skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I don't know what's impossible. I'm saying this stuff is made up. Nobody really knows anything about it, and there's no way to prove or disprove it (except by waiting a long time). I think it gets attention not because of anything to do with the future, but because it triggers emotions in the present. Some people find it exciting and want it to be true, others find it frightening and want it to be false, and so on. That leads to controversy, but the controversy isn't really about anything, other than conflicting emotions finding arguments to clothe themselves in.
I live in southeast New Hampshire, about an hour and a half drive from Boston. I'm interested in meeting people who are involved with the intersection of political activism and technology. I'm working on a web application to help grassroots groups run letter writing campaigns and various other activities. I enjoy working with Ruby and Rails and also run the NHRuby.org user group. Drop me a line at sgarman at zenlinux dot com.
Open letter to George W. Bush by Ralph Nader
PG misses an important perspective, cyberbullies!

People who bully other people because they have better computer knowledge, mainly the two areas of administration and programming

The thing is learning, working ... are both hard, and many ppl got screwed or unlucky over their lives, they either learned useless crap at school or university, or work at non interesting jobs with bad bosses or collegues

And sometimes, we are humans, we are attracked to certain aspects of what we try to learn to escape, or trying to improve upon our bad lack

And sometimes the cyberbullies call us trolls.
It's okay, thought, better be a troll than a bully, the thing is, in time we will learn, and on that road we will have fun, and, the road will not end, and it will meet plenty of bullies, and overtime we will learn to be quiet, for the next person we talk to, and dare to show to them that we don't know, might just be, the next bully ... who will accuse me of being troll ... or that other word incompetent.

But the bully don't see, just like the one in the school yard, its just a school yard, don't take yourself too seriously, its just a forum or irc!

I am reading chatting and enjoying my time, until you came and changed the game, ... thou shall not speak! and now the book seller might have won, for you know, thought can't do teach! And most of the blogs I read were just trolls!
"every three weeks, workplace conditions lead to a fatality toll greater than 9/11"
He and Tim O'Reilly are the only classics majors I am aware of in high tech. Perhaps my six years of studying Latin and two years of Greek have been more helpful than I realized. At 35 with all of his accomplishments I am surprised that Yahoo
let him go.
This is a really nice link, I found it really nice to read although I have got into grad school already :-), nice to be reminded why we are here in the first place.
I just want to point out an issue with a small point Paul brings up, and that issue is how Karma works on YC versus Reddit.

I'm not saying one is better than the other, but there is a tradeoff. On Reddit, you can be rude, and people can downmod you, and it doesn't matter once the post sinks. Here, if you act like an asshole, you get downmodded, and your karma suffers. But even if you make a well reasoned, but controversial comment, you often do still get downmodded because of your unpopular views.

Not that I comment here often, but I'm at four down from seven at one point, and it's really the logical consequence of such a system. It seems to work here, but I do wonder, as Paul expresses near the end of his article here, does this technique scale?
Adding TipJoy Buttons To Movable Type 4
That's not how the military works.

At least for the next decade, humans will always be making the decisions. I know. I've met with people in the military about weaponizing robots.

The real safety addition comes from software aided aiming and added situational awareness. Imaging trying to manipulate a gun remotely with lag, vs. just saying "fire" to an auto-tracking gun. It's a world of difference.

But this is why I call it a "safety system". It has nothing to do with ethics. It's like that IR beam that makes sure your garage door doesn't close on someone. Useful, important, and nothing to do with ethics.
Universities should offer something like this when trying to teach Haskell or Scheme alongside Java - especially the explanation of why you'd do it is better than I was taught.
I honestly like it better without any explanation. It reminds us that HN is not for everyone, but only those who will actually dig to find stuff out. I googled those features after I joined to learn about them, and I like it better that way.
Great, thanks for this.
Think of it as a filter for non-technical types.
This document is pretty shocking, I won't lie. Do you think it's totally true?
Yep! I totally agree. The key takeaway is to shed some light on the motivation behind these concepts which hones your sense of judgement as to what to use when..
Wade Meredith, 26, Kansas City

