skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Basically, it depends on your language implementation, and whether its implementation of threading is based on OS/hardware threads (and therefore multiprocessing) or on software ("green") threads. Often if OS threads are supported, it's actually a hybrid solution.

There are a number of Common Lisp implementations that support MP, often on only some target OSes, and there are a number that don't. To my knowledge, (I'm not a Python hacker!) vanilla Python doesn't support MP, whereas I suspect that JPython and IronPython support the MP infrastructure that their underlying VMs provide.

Software written for green threads may often fail mysteriously on OS thread implementations. Likewise, green-threaded software may need explicit scheduling, which code written for OS threads will generally not be doing.
The Internet? Bah! - hilarious 1995 article by Clifford Stoll
I find this to be a major thesis in many of your essays, but I've got to know... do you feel it would be bad for your brain to work in google research or (gasp) microsoft research or academia? I mean, I would bet working for Norvig is a more significant mental workout than founding many of the yc companies.
Obama and Bush are cousins
The Winners of Airwaves Auction Revealed
We can assure you that this is for real. We at Phusion have been working at this for quite some time now, and several of our beta testers include Rails core team members, as well as some of the largest RoR hosts on this planet ;-). And so far, the feedback has been overwhelmingly positive and we can't wait to share this with you guys. We do ask for your patience though, albeit for just a little longer.

Regarding documentation, we think you'll be more than pleased to see that we've gone the extra mile on this part. If anything, we hate bad documentation as well, so we really intended on tackling this with Passenger ;-). For more information regarding Passenger, be sure to keep a close eye out on http://phusion.nl, http://www.modrails.com, http://izumi.plan99.net/blog and http://ninh.nl as we'll be posting more about it the following few days/weeks.

Kind regards,
Hongli Lai
Ninh Bui
- phusion.nl
'Safe banking' is a contradiction in terms. Every time you place money in another organization, their is an amount of risk involved. It only seems like it shouldn't be risky because the Fed guarantees so many banks and loans. This gives the banks more leeway to make risky loans and artificially shifts wealth around in the economy hurting the lower classes.

Fortunately, it also means that there is more to go around for startups.
Do people really think that watching videos of lectures is equivalent to seeing the lecture in person, following up with a recitation, and completing problems sets with other equivalently motivated kids?

It's the difference between watching a music video and jamming with the band.

Perhaps that's what makes the MIT educational experience worthwhile.

As soon as that can be replicated, I'll buy into it.
Simplicity On The Web: Designing To Hide Features
Isn't equity a big deal? I was employee #2 in a just funded startup. I ended up busting my ass the whole time only to realize that my equity was a fraction of what the founders took in.

IMHO, if you do a startup, do it as a founder, or join after Series B, from a pure risk-rewards perspective.
What’s This “Linux” Thing and Why Should I Try It?
I do agree - completely. If you can pick between a boom time and a recession, pick the boom time. 100%. But if you are thinking of starting a comapny NOW, just because the recession is looming, doesn't mean that you should back away. There are good reasons to start now.
Strange Maps - World-Wide Web Map, From .ad to .za
Google to competitors: I drink your milkshake
Your point about being more worried and yet happier at the same time is totally possible. According to the Big Five Personality trait theory from personality psychology, good emotions and negative emotions are two seperate scales, not one scale. Good emotion is Extraversion and bad emotion is Neurotocism.
link here:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_Five_personality_traits

Also, the two biggest things that correlate with success (three overall, two presonality) are openness to new experiences (creativity) and conscientiousness (discipline and willingness to work hard). The other one is intelligence. I reckon YC weeds for those kinds of people.
Good find!

It's great looking back to those days when opinions like his were, indeed, mainstream. I was in high school at the time and admitting you used the Internet was not something you did. It was something that would be forever geeky, text based, and for the domain of hackers and scientists only.

Things changed rapidly, of course, but I'd say it was more amazing that it DID take off with the general public than the fact we thought it wouldn't.
1995 Predictions = 2008 Flamebait
Hah, that's a great quote.

