skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
This is an unexpected failure mode from Google:

- http://i256.photobucket.com/albums/hh191/GoogleTransit/Googl...

I told it I wanted to get to Sacramento by 8pm this evening (14 hours from now). I'm suprised it didn't offer any alternatives or at least be more honest and say it doesn't know anything about that origin or destination.
Same here. Easy to admin and stable.
The Five Minute Guide to Becoming a Freelance Software Developer | Software by Rob
Can I ask a more general question? Which type of notebooks are used around this readership? It's my impression that most of you use MBPs, but what about other Wintel notebooks, maybe running Linux? What computer do you use for 16 hours a day?
Fuji U810 UMPC -  Good for coffeeshop/remote hacking?
Well, if you "love to read beautiful and meaningful HTML" why does your site http://prezentit.com/ have HTML errors?

First one is on line 34. An end tag isn't finished . . . there are several more, and I am not even a web designer.

That's a lot of nerve, criticizing the work of others, while not getting your own done right.
truely a very sad story.
That remains to be seen. I'm doing some pretty hardcore video encoding and processing that will use and extend some existing C libraries. I was tempted to just use the FFI to call them from Ruby (which I still may end up doing), but I figured that this is a great chance to test-drive D.
If Paul and Walter could merge their two efforts, we would have a programming language called "DArc".

I'm planning to use C++ and Python for my startup this year. It's a little interesting to think about using D and Arc instead.
Surprisingly easily
Superoptimizer - Using brute force to optimize compilers
NO it has not HTML errors, it has done that way to achieve the desired result, take a look at the source code if you like, don't rely just in the W3C validator.

If you find any error, let me know and I'll fix it.
Thanks.

On the other hand I'm not criticizing any HTML errors, I'm just saying that for this case a list suits better than tables.
Were you at work during the dotcom boom? You don't sound like someone with firsthand knowledge of the bubble environment.

In a bubble, your attempts to swim against the tide are thwarted at every turn. The herd is moving toward the big cash IPO. Everyone talks about nothing but stocks (and, my god, is it annoying). Unless you want to work by yourself, ignore your colleagues, and get paid in cash, you're going to find yourself making bubble-type decisions, because you live in a bubble universe. Your salary is counted in bubble units, your colleagues harbor bubble expectations, your investors value your company in bubble terms, and your expenses come with bubble price tags.

This is what makes bubbles bubbles: the smartest people you know start acting like complete suckers. It's the professional gambler's dream.

Here's Greenspun himself, from the excellent Founders at Work:

"...the original sales pitch I made to employees was, 'Come work here. You'll make $150k, maybe $200k a year if you do a great job and you make your customer really happy. We can just do that forever, making the customers happy, not spending too much. We'll pocket the profits, and have fun offices, a beach and ski house that everybody can go enjoy... we'll collaboratively have this great lifestyle.'

"...But they felt like they were dumb because every day they were reading the newspaper about people who had worked for 6 months at some company and now they were worth $20 million because of an IPO. They'd ask me, 'Why aren't we doing an IPO?' And I'd say, 'Because we have profits.' "

That was just the programmers. Greenspun claims that recruiting managers was even harder: in the bubble, why would anyone with half a brain want to work for a company that was never going to IPO?

The sad thing is, I signed up to work at aD based on sales pitch A, and by the time I actually arrived they had taken the VC money and were in the throes of Bubblemania B. I think I would have had a lot more fun at the old aD.
Why not quote them without a frame at length?
This should be a boon for Despair, Inc.
http://despair.com/
I agree.

The US won't default on bonds anytime soon. But they are only bulletproof in terms of value when you measure value in US$ - and not in adjusted terms (inflation, purchasing power paritiy, exchange rate, etc).
There is some good information on MapReduce and BigTable here:

- http://research.google.com/people/jeff/index.html
indeed: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Repeating_crossbow
33 Weird Statues and Sculptures Around The World
How Dumb is Daniel Dennett?
String theorists (Witten, Kontsevich) and astrophysicist (Sunyaev) share Crafoord Prize ($500k)
Grad students routinely live on less than $20K/year...
To get up to date packages?
I always use svn+ssh. I had it under HTTPS initially (first using Apache, then Lighttpd), but it had a strong tendency to corrupt the working copy. Like daily. So I had to go in and delete .wcprops after every substantive check-in, which got really old really fast.