Graphic design, GUI, CSS+HTML, SEO, Blogging, Viral Marketing

wademeredith.com <---portfolio site/contact me here.
No, they don't, but there are orders of magnitude more applications submitted than teams accepted.
By the way, while we are on this topic--can you confirm that passwords are not stored in plain-text?
Microsoft is big on HD DVD and hates Blu-Ray... so I wonder what they are going to do now if they can't have it there way. I could see MS stepping in and getting HD-DVD players produced for computers only. The music industry does not want the storage capacity of Blue-Ray on computers and Microsoft is in bed with Riaa so they will probably team up on this.
I co-founded our startup after reading an ad for a hacker and convincing the other guy to take me on as a partner instead of employee - we met for the first time 2 years ago to talk about the startup that would be, today we've got an angel-backed team. Meet new people and start work with them - it can work, you'll soon find out if it doesn't. Keep in mind looking for people with complimentary qualities though - I put our success 100% down to how we each have a responsibility for well-defined "halves" of the company - me product & tech, him sales, marketing, community, legal, biz dev etc.
I wish I had more votes to downmod you into prominence! J/k, I upmodded (for agreement)
The actual design and implementation of your data model and application are going to be far more important for performance. My suggestion would be to start on MySQL and migrate to another platform if it becomes necessary. You also have to ask what kind of skill sets do you have around and what are you likely to have in the future. A well configured and maintained installation of either platform will out peform a bad one. So are you windows geeks or linux geeks?
The Subprime Explained in a fun and clear way [Google Docs]
I find this interesting, I wonder how they got that many phones into China where they are not even supposed to be selling...
Amazons S3 Cloud Has a Dark Lining for Startups
Thanks Haven!
"But it's completely youthful naivety to think this is the right way to cofound a business together."..

Perhaps not the ideal way, if you already have a big database of contacts you should probably go through that first, yes. But I co-founded our company after meeting a guy I didn't know previously who had advertised for a hacker to do some contract work (as I said elsewhere on this thread) and 2 years later the company's doing great.. Don't rule out this as a possibility, basically.
FedEx?
right on. Jesse's excuses above can be attributed to a lack of balls in changing his situation.

Don't sit on the fence. Make stuff happen. This president's day weekend is finding a cofounder weekend...
I'll be there too.
Machines will achieve human-level artificial intelligence by 2029
Have you posted this on the front page yet? I would do so, but I don't want to steal your karma.

Here's a slashdot thread on the importance of grad school today:
http://ask.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=06/07/14/2250202
I assume Sony planned on eventually breaking even on the PS3 with game sales alone, since that's a typical strategy for console hardware. The real question is, how much money did they pay Netflix and other groups to ensure victory for Blu Ray, and will that be worth it to them? Honestly, at this point they'd probably be willing to bankrupt themselves to finally win a format war!
Common sense speaks for itself. The article really isn't about stating empirical observations and citing sources. i find it to be a well-worded summary of the thought of me and probably many members of online communities.
OCaml for scientific computation [Tutorial]
Interesting article, although it seems to me that the term itself is rather self-explanatory, not a term that needed to be coined. "Ware" is just an item, and "hardware" had surely been around long before computers. So once computers came around, I assume people instinctively referred to tangible computer equipment as "hardware." Calling the intangible elements "software" probably soon followed. I wonder when terms like "firmware" or "midware" originated?
I was saying that failing to achieve your goals can be moral. I'll add that it can be morally better than succeeding at them. Now you say, well yes but it'd be better if you had better goals in the first place. So I think the lesson is: it's not consistency between goals and outcomes that matters for morality; what matters is the morality of those goals and outcomes.
I think we are talking past each other. You are talking about morality, in the common sense semi-religious meaning. I am talking about "morality" referring only to the propositions I'd just put forward about how to live. When you say "failing to achieve your goals can be moral" you are not using the word in the way I did.

