skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
This article is bad mainly because it relies on a strawman as an example. Any (reasonably rational) business owner would love to have a salesman like John, probably promoting him to a higher position where he can have an even better influence. The whole idea of putting a cap on what an employee can earn is a socialistic practice, anyways (don't want employees getting too "unequal"), and has nothing at all to do with capitalism.

Do mistakes happen? Yes. Do companies, owners, and other people in power make bad decisions? All the time. Does that mean that capitalism doesn't work?

The problem, in my mind, is the one that YCombinator is trying to solve. There are not enough owners. There is not enough competition. The more competition there is among smallish businesses, the more likely that big, inefficient companies and other companies that make bad decisions (like firing your best salesman) will fail.

One reason there aren't many owners is all the red tape and government control. Two examples:

My stepmother has been breeding and selling German Shepherds for over ten years now, and she gets customers from all over the US. To go along with the dog-selling aspect, she would like to open up a small shop to sell dog food, leashes, toys, etc. Simple enough, right? In order to do so, they would have to install a new septic/sewage system, just so that they can run a business. Why is this important? Also, in spite of the fact that she is always accommodating to people with special needs (e.g. she would be perfectly willing to carry out an entire litter of puppies in order to show someone in a wheelchair), she would have to take special measures to ensure that all public areas are wheelchair accessible. So she hasn't opened the place up yet.

I just watched Be Kind, Rewind today, and although several of the ideas were far-fetched and irrational, one part in particular hit home. A new developer would like to take over an old building in the downtown area of a small town, and the city can basically force the owner out of his business by citing "building code" requirements. Things like this actually happen in real life; I've seen a similar situation with a building in Columbus, OH, that was not up to fire code.

In both instances, small businesses are suffering because of big government. In both cases, laws were made "in the interest of the people," but in the end, they hurt the people.

In my ideal world, the government would be more responsible for ensuring consumer awareness without the use of coercion. Clearly, people have the right to know that they are preparing to enter a dangerous building. Beyond that, however, if that individual wants to take the calculated risk of going in, anyways (whether to work or conduct business), it should be up to the individual. Government hand-holding only causes more problems, and the implication of the article that government needs to step in and make measures to ensure that capitalism "rewards wealth creators" is mistaken.

/rant (sorry about that)
Yeah, I completely agree, but I don't think most people realize what this means. Deciding to make something simple isn't a choice you make up front. It's something you fight the whole way through. You have to fight your own temptations to add instead of subtract, you have to fight the cries of users who want just one more feature, etc. The simple thing to do will rarely be obvious

Look at the reaction to arc's release: it made people (who probably had no intention of building anything in it in the first place) enraged at its initial lack of unicode support. Imagine that... enraged at the lack of unicode support in the initial release of a programming language. It's hard to look at that reaction and realize what it really means: that Paul's probably on to something.
I touched on a bit of my process here recently:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=122203

I use a Google spreadsheet (or Excel) and sort/execute it all according to its value divided by its cost (ROI).
FriendFeed Raises $5 Million, Now Open to Everyone
Sweet. I guess congrats are in order for paul, but at the same time, it's half his money, so...
> and for taking the word 'drastic' out when posting

:-)
Restaurants where you order with a computer at your table
Inspiration matters
It's a great story, but I'm not sure that I'm buying it. The conclusion is what bothers me; he says the timeout was three milliseconds and proceeds to convert 3 millilightseconds to 558.85 miles. So what's the problem? The packets have to go there and back in 3 milliseconds. This means that the 558.85 miles is for the round trip, meaning that any places more than, say, 250 miles away should have had issues. For me, this destroys the premise of the whole article, since it contradicts things he said throughout.

The idea, though, that something like this could feasibly happen is certainly true, and made for interesting reading.
> Yang reiterated his plan to turn Yahoo into a starting point on the web, a concept he promoted during a speech he gave at last month’s Consumer Electronic Show. Decker said that Yahoo would soon release a new feature that highlights “the best content from the web”

So it will become netscape.com, circa 1994, complete with "What's New" and "What's Cool"! ;-D
Friendfeed, the best software for conversations, raises round and launches publicly
I think the main problem is that this presupposes that people go to college to learn. Most don't. They go to get a degree.

Degrees act as passports to jobs. Employers value degrees because of their scarcity and the work/selection involved in getting one. Give away too many, and they won't anymore. No brand name school could risk this.

For example, someone with a Stanford MBA can get a high-paying job pretty easily. Employers value the Stanford MBA because it does much of the pre-screening for them (it's hard to get into the program, and presumably hard to get through.)If Stanford churned out 1 million MBAs a year, they would become useless.