I think we're both looking at it the same way. PG is in a fantastic position where he gets to spend most of his time around some of the smartest, most driven, and most interesting people all the time. He loves it, and with good reason.

His essays are targeted toward those people who could become the kind of person he respects, and they have not a little bit of force behind them because he believes in what he says a whole lot.
I sold my software startup last year, and while it's the "easy option" to get back into that scene.. I'm thinking I might get into publishing! Can a book be a startup? Hmm...
I think the main constraint is the lack of creativity and the variety of tasks one has to perform in a big company. In a startup there are so many challenges and so many things to learn its always changing,
I also heard Enron was much like this (amazon + the defense co).
some things still ring true:

"What's missing from this electronic wonderland? Human contact. Discount the fawning techno-burble about virtual communities. Computers and networks isolate us from one another. A network chat line is a limp substitute for meeting friends over coffee. No interactive multimedia display comes close to the excitement of a live concert. And who'd prefer cybersex to the real thing?"
Ripping off Clay Shirky's book Here Comes Everybody, he points out that sharing sites like flickr allow groups of large size to collaborate effortlessly around some tasks (his example is people taking pictures of the Mermaid Parade in NYC) without having a boss or even knowing each other, on Flickr through tags. More tools like Flickr could supplant some of the hierarchy in large or medium size companies. Why shouldn't a company be able to be a large group of individuals that self-organize like the people working on Linux have?
Italian 'al dente' is a trip. I hardly believed it at first, but it is tasty.
How many people will leave MySQL now?
I'm a recovering SBCer (now AT&T, again?).

IBMers and SBCers compete over whose company was the basis for Office Space & TPS Reports. (i.e. the TPS Report zero that started it all)
I agree that the "mistake" phrasing is atrocious.

I don't exactly agree with this, though:

Don't infer based on the fact that something is as it is, that it is therefore superior to all other possibilities.

Actually, we can conclude that there must be a good reason why the average human needs eight hours of sleep, as opposed to four hours or two hours or half an hour. It's not as if we can't get there from here: Some living humans really do need only four hours of sleep. And other creatures, not so different from us, have much niftier tricks: Bears can sleep for four months straight, horses can sleep very lightly while standing up, my parrot wakes up at almost any stimulus, some creatures sleep with half the brain at once, etc. If sleep were a big liability, there seem to be lots of genetic switches that could be thrown to reduce, alter, or eliminate it. The fact that those switches have not been thrown in us suggests that our sleep pattern is an equilibrium point in evolutionary space.

Now, maybe you're trying to say that, although there might be a way to design a brain that didn't need sleep -- perhaps scientists will use futuristic neuron-CAD software to figure that out, someday -- some accident in early evolution sent us down this particular branch, and now we can't get there from here. That's true, and it's really fascinating. It seems that creatures without sleep would have to evolve nearly from scratch -- because even fruit flies sleep (a fact that I didn't know until today) which suggests that you have to go back past our common ancestor with the insects to find a creature that wasn't designed around sleep. And if such a creature with a prototype sleep-free brain tried to start up shop today, odds are it or its descendents would all be eaten by fish before they got very far. It's hard to evict species from an ecological niche, particularly when you're going up against nearly every animal species on earth.
Chop vegetables into small chunks, fry them for a little while (add apices at will), then add some water (just enough to make them not burn and allow steam to develop) and cover with lid. Let stew for a couple of minutes.
Add tomato sauce or soy sauce or coconut cream or...
Combine with rice or noodles or...
LinkedIn speaks out of both sides of mouth
I would suggest working part-time as a freelancer as another option. (i.e. if you can't get into YC)
HAHA Nick Negroponte! "You won't be able to bring that laptop to the beach." Of course not, we're only gonna send them Africa...
Wow, I should have looked at that date before I started reading the article. Some of those claims seemed downright weird.
Sorry about the non-pretty printing. It was nicely formatted, when I entered it (I swear). Is there something like a <code> tag I could use?