As far as consistency, can you give one good reason it would be a good way to live to make choices in a way that won't achieve the results you are hoping for? If not, then that is my point: that is a bad way of life. It might, by good luck, turn out well, but it doesn't work reliably, and better ways of life are available.
It's been tried, eg. Clean, Dylan, or Miranda. Results are not really encouraging, and the language often gets open-sourced after its owner realizes they can't make money off it. And those languages are really nice languages (Dylan is my favorite Lisp variant, and Clean and Miranda are in many ways friendlier versions of Haskell).

Companies tend to have much better luck if the language is attached to a product, either as a scripting language or as part of a RAD suite. Think of AutoCad/AutoLisp, Flash/ActionScript, or Visual Basic.

But for general-purpose languages, not so much.
It's funny, I was commenting to a friend a couple days ago that I really liked arclanguage.com because people were hacking there instead of talking about hacking or arguing about hacking. Kinda at odds with what I'm saying on this thread. Maybe I'm just a natural contrarian.

I dunno. I could certainly be wrong - I was about Reddit. (Though I was also wrong about Xobni, and they did basically the opposite of everything PG suggests in this article.)

Maybe I'm just not the target market for Arc. I'd like to think I'm a smart person, and I did download it and play around with it and reimplement it. But right now, I'm finding that Python and JavaScript let me do more cool things, so I'd rather play around with them.
If you do go to Hampshire, take International Relations. Fun times.
If it's any help:

I don't think there is any such thing as 'human nature', though I do think there is a lot of complex knowledge in cultures that achieves some of the same practical results.

I don't think the purpose of morality, or life, is to maximize happiness. I suspect maximizing happiness is consistent with the right way of life, if you understand enough, but I don't think it's the best way to look at things, and I think it makes it harder to see the answers.

In general, ideas don't need foundations. "You can't justify that," is not a valid criticism. This includes moral ideas. So if you have a "moral intuition", or think a common sense notion of morality makes sense, but can't justify it perfectly, I don't think that's a problem. It may be a sign of religion, but not a bad one.

The correct way to look at ideas is not to seek justification, but instead to compare them to rival theories. In other words, ask, "Got a better idea?" If there is no rival theory, then criticism is sort of useless. It can help us notice we'd like a better theory and find places to look for new ideas. But without a rival theory to compare with, we can't see which theory seems truer, or which stands up to criticism better, and can't abandon the current theory.

The ideas about foundations and justifications here were best explained in published work by Karl Popper, and also somewhat by David Deutsch (but more to come, he should have a new book out within 2 years). They are not especially popular, but in my judgment they actually make sense, unlike all the rival philosophies.

If you read Popper, be aware that he never wrote much applying his ideas to morality or education. He wrote a lot about science, and about communism and historicism, and also about certain (bad) schools of philosophy, but also explained epistemology in abstract.

Guess that's long enough for now. For what it's worth, I like fielding (non-hostile) questions in these areas.
AKA pmarca's "Product/Market fit": http://blog.pmarca.com/2007/06/the-pmarca-gu-2.html
2004-2005 Tualbee Survey on academic earnings in CS:
http://www.cra.org/CRN/articles/may06/tables.27to34.html

2006 Slashdot thread on the importance of a grad degree:
http://ask.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=06/07/14/2250202

The thread isn't exactly relevant, mostly it's talk about how financially useful a grad degree is. Interesting in that regard, though.
Yahoo and design innovation are oxymorons
21 C,C++,C# cheatsheets
It's been the experience of nearly all of my friends who went to grad school...
I guess I should rephrase it as morality's goal maximises happiness.

What would you propose as an objective moral goal?

Do you recommend anything by Popper or Deutsch specifically?
For $44 billion, Microsoft could buy every Silicon Valley and Silicon Alley venture-backed start-up in existence.