I think this would dilute the brand beyond meaning.
Good to see someone participating in their own funding round. Must be odd owning both common and preferred shares (assuming that's the case).
It's nice to see some common sense find its way into our civil court system here in the U.S. I only wish awarding attorney's fees to the winner were mandatory.
It's true that what I propose is not an optimal solution for the very brightest students. For such people, if they wish to develop there really is no choice: they need to move to the centers of world learning, and seek out the brightest people they can, to challenge and teach them.

But for people who are merely bright and interested, and perhaps not able to afford Harvard's fees (or otherwise gain acceptance), what I propose might have some considerable value.
David Friedman wrote about disaggregating and decentralizing the functions of educational institutions, and the positive effects thereof, in his seminal book "The Machinery of Freedom". I believe the relevant chapters are called "A radical critique of American universities" and "The impossibility of a university".

Of course, this was pre-internet.

Someone needs to tell Mr. Friedman about the open access movement so I can stop telling people about his works and start linking to them.
Its just the other side of the same coin...
Smart hacks for heavy net surfers
...and I've learned more about programming from this web site than I have from anyone I met here at school. Granted, I'm going to Ohio State and not MIT, but our CS program actually ranks among the top public universities. Eventually, I plan on moving out to Silicon Valley to really get immersed in the programming entrepreneur mindset. This is not something that has been motivated by school or the people I've met here, but by the things I've read online. Clearly, an online idea as mentioned would have some good impact.
I've incorporated GTD into my daily workflow (I use Emacs and have written a GTD module). Personally, it's worked very well for me - especially in reducing my stress levels.

The key (I've found) is to capture _everything_ in buckets. You can then process each bucket based on your energy-level/schedule.
Okay, I wasnt meaning offense. I was just trying to figure out whether you were joking or not... Good luck
How do you like OSU's CS program?
Oh you drag the side to get something! I get it
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This was really cool over a decade ago, a year after Adrian Thompson received his thesis for this work. (I mean, it's still cool, though there's a 11 years of research between then and now.)

http://www.cogs.susx.ac.uk/users/adrianth/ade.html has some of his papers written more recently.
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Interesting... even though accuracy is generally high, the false positives weigh heavily on the experience.

How accurate can we get recommendation systems anyways? I know my friends recommend movies to me all the time and a lot of them aren't my taste - do we expect computers to outperform our close acquaintances?
http://www.ibiblio.org/harris/500milemail-faq.html
What could have been a good career in game development
Back in 1996 when I was learning C, disconnected from the rest of the world without an internet and no one to help me with and no books that decribed concepts of C in detail, I tried my hand in trying to make my own version of games like digger and dangerous dave. In the process of coding this game, I came across problems to which I couldn't find solutions and eventually gave up on game programming. Since then I have been into other things and I now want to start off from where I left things previously. Following are the issues that I faced when making the game:

1) The program code was linear and used a shitty switch/case construct to take keyboard inputs and call functions that would move my character on the screen. However, since moving the character meant redrawing bitmaps on the screen, a lot of CPU cycle was spent on this (on a 486) and I wasn't able to get fluid motion from other objects in the game screen. For eg: I would have a moving paddle that I need to jump on top off. However to do this, the paddle should move independant of my character. But if I pressed and held an arrow key to move the character, all CPU cycles would go into moving the character and then the CPU would have to wait for no inputs from the keyboard to move the other objects in the game. I was never able to get things work independant ofone another.

I now know that the solution to my problem is threading but I am not really sure how to create threads that have functions in them and call them. It would be nice if someone can point me to a beginners tutorial on threads that addresses the kind of problem I am facing.

2) I was always amazed at how games like dave and such had more colors than the 16 colors Turbo C would allow. I have now come to know that int13 is used to gain access to a larger color pallete. However the usage seems very confusing. Any links that can give me a good insight into this?

3) Considerable amount of CPU cycle was spent drawing bricks and blocks on the screen. I figured the way games did it was use tiles and replicate them. How do I get any bitmap I create to come up on the parts of the screen where I want it to? Are we doing a direct frame buffer write, if yes, how do I gain access to the frame buffer and what are its controls?

I am not a CS major and nor do I obviously code for a living but I would like to get back into it seriously. Any help is appreciated. Thanks.
What the hell was the point of those charts? I couldn't make this up... he said, "Here's a chart to help explain the situation," then he showed two graphs with no figures on them whatsoever based on data that he pulled out of his ass. Then he spent two paragraphs talking about these charts. He could have just as easily related the same idea without showing pseudocharts.

