skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
People aren't defined by their arguments. They are defined by their perspective. Winning arguments change no perspectives (unless you are arguing with saints).

The reason they don't is that ideas are not trees. There is no root node. We are not deductive thinkers. We do not trace out the implications of ideas to their ends because they have no ends.

More often, we learn ideas that ripple a little in the neighborhood while the rest of our knowledge remains unchanged. Further, in some cases, the evidence may be mixed, and our idea graph won't change at all.

Kuhn would probably say that there is no way for a scientific revolutionary to argue with a conventional scientist because the purpose of a revolution is to change the context to a different set of concerns, a different language, a different problem.

Einstein couldn't argue with Newtonian physics in Newtonian terms. The point of general relativity isn't to refute the central point of Newtonian physics (whether you think that's the inverse square law or gravitation or the laws of motion, etc.). You might say Einstein was "refuting" some naive conceptions of space and energy, but no one had proven they were naive before he exposed them.

Einstein provided a fertile perspective that allowed others to see the old science and data in a new way. But this has nothing to do with winning arguments. It's DH{NaN}.

Acting like Einstein's work is a rung up the ladder to Final Physical Knowledge is a positivist view akin to the belief that evolution is creating the ubermensch (in some objective sense). There are lots of local minima out there. There is always another perspective to take on the same data.

Refutation should be reserved for stuff that's obvious to clear-thinking people.

Of course, that begs the question...
The investment bankers are certainly working 80-100hrs/week and mastering BrickBreaker on their Blackberries. It's not so bad in trading... 5 days a week, ~12hrs/day.
How to survive the recession - list of fastest growing jobs in US during the period 1929-1933
correction: would not allow it
If you've got some basic eletronics knowledge I highly recommend "Designing Embedded Hardware":
http://www.oreilly.com/catalog/dbhardware2/index.html
Speculative bubbles have always and everywhere been about inflation of the money supply. Dutch tulips, south sea bubble, mississippi company, 20s stocks, nikkei, dot coms -- it's ALWAYS been about the money supply.

Here is why finance has changed so much and become such a big deal since the early 90s:
http://www.mises.org/content/nofed/makegraph.php?tms=true...
> Allocation of investment is the heart of a capitalist economy.

Allocation of capital is at the core of a capitalist economy. That's not what most people in finance are doing. They are speculating with funny money. There isn't really that much actual capital involved; savings rates are abysmal after all.
The Internet has gone stagnant

This guy's buying a baseball team? Baseball was stagnant at the moment of the second pitch.
Some tips:

To see how something works, break it and unbreak it in many different ways. Sometimes the part you think does something isn't it. You don't know code well until you know how it acts when broken. Seeing what error messages mean will help you recognize them in your own code. Hotkeys are good. Ctrl-Z (undo) and Ctrl-Y (redo) are great for breaking/unbreaking code. Version control will be useful at some point.

Change one thing at a time when fixing bugs, or you'll never know what fixed it. Afterwards, explain what happened.

Do not make changes without a reason--that's a short path to cargo-culting. Read the doc, then use the scientific method--hypothesize something, then test. Rinse, lather, repeat. Otherwise, you're just guessing and will waste infinite time, like a Shakespeare-typing monkey.

When borrowing code, understand it, or it will cost you in the long run. Stripping code to the bare minimum or adapting it is a good way to know what parts do what, even if you just use the original.

Remove lines you "think" you need in your solutions and see if they still work. If a line of code isn't necessary, but is not hurting anything, remove it anyway.

I have no idea how people coded before Google, and it scares the crap out of me. Paste in your errors with variable names removed. Invest time to become a Google search pro.

If you haven't tested it, it's best to consider it broken.
Aquinas wasn't quite so thorough in all his works. It's mostly the Summa Theologica which is so rigorous. I agree with the application however, for one to brook disagreement with another, one should usually understand the subject better than that person. This implies understanding your opponent's arguments better than your opponent. If don't understand your opponents arguments better than he, who are you to say that he is wrong in making them?