Yes, and that money would go right back in to new venture investments. There's an endless supply of two guys in garages and bored PhD students.
I figured more that since they make them there maybe they made a "few extra" but sure FedEx might be the real reason why so many phones are there.
Heh, it'd be funny to have the most negative karma on YC. The only reason I care about karma is cuz I want to change my header's color. Only 15 more points to go!

Once there, I'll stick a post on the front page and get downmodded into oblivion.
On a possibly-explanatory note, the article did call them all trolls...

(And on a recursive note, a comment on the Reddit thread now links to the parent comment, which links back to the Reddit thread, and so on...yay stack overflow!)
Who cares? Why so much fuss over this "format war"? Format of what? An ancient concept of storing read-only bits glued over a piece of plastic? I don't plan on using CDs or DVDs or any kind of big physical objects to store anything on in the future.
>I don't entirely agree.

According to him, you should have just downmodded him. What's with all this discussion and reason?
Ask YC: Please recommend me an alternative to Google
I've tried others but Google seems to wipe the floor with them all for accuracy. Can anyone recommend a search engine as good as Google that isn't Google?
The Apple Product Cycle
Social networking for friends you never had
Matlab is actually high-level language so it is possible to monetize computer language.
Deutsch only has one book out, which is very good. My only warning is that half of it is sort of off topic (physics, virtual reality, computation, time travel). But that's ok, because of the density of ideas fit into each chapter.

http://www.amazon.com/Fabric-Reality-Parallel-Universes-Impl...

Popper has lots of books. Maybe The Myth of the Framework is a good choice. As I recall, it has content from lectures he gave to people not already familiar with his philosophy, so those parts are especially clear and accessible.

Proposing an actual moral goal is tricky, because we have to be careful to keep separate the issues of whether there are true moral ideas, and whether my particular idea is true. And very strictly, my idea will not be true. It will have truth to it, but not be perfect. Which may be a confusing concept, because the prevailing epistemology says that knowledge is "justified, true belief" by which it means 100% absolutely, perfectly true. That perspective discounts any possibility of "partial truths" as knowledge. Further, it encourages people to believe they possess (final, certain) truths. But I don't claim to have any of those, nor do I think one can have those.

If you're OK with all that, I can tell you some tentative guesses at moral truths.
Why IBM should buy AMD
New York, NY - doesn't have to be a co-founder, just always happy to meet more smart people.

fedorov@rutgers.edu
Fair enough (hence the upvote), but I judge trolls in part by the quality of the fish they catch. Obviously with Adequacy, this becomes an interesting game. But the "Kid's a Hacker" was awash with fanboys trying to out-"get it" all over each other. At least Commie Day Care's second-level trolls were _genuine_.
Yeah, that also makes sense...

It was just so easy and profitable for individuals and small time vendors to ship them overseas that I figured it happened on a small scale over and over and over again. Banning cash purchases of the iPhone didn't do much.
Any news.YCers going to SXSW?
Let's organize a meetup. Is that cool pg? (wanna join us? :)

I'm thinking lunch on Sunday or Monday perhaps.

(If you're not familiar with SXSW Interactive (http://2008.sxsw.com/interactive/), it's a yearly conference covering subjects like web standards, APIs, new business models, web 2.0, design and entrepreneurship. You can get a sense of the topics at http://panelpicker.sxsw.com/)

Hope to meet some of you there.
Oh, hey, DHH loooovvvess the MacBook Air
I hope this is wrong. It would break a fundamental law of the universe: Sony Never Wins Format Wars. What next, <insert random irony here>?
Also, a couple of French TV show hosts pulled the same trick with physics instead of postmodernism.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bogdanov_Affair
Upmodded in compensation.
The result of a one night stand with PHP
What is this supposed to be? This link takes me to a page with:

