skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I believe Steve Jobs has a patent on inappropriate uses of the word "insane" and its inflections.

Anyway, the HP actually seems better for most things. The AMD processor seems to cost a bit more than Intel. Aside from that, I won't compare them.

mac:

2.4GHz Intel Core 2 Duo
2GB memory
200GB hard drive1
Double-layer SuperDrive
NVIDIA GeForce 8600M GT with 256MB

hp:

Turion 64 X2 TL-62
Memory Size:	3GB
Dual Layer DVD RW
Capacity:	250GB
Unspecified, probably crappy, video card.
BIL Conference - Minds Set Free.
1. Apple doesn't make machines that fit into feature tables.

2. Even then, the HP is not similar to the MacBook PRo, it's missing a comparable CPU, 802.11n, backlit LED screen, multitouch mousepad, backlit keyboard, and most importantly software: Mac OS X and iLife.

3. The "fashion" tax is also the quality tax. Al casing and hundreds of screws is a very real difference.
There's clearly a market for it. People make shortsighted decisions based on price all the time. Often the person making the decision isn't the one with the office in the middle but the one at the corner...

You get more usable floor area per ground area if you fill your whole plot of land with a huge cuboidal office block with no inner courtyards and light channels. It's easier and cheaper to build.

Result is more profit.
what's a better system then - more socialism and government control? imho that too will lead to maintaining a status quo.

The only things that change are the people at the top (gov officials and their families), a lot of resources will be wasted (compared to a more capitalist system), and that it's much much harder for people at the bottom to move up (not to mention less incentive). O yeah, since we're talking about government controlling most of the resources and distribution, you can probably kiss your rights goodbye too. It's not like this hasn't been done before with disasterous results... there's a reason China changed economic systems...

"most people either are stupid and/or can't change"

doesn't it make sense then for the system not to reward them for their behavior; and instead to reward people that can change and work both hard and smart?
I think that the attitude of the 37signal guys will eventually backfire, and it might be about to happen.

Whenever someone comes out guns blazing promoting something as the next coming of christ (excuse the verbose wording) people will have a tendency to want to pull them back down to earth, and look for small mistakes that they can use to do so.

Just the other day on YC news I saw a comment about their book getting real being "a load of bullshit", and I have seen comments like it elsewhere.

The people that have long term success tend to be much more humble about what they do. Linus Thorvalds is a good example. We don't want to bring him back down to earth, because he already has his feet solidly planted there.

I have absolutely nothing against the 37signal guys, just pointing out how human nature works...
Buffet's investing record puts him on a league of his own. But his humility and compassion, in spite of all the wealth, now that's exceptional.
Masterpiece Engineering
New Macbook Pros Released
You have it backwards, actually. Python is strongly typed and C++ is weakly typed. You probably meant dynamically/statically typed.
Some additional facts that are highly relevant to price point:
3MB shared L2 on the MB, 2x512 on the HP

Macbooks, let alone the pro, have dvi out, which is a must for most people, and the HP doesn't.

The HP is about the size of 2 macbook pros in terms of thickness.

The HP's horrible vid card and screen gives it a resolution of 1280x800 on a 15 inch screen. The Pro you are comparing has 1440x900 on the same sized screen.

I realize I am coming off as sounding fanboyish, but that is not my intention. I fully realize Macs are not priced very low, but these crappy HPs and Dells are nowhere near the quality of components.
Hoping not to sound too smart-ass, Im pretty good at seeing the big trends, and breaking out of paradigms. My first startup would probably be a success if it was started now, but ten years ago nobody understood what the hell I was talking about.

What I do (having thought a bit about it) is this:

1 - having a pretty good grasp of a broad spectrum of technologies and where they are heading. This includes things as diverse as FPGA's, software and diesel engines. I don't know much about the details of any of it, but I have an idea of how stuff works and where it's heading.

2 - A good sense of human nature. Basically knowing what people want...

3 - Having lots of "what if" thoughts.