That gripe aside, the article was quite solid, but it failed to mention the business implications. If a mobile provider was smart enough to open up its devices, create an API for developers, and allow that API to be used for free by any device manufacturer, that provider would see an influx of new devices, app developers, and customers. Other providers, wanting to enable these applications on their network (and maintain their customers) would be forced to open their devices as well, devices with the same API layer. Problem solved; mobile apps everywhere.

Instead, in the US at least, providers continue to try to lock every customer into a two-year contract to keep them from leaving, instead of relying on their quality of service.
Pareto efficient
Forget the Java apps for now? I would forget them for longer than that. Java is not particularly optimized either for programming or for the OSes of mobile phones, and it's losing market share in the programming world to other language alternatives. If there is a "next mobile language", it will either be something akin to the C/Unix paradigm (where the interface between language and OS/hardware is a thin layer), or it will be high-level enough to be worth its runtime inefficiencies. The best case would be that it would be both, and someone would write a compiler which would convert the latter to the former.
Yahoo Announces Open Search Platform
This is a great insight, one that I can unequivocally agree with, and it led me to an insight of my own. Modern-day teachers have the cause-and-effect backwards. Instead of focusing on improving the quality of the programmers, they are focusing on developing a language which is impossible to use incorrectly, no matter how bad that language is. Java can certainly be seen as a step in this direction.
Nope, I would use sum. Python, Ruby, Lisp, and countless others already have it defined. If I happened to be using a language that didn't define a sum function, I would write one.
I'm pretty sure that it fell through... Not sure why, even something like the slower 125 mph option would be perfect for the Tri-State area.

The only thing I don't get is their choices in starting locations: I guess Anaheim isn't that bad, but by having people drive an hour and a half to Victorville to take a high-speed train, they only gain an hour, two max. I'd think that they'd want the system to at least have the potential of being expandable; if the line started out of LA, they could eventually have it as a hub serving San Diego / the Bay.
I actually don't mind Perl's type indicators which show up in front of variable names, as it makes it clear throughout the code what you are working with (this coming from someone who rarely uses Perl anymore).
It's also better than "X Considered Harmful," although I'm not sure how much better.
Looks like N.YC got its first spammer!
http://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=cris2cool

:(
Cool, they implemented one of my ideas that I was hoping would come out. Now if only they had little robot waiters in small tuxedos...
I downvoted you because I think discouraging learning is a bad thing in general. Perl may be ugly in some cases, but it also has some good ideas. Even if it's the worst language ever, though, it would still make sense to learn it so that you would know why it's the worst language ever. Otherwise, you're just asking someone to accept it on faith.
cris2cool is definitely not the first! (nor the last)

They've just been doing a good job keeping spammers at bay.
Six figure starting salaries?

Maybe I'm confused about what an "application developer" or "application architect" is, or what exactly they mean by "starting," but I just don't see many new CS grads making that kind of money. Last I heard, starting salaries with a CS degree were somewhere around 50-60k. Did I miss the memo?
Maybe he's making a joke about Scientology. I pray it's a joke.
The most interesting thing in my opinion is that MapReduce implementations has been made with c++ (Google) and Java (Hadoop/Yahoo). And not with a functional programming language.
not the first, there was a whole discussion about.... ipodchick? (I think that was the name)
The title of the article is misleading. SSRIs were the focus of this article, and they're but one of many classes of anti-depressants.
You bring up a good point. I don't think anyone had the vision that we would be socializing the way we do now on social sites like Facebook. Even Mark. Z probably didn't see it until it started taking off.

The question as I see it is, can we predict the trends of the future? This divides itself into 2 questions: 1) Do we have enough knowledge/creativity to see the next waves of the future, and 2) If we saw a thousand possibilities of what would happen in the future, would we be able to pick the right one?

A different way to see it is that you are the force affecting the future - can you push your design/plan/idea far enough to make it groundbreaking?

What is interesting to me is not answering these questions, but rather, asking -

What can I do to strengthen my ability to answer 'yes' to these questions?
wow, time warp. (i think it was int 10h though, for the video bios, and you had to poke around different ports to change the vga palette :))

things have, um, changed significantly -- nowadays libraries like directx abstract away the details of direct hardware access and handle graphics, sound, input, timers, etc.

if you're just looking to play around with games, pygame is perfect for you -- http://www.pygame.org .

if you're really looking to learn the details, you should probably grab a couple books on amazon (hard to recommend one in particular without knowing what you wanna do.)
Google Summer of Code 2008 is on!
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=115800
it's a joke
Ahh, I stand corrected. Thanks for the link.
The iphone might yet change this.
Do you still want to program for the 486 or are you looking to program using a more modern environment? If you are going to program for a modern platform, which one would you like to target? No matter which platform you choose you will probably want to use OpenGL. For that I recommend http://nehe.gamedev.net. If you want to develop for Mac OS X then I recommend http://www.idevgames.com and in particular http://www.idevgames.com/forum/showthread.php?t=11896.
Oh, Go Ahead. Overthink FizzBuzz.
Gmail's Buggy IMAP Implementation
> with Google, the advantage of having a CPAN is neutralized.

