skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I think it depends on temperament as well as on what kind of system you're trying to build. I could tell you why I love working in Lisp compared to C# - it makes building abstractions so natural and malleable that I feel like a fish swimming in water instead of glue - but it doesn't follow that your experience will be the same. All you can do is give it enough of a try to decide for youself.

I know lots of C# programmers who would much sooner give up abstractive power than the list of functions that pops up when they hit the "." key. Many are quite happy writing duplicate code as long as the IDE types half of it for them. They don't even notice the duplication. This is not the temperament that is likely to enjoy working in Lisp.

If, on the other hand, you feel that you increasingly have to fight with C#/ASP.NET/VS as your program grows more complex, or if you have a persistent nagging sense that it shouldn't have to be this hard, you might like Lisp.

Here's a suggestion. Whatever your project is, learn enough Lisp to program a basic first version of it. Resist the temptation to reject what's unfamiliar until it subsides (otherwise there's no point in the experiment). Then ask yourself which feels better.
US AG Mukasey: piracy funding terror
Who cares who's "qualified" to say what? Is there a part of the article you feel is mistaken, and if so which part and why?
Why would demand be static? Do you really think that demand for marketing doesn't increase? That would require having only a fixed number of people wanting to sell, and for them to only be willing to sell to a fixed number of customers.
I like where you are going with this business of disagreeing. I'm drawn to the subject.

Question is - what are you (and now, we) really trying to accomplish here - the issue/concern disagreeing?

As Well:
What's the context (purpose) for all this disagreeing you talk about? For bringing this subject up for view, in the first place?

Is it to be right (a bit of arrogance) and try to make the other guy wrong?
Is it to get to what works - to learn to say or do something better together (personally or professionally)

What are you looking for - what do you want to change or happen - as an end result of the discourse - disagreement?

John McLaughlin, Day Traders - Consultant / Coach
www.DayTradersWin.com
Thanks for pointing this out aston! I can't believe I missed that.

I think this is the first public break down of a ycombinator company ever.

For all those interested:
http://www.edgar-online.com/bin/cobrand/?doc=A-1108630-00011...
Hello.

A lot of people here recommended emacs, but it might not be the most suitable tool for you personally, or not the most suitable tool for a given task.

For example, if you want to code in Java, the best tool for that job is IntelliJ IDEA.

If you want to code in Common Lisp, the best tool for that job is emacs - mostly because it offers the best integration with Lisp (with an add-on).

Emacs and Vim both have their followers, and they have fought many religious wars over their editors' merits.

The point is that your choice of an editor need not be between emacs and vim. They just happen to be the preferred tools for most of "the big boys" around these circles.

Since you're aiming for web-development in a business environment, in your situation, you're probably more interested in making code appear on your screen than hard-core editor wizardry.

Don't spend too much time worrying about emacs or vim.

If you do want to settle in one of those camps, choose after you've tried or investigated both, and have a good idea of why you would prefer one of them over the other.

As for a programming language, I'd say that Python should be a safe bet.

It's a relatively elegant, mature language, which should be useful for all kinds of development.

One of the most popular web-frameworks, Django, also happens to be written in (and for) Python. It looks like a sensible and practical tool, and I suggest you check it out.

As a sidenote, PHP is not very highly regarded as a language by serious programmers. Its merit is getting stuff happening quickly.

Just like others have said, you need to learn HTML, CSS, JavaScript, and SQL too.

Using something like Slicehost would probably be a good idea too, so you'd get accustomed to the maintenance side of things.

I wish you good luck! :)
It might be possible to meet some well-connected valley folks there.
This is so extremely old and unworthy of Hacker News.

We need a down arrow.
Well, for starters, the author's baseline claim that there was no factual basis for redlining, which he freely admits is the minority opinion in the matter.

More importantly, the claim that the government and the liberals hounded banks into offering subprime loans, and that it wasn't just the dollar signs in their eyes that made them do it.

These things may be true or may not, but I would like to see better evidence before I simply accept them as facts.
From personal experience, I can say that a genuine course in marketing (not a 'how to write ad copy' intro to advertising) is absolute gold. Bare-minimum: Look for "M.A.S.H. Analysis" in the course outline.

To answer the poster's question: I'd say go for it. Worst-case, you're surrounding yourself with like-minded students.
I might be misinterpreting your comment, and if that's so, my apologies, but that would seem to assume that they're dipping into savings to pay month to month expenses and will be buying houses on top of it. Which is completely possible, I don't know any of these guys, so that's one way to look at the situation.

But, the other way to look at it is that they suddenly have a million dollars (per the article) accruing interest every year as their salaries at Live Current (now I'm making assumptions :) ) cover basic expenses and then some, leaving a security blanket that lets them do most anything they want in the future without worrying about the financial hit.