(trivia about Aquinas: his handwriting was so bad, that there are only about 10 people or so in the world today that can read it.)
What's the methodology and data behind that graph? The fact that it refers to "True Money Supply" rather than established measures like M1, M2, M3 has me rather skeptical.
Economics of H-1B visas
Creative Labs: Fixing our crippled sound card drivers is considered "stealing our goods".
Correct me if I'm wrong here, but saying that a senator would vote for a senate pay raise because they're a senator is not an ad hominem attack. This argument is saying that there's a conflict of interest regarding what they're requesting; that's not a personal attack that has nothing to do with the argument, which is what an ad hominem attack is.
Aristotle was speaking in terms of what convinces people. This is only his 'Rhetoric' however. His 'Logic' deals with correct arguments.

However, I do think that there are cases where an ad hominem is correct however. If someone's argument is based on his own authority, and his authority is widely acknowledged, then the only way to attack the argument is to attack the arguer. One example is the repeated misuse of Einstein as an authority om things like economics or theology.
Image Recognition solved?  Or, human powered?
>>Persons engaged in liquor stores: up 335 percent

Something tells me that that kind of growth had more to do with abolishing of prohibition, rather than with an economic depression. Although I can't deny that alcohol is attractive to those down on their luck.
Coming Soon, to Any Flat Surface Near You
I did a search and found the chart in context:

http://www.mises.org/content/nofed/chart.aspx?series=TMS

The TMS is heterodox measure, but it has been in use for years.
How Switzerland Became the Envy of Europe
Freerice.com - A free and fun way to help feed the hungry
Cycling Hobbies to Day Jobs: A Personal Assessment of Starting a Startup
I would argue that any developer should spend a couple of years maintaining a small to medium-sized application written in C. It's like eating bran: not a particularly huge amount of fun, but good for you in the long run.

But maybe that's just me...
"... I would love a dating site where I could search for women based on their reading habits. ..."

Heard of this exact idea on popular media this week. Can't find the site though. So the idea while not original, is worth trying. How do you really know if a person is really reading the books they claim online though?
Huh. For one that goes down, ten will go up. Say what you want about copyright infringement, but too many people think that either it's OK to download or that they won't get caught. There's too big of a 'market' for illegal downloads.
You can do it if you work hard. I did econ / accounting @ UCLA and took a couple of C++ courses that was enough to get me hungry for building a web app rather than a desktop app.

I am self taught and was stubborn enough to learn to setup a load balanced web cluster in linux, a postfix mail server, and write the code for my web app.

The secret, like others have said, is to build out an idea you have. Once you finished that project you will most likely have dozens of ideas you want to work on. Right around that time read The Dip by Seth Godin so you learn to know when to hold em and when to fold em.
Check amazon mechanical turk. I bet you'll find the secret there...
This article uses a classic diversion tactic - focus on a singular issue, which may have contributed, and attribute all of a complex issue to the single issue that fits the agenda.

No mention of how lending agencies, given incentives to close as many mortgages as possible, had no incentive to make sure those lenders could actually pay. The article gives no mention to how the Fed's lax monetary policy dropped interest rates and created a frenzy in housing that blocked a lot of people out unless they used non-traditional instruments.

The author doesn't say that the "anti-racist" policies are one factor (which may be true) but that these policies are the direct cause. As someone who purchased a home two years ago, I became personally aware of how low short-term interest rates combined with a housing frenzy that drove prices up over 20% a year can easily push a lot of people to get low-interest ARM mortgages instead of more stable 30yr mortgages.

I just think this article takes on a straw man because it suits an anti affirmative action agenda.
Generation of Greatness: The Idea of a University in an Age of Science
In order to register I need a non-anonymous email (i.e., non-Gmail) or Credit card number or Scan of ID card.

