skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
You should compare your health care expenses to what people in countries with state-paid health care pay. In Norway, the government or local government end up with about 60% (probably a bit more) of the money a regular employee earns. I think something in the realm of 10% of that money goes to health care (stitching together these numbers is a bit tricky, because our health care doesn't pay for exactly the same things your health insurance does)
Making an open source project into a startup seems like a very long road. I don't know this particular area (finance messaging) though.
The Professor as Open Book
That's why when you get someone like Steve Jobs to give you advice, whether you like it or not you listen to it without being defensive. It's very tough to do (from customers and potentials too); it's easy to say to your self, "well, they just don't get it." But that's foolish.
The perfect virtual community - facebook lost it
"groups of 8 work well; by 20 they're getting hard to manage; and a group of 50 is really unwieldy."

Amen. I like to state here my 2nd law of corporate's immutable entropy: individual intelligence times somewhere between 50 to 150 leads to collective stupidity. It's a rather sharp s-curve, really.

Great stuff Mr. Graham, thanks.
Jurgen
You really don't though, a few minutes is all that is needed for something that cooks quick like fish.
Interesting to see how this will play out. Professors are divided on the issue of how much to bare. There are those who feel that not being seen as an infallible guru takes away their prestige--even to the point of advising other instructors to never admit they don't know something. Others, like me, take a more "I'm human too" approach.
Australian Startup Carnival Highlights Antipodean StartUps
“No Pie Charts… Not Ever!” (says I)
this is bad news for my http://markkit.net if http://awesomehighlighter.com could make it to YC. :-)

this makes me wonder about this post : http://markkit.net/archive/stevenf.com_2008_03_the_first_the...

since i can't be "the first" (not beeing funded by YC), and since we are both "free". my only chance is to be "the good".

I think I'm taking the challenge.
Phrased that way, the scenario is reminiscent of Plato's cave allegory.
Paul Krugman: Partying Like It’s 1929
<EssayFormula>

Observe Something (mostly objective)

Generalize (subjective leap)

Expand (more subjective)

Conclude & Recommend (very subjective)

Let It Go (expose bullseye)

</EssayFormula>

Observe corporate programmers --> zoo animals = small leap

Writing about what you know ---> "Participatory Narcissism" = large leap

Funny, Jeff Atwood does EXACTLY what he accuses pg of doing, albeit with less style.

pg is at a unique intersection to observe that which most never see. We don't have to agree with the leap - that's what makes this a forum instead of a circle jerk.

I, for one, look forward to pg writing about what he knows. If only others did it as well.
I beta tested this service today and I am little impressed with this search engine. The thing I liked about this service is that the screenshots of the webpages are prominent and gives fair idea about the contents unlike Google where the results become fairly blind and some times we just have keep on clicking many links till we land on required page. Its also unlike Snap service, where the screenshots are small and even if they are large on their homepage, the navigation is is not as smooth.
But, I guess there is long way to go for this service till we can compare it with Google, because the search results are very poor for atleast the keywords I searched. For "Tom Cruise", the the wiki page was right at bottom and imdb was nowhere in the sight. The top results were of some less profiled webpages. One more poor point is that the metadata or the text details for the results are also very poorly integrated, making it hard to find out the details about the results.
_Introduction to Objectivist Epistemology_, Ayn Rand

The "Organon" books by Aristotle

_Introduction to Logic_, H. W. B. Joseph

_An Invitation to Formal Reasoning_, Fred Sommers & George Englebretsen
While I realize that YCombinator is trying to change this, here's my startup experience.

1. Inspired by PG's rhetoric, go into partnership with semi-famous TV talk show host to build site.

2. Work ass off for 9 months. Site grows like gangbusters, VCs banging on the doors.

3. VCs/Partner bring in new CEO. Partner/CEO fill every position above entry level with new hires.

4. My job is now 9-5, cubicle, no chance of advancement.

5. CEO and partner now described as "founders" in the press.

So I mostly followed PG's advice, only to end up in the exact same mind-numbing job he's saying to avoid.
Brad Bollenbach once wrote: "Complaining and inactionable criticism is the highest form of mental masturbation."

http://30sleeps.com/blog/?s=criticism&x=0&y=0&pa...