No problems with svn+ssh; seems to work fine.
Do not waste a life! You should use optimizing compiler ;)
My computer is fast :) I told "YOU should ask: why your object code is not optimized (and it slow" (instead of "why you use tables").
heh i dont know if this would actually work in a restaurant.

how are they going to 'fulfill' the seating fee? does the user (restaurant goer) have to sign up while they wait and pay $5 with their CC in a little terminal before they sit down? if so, is this really any different from an online reservation service like OpenTable (the variation being you aren't actually getting anything in return from the service, just paying a fee)? are customers supposed to be happy with this?

the only way this could practically work is if the seating fee was charged to the bill when they are seated. how are you going to communicate this fee to the customer? tell them at the door? any restaurant that implements this will certainly solve the problem of over booking. they'll alienate all of their customers.

"welcome to Posh Food, where we are so pompous we charge you a floating fee for the privilege of dining here. right now it costs $8 just to sit down. cash or charge?"
This story and the mention of MIT's "high suicide rate" remind me of something I've wondered about. Depression and suicide seem to be common among very smart people. Does anyone know why?
Debian testing
He quotes a person whose like or dislike of Dennet is not based on how good Dennet's ideas are and instead are based on personal character:

"I used to be a rabid Dennettite [until] I started reading more widely in the subject, and found that Dennett had been pretty (no, make that very) badly behaved [...] And that's when the hate developed."

Aaron goes on to call Dennet "stupid" but fails to actually seriously discuss any on-topic ideas.
If you want to know what mindpixel actually spent his time thinking about and how others treated him, this k5 article is fairly representative:

http://www.kuro5hin.org/story/2005/6/11/224459/073
For a bootstrapping entrepreneur, VC money is a drug and a distraction. And by calling it "Smart" money, the popular culture is attempting to turn it into a "legalized" drug. This is a really good article and having been in the trenches for many years, I highly recommend it to the YC community. VC money should be dumb, the dumber the better. Only by understanding this assertion, can one focus on what it really takes to build a company ... and it is not about taking VC money. Enjoy.
I avoided the extremes by consulting for dotcoms. It sounds like you tried to do the same indirectly by working at aD (sorry that didn't work out).

I have a lot of respect for what Greenspun was doing back then ( particularly things like arsDigita university, photo.net and Scorecard - http://www.scorecard.org ). Even his Tcl AOLserver abomination had its good points :-)

I never understood why he needed to take VC money. With his business he could have grown it and sold it or eventually gone public on his own.
Their advice about weeding out bad investors is reasonable, but they're incorrect about the meaning of "dumb money." Conventionally, "dumb money" just means investors who have no particular connections or expertise in the startup's domain. E.g. your college roommate's uncle Al, who made his money from a chain of shoe stores.

An evil VC who wants to control your company or fire you as CEO or merge you with one of his portfolio companies could be called "bad money," but that is certainly not what people currently use the phrase "dumb money" to describe.
Because when you're smart enough to realize you're not quite smart enough, it's crushingly depressing.
I don't know. However, here's some hypotheses, some combination of which may be most of the reason:

Even if depression and suicide attempts aren't more common, very smart people may be enough more competent that they succeed more often. Most attempts at suicide don't actually result in death.

It could be that the easy wins in building a smarter brain happen to lead to a genetic predisposition to depression.