They can travel off to Africa and spend three years learning Swahili, then surf and learn guitar on a Brasilian beach.

They can build up Live Current per the plan and shape the company.

They can start a new company and bootstrap it, no investors, no worries.

They can do small-scale angel funding, even.

Or not.

But they have options.

And, those options were gathered over the course of a year, putting them in a position that 90% of retirees can only dream of- financial independence. That is huge leverage, and that is huge success.

Also, keep in mind that those are prices in two very expensive places- they could just as easily move to a country where the exchange rate is more favorable and increase their relative savings by a goodly amount.

So, yeah, they didn't cash out for a billion- but they now have a million dollars at 17 and 19. Because of that, they're completely financially independent, and, thus, free- forever, barring any catastrophic financial meltdowns.

So congratulations to them- I can't wait to see what they have coming down the pipe.
It probably depends on the professor: is this Gibbon guy a good teacher? Try to find out if he's taught the course before and how it went.

It's the difference between just learning cute terminology (bad professor) and initiating a real interest/solving hard problems in the subject (good professor).
This just came up on Django-users... it's DTL Prokyon (http://www.dutchtypelibrary.nl/Prokyon_rdrct.html)
I noticed that too - I had absolutely no idea who pushkin was until I asked wikipedia. I do, however, know all the people you mention, and why they are known.

People are just different, and so is their taste in books. The idea of finding partners based on book preferences is interesting though. I would love a dating site where I could search for women based on their reading habits. I mean if I could search for women that liked Neal Stephenson or Bob Woodward I would be thrilled.

So could someone here please make it? Please...
Ex-Googlers Launching Startups To Attack Mother Ship
Perry, i decided to learn how to program about a week ago. tuesday night i started with HTML (dont laugh). i think it is important to know those basics before you go on and learn server side scripting. i tried hackety hack before and php, but the problem is you want instant gratification so you wont stop. thursday night i stayed up an extra 3 hours past my normal time and created a nice html document with my pictures linked from tumblr, added an email form, comment form and submit buttons. off course the form did not submit anything to the server, but now i am hoocked, and instead of pinging developers and killing them with "what's the status" now i know within a few months i will be able to start creating simple web apps. so start small, then once you got html, xhtml and css locked, move to server side scripting.
Who Pays for Our Online Lives?
I've learnt this lesson the hard way. Now my favorite book in social networks is "Why Most Things Fail" by Paul Omerod.

I'll recommend it to everyone, but specially to those with some interest, and little knowledge, in Economics.
Yahoo’s New Rock Star Retention Program
Wall Street Stole My Smart Friends
"Winning an argument means you have found or are closer to a particular truth" - no, it means that you convinced others that you are closer to a particular truth.

Definition of win from http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/win

transitive verb

1 a: to get possession of by effort or fortune b: to obtain by work : earn <striving to win a living from the sterile soil>

2 a: to gain in or as if in battle or contest <won the championship> b: to be the victor in <won the war>

3 a: to make friendly or favorable to oneself or to one's cause —often used with over<won him over with persuasive arguments> b: to induce to accept oneself in marriage <was unable to win the woman he loved>

4 a: to obtain (as ore, coal, or clay) by mining b: to prepare (as a vein or bed) for regular mining c: to recover (as metal) from ore

5: to reach by expenditure of effort

For me the only matching definition is 2a - the argument is the contest and what you gain is the recognition that you were right.
This is most amusing. A link to one of their papers: http://pdos.csail.mit.edu/scigen/rooter.pdf

It really looks like a real CS sorta paper. If you actually spend a second to read it, at first it seems like most dense science reading, but then slowly you realize its just random babble.

The paper I linked even got accepted to a conference. Their grad student salaries couldn't afford it, but they got enough paypal donations to go! Kudos to them.
A Sony Vaio laptop running Ubuntu remained unscathed at the end of the conference.

Just one reason that all my computers run (Gentoo) Linux.

Several times I have replied in response to a comment about a startup using Flash, indicating that it can be difficult to get running for someone using Linux. This submission is another example of why relying on a technology like Flash (as opposed to an open protocol like HTML and Javascript) may be a bad idea: you could be forcing your users to compromise their machine.
> nypost ain't liberal

We would classify the the Village Voice as a very liberal paper, but send it to someone in Nebraska and they'll tell you it's pornography.

Political ideals may draw on universal principles, but the line of scrimmage is different in every district. Murdoch is a businessman first, and he likes to own news companies. He happens to prefer to play one side of the line of scrimmage. The combination means his mouthpieces say different things in different areas. In some areas they endorse Hillary Clinton for re-election to the senate...