Are you serious?
Watch Ezra's Presentation on Merb
"privacy policy: TBD"

I would not touch that with a ten foot pole. That's one of the first things a company should consider.
This is an incredibly cool technology, and the basic idea is pretty simple: You take a RGB LED, modulate the intensity of the red green and blue diode so that the light output matches the scanlines of your projected image. Then you project it onto a mirror mounted on a piezo electric crystal which oscillates to match the scanlines. And voila - you have a projector.

The inhibiting factor has been that RGB LED's have been quite expensive but they are rapidly dropping in price. The blue ones are particularly pricey.
damn.. :-)

You could do it with music as well - make a small app that scans through your music library and uploads it. Then match with people that have the same taste in music. Would probably have broader appeal, since more people listen to music than read books.

Or has that been done too?
This article is silly. For one thing, the economy has changed an enormous amount in the past 70 years. The jobs that did well during the Great Depression may well not be the ones that do well now -- the jobs that do well now might not even have existed 70 years ago.

More importantly, choosing your career based on transient properties of the economy is a terrible idea. Do what you love, and make sure you're good at it; the rest will work itself out.
My point is that real owners of capital (i.e people who saved the capital) will not lend to create the kind of leverage these hedgies have employed. Imagine you are a billionaire. Will you lend to (which is different from having an equity stake in) Meriwether so he can lever up his fund 14x with your borrowed money?

Yet, banks have freely lent to them, because they could, in turn, borrow from the Fed. The Fed (i.e us taxpayers) have operated as the ultimate patsy in the system, providing a one way bet to the speculating class. The evidence of it is the relentless expansion of the total credit in the system (as a percentage of GDP). Literally, the Fed has allowed the creation of total system-wide credit at 2-3 times faster rate than GDP growth, for many, many years running.

No matter what happens now, most hedge fund managers got theirs. As has already been observed, 8 years of feverish levered returns followed by one year of total wipe-out of capital still makes the managers ahead!
Same goes for the gas station attendants and repair services. I suspect they had more to do with the rise of the automobile than the general economic climate. The analogous job today is "dot-com entrepreneur", not "gas station attendant". ;-)
How would you build a human computation game that assigns names to people in images as a side-effect?
How to Start a Startup
Starting a Business: Advice from the Trenches
Startup Search: a directory of web technology startups
Perry, how do you know that the two of the founders actually do lots of programming in Auctomatic?

They could've helped the team in other areas such as:

1) Strategy

2) Marketing (newsletter, beta invitation, etc)

3) UI design (but not UI coding)

4) Sys/Net/DB-admin

5) Legal issue

and let the Collison brothers do the actual programming without having to worry of these stuffs. The Collisons are one of the kind. Prodigy is the right word to describe them both.

If you look at their About page: http://auctomatic.com/about , there are 2 more people beside the 4. At least one of the two is of technical type.

Summer is 4 months long, I'm sure you can learn something. But I don't think you'll be anywhere near the people in this website in terms of technical ability.

The more you ask technical questions from News YC, the more you "dig" yourself deeper in the technical side of the world and the less time you will focus on your startup.

But don't be discourage, anyone can start anything at this day and age.

You can:

1) Learn PHP/MySQL/JavaScript/HTML/CSS and ignore advices

2) Learn Back-end (PHP/MySQL/AJAX) and outsource front-end

3) Outsource everything to India/China/Russia/East Europe

There are the News YCombinator kind of startups.

There are the Google, Microsoft, Amazon, Yahoo! kind of startups.

There are also the kind of iContact, "Ben Casanova", PlentyOfFish kind of startups.