Does anyone other than pg even attempt to write essays?
Same. And I don't even have a fully-stocked cabinet, yet. Need to hit up the japanese and indian supermarkets. And any others that I can find.

I prefer to shop at places like that than places with an 'international' section. You get better quality ingredients, at cheaper prices. And a wider variety!
The author seems to agree, however "The viewpoint of the article is “since we’re in a recession…” not “if you could pick between recession or boom…” "
Obituaries are to journalism as HTML is to hacking. Aspiring writers have to start somewhere.

Let's just not confuse the lack of journalistic professionalism (is that an oxymoron?) with the man's accomplishments.
Not sure, but it occures for me too (only if I leave a page idle for a while, and then click the 'More' link).
It usually is.
Clarke was widely known as the guy who popularized the idea of artificial satellites for communication long before he died, pretty much in the same way that pg is known for having popularized Bayesian spam filters (among other things of course).
An interesting essay, but some misleading assumptions.Consider these points: Animal groups do have bosses and hierarchies; Society at large is required to be hierarchical in order to create enough cash to allow high risk ventures to fund your 'wild' or 'natural' programmers.
How to refactor 31,000 lines of bad code
Damn you, Paul. You had to post this just as I was trying to make the decision whether to accept a relatively high-paying corporate job or keep struggling to "live the life" running my own business. I'd almost convinced myself to go back into the world of commuting, bosses, dark windowless cubicles, and soul-crushing boredom in exchange for certain financial stability.
I like your site, it's very nice. I've been learning Go, so now I have another toy to play with. : ))

I plan to add games like Go and Chess eventually. I've tried to focus on mostly lesser known games so far. The Go and Chess communities are very well served, and I'm not sure I could add much for those communities.

Some of my site is open source, btw. The ruby libraries that implement the game rules and bots is available at:

http://vying.org/dev/public

The server itself is closed source, but I plan on adding a well defined http api for outside apps to play there this coming week.
Did We Just Witness a Twitter Marriage Proposal?
Why open source is considered to be "long road"? I assume open source to be important to financial institutions (auditing, regulations, etc.).
I've had 9-5 jobs (as as software engineer at small companies) for the last 10 years, and I mostly like the work I do. Recently, I've founded a startup with a friend and I work on that in evenings and weekends.
From that perspective, PG's article makes a lot of sense to me.

The problem with Atwoods reply is that it has a high level of slashdot-esque "it's not true because it hasn't happened to me".
When you went "into partnership with semi-famous TV talk show host", how much equity did you get?
I'm thinking about a similar problem, but perhaps more daunting. I have a program which is my first real app. I work alone, it's over 40,000 lines (that includes comments though). Part was written before I knew very much about coding, and it's very tempting to try to make it all neat. (I have nested inner-class messes that are pretty hilarious).

It seems unit testing would be key, but it's problematic in that everything is private! Getting the bird's-eye view is an intriguing thought, but I'm wonder how to actually go about the refactoring itself?

I could avoid it, but it seems that I'm already hacking code that itself was a hack (cuz I didn't know what I was doing). It makes updating and extending a very time-consuming proposition.
Good points. To clarify what I meant - I get that it looks geeky, but I can't put my finger on what one would do about it.

Is this something fixable?
I got some equity. Some day it might actually be worth something. I was participating in a conversation about how being a founder is better than being an employee, and pointing out that they often end up exactly the same (except for the equity). I edited the post a little, remembering that I do still have friends there.
Managing investors is important, and that means you have to think about their perception. Though I was probably a little unfair, part of Calacanis's job is to make things look glamorous and exciting.
Paul Krugman is very confusing. It's almost like he is trying to fool people who don't understand the difference between savings and loan banks and investment banks ("shadow" banks, in his lingo).

The problem in 1930 was that depositors at savings and loan banks all wanted their money back simultaneously. Many people (read: main street) got screwed, leading to the creation of the FDIC. I.e., "the bank doesn't have your money. Sorry."

