaoke, now I'm working on my current project, a hosted website load testing solution. The site prototype (but not the app) is up, at: http://www.testomatix.com. Edit: also rocking out with Pandora while I work. I really like pandora.
Future directions in computing
Really? My great-grandpa's mom reads Hacker News in her iPhone.
Good take.

I learned of the existence of Common Lisp about 1 year and 3 months ago, via PG's essays. There was this mysterious language I kept hearing about on Slashdot, that supposedly made you a much better programmer for the rest of your days if you learned it, and that was so much more advanced than Java, that was my only language at the time because I was "fresh out of college" (I actually dropped out at term 5 of 6 for mostly inconsequential reasons, one of them was gaming, now I stopped it entirely) and didn't know any better. Though in a sense, I did know better, because I was beginning to really "bang my head" on the "low ceiling" of Java, I was somehow attracted to metaprogramming techniques, I understood the repugnance of the boilerplate code, etc.

So, I read about all of PG's essays and researched it for 2 weeks, and I was hooked. I absolutely wanted to have those cool features like (apply) (and everything else really great about lisp), that I had so fondly dreamt of.

I spent the next year learning Common Lisp while writing my first website, and I have now developed (still evolving but mature-ish) a quite decent web framework! I made optimizing compilers for HTML and CSS, and I made a "form validator compiler" (among other stuff): you specify rules of validation in any order and it compiles into an optimized tree of closures that computes the stuff in the right order (well, actually it doesn't figure out the order itself yet because that's related to graph theory, and I have yet to learn that).

Could I ever have done so much in Java, or any other mainstream language? HECK NO! What I love most about Common Lisp is that it gives you 2 more responsibilties/powers basically. It places you in the seat of the language designer, and that of the compiler writer. That's my experience anyway. In Common Lisp, it's so easy to make new syntaxes and semantics that you can afford to use advanced techniques (ex: compiler writing) regularly and easily. It lets you deal with the hard stuff, if you're up to the challenge. As has been said, it's a language in which you think more than you write.

Common Lisp is my only language right now (well, except HTML, CSS, SQL and whatnot), but I plan to learn Haskell in maybe a year, and then maybe Erlang or some other cool language.

Also I want to rack up my computing (ex: algorithmic) and math skills, I could certainly use a more robust footing for the advanced stuff I want to make (like rule-based systems). I never liked math very much at school, and found it pretty useless, but now I'm really excited about learning things that will actually be of use for my work (and for me, work=play=life).

Hum... to go back on topic... well, that guy must have tried really hard not to find profound insights in lisp to succeed.
You were smart enough to realize that you need not be depressed when you are smart enough to realize that you are not quite smart enough.
Just like the "Learn Java in 24 hours" implies that its authors are also experts, right?
If I may make a suggestion, chasing a woman has much higher ROI than chasing women.

And, of course, you can ask her in bed if "the big switch from Edison" is worth reading.
Maybe a workaround:

1. Ad server signs the text of the javascript code with an HMAC-style digest with a shared (private) key. Maybe the first line of the text is the hash of the rest of it. (Possibly also an advertiser-id jammed in there so the site knows which key to check).

2. Client pulls the javascript as plain text via XMLHttpRequest. (May require hacks or flash to do cross-domain on some browsers. :-( )

3. Client sends the whole thing via a POST XMLHttpRequest to the site's server. (Remember, that only the advertiser and the site can have the same key; if the client can get it, the attacking site can, too).

4. Site's server returns some OK message with the hash to the client.

5. Client javascript calls eval on the text of the javascript.

That should keep anyone from injecting malicious javascript by stealing the advertiser's domain. It does NOT protect against an attacker who has managed to get ahold of the secret key, but that's a lot trickier for them to do.
They have two "in progress" projects. I guess we should come back in three business days (say, Thursday, Jan 24) and see what new projects they're doing instead. ;)
I prefer the MP3 version. Here it is, complete with an insightful intro by the man himself:

http://www.monzy.com/?p=245
Or, eliminate 3rd-party ad serving altogether. Require all js and flash content to be cached and approved by the originating ad server.
Money talks.
An addendum:

If the advertiser is okay with it, you could have it work like this:

1. Client makes HTTP GET request from the site's server.

(1a. If the page has to load before the advertisement does, the site server returns immediately and the client makes an XMLHttpRequest to the site server, then proceed to step 2.)