I wish you the best on whatever the path you chose.
Startup 101: Do you have what it takes to fire your boss?
Are you using a 64-bit architecture? When I was running 64-bit Firefox and using nspluginwrapper to run Flash, I was getting total browser lockups and 50% (100% of one CPU) usage in some (totally random) instances of Flash usage. It got to the point where I downgraded to 32-bit Firefox with 32-bit Flash, where I haven't had as many problems (but still some laggy Firefox performance, for example on Buffalo Wild Wings' website). Actually, I would guess that because of issues like this and the Java plugin, Ubuntu probably uses 32-bit Firefox even for 64-bit architectures.
Excellent point. The result of financial speculation of recent years was the allocation of credit to the real estate industry, distorting the real economy in multitude of ways, by pulling resources in an unsustainable fashion.

In 2000, there were 100+ optical networking companies in the 10 mile radius around Palo Alto. That was the result of that period's credit bubble, which worked its way through credit -> stock market/debt market -> telecom companies -> start-ups.
I think that this fellow is only focusing on the Internet as an alternative entertainment medium. Video streaming does go slowly across the Internet and seeing that he made his fortune through video streaming it would make sense that he would take this view. However, the things that make the Internet popular are not it's ability to emulate television, but it's ability to do things that television cannot. It's strengths include a low barrier to entry for both application deliverers and users, and a world-wide audience. Neither of those are available with cable.

The former could change, but it seems unlikely with the current market, cable is too tightly controlled.

The latter couldn't, at least not through Mr. Cuban's scheme. Seriously, what good would an app like Digg/Reddit be if it were only available on an intranet? Who would write a weblog if he knew only Comcast users would be able to read it? Consumers would be divided based on the cable service for which they paid. This seems like it would totally miss the point of the Internet.
A good article about adding one tweek in the way you post to your blog that will increase your Alexa and pull in more page views - make your site a little stickier!
It's an ad hominem attack if you are attempting to refute an argument they made for the pay raise.

For example, if a senator gave a speech detailing why senators needed more money and someone dismissed the arguments based on the senator's sentatorness rather the quality of the argument's themselves.

Also, an ad hominem is not merely a 'personal attack.' For example, an insult is not an ad hominem. An ad hominem is an attempt to discredit an argument based on qualities of the arguer instead of the argument itself. Pointing out a conflict of interest is an ad hominem attack if you are using it to discredit an argument.
Not to mention growth doesn't equal job stability. You want stability you become a mortician.
Thanks. IRC is a good idea.
Number four, I would say, is probably pretty common among all personality types, eh?
Understanding the computational difficulty in both theory as well as practice, I have to say, I find this reaching.

I guess the bigger question though is, "Who Cares?"

If someone's going to use humans to tag my 5k Flickr Photos, and I don't have to pay for it, it's probably better than an automated solution anyways -- the humans will invariably tag better anyhow.
WordPress Gets Major Overhaul
Wait.

"# Nathan Stoll "broke up" with Google in December. Still not clear what he's up to."

So... if it's not clear... why is he on that list at all? Or is this like a list of what notable faces quit their Google jobs lately?
I think that the one item that made sense was the growth in second hand stores. With more people hawking goods to get by, it makes sense that pawnshops would experience a boom. I doubt that this upcoming recession will cause a sufficient rise in hawking to make this profitable however.
Thanks.
I think Google custom search will be more popular because it really gives the users value.
If the OP is interested in learning to hack, in the sense of making computers do great things, then this is the best resource suggested on this thread. In addition, MIT published videos of the lectures by the authors of this book (http://swiss.csail.mit.edu/classes/6.001/abelson-sussman-lec...). They are spectacular.
dewnapalm
It matters if you care about privacy.
Does your OpenID provider work for me?
I had an issue this past week with LiveJournal and the joid OpenID library for Java. I'm wondering if the nuances of any other providers will cause issues for me. If you are an OpenID user, could you try clickpass registration/login on my site? Please comment here with who your OpenID provider is and whether it worked. If you log in successfully the "Personal Info" page has a "Forget I exist..." option if you want.