4 - being able to extrapolate the "what if" thoughts using my knowledge of technology and people.
Mostly, you have to opt in. There are a few ones turned on by default.

Someone would have to provide a genuinely useful service and then turn prankster. Could happen, but unlikely.
Agreed - I would also recommend taking a class or two if you have the time. Decent community colleges will have many courses for web development ranging from beginner to intermediate. Studying and learning in a classroom environment has many benefits - Who knows, you might meet a few new friends and like minded folks as well!

Good Luck!

(PS: In the Bay area, foothill college is great, IMHO, for continued education)
They are disrupting the whole car ownership market NOT the car rental market
I've used all the freelancer type sites (elance, rentacoder) and have found oDesk.com to be the best.

Primarily because you can get candidates to do technical tests (i.e. javascript tests) that I've found to be a fantastic predictor of success.
Yeah. The real name should be something like Yahoo Opt-In Search Result Decorator Platform.

It's harder to loop third parties into actual search processing and ranking -- for one thing, they would have an incentive to rank their own results the highest. Yahoo has an incentive to keep results globally relevant.
"Engage in combat fully determined to die and you will be alive; wish to survive in the battle and you will surely meet death."

Uesugi Kenshin (1530—1578)

Applies equally to war & startups.
I'll offer up a defense, and point out that he was speaking to a group of MBA students at a prestigious school. None of the members of his audience are going to want for any of the things that you listed.
"If I wanted to do something wild & crazy I could do it, but Anna Nicole Smith is gone. Reminds me of the story of the 60 year old man that got a 25 year old to marry him. When his friends asked how he did it, he replied, “I told her I was 90.”

And that, people, is how that guy is rich.
In Denmark university is free. You even get a state grant of about $1000 a month to live off while you study.

As we have no natural resources we have to fall back on a smart population. And since, according to numerous studies, we are one of the richest and happiest countries in the world it seems to work pretty well.
Agreed. The internet isn't a magical place where the best product automatically wins. Much to the misfortune of us hackers.
Berkshire Hathway's letters to their shareholders is a great read as well.

Also, look up Charlie Munger and his essays, the #2 guy after Warren buffet.
Hmm...

<sarcasm>

I have this great idea for a web service. Haven't thought it out completely but it will be kind of like in between google and twitter.

Want to be my partner? I've got the idea, you program it. And the idea is so great that it will virtually sell itself...

Anyone interested?

</sarcasm>
What's New in FreeBSD 7.0
For us:

We have 'tiers' and bill a user based on which tier their use fits in, if they increase enough to be in the next tier, they get everything that goes with it, if they only have a small increase, they get an overage, that is some cost between the two tiers.
Dup see http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=123946
I think that the fact that so many have said "YC got it's first spammer" so many times, is such a good testament to how fast spammers are dealt with. Thanks!
it now looks like this: http://images.apple.com/keyboard/images/gallery/wired_1_2007...
Thanks for all the info. I kind of have the feeling that in the end it depends on how much you can stick to it, like every other time management methods. :)
BricaBox – Social Media Personalized Homepages - Looks like Wordpress on Steroids
Why 9? Life's too complicated these days - I want the article, "One step to angel financing"
Hypewatch: Sun CEO calls MySQL deal "the most important in the modern software industry"
I'd start by coming up with a project, a goal. What are your interests? Gaming, sports, cooking, art? Decide to make something web-based that pertains to whatever interests you have. Doesn't matter if you're reinventing the wheel.

Now, start creating. Learn the necessary technologies as you go along, mixing in healthy doses of theory and best practices when you get the feeling there's a better way to do what you're trying.

It's hard to learn technologies in isolation, when they have no meaningful connection to problems you're solving. So give yourself an interesting challenge that can be overcome with the tools you want to learn.

If you're using automated tools along the way (installers, package managers, code scaffolding), consider doing what the tools do for you manually. Unravel things and get closer to the metal until you're satisfied.

Consider sharing the source code of your project with others. Maybe nobody will take notice, but it will give you motivation to make your code beautiful.