I could not disagree more strongly. Perl has CPAN, R has CRAN, Ruby has Gems... why does this pattern recur, over and over, in successful languages? Probably because it works. Someone is working on a problem, thinks "gee, I wonder if someone else has solved this in insert language here??" In some languages they get to head off on a wild goose chase via Google. In others, they type 'install Foo::Bar' or 'install.packages(fixMyProblem)' or whatever, and with luck, continue on their merry way, NOT switching contexts or handling an interrupt. From a programming perspective, THAT RULES.

Google does not solve all problems, not by a long shot.
Jokingly voted them up.
Python GUI programming platforms for Windows
Ha. Michigan vacations? I didn't know there was such a thing. Next they'll be spamming time shares in West Virginia.
Oh, go ahead -- prematurely optimize
The iPhone is driving the change he writes about -- the mobile Web, instead of mobile-specific Java apps (for example).

It strikes me as a colossal ''duh''. Would any of us be here reading this site if Paul Graham hadn't had a similar insight with regards to selling shit (via the Web) in 1995-96?
heh, "Voter"
My wife's iPhone has free unlimited data, not-free text and mobile-to-land-phone minutes. Guess how she harasses me to pick up our daughter or buy specific groceries?

FWIW, I've rarely seen such a brilliantly executed electronic device in my life. I thought it was outrageously overpriced -- now I'm wondering if it isn't a halfway decent deal for the interface and capabilities of the thing.

I continue to carry the cheapest Motorola piece of shit that will accept my SIM card, but I'd be lying if I said I didn't envy the iPhone.
Firstly, skip all of the low-level, platform-specific details and learn JavaScript. This will give you all of the colours and performance that you require for sprite based games. I've seen a very good version of OutRun done in JavaScript. A 2D platformer can definitely be implemented. Also, if you implement in JavaScript then you'll also get a wide audience for your work without requiring anyone to install anything.

Secondly, a real-time game is a turn-based game where the turns occur in real-time. Unlike a strategy game, the computer continues even if you don't make a move. Imagine AD&D melee combat at 30 rounds per second. This doesn't require threading.
Francis Crick and Richard Feynman didn't mind it either, and I dare say their chosen careers might have required an even clearer perspective. I've never really understood why LSD gets a bad rap -- you have to try really, really hard to fuck yourself up while tripping, or have terrible judgment.

Then again, as Ken Kesey put it -- "we thought we were writing the history and future of the universe, but what we really said was 'if you pick your nose long enough, the world will unravel'." Drugs, strange experiences, etc. may unlock insights but they don't seem to help the unprepared mind very much.
I meant native apps on the iphone. A lot of people are looking forward to the SDK.
I thought about submitting this, if only to raise awareness of the fradulent system of electronic voting machines. It's only funny because it's true.

See this for congressional testimony about the problem. http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=88924
First of, I second the others. By the time I got around to seriously learning programming and specifically game programming I was using Python/Pygame on a 1 gigahertz machine and it gave me about as much power as a 486 would running optimized C code. (more in some instances, less in others) If you're after concepts and not retro-technical details this is a good route to go.

But as for the questions:

1. Threading is not the answer; it was a missing concept on DOS machines. Interrupt polling is what you want to look at.
2. I recall reading about this but never did it myself. These days you're lucky if both the monitor and graphics card support mode 13h.
3. The term you want is "fast rectangle blit". This is still relevant if you use software rendering.
I wonder if an expert (human) with access to the same data set, any automated tools they choose and their own knowledge/research of movies could do a lot better. I think they probably would be able to crack the 10%. If they couldn't then it would be a fair indication that the data is simply too noisy to beat the 10%.
If I could just be a touch sycophantic for a second: I'm actually REALLY impressed at how good News.YC is at deflecting spammers. I have a super low-traffic blogger blog and I see more spam there than I see on Hacker News.
Next they'll be offering Eastern Washington vacations.

Come for the sagebrush, stay for the irradiated rattle snakes.