Also, not all of the error message printed. What's up with that?
Why not take over the ReiserFS project? We all know about the difficulties it's leader is having...
The Art of Motorcycle Maintenance - Robert M. Pirsig

Lila: An Inquiry into Morals - Robert M. Pirsig

The Open Society and its Enemies - Karl. R. Popper

The Player of Games - Iain M. Banks

Pale Blue Dot - Carl Sagan

The God Delusion - Richard Dawkins

"Two roads diverged in a wood, and I—
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference." from "The Road not Taken" by Robert Frost
A bittorrent enabled browser that would automatically scale and act as a backup for what users browsed... course the trick would be to prevent cache poisoning and keeping posts going to the proper place.
Is it just me or did I see a filter in the lower left corner of the box?
I'm tired of reading articles like this. If you're going to blame the current crisis on a lack of regulation, please tell me what SPECIFIC regulations you would implement, and explain how they would have helped us avoid the situation we're in.
What if a user owns messages that they post to other people's walls? The other user could remove bad posts from the wall, but the poster could also claw back the messages too. If it was a thread, it could look like <comment removed>
Mantis shrimp vision reveals new way that animals can see
Back then I thought that Stoll had a point, though he went a bit too far. But he turned out to be very, very wrong.

The problem is the assumed dichotomy. Nobody substitutes network chat for meeting friends or attending live concerts. We augment these experiences.

We use network chat to meet new friends, arrange our meetings with old friends, keep track of distant friends, shop for mail-order coffee, learn about exotic coffees and coffeeshops, and swap hints on the home-roasting of coffee. We figure out which live concerts to go to by watching Youtube and keep track of where and when those concerts are using mailing lists and Myspace.

I'm a classical music idiot, but I own a couple of Vladimir Horowitz CDs. Vladimir is, of course, dead, but I found some video of him on Youtube, and in the comments was a mention of Martha Argerich, an awesome pianist who is still very much alive and is giving a concert not too far from here in August. If it weren't for Youtube I might never have known this woman existed.

I won't say much about sex -- that's what the entire rest of the web is for -- but it seems to me that the web is the most important innovation in the history of sex since birth control.
Speaking of a lathe, I know a few kids who recently started a custom drum company.
"11th cousin" is not a cousin as popularly understood. Their most recent common ancestor was in the 17th century. Change your title to something less sensationalist and more accurate, please. Or, better yet, don't post this sort of thing here. It's not Hacker News.
His book "The Cuckoo's Egg", is, on the other hand, a good read. And given some of the cyber-utopia-singularity type of people he probably ran across in those days, he was probably right to throw some cold water on things.
This is actually a very typical mistake. To look at a technology as it is instead of how it could be and then try to make predictions using only the latter. The exact same thing happened to cars, electric lights, telephones, you name it.

It seems almost human nature to make this mistake. Thats why visionaries are, well visionary.
He wrote it in 1995 and he turned out to be wrong. Can we get it right? How are things will be different in 2021?
Without a doubt, Heidegger's explanation of readiness-to-hand in Being and Time has done more for my usability and process inefficiency evaluating skills than even Don Norman's Design of Everyday Things or any HCI book I've ever read. While Norman's book comes in a strong second, the benefit of the first few chapters of Being and Time is the incredibly low-level cognitive access it gives you to the work your brain does when engaged in a task. (If you're interested and don't mind slogging through some tough writing, pick up the hardcover version and Dreyfus' Being-in-the-World and read them together. Reading a Wikipedia article or some other summary fails to deliver the same degree of low-level access.)

I'll also mention Ayn Rand as someone who wrote inspiringly about the entrepreneur as a (potentially) heroic figure, but hasten to add that her sociology of looters and movers is way too simplistic to ground some of her views on ethics.

John Stuart Mill's "Utilitarianism" was my first assigned reading in a political philosophy class, and remains my favorite.