It could be that smarter people are more easily able to internalize that there's no ultimate point to life, and less able to just have faith.
This would be just as informative if someone else wrote a blog post called "How dumb do you have to be to say 'How dumb is Daniel Dennett?'" and then quoted Aaron's in full. No new information, no arguments. I know from other posts that Aaron is a fan of John Searle (whose "Chinese room" argument disproves a Turing Test for artificial intelligence by disproving any kind of intelligence). So to me, this post reads like a reminder that Aaron is on a particular side of a particular squabble.
You can see from their traits:

1) Super smart

2) Actively thinking every single day

3) Thinking how to solve hard problems

4) Too involved/focused with the area field they are in

When people called that RMS is nuts, sometime I wonder, is he really that nuts? He's fighting for a better world of software. But at the same time, he doesn't fight over super-hard-algorithm. RMS is still in touch with humans albeit he's fighting/arguing with them CEOs/PRs.

The rate of suicide is high among Grad/PhD students because they have to "think outside the box" every single day. They have to find a "breakthrough".

Sometime, "thinking outside the box" means to break all the logics and common sense around you. When you start bending logics, there's a good chance the situation will change the way you perceive things. You began to accept your "new logic" (as in this case, human is just like a program, disease equals to bug).
Maybe it's because smarter people tend to be less average. Less conventional. Less traditional.

Deviating from tradition is the only way to get amazing new gains. But the majority of deviations are mistakes and make things go wrong.

And when untraditional things go wrong, there is less support available to help deal with it.
What is the trade deficit between a cow and the rancher?
A "Parallel-ogue" of Paul Graham's "Beating the Averages"
This reminds me of the old joke about the wife asking the husband on whether or not her butt is fat. There is no good answer here and the absolute wrong one is when the husband asks for the definition of fat.

There is no definition of smart versus dumb money that would serve the discussion here.

My observation is that many of the Hacker News readers are first time entrepreneurs and my belief is that it is important that they understand that they don't build companies by relying on VC money (even if it comes from YC). The more they accept that VC money is dumb, the more they will focus on what it takes to build their companies.
Why is this useful or interesting to hackers?

Seems like Aaron doesn't like Daniel. Also seems like it belongs in a soap opera and not on ycnews.
None of the above -- get yourself an asus eeepc instead.
I don't know, it kind of makes sense. You guys don't have nearly enough imagination for the level of common evil and machiavellianism in the typical C-suite. And for guys at the top of the money/power pyramid, like Larry, who got there through long experience with just this sort of corporate skullduggery and drama, they'd be underperforming their shareholders if they weren't doing this sort of thing.

Also remember that anyone at that level is completely insane.

Sun has, in fact, destroyed every acquisition they've ever gotten their paws on. That list he links to only goes back to 2002. The full set is a dizzying tower of failure.
I believe he is plenty smart but that he does have a lot of traffic and he monetizes it only one way. It seems to me that he could be getting multiple levels of monetization out of his system but he is not. He has been determined and dare I say smart enough to get this far, but he could be reaching out to the next level and building upon his success.
If Dennett's argument (in the ordered list in that post) is stated accurately, it is obviously wrong. Having not read _Freedom Evolves_, I can't say whether this is an accurate summary, but it's clear that "to avoid the actions you'll deterministically take" and "to avoid objects" are not using "avoid" in the same sense.
I posted it here not for Aaron, but for Dennet. I thought that the argument posted by Aaron (and attributed to Dennet) was silly, and if that argument was truely Dennet's, then maybe he was right at some level. That was it.
YC Feature Request: Comments/Submissions Count
Could our profile include the total numbers of comments and submissions we've ever posted?
How to live forever: abolishing aging
Sourceforge Marketplace: a new way to get (and offer) service and support for open software
Classic Computer Science Papers
The more intelligent you are, the more alien you are to a society designed and run by average (if not dumb) people.
It typically has less to do with performance or stability than with ease of use. While Linux is piling on features, BSD focuses on clean design and quality of code and documentation. Linux is "do it now," BSD is "do it right."
CentOS 4.4. (I'd upgrade to 5, but it's a huge pain on SliceHost at the moment.)
This guy is a, hum.... "lisp non-getter". An inconsequential sceptic.
Upvote if you don't want YC to turn into Reddit.
no text

Edit: FYI PG removed all the upvotes from this.
Not to be trolling or sound like a stupid old fart - but if I want to see weird statues, LOLcats, or the best picture in the world I will go to Reddit.