I tried to sidestep this criticism, but I was wrong to even sound the terms. The point is that the NYPost doesn't usually run articles like this---otherwise I wouldn't have read it. This tidbit is so salacious it even got my attention.

> Wikipedia

Wikipedia indeed.
Actually the earliest recorded references to hacking (in the documents of the MIT Tech Model Railroad Club which is generally acknowledged as the origin of the term) all have the term used in the mallicious (if mischevious) sense such as phone phreaking.
too bad the application deadline is over
Excellent read. I think there is something in the air or water in the bay area that has been poisoning people into making startups that have very little chance of ever actually making any money.

Having a good business model does not mean you have to write out a 100 page business plan and have miles of spreadsheets. Just figure out a way to make money. It is even better if you design your startup to both get money AND user traction.

Tossing adsense onto your main page does not normally cut it.

With my startup, I'm using a low cost subscription based model for an online poker site, plus I am upselling microphones/headsets for the voice chat functionality that is being added to the application. The software is still in beta, but is actually working. I also have years of experience in analyzing, getting, and converting traffic.

-Zak
The problem on those sites is that their is not only poor comments

This is a legitimate problem, and ironically it is a symptom that a news concentrator is becoming a victim of its own success. As the signal-to-noise ratio attracts a progressively larger crowd, the types of information that are viewed as 'signal' broaden to appeal to the lowest common denominator. It's similar to hiring in a small company -- but at least in that situation you have control over the purse strings. (Even the trolls get dumber as time goes by and a site grows more popular.) Thus the comments on an arbitrary story suffer, and it requires more work to pick through them. However, if you 'listen' to subcommunities (eg. economics, programming, math on reddit) you find that (unsurprisingly) the baseline rises again. If you have no interest in those subsets, however, you're kind of out of luck. (But if you're here you already knew that)

You could probably model this as a logistic process, provided that you account for renormalizations (such as the literal renormalization that took place on reddit recently).

but also tons of users who upmod them.

This part (or at least its independent, non-interaction effect) is irrelevant; if you focus solely on people who have strong and demonstrated critical thinking skills, you can learn a great deal, and also gain a different perspective. Their input is much more harmful when it comes to filtering in or out the news to be concentrated.

Most of the interesting threads in which I have participated eventually lost the interest of the masses because they had descended into minutiae. But that's where the interesting bits lay, so that's where they went.

Ignore the riffraff. Lord knows they'll usually ignore you if you're presenting anything challenging. Even in a swamp like Slashdot, there is occasionally a perspective-changing comment that is worth reading.

If you want to expose yourself to a wide variety of opinions, you have to be willing to do a bit of work yourself, and determine which ones hold merit. It's a two-way street, in many respects, and your priorities (in addition to your time pressures) will determine how far you are willing to take it.

It appears to me that the 'social news' sites on the Web are simply recapitulating the arc of the special-interest BBS nodes and Usenet cliques of years past. Everything old is new again.
Ask YC: Working on a casual gaming or pc/console game start-up?
After reading a great interview with the guys behind Mass Effect, I was curious to see if any one is working on a gaming startup?

(Link to article: http://venturebeat.com/2008/03/29/qa-with-bioware-founders-on-mass-effect-and-life-at-ea/)
You get a down arrow once you get enough karma. You know, so people don't abuse the ability to down vote.
Also, learning C helps you understand what's going on at a lower level, which can be important.
We'd definitely consider funding it.
The human algorithm: Stumpedia launches open-source search engine
Agreed. Or just ask the professor. If I were a professor I'd be ecstatic if someone wanted to sit in on a lecture just to learn, not for credits.

However I've also had great professors who would allow it because they feared the students wouldn't be fully committed since they weren't obligated to do assignments and exams.
I remember reading a similar article about the release of endorphins after physically stressful events back in 2005, but after looking for an hour, I can't find the link.

I was under the impression that this was pretty much accepted and understood.

It was an interesting read, nonetheless.
Well, the nice thing is that the author may be getting some of his smart friends back, now that Wall Street has overreached.

Perhaps some of the statisticians will come back to work on fundamentally (as opposed to monetarily) interesting problems, more of the sharp deal-makers will again be available for non-financial-sector positions, and the equilibrium to which the author alludes will briefly allow for a bit of overcorrection in favor of societal benefit.

It's a bit optimistic, to be sure, but not impossible.
Being able to buy a house is no small thing. My father was a fairly well-paid engineer, and I don't think he paid off the mortgage till his late fifties or early sixties.