2. Site's server GETs the javascript-text plus digest from the advertiser, checks the digest, then sends the javascript to the client to be eval()'d.

Since the final javascript is the one that will be loading the advertisement's images, links, etc., the advertiser can still independently verify that an actual user is viewing the ad.
nice. i will probably try http://honolulu.craigslist.org/search/cas/?query=w4m
That could work. See also my addendum, which would work well with your caching scheme.
Is she the one with the time-travel startup? ;-)
An Asynchronous Comet Server for Django
An Asynchronous WSGI server has been developed for Django. It's being called django-evserver. Pretty cool video of the technology in action after the jump.
"I think what we need to do is go to everybody's house and make sure that only licensed statistical arbitrage traders have black boxes."

Worth reading for that line alone.
Shulman
http://www.aleph-zero.info/
Seth Godin: a shortage of digital coaches
A bit of trivia: A good friend of mine designed one of those new cities, and my cofounder is over in Riyadh at the moment coding. (He mentioned how boring it is there)
Found out how to rip mp3s out of flv movies.
EC2: Ubuntu 7.10 Gutsy Base Install
I'll be far more excited when the FreeBSD 7.0 AMI is available. :-)
That's a pity it's Sunday morning here already :)
What would you do when your program does not do what your documentation says it should
Whether or not they make it as an industrial power, at least the Saudis are investing for the future instead of squandering their petrodollars like some other resource rich countries, eg. Chavez's rampant spending in Venezuela.
> they recognize the irrelevance of everything...they can't escape the irrelevance of everything, because that's just how nature is...QED

In science, when a model of the world ceases to be useful, the smart thing to do is to find a better model.

Even if there is an objective nature, animals can only hope to experience it subjectively (our brains are remarkable at filtering physical input received from the five senses, and our world view is shaped by a lifetime of filtering and selecting input).

Consequently, the gifted "everything is irrelevant" individual will be depressed, not because everything is actually irrelevant, but because the individual believes this to be the case (moreover, whether or not "everything is actually irrelevant" is actually irrelevant is the follow up joke).

It's a shame that many gifted depressives are apparently so emotionally attached to this ugly model.
win. ty.

edit: this is interesting too: http://www.fastseduction.com/
if you focus on one girl that's very risky, if you learn how to have a high percentage chance with most women, that is a low-risk investment
If you want to know anything about that, just email me. I've read extensively on that subject. :P
I went to a local rock show.
Ate some haggis for Burns Night, read some poetry, drank some beers, then some Glenfiddich fine single malt, then continued to work on prototyping a business application I'm working on.

I'm leveraging the Clojure Lisp, and along with NetBeans 6.0 for GUI design, and TextMate for editing code, it's definitely the most productive language I've ever worked in.

The neatest thing is that that same code runs unchanged on OS X and Windows XP, since Clojure runs on the JVM. (v 1.5 for those of us with Leopard, that is.)
The Algorithm: Idiom of Modern Science
This one is a long read, with somewhat "boring" subject. This article did not generate much interest on programming@reddit and I found it to be an unfortunate fact.