Active Server Pages error 'ASP 0221'
Invalid @ Command directive
/apps/erroregg.aspx, line 1
The specified 'Page Language="C#" AutoEventWireup="true" Title="Error" ' option is unknown or invalid.
Microsoft OLE DB Provider for ODBC Drivers error '80004005'
[MySQL][ODBC 3.51 Driver]Unknown MySQL server host 'db1.plime.com' (11004)
/config.p, line 358
use metasearch if you're not satisfied with google.
People who tend to like pg's line of thinking also tend to migrate from Reddit to here... so in Reddit remain the people who mostly disagree with pg.
Couldn't you achieve that much more easily with a Greasemonkey script?
Research could also involve independent study courses and/or an honor's thesis. The latter could take two years to complete, but when you go to apply for grad schools it's something you've completed based on your interests and drive. It's the perfect example of completing something that grad school will require. You will have formed a committee, presented your ideas, executed a plan of work, and defended the results. It's practice for grad school because it's a mini-version of it.

Independent study courses are a great way to explore your interests more intensively especially as you get ready to do your own work. If you're working on research with a professor, some schools will allow you to get credit in this form. Or you could simply do more focused reading with a professor and get credit for it. One of my best experiences as an undergrad was an independent study with two profs (philosophy and psychology) to talk weekly about mind and brain issues. I needed to know them to see if it would fly, and I organized the reading list with their input, but afterwards it functioned as a normal course with me as the only student.

Through a thesis committee and independent study courses, you'll also get to know professors for those all-important letters of recommendation (as Paul recommends). For those, it's better to know 6 profs well so you can then pick the ones that know you and can best speak highly of you. In a class, especially one with more than ten students it's very hard for a prof to see how you stand out. Better to start working more with them directly. Then they'll have much more to write about. In a similar vein, take small seminar classes wherever and as early as possible. That's a straight-forward way to get to know profs (to see who you want to work with or have on a committee) and for them to get to know you.

Also, find ways to go to other schools during the summers to conduct research more in line with your interests and to be surrounded by like minded peers. Schools have programs that will pay you a little bit and put you up in a dorm. If you research those programs quickly, you could find something for as soon as this summer.
Thanks. I think that Google have a great product but I have a natural aversion to using the biggest, most popular of anything...
I have similar suspicions... the best co-founders seem to be people that were already good friends or partners in something, so it's sort of a catch-22: if you don't already have that person in place, rushing out to try and find someone is certainly not going to find you anyone that you've known for a long time...
Semweb solution is to add annotations to everything (tags), so its obvious to a machine what the information means (ie, the content providers/authors do more work up front to provide more automation later). Versus the crawl the web and index approach with unstructured data (which google are very very good at, clearly).

I see it a bit like the static/dynamic typing "disagreements" people have (heck I disagree with myself, frequently).
P.s. More directly in line with your original question: It's very hard for undergrads to get face time with profs at the better name schools. If you get that opportunity, it will shine through in your letters, but more importantly, in your experiences.
And I'm in Innsbruck. I'll remember to look you up if I'm in Munich again - feel free to come down here to visit some time for day of hiking or skiing or something.

bluelu - where in .ch? I am in Zurich sort of regularly on business these days.
It looks like a lot of people are simply interested in meeting other hackers in their area, whether looking for co-founders or not. Maybe that should be part of the site at this point.
Aw, Tell me you miss giant obnoxious smiley faces and frames?
Do you think that the language you use matters much? i.e. if you have a language that makes you twice as productive as in Arc, would that be a big advantage or a small one? (compared to having money, a good idea or being smart, etc.)
The Missing Curriculum for Programmers and High Tech Workers
Santa Monica, CA.

If you are creating or have a nice idea for a client based on the webdav protocal (web-based or desktop), we would be interested to work with you. We have the server implemented already which works with existing clients and developing other clients
1) Yet you're posting on YC?
2) That's silly.
Yeah, because this place is bigger than Digg, Reddit and Slashdot combined :eyeroll:
3 years ago when people said they didn't need to pay a premium for speed and would take a cheap Dell that did everything they need, Mac fans said "But I do it faster!"

Now speed doesn't matter.

Everyone's insane.

F* marketing.
"...and has already categorized them using Bayesian filtering."