As far as specifics, Python strikes a nice balance among power, maturity, and marketability. MySQL is standard. Be sure to "unravel" your DB code into SQL without just relying on framework magic.
I agree. Among other things, it allows you to easily substitute head or tail for cat when building up a pipeline to work on the output of large files.
That was a great post. Actually that post is the reason it got me thinking and started this thread. I sounds like it would fit every well with GTD. The book gave a very general idea of how to prioritize tasks, and you method would plug in very well for work-related tasks. Thanks for sharing!
FT puts high price on networking
I've recently switched from SVN to git. The posting mentioned Mercurial, and I've heard Linus mention Mercurial in his talk at Google. What is the difference between hg and git?
I'm surprised by the war analogies. Withdrawals are an essential part of military strategy.
</more sarcasm>

I wouldn't dream of partnering with programmers because they're all so wise with deep experience from a wide range of experiences.

I tried partnering up with programmers before but they all informed me they're busy becoming billionaires by setting up their one-person companies to be sold to google on the basis of their awesome algorithms that load YouTube videos 1.23% faster, or their awesome multiplatform databases that connect my car garage opener via satellite to my blackberry, so I can know the instant my garage door opener's battery is running low, or a bluetooth enabled automatic public restroom toilet flusher that links to the ruby-based website they just built so I can know when all my friends are using the restroom, or any other such random multi-billion dollar ideas that lots of people are willing to pay for that every programmer I ever come across seems to secretly be working on.

I can't for the life of me figure out why I keep running into the same brilliant, wise, full-of perpsective programmers at the same parties/meetups/conferences and somehow the folks at google STILL haven't discovered the business value of their Ajax enabled fantasy poker/football/pokemom/Skoble stream mashup, but I refrain from commenting because I know that all programmers everywhere know a lot more about businesses and how to start one in a down, non-speculative economy than anybody anywhere.

</more sarcasm>
Before Superwall,

Before Jia Shen of Rock You was a Facebook/Myspace luminary, presenting talks like "Designing Viral Apps: Engineering the Viral Loop"...

"Fresh-faced entrepreneurs Jia Shen and Lance Tokuda were running out of money to fuel their start-up when, in February 2006, they landed a Founders Brunch invitation from venture capitalist Saar Gur. They pitched their business to anyone who would listen, even planting themselves in front of the eggs to get attention. They hit pay dirt with Internet entrepreneur and investor Ariel Poler who, in turn, introduced them to other financiers.

Today, their company, RockYou, whose software allows users to add slide shows to their profiles on Facebook and MySpace, has raised millions of dollars and garners more than 1 billion page views a month."
A Lambda Calculus Reducer
Data Shows 2007 Worldwide Global Cooling - single fastest temperature change ever recorded
Out of curiosity, why don't you want to learn PHP?
That's true, I didn't think of that
I don't know if you'd call it a social network, but the answer is Twitter. Legendary downtime.
Philanthropy made easy - just search!
Do these still come with bootcamp? I really want a Mac Pro, but the ability to dual-boot would be key.
Replace 'world' with 'US' and the statement still stands. In fact, being born into poverty in the US is very unlucky because it is highly unlikely that you will achieve a fraction of the success of your more well funded peers. It is possible, but unlikely.

The fact that you have the opportunity to become super rich is no 'gift' when you consider that the most likely outcome is that you will work a shit job making shit money so some asshole like Buffet can squawk about how grateful you should be.

Don't get me wrong, I have no problem with people getting rich. But please realize that the gap between the average Joe and the Warren Buffets of the world has been growing larger for quite some time.
As an Emacs user, it's one of the things I look for when I buy a laptop. Right now the right ctrl key on my HP laptop is directly underneath the slash key, and the left ctrl key is mapped to caps lock, so both my pinkies only have to move slightly.

For the Mac users, how are you guys dealing with this? I've used 10.4 and the re-mapping feature in the preferences panel seems fairly limited.
Viral Marketing Works…A startup story
Yep. All is included.
We're offering this $$$ opp, what would it take to make it worth your while?
We have an Alpha version of our service, which needs the last 20% development push to get over the hump to begin generating revenues. We're looking to gather 4 more people.