For all younger hackers I strongly suggest to at least bookmark it if you don't have time to read it, this text is a very nice collection of short "popular introductions" into various exciting fields of CS.
Good luck to them if they can get this. I'm sure that the 3-days will have some caveat and they did say 1.0 in this time. If you were large enough, and had the funds, you might go to these guys to get something out the door quickly. From a PR angle also this will definitely get into the press. Interesting to watch
EconTalk podcast: Munger on the Nature of the Firm
EconTalk podcast: Duggan on Strategic Intuition
Hackers Have Attacked Foreign Utilities, CIA Analyst Says
lol! Not many people using the RSS, I gather?
I don't understand your question. Do you mean you want an aspect of FreeBSD that's easier to use?
Wrote a follow-up to this one (from a Computer Science perspective) at:
http://amundblog.blogspot.com/2008/01/how-to-complete-your-p...
Yes, good point. Cheaper than a small team of lawyers. I remember a build-a-website in 24 hours contest nine or so years ago - perhaps Obie and his team might volunteer their productive capabilities for a deserving non-profit? I think the right pro-bono project would generate good PR and better karma.
I am interested in seeing what (assuming the who, who comissioned the site allow it) kind of customer experience can be built in three intensive days.
Just saw a movie. Awesome intravert sport, movie watching. Except for the whole leaving the house thing...

Seeing Cloverfield makes me glad I just moved from NYC.
I'll prefix this reply with the fact that I'm a Scheme fan. But I would never try to code up a large project in anything related to LISP right now.

It's awesome that you've put together your own framework, but at the same time kind of unfortunate that you have to. Lots of languages (including Java) already have form validation frameworks that do pretty much anything you want, but Common LISP doesn't have the community behind webapps to get really great libraries.

I won't take away anything from LISPy languages as far as learning more about computer science in general and AI & language design in specific, but it's not the end-all be all of programming languages, at least not anymore. Ask PG how many startups he's given YC money to that actually use any language invented before the 90's...
The intangible anti-benefits of living in a dark-ages theocracy are probably worth a lot of negative money, especially to creative-thinker types.

Witness, on the other end of the scale, how much people are willing to pay for a crappy loft in SF (or, even more so, Manhattan!).
pg, could you please change the MIME type of the feed to application/rss+xml (it's currently text/html)? Some by-the-book aggregators won't read this feed properly.

http://feedvalidator.org/docs/warning/UnexpectedContentType....

Thanks.
Something I had to deal with recently, it was very painful. My girlfriend eventually got me to dump the design and just code.
Birthday party at a pub until 4am. Much drinking and delight.
So we should invent our own uncorrelated black-boxen?
Church of Scientology website being attacked by hackers
Interesting idea. That seems like a lot of work, not to mention the same origin policy issues. Why not just validate it server side? A simple server side script could pull the JavaScript from the advertiser, verify it, and pass it on to the client.

Or use a public key signature and verify it client-side, though that would require the encryption algorithm implemented in JavaScript.

However, why do advertisement need JavaScript in the first place? As demonstrated by this incident, you're trusting the advertisers not to do bad things on your site.
I think you missed Daniel's irony
Because ignorance is bliss.
The Huff ["How to lie with statistics"]
This thread is pedantic.

By thy way:

sum(i=1..n) i*i = n/6 + n^2/2 + n^3/3
Existential depression is something we all deal with just fine. It doesn't cause suicide. In this case, presumably unmedicated serious bipolar disorder caused suicide. There is a big difference and a life probably would have been saved if someone would have just taken their lithium.
I still don't know if this will work for them. What matters most is the incentive structure for the students; and I don't think anyone can just engineer it correctly.
Ask YC: which Ajax Framework? How to deal with language diversification?
I think the question has been posed before, but I can't seem to find the thread. So which Ajax framework is everybody using?

Also, it seems Javascript is developing similarly to LISP and Scheme, in that lots of variations of the language develop, all with slightly different philosophies. I guess I just have to pick a random one and be pragmatic about it? It's hard for me to do, though...

Edit: or is the first step of a true LISPer to create his/her own version of the language?
Mobile phone radiation wrecks your sleep
> Why not just validate it server side? A simple server side script could pull the JavaScript from the advertiser, verify it, and pass it on to the client.