Here's the link. I'll also put it in a comment to make it clickable:

https://ourdoings.com/person.html
The link with the clickpass button:

https://ourdoings.com/person.html
They took the jobsintown.de advertising campaign a little too seriously...
http://www.frederiksamuel.com/blog/2006/05/jobsintownde.html
Oh, look. Pure naked evil.

Small now, yes, but give them an RPG and a mask and I assure you it will scale.
And for every few people that care about privacy, there will be a few people that don't...
http://www.wowio.com/help/helpmain.asp#newusers6
Zemanta- Stop Trolling the Web to Find Content for Your Blog Posts
I have to disagree. Depending on how long they've been around, maybe TagCow is at the point where they really should have typed out a basic privacy policy. But to say that it's "one of the first things" a company should consider is a lawyer-fearing mentality that can kill a company before it's launched; it's the kind of mindset that says the founders of a coffee shop company should be discussing whether to put "WARNING: VERY HOT" on the cups before they're talking about branding and business models.

Privacy and data storage are important issues that shouldn't be ignored, certainly. But I think when you're starting a new venture, the default assumption should be that your policies are going to be as user-friendly and standard as possible, until something arises that forces you to say, "Standard might not work for us. We need to take a look at the details."

As far as TagCow specifically is concerned, if TechCrunch's assumptions about it being human-powered are correct, then TagCow is probably trying to figure out a way of saying, "Your pictures will be shown to 3rd parties" (their tagging contractors) without making it sound like "your family photos are being spread around the internet like a coughing cold at summer camp". Best of luck to them.
5 Tips Basics of Good Website
Foundations of good website
[Consciousness] is human. If one or more aspects of being human aren't computable, then it's plausible that computers will never pass the Turing test.

You seem to be saying that a computer would have to actually be human or be conscious in order to pass the Turing Test. But passing the Test only requires the computer to simulate some observable behaviors of a conscious human well enough to fool a skilled interrogator. In particular, it only has to simulate those behaviors that are observable through a low-bandwidth TTY.

I suppose one could argue that there simply does not exist an algorithm that could pass the Turing test (when run on a the powerful computers of the future), but that seems like a very hard case to make, particularly here on Hacker News. One could instead try to argue that though such an algorithm may exist, we will never find it, but that doesn't seem to be what you are saying either.
Whoa. From the title, I thought it was asking someone to be more original on their blogs or something.

Interesting startup idea they have there... Not something I would've thought of. Although that may be because I don't maintain a blog.
Ask YC: (&lt; (/ signal noise) too-low)
T

I've been a member of Hacker News (actually Startup News when I joined) for over a year now. I've learned a lot here and been exposed to a lot of interesting ideas. Recently, however, I've often seen the front page have at least 10% of the stories be either more Reddit-worthy or be submissions discussing how to combat Hacker News deteriorating into just-another-news-site.

With the value I'm getting from Hacker News being much lower than it was when I joined (and up to a couple months ago), I think it's time for me to go. There have been several posts I've seen on the front page where I've wanted to say, "Well, this is definitely it," but I think it's better this way, to just keep it to my own submission and leave.

Best of luck to everyone on their ventures and in your lives in general. If I ever get something going, I'll be sure to mention it here first.

Thank you for some great discussions.
Don't you have friends in your program to consult for advice? Assuming you're not in that program, isn't there any kind of forum for Stanford students to discuss classes? It seems like YC is unlikely to give you the feedback you are looking for in regards to such a specific question.
Yea, I thought it was a pretty cool start-up. A lot of start-ups are just redundant, but I thought this one really stood out.
Still. Other US-only sites, like Hulu, don't ask for my drivers license.
Update: OK. No one seems to get the joke. The explanation is as follows. These are my actual interview questions. No coder would do an essay assessment, so I came out with the most outlandish, didactic, "you are inferior" way of making an assessment. I promise my April Fool's joke will be better.
Do you already go to Stanford? Do you have a college degree from somewhere else?
Yeah... no reason to stop at books either, you could also do music/movies, all forms of media really.