The problem today is that savings and loan banks gave out a bunch of loans to low quality borrowers. They then sold these loans to investment banks while misleading them about the quality (and the IB's just figured it out). "Conventional" banks (the ones PK seems to think are so great) screwed the "shadow" banks (those scary unregulated ones), and now investors are trying to avoid risky investments until things clear up.

Both are scary in a "trouble on wall street [financial word] [financial word] bad for the economy [financial word] [financial word]" sense. But beyond that, the situation is rather different.
Like you, I have an aversion to microwaves but recently I found a use for them (thanks to culinary hacker Heston Blumenthal): use them to "cook" vegetables of which the aromatics dissolve in water, like fennel, asparagus and broccoli.

What you do is you rub butter and salt and pepper on the vegetable of your choice and wrap it tightly in two or three layers of microwave foil. Then you zap it three times in one mine bursts at the highest setting.

Best fennel / asparagus / broccoli you've ever tasted.
This is not a "naturalistic fallacy" (more properly called an appeal to nature), because PG uses "natural" in the very narrow sense of "evolutionarily optimal". PG must have thought his target audience is discerning enough to dereference such things without any hand-holding.
Pasta in general can be done quite nicely in the time it takes to cook the pasta (which should never be more than ten minutes). As the pasta cooks, chop up some vegetables and fry it. Maybe with some cream or some minced meat or something else.

Healthy and quick.
Quick and fairly good: some Turkish or Italian bread with a stew made of canned tomatoes, canned tuna and lima beans (also canned). Add some fresh basil and maybe some grated cheese.

Five minutes tops.
A music performance simulator. The interface would be a bit like command and conquer, but instead of ordering troops around, you'd be setting up violin sections, and mixing recordings of chorister's voices.

The Nintendo orchestra simulator is a taste, but my dreams were/are far bolder.

Something nice - there is huge crossover in the latin used through much of the choral repertoire. Thus, it's a nicely defined group of samples you would have to record for each singer - would probably only take a couple of hours per singer to get to a point where their voice would slot in and be in effect generic. Perhaps you could break down constonants and 'cambridge vowells' and come up with an even simpler and more flexible sample set.

If money were no object I'd also buy a second-hand stone church, build a house on the back, take up serious lessons and se if I could find a way to get an apprenciceship as an organ builder. Maybe get into choral conducting and try and bring music to people who have talent but haven't had the sort of childhood full of exposure. I'd read a lot of economics. I'd like to think I'd get more exercise.

Oh - I'd also like to work on an interaction engine at the same level as HTML but far more advanced. I think Silverlight and an Adobe project are trying to address this at the moment, but we really need something that's free software and has a lot of the simplicity of HTML without its suckiness (and with better asynchronous event support).

The great thing is that there's so much money washing around the world today that I'm working full time and still getting plenty of time to explore ambitions that are not too far removed from what I've listed above - and what I have written there is my ideal. Computers are stupidly powerful; demand for geeks is high; there are lots of people doing neat stuff with music.
when i was a kid:KOEI historical games - got me into using hex editors to change the stats :D

the games exposed me to sun tzu art of war

local book about python and unix - i used python around 2004 and beat the courses assignments ('beating the avg' reminds me of those days) ... later pg's great hacker on slashdot and then lisp - settled with newlisp now

iBookG4 exposed me to unix, designs, hardwares and most importantly, woz and jobs ... later my ibook was broken. I am very happy with OpenBSD now

chemistry (and later internet recipes): now i bath using soda ash and citric acid at very low conc - eliminate the need to restore soap and shampoo (great time and $ saving for me) ... i also make my own fertilizer for aquarium use

among other things:
open source, MIT+BSD license
statistics, design of experiments, bayes, simulation
wikipedia and generic drugs
low calorie for longevity
vegetarian dog, vegan, glycemic index
no television
vim, jquery
pg essays esp how to make wealth and the other road ahead
Wild animals are beautiful because they have hard lives
"The less confident you are, the more serious you have to act."

perhaps these things teach me that having great control at raw level (source code, chemical, generic drug etc) gives me power to go vertically (own hardware, os, language) as well as horizontally (own tweaks, foss libraries) without much dependencies
Egg and rice (from the fridge) :P I cook the bestest eggs in da whole world. I cook it better than Chuck Norris. Seriously, I do.
I agree, I installed it and technology wise it's pretty cool. However, 1) once you install it you need to setup all your hardware (e.g., my WiFi only works in 8.04 and my second screen and USB mouse are still not working, and I'm fairly experienced), plus 2) I need to transfer everything right away.