See my addendum: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=101149
JQuery
+
http://searchyc.com/ajax+framework
Paid answer website..feeback wanted
I will _consider_ this suggestion

I hope you request for a user and use it..
I prefer the "dolphin" approach (from Hitchikers guide...). Where the dolphins think they are the most intelligent because all they do is muck about in the water having a good time.
How many YC funded startups actually use any language invented before the 90's ?
... that would analyze what "dumb" boxes are doing at the moment and do the opposite. If HFM is right about this, "dumb" boxes are moving big volumes of money actually.
Mitch Kapor vs. Ray Kurzweil: A $20k Bet on Turing Test
The story mentioned CyC. I haven't heard about that in at least a decade.

Wikipedia says OpenCyc 1.0 was released in July 2006. Google turned up one recent article:

- http://newmobilecomputing.com/story/17331/Interview_with_the...

but that doesn't say much about any practical applications. There also seems to be a web service for it here:

- http://www.cycfoundation.org/blog/?page_id=13

I wonder if anyone has found a good application for it.

The Texai project sounds like it is trying to do the same thing these people were doing using text from Wikipedia and terms from OpenCyC.

- http://www.texai.org/blog/about/texai-project
Yahoo integrates del.icio.us bookmarks into regular search results
I'm entirely on Mitch Kapor's side on this issue, and I think what he doesn't say here is that Turing Test is a nonsense. Not only it would be impossible to imitate personal history, to answer all questions in a psychologically correct manner (taking into account childhood stories, libido etc.) - not only that.

We expect intelligent machines to solve hard problems, or to replace us in some routine, boring tasks that can't be formalized on ordinary algorithmic machines, etc. This does not necessarily imply full psychologically correct impersonation, so Turing Test is irrelevant and it's a waste of time.
There's no indication from my reading of the article that any of the embryos produced were ultimately viable, so I'm not sure the title is 'accurate' per se. So far, this seems more like an effort by Mssr. Wood to get publicity for his company, Stemagen, of which he is CEO. Unless of course we have a very loose (strict?) definition of "clone"...

The actual paper [PDF] is at: http://stemcells.alphamedpress.org/cgi/reprint/2007-0252v1.p...
Development of Human cloned Blastocyst Following Somatic Cell Nuclear Transfer (SCNT) with Adult Fibroblasts by Andrew J. French, Cathrine A. Adams, Linda S. Anderson, John R. Kitchen, Marcus R. Hughes and Samuel H. Wood. DOI: 10.1634/stemcells.2007-0252

My biology kung fu is very weak. Any biohackers care to offer more expert opinion as to whether this is a substantial/notable event?
Ask YC: Are there any promising non-web startups?
I'm graduating soon and the job search has began. Unfortunately, it seems like there's not a whole lot of opportunities for somebody like me in companies that aren't huge corporations. I can do javascript, and web applications. I find doing C, C++, and python much more fun, especially when dealing with concurrency, optimization, 2D/3D graphics, image manipulation, etc.

So I guess my question is: Is there a place in the start-up world for programmers like myself? or should I just suck it up and sell myself to a large corporation or spend my time concentrating on becoming proficient at web stuff?
Wow this site is awesome:

"FastSeduction.com is the Center of the Seduction Universe(TM), your Get Laid Portal(TM)."
Please don't post articles from the Daily Mail, they're basically a tabloid and if you can't find the article else where then it's probably just bullshit.
There are actually 9 people on the team, though I don't know how many work on any given project.
You will get the best ROI by managing your portfolio correctly. By all means make a close on the deals that are ready for it. But equally important - make sure your pipeline is full and has a steady inflow of potential deals.

:-)
Forbes columnist says he really likes Linux, no matter what anyone else says (video)
It always bothers me when I see statistics in the news that don't point to their sources. Especially since the most outrageous ones (such as the one quoted in the article) are the ones that tend to get blown up and carried by other news outlets. This has a tendency to promote the poorly researched stories (since they are the ones more likely to come up with preposterous claims based on bad statistics) and noone seems to care much that the underlying assumptions are shaky at best. I see countless examples of this every week.

