skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Yes.

My favorite kind of joke.

Man on cell:
"No, I'm just saying you're being unresponsive. Unresponsive! Hello?"
Google to Host Terabytes of Open-Source Science Data
I'll fix it. Edit: fixed; sorry.
There's two things you can do:

* convince pg to work on better control policies;

* write your own alternative with better ones.
Was it betterexplained.com?
Yup. Wait for it. ;)
Another question, has it always been this way? I remember reading somewhere that our levels of depression and suicide are a historical anomaly. What is different between now and then?
It's a problem if the situation is escalating...
I only like that for short things.

One of these days I hope to find a way to get a browser to follow a link by opening a smaller window/area directly in the text. That way I don't entirely lose the visual context on the screen.

I've been told the original Xanadu system was designed that way.

Enso also uses this idea in places. Now that the http://www.humanized.com developers have joined Mozilla, I'm somewhat optimistic that this may actually happen.
i place my bets on existential depression

from: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intellectual_giftedness#Depress...
"A number of people have noted a higher incidence of existential depression [in the gifted], which is depression due to highly abstract concerns such as the finality of death, the ultimate unimportance of individual people, and the meaning (or lack thereof) of life."

they recognize the irrelevance of everything. it's not uncommon for all types of people to have these sorts of thoughts, but the very abstractive abilities of the gifted mean these are more than just thoughts to them. these issues are as clear, concrete, and tangible as a brick wall is to mere normal humans

compounding things is the fact that these gifted people hold nature in the highest regard, and see it as the only arbiter of truth. they can't escape the irrelevance of everything, because that's just how nature is

it's a painful QED
Didn't the black swan refer to Kahnemann? Drat, I've lent out my copy.

http://www.amazon.com/Black-Swan-Impact-Highly-Improbable/dp...
How to hack weather: the new social weather startup
Later on q reaffirms aaron's argument (@ 2008-01-19T10:55:30), seemingly based on q's own read of DD's work. So, at least two seemingly smart people come to the same conclusion independently.
Researchers teach AI agents to play Ms. Pac-Man
"The relationship of C and Unix is unclear to me"...

I basically just stopped reading after that.
heh: "How do you keep garbage out without any form of validation mechanism? ... All you have to do is try to [imagine] Slashdot without the moderation system to see what's going to happen to your database."
Who is q?
I'm wondering what they have in mind to protect your eye if the lens is damaged. Torn contacts are already bad enough as it is.
The more they accept that VC money is dumb, the more they will focus on what it takes to build their companies.

Larry & Sergey, Max Levchin, and Mark Zuckerberg all took VC money. If they're dumb, who counts as smart?
We may be confusing cause and effect here. It's their insanity (actually inferiority complexes) that makes them take over infinitely hard problems when one gets all or nothing - more often the latter.

This also reminds of Dangerous Knowledge (can't find it on Google Video anymore)
somebody's been reading wittgenstein
Material for anyone who wonders about this:

Jonathan Haight's research on conservative and liberal values:

http://www.newyorker.com/online/video/conference/2007/haidt

Kazimierz Dabrowski's theory of over-excitability and positive disintegration.

http://www.stephanietolan.com/dabrowskis.htm

http://members.shaw.ca/positivedisintegration/

Durkhiem's ideas about anomie:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anomie
Maybe previously, people were too occupied with subsistance to wonder if they should kill themselves.
Here's my shield against existential depression, arrived at after much pain (with major influences):

Notice that you don't bother wondering what it all means when you're having fun. Meaning comes from having fun. (http://www.amazon.com/Just-Fun-Story-Accidental-Revolutionar...)