- someone to help do business development
- someone to help do PR & marketing materials
- couple more LAMP programmers

We can't pay with cash, so how do we find people who are willing to take the risk? We're thinking of a dividend like model, where investment of time = percentage of revenue stream from the system at the get go.

Curious, what would it take to make it worth your while?
Thanks!
That's one POV.

Another: if you wait 6 months, there'll be another significant bump 6 months after that. (WiMax!) The sensible thing to do is to wait a year. Sorry, 18 months. Oh no, 2 years.
Ask/Poll News.YC: What is a good open source Bayes classifier?
I'm just doing a little research for a project and I thought everybody could benefit from the fact that we have happen to have an expert on the subject as a member.

I would also like learn from what other people have used as well so any input that others could give would be helpful.

------------

UPDATE: I started a poll thread below so that we can submit a project link and up-vote a link if we have experience or knowledge over one project versus another.

Thank you to everybody who replied, you are great!!!
"it is highly unlikely that you will achieve a fraction of the success of your more well funded peers"

Just goes to show that the human psyche cares more about relative prosperity than absolute prosperity. This is well documented in research. Still, I have to question why you would prefer to be 'rich' in a place without running water rather than be 'poor' in America (where the poor people only have one TV and have to drive used cars).

Of course, there are a lot of people worse off than my above glibness suggests, and I think we should definitely be doing all we can to help those people out, but don't try and claim being poor in America is somehow worse than being poor anywhere else just because people like Warren Buffet live here.

"Don't get me wrong, I have no problem with people getting rich."

The fact that you called Warren Buffet an asshole shows that you do. If you knew anything about the guy, you'd know he doesn't rate anywhere on the asshole scale. My guess he is just a soft target because he happens to be so rich that he is a statistically anomaly.
New Wii craze is opening up
Blah, blah, blah. I think most of these recommendations are from 15-year-olds who just read about a cool web framework and are now spouting how damn good it is.

Anyone recommending a framework before someone understands web programming isn't someone I would hire. Frameworks are where you go when you finally get what is missing with your web programming language. It might take you years to get to that point.

Go with PHP. Period. People are going to blah, blah, blah about how PHP gives you bad habits, has bad function naming, ran off with their kid sister, whatever. PHP is a mess but it works. Name a webpage .php and you are good to get going. Try that with Ruby.

PHP is a tool that gets the job done and let's you quickly become immersed in web programming. If you don't know your GET from your POST, a great Ruby framework ain't gonna help you.

Once you get PHP figured out (and now are employable as a programmer?), try Python or Ruby out. They are gorgeous, elegant languages. I love using both of them. Then slap a great framework like Django or Merb on top. You'll love it.

But only after you get the basics down. I'm ashamed at you guys, really.
"Worth my while" couldn't be reasonably computed until I knew more about your company, like:

-Anticipated viability of the company and revenue stream predictions

-Effort (in hours) that I would need to contribute to effect a positive outcome

-Financing model of the organization

-Compensation of other employees in a similar position to effect the outcome of the company

These things factor into the "risk", which affects the appropriate "reward". If I could make a major impact on your company by only needing to invest 8 hours per week, it wouldn't be a tough choice to make the decision to attempt to help out. If however it would take 20+ hours per week, then other things/tasks get requeued to make room to help with your startup, that changes what I would need/want to get out of it to make it worth my while...
A reciprocating saw should get you through to daylight soon enough. They just don't build offices like they used to.
You seem to consider quality of life as something you can measure by material gain. Nobody cares about televisions and cars when they come down with cancer and can't afford treatment.