Some major news outlets should start doing a bit more research on their stories, and maybe hire a statistician.
Alternate links:

Mature Human Embryos Created From Adult Skin Cells

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/01...

US scientist clones himself from skin cells

http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/2008/jan/18/genetics.medic...

Cloning Said to Yield Human Embryos

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/01/18/us/18embryos.html?ref=us
Oh, that would be meta-black-boxes. A fine idea.

Perhaps more humbly - I was suggesting simple black-boxes that do behave differently. In statistical jargon: uncorrelated or even independent.
I believe that a big part of embracing new tehcnologies is time. The crowd that creates new technology are the first movers, and immediately jump at something that makes their life easier/better/cheaper/faster. What most innovators fail to see is that it takes time for normal people to change their behavior and start doing something different - even if it has obvious advantages.

I wrote about it here: http://www.maximise.dk/blog/2005/04/why-bubble-burst.html
I'm new to EC2... how can one be sure that the image isn't bugged somehow? I guess you can't...
Proof?
Hey, it's 2008. Bet #2 says:

In a Google search of five keywords or phrases representing the top five news stories of 2007, weblogs will rank higher than the New York Times' Web site.

Unfortunately they don't say how the top 5 news stories are decided or what keywords apply, so it's hard to see who actually won.
I loaded the home page in Internet Explorer 7 (should be main stream enough?). The page generates javscript errors when I click a link...
Rails routing is 9 times faster than before
What's the most optimal numeric base?
A word of caution.....

A lot of the "get things done" and "get better fast" solutions that are floating around draw from experiences of successful people or organisations, extrapolate from this and present what they have done as the best solution. This, however does not take into consideration what is cause and what is effect.

For instance, if you take 50 companies and let them follow this advice (from the article)

- Bet the company

- Think big

- Prescribe change

- Reach for the sky

- Set your sites high

- Commit to change

what you will see 5 years later is that 40 of the companies have gone bankrupt because they bet the company and reached for the sky. But all that is apparent to the casual observer is the 10 companies that have success, and all that is observed is their often risky strategies that have led them to their success.

To drive the point home: In 1982 Tom Peters and Robert Waterman did exactly this, they investigated a number of successful companies and saw what they had done that noone else was doing. And they concluded that this was what you should do if you wanted to be successful, and thereby completely ignored cause and effect. Their studies were published in the business bestseller "in search of excellence".

And what if you look at the companies that they investigated today? Many are bankrupt, and many are in financial trouble. Only a few are doing really well.

One of the companies that "did all the right things" was Atari.

This was actually one of the primary reasons I left business school. I basically thought "these guys have no idea what they are talking about" - and a lot of them still don't...
Web 2.0 design style guide
Ah, peanuts. They are always dividing and multiplying. Can't wait to count mine.
Usability of pagination links
This proof helps: http://pirate.shu.edu/~wachsmut/ira/infinity/answers/sm_sq_c...

From that:
sum bla= n(n+1)(2n+1)/6, then you go distribute
CJR: Blogonomics
Didn't you think in applying for research in places like http://www.merl.com/, http://groups.csail.mit.edu/vision/, or in companies such as http://www.gesturetekhealth.com/, http://www.tandentvision.com/, etc? There is lot of interesting research in computer vision in usa, both in large and in small companies and companies and laboratories if you are interested in that. Maybe some of these companies are small enough to categorize as "startups", I don't know. You could check the always growing robotic field too.

This site could be useful for you, too: http://www.cs.ubc.ca/spider/lowe/vision.html
Sounds like an opportunity for http://dbpedia.org
It is working flawlessly for us so far.
One thing you could do is follow the VC money.
Do some VC research. Look for VCs that invest in whatever non-web stuff you think makes sense (you must have some ideas there). Then look into what startups they've funded and consider contacting them or their recruiters.

If you're more ambitious you could research the kinds of problems you think those startups will have and look for an application you can build that they might need but isn't something they would want to develop themselves.
2008: Year of the Deadpool