Nietzsche's On the Genealogy of Morals prompted me to question whether the values I had always held were really all that valuable.

Eleanor Rosch's work on basic categories and prototype theory (without which Lakoff's Women, Fire, and Dangerous Things--not to mention Weinberger's Everything is Miscellaneous--would likely not have been written) is fantastic, debunking empirically the Aristotelian theory of categories as being defined by necessary and sufficient conditions (they can be, where we intentionally define them to be from a top-down point of view, as in geometry, but bottom-up the construction of categories is much looser and based on family resemblances with one or several prototypes serving as the central point of comparison: hence, when I say "bird" you're more likely to think of a bluebird-type bird than a penguin or an ostrich). Knowing this does a lot to help loosen up your understanding of things, which can become rigidified by traditional mathematical, scientific, and analytic philosophical education.

Several others worth mentioning, but I've got to get back to work!
The sentence may be a little ill-formed, but the general point is true. There are genes like the ones that cause Tay Sachs disease and sickle cell anemia, that have genetic advantages, like resistance to TB or malaria. But in the absence of the selecting force, such as with modern day medicine, the frequency of those genes in populations decrease over generations, which is the definition of evolution.
Sleeping seems like a huge disadvantage over a creature that could stay active and hunt 24 hours a day^, but if there were no selective force for creatures that sleep, creatures would evolve that don't require sleep pretty quickly. I'm not sure how fast, but the change would be observable over a couple of generations.

^(This advantage is not necessarily true in all cases. Bears sleep because it's not energy efficient to forage in the winter, humans may have evolved sleep as a way to save energy during the night because electric lighting became popular. However, I really doubt this hypothesis because of the number of critical functions that degrade under sleep, as well as the increased risk of heart problems from people who don't sleep a lot, which is really independent of whether you feel tired or not.)

On an unrelated note, how do you escape asterisks?
Why Spider Silk is so Strong
A lot of these issues were just bootstrap ones; starting a good internet requires shopping service lots of users, which are attracted by... good internet shopping. Oops.

Not many people in 1995 had an appreciation of just how large the internet would get, because roadblocks like this seemed to stop adoption all over the place. In actual fact it was not stopping growth, just slowing it until critical mass was reached.

Some of his points are still very valid however:

"Lacking editors, reviewers or critics, the Internet has become a wasteland of unfiltered data."

This one is _still_ true. It's getting better because of slashdot and other link collectors, plus places like wikipedia, but no one would claim it is totally there yet.

Right now the internet is divided into two parts: the known good bit and the unknown quality bit (which includes parts known as good months or years ago, but not checked recently).

It isn't as likely as it was in 1995, but if the data you happen to need is in the unknown quality part you are back to the same position as you were in 1995.

Plus plenty of people still prefer reading books to reading on a screen :)
For programmers this was explained by Brookes in Mythical Man Month back in 1975 - a timeless classic. The return to smaller units is a bigger trend I think. In 1955, Fortune 500 controlled 1/3 of US GDP. In 2000 it was 2/3. I think we are at an early stage of a massive trend that will reverse this. Not just tech/media but shops, farmers etc. Phew, it was all getting kinda white bread boring out there!
Is venture capital’s love affair with Web 2.0 over?
The Royalty Scam: "...we need to establish the principle of artists’ rights throughout the Internet"
That seems like a lame site. Look at their sample question. A cat could get that right.
This is such an unspoken truth. Depositors and investors have much more responsibility than the media ever pegs them with. I remember being impressed during the Enron thing with how nobody dared point out shareholder greed and ignorance. It was all about a few crooks at the top. Skilling and Lay were the bee's knees as long as the stock kept shooting up, even though there were tons of red flags in the accounting. Investors saw dollar signs and didn't do their homework.
Actually, we can conclude that there must be a good reason why the average human needs eight hours of sleep, as opposed to four hours or two hours or half an hour.

Now, maybe you're trying to say that some accident in early evolution sent us down this particular branch, and now we can't get there from here. That's true, and it's really fascinating.