Running in VMware may not be as quick or have all the UI effects, but

1) It piggybacks on your Windows' hardware support, which is probably already working fine
2) The transition path is much quicker. If you don't have a piece of software readily installed in Ubuntu, you can always alt-tab to Windows or OS X.
Cool. Fusion pellets.
When I get around to this (when I get to the don't-need-to-monetize-it stage), I'll probably look at hacking up the hacker news source to learn arc and borrow its front-end for voting/discussion. I can also use arc for the evolutionary algorithms, which should be sweet.
All metaphors break when pushed hard enough, or when pushed gently in the wrong direction.
BTW, if people are interested in economics, there's now a subreddit for it:

http://reddit.com/r/Economics/

Of course it gets some of the same wingnuts that the rest of reddit gets, but there are a few bright guys there.
The thin skin of Apple fans
I made a similar point, albeit more briefly, in this post: "Pardon Me, But Would You Have Any Grey Poupon?": http://buzzpal.wordpress.com/2008/02/23/would-you-have-any-g...
Zippo lighter
Paper: http://www.ssc.wisc.edu/cde/cdewp/98-07.pdf
I try to seem human, because I don't want my students to think that infallible guru's exist. Plus, many "infallible gurus" are real dicks.

Several times, I've gotten student evaluations like this:

"This prof rocks. When I pointed out a problem with my midterm, he immediately fixed his mistake and apologized. How awesome is that? "
Hi,

I'm the author of that article. I actually have a blog post in the works that addresses your concerns fairly directly, since they are concerns for me too. Keep an eye out for it. In brief, I recommend you buy a copy of Working Effectively With Legacy Code immediately, then work to get unit tests in place. Make sure you have a couple of tests for each public interface in the system. Once you have rudimentary test coverage, it becomes easier to refactor things without worrying so much about breakage.
so Jeff went through YC? what was his startup?
Ulysses by James Joyce
Code Complete by Steve McConnell
Walden by Henry David Thoreau
Breakfast of Champions by Kurt Vonnegut Jr.
Watermelon Sugar by Richard Brautigan
Murphy by Samuel Beckett
Gravity's Rainbow by Thomas Pynchon
Comcast cameras to start watching you?
Copyright is dead
Well, speaking about the lawyers fees, the sky is the limit. ;) I know typically a good and expensive lawyer firm can charge around $15K for the family of three (well, this includes the official payments for the process, but doesn't include the medical exam and a few more minor fees). You can always negotiate though.

I've been working with David Fullmer from Ivener & Fullmer, LLP. The web site is http://usworkvisa.com/. You can contact me personally and I can provide a reference. They are based in Los Angeles.
to compare someone to a caged lion carries with it the suggestion that they lack agency.

It most certainly does. PG is commenting on what, to him, is the revolting sight of a bunch of apparently smart people wasting time in a pointless "team-building" exercise. He didn't think those people looked happy, and he didn't think they looked like people who were wasting their time by choice. They looked like people who... lacked agency!

He obviously didn't mean to imply that they'd been forced into their cage.. the entire essay is about how you have a choice about whether or not to be treated like an employee.
I think they could be used together. If the technology is applicable and useful, just because there are other avenues opening up doesn't mean we should discount this one simply because the -potential- for something greater is there.
While that may be true, there are two problems with this:

* Most of us don't want to move to most places which have such a low cost of living. Living in a beach hut for the rest of my life is just not very attractive to me. I guess it depends on your definition of "comfortable" but I'd have to say that I wouldn't want to live in any of the developing countries I've visited. Besides, luxury goods will be imports anyway, and still have western prices.