Having fun usually involves work. (http://scrapbook.akkartik.name/post/24169645
http://scrapbook.akkartik.name/post/21256293)

How do you figure out what you love? Do something, see where it leads. Iterate between the doing and the loving as fast as you can. Sketch. (http://scrapbook.akkartik.name/post/24170012
http://scrapbook.akkartik.name/post/24169153 http://scrapbook.akkartik.name/post/1451852)

What you love is a moving target, it changes with you. If you neglect it you will lose it.
Famous Chess Game, Bobby Fischer against Robert Byrne
CIA: Hackers Shook Up Power Grids
The time has come for us Brights to come out of the closet. (Daniel Dennett)
It seems that Dangerous Knowledge was taken down from Google Video. Here is a link to the BBC page:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/bbcfour/documentaries/features/dangerou...

"In this one-off documentary, David Malone looks at four brilliant mathematicians - Georg Cantor, Ludwig Boltzmann, Kurt Godel and Alan Turing - whose genius has profoundly affected us, but which tragically drove them insane and eventually led to them all committing suicide."
Read the article by following the game here: http://www.chessgames.com/perl/chessgame?gid=1008419

Absolutely amazing...
I agree.

Moreover, at any point in time I have three options.

1. Make a booking now, and run the risk that I might pay too much,

2. Wait a little longer, and run the risk that I might miss out altogether, or

3. Say "sod this" and make a booking at another restaurant that doesn't make me play silly headgames just in order to eat there.

I reckon I'd choose option 3 every time.
Here a link to a previous discussion of existential depression on Hacker News:

Existential Depression in Gifted Individuals

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=78594
I never said that we don't take VC money.

I just said that we take VC money when all we need is money.

Which by way is exactly what these gentlemen did? They didn't treat VC money as R&D money but instead they treat them as working capital. They took VC money when they have paying customers and a working business model and it was time to grow the company.

The point that I am trying to make in my own writing (http://www.startupforless.com) is that entrepreneurs should concentrate on building their company with their own money FIRST and when they have a ready product, they can CHOOSE.

On the other hand, there is nothing wrong with the YC model which is to take money early. But YC is an exception, not the rule. And YC money is clearly smart money.

But there are a whole bunch of us who doesn't fit the YC model.
The Evolution of Culture (Daniel Dennett)
Daniel Dennett on free will (video)
I haven't read, but maybe I should - just checked out the reviews on amazon.

It is interesting to note though how markets (and in particular stockmarkets) are heavily influenced by behavioral economics and traders inability to assess a situation correctly in statistical terms, which creates a non-equilibrium in the marketplace. I actually thought up a plan for exploiting this that might just work, unfortunately I am not a programmer so I will have a tough time implementing it.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Q_

But I don't recall seeing Dennett in any episodes.
Naturally-- and no one is complaining this is unfair--Microsoft also demands reciprocity of contacts. They say, in effect, we'll show you our Hotmail contacts, but you have to let your users share theirs when they sign up for Microsoft's Windows Live services.

...

"Microsoft is the anti-data-portability company."

Seems to be the opposite to me.
"which tragically drove them insane" - here's where the error lies. The film mentions that Cantor heard "voices" even before he got interested in mathematics, so it's not his genius that drove him insane, but rather the other way around. Cantor, Boltzman, Godel and Turing were among the few successful insane scientists.
Why should that be depressing? It seems to me quite normal that I'm not smart enough for many hard problems - why should that drive me crazy?
Boeing 777 accident due to software failure?
This article is about five years old, and boy, am I glad that the terminology "Bright" hasn't caught on. I'd be way too embarrassed to go around trying to tell people I was a "bright" -- it just sounds weird and creepy.
He goes into why he took VC money here:
http://itc.conversationsnetwork.org/shows/detail94.html
Nearly every paper I wanted has a broken link. Nice collection, though.
Yeah, that was my initial reaction too. I've thought about it and I do like the idea of stealing the word "Bright" just as homosexuals have stolen the word "gay". Both are generally positive words that originally had nothing to do with the new meaning given to them. My current stance is that I'd like to unabashedly call myself a Bright to convey that I don't believe in fairies and gods, but it's unfortunate that the current social and political climate doesn't allow it.