The great thing about this place is that the signal to noise ratio is good, the articles that are linked to are insightful, and the people are intellligent.

Kind of like Reddit in the early days.

Go figure...
What does LTS have to do with production? Unless you plan to leave your servers still for 7 years I don't see why you can't use the latest and greatest. It isn't as if LTS if the only one that gets patched, it just gets patched for the longest.
I haven't read Freedom Evolves, but I intend to. Judging by the list of points that Aaron provides and Dennett's other books, I bet Dennett's actual point was to say: 'Look, this is plausible, and you can't dismiss it out of hand. Yes, obviously the data still needs to come in to determine whether this is the actual truth, but you shouldn't consider it a foregone conclusion that this isn't a valid option.'

Here's some "primary source" Dennett material in contrast to Aaron's angry "tertiary source" rant: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=101017
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=101024
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=101023
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=66917
I think the same. But I found these statues (particularly the first one) to be pretty interesting, showing a particular ingenuity. Probably material for NYC.

And I was curious about whether the NYC audience would like those too, or not. It was just about sharing an interesting link (note: not a cool link, something that I found to be interesting).
I like Dennett a lot precisely because he's badly behaved and disrespectful of other philosophers.

Free Will is a completely meaningless concept. I don't know what it means in the real world, or how I could test for it, or what would be different if it did or didn't exist, and neither does anyone else. I don't know why people spend so much energy squabbling about it.

At least consciousness (which Dennett might but in the same category... something that affects _precisely_ nothing) is something I can experience.
How did this completely unimportant blog post make it to the top page on hacker news?
Error in RSS produced by Hacker news
slash which should be placed after .com in item link address is placed after 'item'
Hark! Philosophy doesn't have the same standards of argument as 20th century mathematics! Sound the alarm!
Upvote if you hate cheap attempts to gain karma.
Why is it pain?
I chose to join my current startup precisely because of the moral implications. It's a "change the world" (i.e, the real world) kind of an idea, the linchpin of which is technology-based. I wish I say more about it than that, but we're hush-hush about it for the time being.

It's interesting that I'm not alone here, that other founders here (YC-funded or otherwise -- we're not) also aim to improve the world somehow with their companies.

I saw an article recently in the WSJ [1] about how young people now are more philanthropic than previous generations. Whereas in the past, philanthropy was the domain of the rich (think Andrew Carnegie), the Internet now allows individuals, even children, to each contribute effectively in small ways. Combined together in large numbers, these small contributions can be significant.

Of course, I'm not only talking about money here. By "contribute", I also mean knowledge (e.g, Wikipedia), resources (e.g, OLPC "buy one get one"), and so on. The "new philanthropy" is all about the sum of small, individual contributions. I think this trend in the startups around here are part of this.

[1]: http://online.wsj.com/article/SB118765256378003494.html?mod=...
Is this thread some kind of self-referential joke? This is the most Redditish thread I've ever seen on news.yc.
Gamer uses virtual training to save lives
I just read about this place on programming.reddit.com, and I noticed how much better it was! Pretty soon, everyone else will too... (And wait until the trolls figure out that they can't be modded down here.)
All is forgiven, I just wanted to point it out :-)

The first one reminds me of an art project we did quite a while ago: An electronic valve inside a tap would open to let out a droplet of water twice every second. A strobe would be synced up with the valve, and light up the droplets of water falling to the ground. By carefully timing the strobe you could make it appear that the droplets were falling upwards into the tap. It looked really cool.