Also, the reason the Auctomatics don't have all the cash to invest is that the noncash part is already invested: it's stock. And the Auctomatics certainly hope they can get at least market returns on that.
If you're hoping to get into web development, then you'll need to learn quite a lot of pieces of technology. For a professional, the minimum knowledge base is TCP/IP networking, HTTP, HTML, Javascript, the DOM, SQL, a bit of UNIX shell, and at least one general-purpose programming language like Python, Ruby, or PHP.

As a hobbyist, you can start smaller than that, of course. Learning HTML and a bit of Javascript is a great start -- if you can build simple client-side dynamic apps, moving into server-side scripting is a lot easier. Configuring a basic Linux server to host web applications (even if it's just a virtual machine, or a spare PC under your desk) is a big step forward, too.

As an economist who may want to do some web development, though, you might gain as much from learning a general-purpose language like Python as you will from web development. Being able to toss out a quick script to do your simulations or mine an existing data set may prove substantially more valuable to you than an in-depth understanding of PHP and Apache configuration.
Start here:

http://mitpress.mit.edu/sicp/

No, seriously. If you've never programmed before, this will teach you far more than you'll need, initially, but later on you'll realize that you picked up a lot of really good habits and never needed to unlearn the bad ones.

Try it. If you like it, you won't look back. If not, perhaps a career in finance isn't such a bad idea anyways.
I'd say that (good) parody and satire frequently make use of DH1-4 in order to effect an argument that's usually at DH6. It's the matter of creating straw men or ad hominem attacks which are implicit criticisms on the actual content of the argument.
They didn't die of not figuring out a business model, though. They died of ceasing to be popular. If anything these examples support my case for the primacy of getting lots of users.
Not a bad idea by any stretch, but it helps to know what you're looking for when you do hire someone.

Plus, if you just have a little itch to scratch, it can be a lot less work to implement the damn thing yourself, regardless of whether it's elegant or scalable or perfect. Microsoft's original product was built on your model (Gates farmed out the compiler IIRC) but he certainly had a good idea of what qualities he was looking for in a programmer.
Flickr does have fine-grained license options on the advanced search page, and also has an "add to favorites" button. It's just above every image.

You do have to register and log in to store favorites, though.
Well, if he's going to learn to be a hacker he might as well learn about all of the age-old flamewars too.
Learning electronics was much, much, harder for me than programming. Electronics seemed magical. I couldn't break complex circuits into the little components, circuits didn't seem to be built hierarchically. I felt like, if a circuit designer wrote code, you'd have one big function with no loops and minimal branching. First thing to keep in mind -- that's not true. It's just hard to see the components until you get familiar with them.

But, to answer your question. You _need_ The AoE. Read it over and over and over again. Look at Forrest Mims books. Your local technical library should have some.

The most important thing (not mentioned) is your lab. Mims books basically beg you to build his circuits. At minimum, a power supply and multimeter. Consider adding an oscilloscope* and function generator. I have a lab at home, basically everything purchased off of ebay, it's great. You'll need components. These are expensive, I have several bins of components at home. Handy to have when you think of an experiment to perform. If you live in the bay area, go to weirdstuff warehouse. You could film wargames 2 in that place.

If you really don't want to invest in a lab, an alternative (might) be the software package "multisim." Multi-sim lets you hook stuff up in software, and simulate the output. I've heard this tool helps students learn circuit design. But I've never used it.

good luck

* Just learning how an oscillscope works, and how to use it will teach you more than you can imagine :)
Good read would be "How to become a Hacker" - http://catb.org/~esr/faqs/hacker-howto.html

Anyway since most of the startups are built using Open Source software, beginning to hacking with them would take you to the edge.
I definitely agree with finding something you <i>want</i> to build. One of my friends taught himself programming using me to bounce questions off of every now and again, and the hardest part seemed to be when he abstractly wanted to keep learning programming, but he was just too bored at the moment to keep going.

Find something fun to build, the smaller the project the better. Keep working on it until you can't bring yourself to work on it any more, then repeat with a more ambitious project.
Quote from the original article: "[...]And the license is a generous gift from the photographer to you."

As an amateur photographer with almost 4000 CC-licensed images on Flickr, this pisses me off to no end. My images are under the non-commercial attribution-required variant of the Creative Commons license, which means that simply downloading a copy of one of them to include in your business presentation or website is a flagrant violation of the license terms.

My "gift-giving" is directed towards the general betterment of society, not lazy web designers or bloggers who don't think other people's work is worth anything.
> Wikipedia indeed.

If you're going to impeach what you believe to a a secondary source of questionable veracity, it might behoove you to use something other than baldfaced assertions yourself.
I think that Norvig's point in this article is that to really learn to use a language, along with all of its specific idioms and everything (so that you're not just writing "Java in Python"), one needs to study and use it for far longer than the learn-quick books would suggest.

I think you're misunderstanding what the OP is looking to do.