That was indeed the idea behind my previous post. Rather the same thing happens with humans only changing teeth once a lifetime instead of continuously. There is some evidence that changing once doesn't give us an evolutionary advantage, but is simply a leftover from some ancestor's trait way back. (I'll see if I can find the reference).

I'm not saying that humans might not need their sleep (we die if we are sleep deprived), but that, based on the fact that we sleep, you can't claim that sleeping creatures have an advantage over hypothetical non-sleeping creatures. Maybe it's just something that stuck and doesn't do enough harm to kill us all out.
What’s the Persona of Your Company? eg: Facebook, Xobni
My reply to mechanical_fish sort of covers your argument as well I think.

you can type a solitary * by placing a space after it
http://www.linkedin.com/companies/10667/Facebook

http://www.linkedin.com/companies/151003/Xobni+Corporation
I used to joke with my friends who just got engaged about having a voicemail system "Press '1' to hear how he proposed..Press '2' to hear the tentative wedding details..Press '3' to leave a message'

I think it's a genuine proposal - and most of their wedding party/guests probably are already part of their twitter network. Nice one-to-many broadcast.
Yes, darling, and you can be more FABULOUS too!

I think maybe you could start jetting (it's an accelerated version of planing) to compete with big companies by leveraging open-source finance messaging products like RabbitMQ instead of starting from scratch. Then you can concentrate on new functionality with a solid foundation.

You might want to invest in a spel-chekker, as well.
Well, since no one has mentioned the self serving nature of the article, I guess I will. Seems like someone who founds startups and needs a good pool of people to start those would need to convince people of all this.

Bravo, they seem to be buying it!

I worked at a few small companies and there are certainly downsides to small companies. Likewise, there are downsides to starting your own company as well, like friggin receivables.

I work in a 100ish person company now and it is awesome.
I would have liked to see some recommendations rather than just hand-wringing.

My understanding is the crux of problem was the arm-twisting that went into having the ratings agencies grade them as low risk (make it look pretty if you want our business in the future).

I would think that the best "free market" solution would be increased transparency and tools to get these transactions out of the shadows.
This _really_ explains my previous boss.
I have to say that these comments (the first 5 at least) are so refreshing. It's great that there are people out there who see through Krugman's propaganda.
+1 - but that gets us into politics... and there lies madness.

Let's just leave articles like this for other sites. I think the economics reddit is a good place to discuss them, as mentioned below.
Boil water, cook pasta (not spaghetti but something like rotini). Cook Campbell's soup (Chicken with dumplings) on separate burner. Drain pasta, toss soup over. It's not a healthy meal but it will do in a pinch.
The Planning Fallacy
Secret shortcut: personal vs. impersonal
Amazon Kindle and Sony Reader Locked Up: Why Your Books Are No Longer Yours
Me three.
I'll hire you if you know Perl.
The Theory of Relativity in words of four letters or less
A worn out, moth eaten copy of Lord Byron's complete works. It took me almost a decade to outgrow the influence. Especially the poem Manfred, and the soliloquay at the beginning!

The Sanyasin - Satprem. I walked the streets of Chennai not knowing what the hell was happening, while reading this. Magical, mystic..anyone who has ever held any spiritual notions should read this...

Last Temptation by Nikos Kazantikakis, what can I say..every word has drilled through me!

Ka by Roberto Calasso, this made me confront my own culture and religion like no other.

Siddhartha by Herman Hesse.

Godel, Escher & Bach - Douglas Hofstadter. Barely made it to 4th chapter but that alone has shattered opinions I held about my style of thinking.

And Sri Aurobindo...almost everything that he has written touches me like no other. It was like coming home after being in exile. Not that I understand anything but...

And of course Don Box's talk on DDJ about the origins of .NET!
Hi White. I just mailed you regarding some questions I had. I hope thats Ok. My email address is in my profile. Thanks!
WebKit gets an A+ on Acid3