Great fun - got me laid too :-)
Blog entry on how markets work?
A great blog entry on how markets work was posted here somewhat recently -- can't find it via google or searchyc -- anyone have the link?
I hate to press you on this point -- the wreckage of many a
flame war has barely had time to grow moss -- but can you point
to a specific feature? I assume you mean OS level features --
system calls and such.
Microsoft's High Hopes: A Robot In Every Home
I really liked the linking used, it's nice to get quotes to put things in perspective but this took you into the story and gave you all these other documents and sites to explore. It was all kind of creepy really, I felt like a voyeur almost.. excellent article.
What do you mean obsolete? Do you expect tables to stop rendering some time soon?
It seems to me that the entire study of philosophy is comprised of arguments based on linguistic puns; how else to express our thoughts? As long as we are limited by language, any existing language, we are constrained by its syntax and semantics. This is analogous to the study of physics with math; we often need to invent new math to model physical phenomenon. Likewise, until we invent a suitable new philosophy language to model the world, we're just going to spin our wheels.
If I understand it correctly, the idea with Reddit is that the
community can decide what news it wants to see, by posting links
and then filtering them. If the community wants hate speach (or
more of those Ron Paul links) and Reddit serves up hate speach,
then isn't the algorithm working?

I suppose you could actively ban users who skew the community in
that direction -- though you'd have an endless calvacade of sock
puppets to deal with.
Comments can be downmodded without problems.
Sounds like your working along the lines that I am, except I am using (gasp) c++. Are you doing H.264/263 or some custom stuff?
What if said restaurant were based in a casino?
Microsoft strong-arming Valley startups?
Upvote this comment if you agree, but don't want to fall for vlad's trick.
For much of the world, the US is on sale at discount prices
As the above comments show, smart people tend to take things more seriously. Not that that's a bad thing, but I think it explains the extremes in the views of smart people.

Of course, I've just moved the question up a level here...
I just noticed this. The feed is generating links like this:
http://news.ycombinator.comitem/?id=100946

... when they should read this:
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=100946
heh great comment :-) They would break the bank...
I'd also like to see the ranking of each with respect to the whole community and also for just the last 30 days.

It would also be interesting if there were a way to see the amount of karma gained or lost in a period relative to the total of all karma gained or lost in that period.
Who cares? It all seems so pointless
Yeah, it amused me. Also I'm considering changing the post title to either:

Upvote if you love Hitler.

or

Upvote if you think being able to edit post titles is weird.

And I needed a frontpage post to do that with.

However, it's good to be able to fix typos in your posts, and it hasn't actually been abused yet (as far as I know), so maybe I shouldn't.

Edit: I'm not going to, OK?
You, sir, are a genius! We also need to watch out for those diggers. I hear they are even worse and ruined reddit to begin with. We must fight against the encroaching dark.
Gentoo on two, ArchLinux on one
Just upvote me.
Sure. I get the feeling I'm not hearing an accurate summary -- like when Naomi Klein turns something like "the pursuit of rational self-interest maximizes collective gain" into "They're trying to convince people that by doing good you do bad, and that by being bad -- by pursuing your most selfish desires -- you do good." (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g2kTy7glZ9s).

I've read some Dennett, and I've never found anything amenable to the paraphrase AS quoted. I'm sure if you wanted to, you could find people who tell you how ridiculous Dennett was by quoting him that way, just as people have had a great time finding out what Milton Friedman said by way of Klein's parody. I suspect that AS just hasn't bothered to consider the possibility that he and his idol are wrong.
You can't downmod comments until you have a certain amount of karma. I think it's around 25.

Edit: lol someone downmodded this. obviously mad about something else i posted. I hope he doesn't think of going through my comment history and downmodding them all. Hopefully he's too dumb to find it here:

http://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=curi
I think you need a certain amount of karma before you can downmod comments.

edit: curi beat me to it
Functional Programming | Pure vs Impure [Channel 9 video]
Yeah, you are right, you can solve it in the address bar, but I guess to check for the typo makes more sense ,-) PG ? Anybody there?
they get insurance through school.
23 July 2003

It also happens to be the most recent entry on that guy's blog. I did find this comment at the end amusing:

And on the topic of Lisp (or APL, as another example) people have voted with their feet.

I'm would bet Arthur Whitney over at http://www.kx.com is as fond of his secret weapon (K, derived from APL) as pg is for Lisp.
you can get insurance for as low as $100/month...
Overcoming blankcanvasphobia