* Will those places that currently have such a low cost of living stay like that for another 60 years? I really doubt it.
Recipes came about by evolution
>10-15 minutes

You are overcooking it. Six to eight minutes is enough. If you ever go to Italy, you will see what I mean. Their normal cooked pasta is 'al dente' for non-Italians, and their 'al dente' is ... soaked in warm water. But good anyway. And do salt the water generously.
dhamma.org is also interesting from business model point of view.. the system will not accept pay from newbies; you can only pay after you pay your dues (sit down and shut up for 10 days straight).. you might think b) people would game the system for free room/board or a) this can't scale.. but the facts prove otherwise:

from a little center started in lates 60's, in india, now there are hundreds of centers around the world.. when i got to mexico in late 2005, there was one center, now there are three.. the system is growing.. people tend to pay after they get the goods, because it feels good and right..
Blyk and Management-to-Developers Ratio
I'll have to ask my Birkenstock-wearing living-in-Berkeley friends what they eat now... :-)
I didn't like that one very much, it seemed rather one-sided.

For example, I thought it was bullshit to claim that Brazilian farmers are starving because other countries are buying all the soy beans. Clearly it is a political problem, otherwise Brazil would use the money it gets for the soy beans to buy other food for the farmers.
> It would be the biggest evolutionary mistake if sleep does not serve some critical function," Walker says.

it's a minor quote from the whole article, but sentences like these always annoy me: Evolution does not make mistakes! It's not an It! it doesn't do!

Evolution's simply a term that describes change. You should treat it like the term "moving". As in "Creature a moved to B" <=> "Creature A evolved to B" how silly would it be to say that movement made a mistake.

And even if we forget syntax and focus on what the sentence implies the sentence is overly bold. If we sleep, then somewhere along our ancestry, creatures that slept survived. That's about all you can say. Maybe sleepers where unfit for life if strange virus X hadn't wiped out all non-sleeping superior lifeforms. Or whatever. Don't infer based on the fact that something is as it is, that it is therefore superior to all other possibilities.
Q about Exercise 10.4 in "ANSI Common Lisp"
I came up with the following solution for Exercise 4 in Chapter 10 of "ANSI Common Lisp" by Paul Graham:

(defmacro ntimes (n &rest body)
(let ((h (gensym)))
`(let ((,h ,n))
(if (> ,h 0)
,@body)
(if (zerop ,h)
nil
(ntimes (1- ,h) ,@body)))))

Using GNU CLISP 2.44, this works fine. However, when I use SBCL 1.0.6 via Cusp v0.8.174 and do the following call:

(ntimes 10
(princ "."))

I get the following error:

Control stack exhausted (no more space for function call frames). This is probably due to heavily nested or infinitely recursive function calls, or a tail call that SBCL cannot or has not optimized away.

What exactly is going on here? Is my solution correct and SBCL is wrong, or is my solution incorrect but it just happens to work on CLISP?
wonderful analysis...

I can so much relate to this one. I work for a medium size business (~500 employees). I have been termed cowboy, SWAT and such - it took me around 5-6 years to realize I am more of an entrepreneur than a big team player. I have an idea and I want to execute it to full extent.

Problem is, after all, software is for a business and to run a business you need non-technical business mind, one that understands customers, their needs, marketing, sales & support. Thus a need for that other half. I am still trying to find one :)

Kapil Tundwal
http://ktundwal.blogspot.com
I had always thought that IQ was an adjusted measure to see how well one does with abstract thought. The chart doesn't seem to say much, other than to separate professions where people physically labor vs people who mentally labor.
That makes a lot of sense. I'll get the book and look out for the post. But I was wondering: does it make sense to have classes implement interfaces specifying public exposure of methods, but contain public methods that are there only to be accessed by the tests?

That is, the interface specifies a public method getIdentity() that returns an _identity_ object, but the class has getName(), getIDNumber(), that are public (so we can test them) but not declared in the interface? Do people do things like that?
I just read A Mathematician's Apology. Really interesting, it really puts Hesse's Glass Bead Game in context.
It's only a matter of time before we're cracking Blu-Ray Discs like we did DVDs.
Lifestyle Companies