Being rich in America is certainly great. Being poor in America is not that much different than being poor in the developing world, aside from the better hand-me-downs.
now is a good time to buy last gen's macbook pros for a steal.
Skylight. You don't even have to be near the outside, e.g., "Solatube".
I'd like to see most everything that you own be able to do this. Then, there'd be an aggregator of your stuff that you can get a 10,000 level overview of. How old is most of my stuff? How fashionable is most of my stuff? How much of my stuff do I really use? How much is my stuff worth? Which of my stuff have I been neglecting? That way, we can learn to live with less stuff. (or if that's not your goal, live with stuff that other people envy)

EDIT:
This reminded me of: http://www.360voice.com/

It's something to let your xbox360 blog about you. Its entries are like:

"Cormyre seemed really excited to play yesterday. Our current gamerscore is 32,936 . That is a boost of 60 points over last time! He rocked out to Burnout Paradise, Devil May Cry 4, LEGO Star Wars II, Aegis Wing, Tomb Raider: Anniv. gaining 1 achievement, and I think there was some random Live Marketplace browsing, but I wasn't paying attention."

"Cormyre must have heard my calling... I was practically startled when his greasy finger pounded my power button. I mean come on... be a little gentle... I am fragile. Just some helpful advice for someone with a 32,876 gamerscore. That is a profit of 650 points over last time! He rallied Guitar Hero III, Tomb Raider: Anniv. adding an amazing 20 achievements, and then he had to stop because we both couldn't take it anymore... we were spent."
Because I've seen PHP code and it looks too messy for me.
Just my opinion.
Ah yes, I know exactly what you need.

I too programmed for an uncountable number of hours in a similar setup at my university dorm. What I did is keep those bright lights on while wearing a baseball cap. This is very easy on the eyes and keeps you alert.

Why is this the best setup? Studies have shown that having lighting from the sides but not the top, simulating somewhat of an artificial sunset in the horizon, keeps people awake and alert for longer periods of time. Plus, that narrowed field of vision seems to help with concentration. Don't dismiss this until you try it.

I did have a window but I put my back to it. The view was pretty depressing anyway.
What sort of classification are you trying to do? Text, I assume. If it's text and you need something open source, or just a pointer to how to write one yourself, you could read the article I wrote for Dr Dobbs on this subject: http://www.ddj.com/development-tools/184406064

There are quite a lot of toolkits out there that do Bayesian things (take a look at libbow or Weka).
How Clinton Campaign Mimics An Over-funded Startup
he outlines a good idea vetting process, which is worth while for both business dude and hacker dude(ette) alike.
I'd rather be able to use the same app on my phone as I do on my desktop, as I do in an internet cafe, as I do on my wii, etc etc.

Webapps are the true "Write once run anywhere".
True, although hopefuly that'll just get exposed to javascript. In the same way that the orientation of the iPhone (portrait/landscape) is exposed to javascript.
As Benjamin Disraeli's quote goes, "There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies, and statistics."
Maybe, if we are in fact able to affect the climate to the extent that some argue we do, we should concentrate on developing the necessary pollution requirements to turn Greenland into Virginia.
The last 20% tends to be harder and take longer than the first 80%.

Where are the developers from the first 80%?
If Perl is ok, you can try these:
http://search.cpan.org/search?query=Bayes&mode=all
The one in BioPython is pretty good.
37signals responds to Wired article
Theres a rather good explanation of MapReduce in the book "Beautiful Code". (Its just a rather good book, period.)
Macbooks only have mini-DVI out. You need an adapter to get DVI output.
Same thing I've always done, on every platform: make sure the key to the left of A is mapped to control, and only use that. Even when I'm on a keyboard with 3 control keys, I only ever use the one.

I don't think any laptop has a good key layout. Just pick one and try to get used to it.
+1 to write a couple of CGI scripts to get a feel for how pages are actually put together by the framework.

My personal experience is with Perl and Java, both of which are going the way of the dodo, or so it seems. So, I can't recommend any of them in good conscience.

But, whatever language you learn, I would first take some time to write some basic non-web programs. Once you are familiar with the basics of the language (variables, flow control, arrays, hash tables, etc.) then I would write some CGI-based web forms. That would give you an idea of how the basic functionality of a web site is chiseled from the primordial silicon.

Then, when you pick a framework you will know what is being abstracted and what parts of the web programming tasks are being streamlined.