Daniel Dennett has proposed a similarly positive word for people with supernatural beliefs: "Supers"
> Were you at work during the dotcom boom? You don't sound like someone with firsthand knowledge of the bubble environment.

Just FYI -- I was working in San Francisco during the craziest days of the bubble, at a company that WAS profitable, IPO'ed, then got bought by GE and merged into another which began bleeding money. I looked at aD, along with some other places, and saw that aD had headed downhill, so I moved back east, launching another company and eventually ending up at Google.

I remember being rather disheartened by what happened at aD. Not surprised, given my experiences with corporate drones, but nonetheless disheartened that a company with a good premise, a plan to make the world a better place, and solid profits from operations had been destroyed by VC politics.
Google To Become Open Source Science Repository
Society is designed? Interesting... I'd lean more towards emergent behavior.
Beat me to the k5 connection. But Mindpixel consistently demonstrated an inability to translate his claims into anything remotely resembling reasonable thought. There's a now-lost-forever post in which he claims to have predicted a terrorist attack. http://www.kuro5hin.org/comments/2006/8/21/121745/650?pid=12... certainly sums up the silliness.
VC Investments Rise to Six-Year High
I think the complaint is about everything other than this detail, such as forcing startups to use Messenger exclusively and give MS first shot at search deals.
I agree - but emergence that will favor the Joe sixpack due to his abundance.

In short: Lowest common denominator.
That's it, Thanks!

For others, here's the link:

http://betterexplained.com/articles/what-you-should-know-abo...
I think the general consensus was that he was a really intelligent and creative guy, but he lacked the discipline to sit down and spend 20 years proving his theories. I remember the post you are talking about though. Supposedly he used a Bayesian filter on real time Google searches to predict two gas station bombings in Baghdad. It's a shame that story didn't get front paged, it was kind of interesting even if it was made up.

It's really weird though going back and reading my conversations with him on K5. I'm sure a lot of people here probably knew him though; it would be almost impossible not to have had a conversation with him if you were a regular social news user circa 2000. The guy posted constantly on Slashdot, K5, Joel on Software, Usenet, etc.
Hashrocket: For $30,000 they'll build your web app in three days.
Interesting. My stuff is pretty niche and custom. No H.264 for me. :)
How to crack a Binary File Format
Sweet article, thanks.
I'll do it for $29,995.
After reading this comment, I was curious about when I stopped reading, so I went back and checked. Oddly enough, it was after "I fail to see." It wasn't conscious; I must have just learned to associate that phrase with a 0% chance of anything interesting following.
'M-x doctor' made them do it... ;-)
Saudi Arabia is trying to move beyond oil to become an industrial power
My great-grandfather would have enjoyed this article.

But he's visiting his mother this weekend and she doesn't have internet access.
That's not at all accurate. He was looking at queries that hit GAC and /post facto/ saw a correlation. Not exactly brilliance, imho.
Their page doesn't render correctly in my firefox session. Do you get a discount if that happens to the site they build for you?
One sentence description of why trade deficits mean little and currency exchanges tend to equalize for areas of similar productivity.
What ever happened to triple redundancy? If it's all within the software, then it is not redundant.
The Risk of Innovation: Will Anyone Embrace It?
Obie Fernandez! Zed Shaw thinks he's cool, and that's all the credibility I need. I would do business with Hashrocket if I worked in a big company.
I got linked to an associated press link which looks gross.
Why not just ask for an open data base to see what analyses any of us can come up with.
Can't read "About" at 800 x 600. I guess I've been fired as a prospective customer.
I'd settle for the transaction logs.
Assuming they are working day and night, night and day that is close to $417/hr. The aspect of hiring high-class code hookers (or if you find that offensive, Ruby on Rails ninjas) aside, building a successful web site seems to be more about your network's influence when you launch.
800x600 is below the "industry standard". To design for people with resolution that low is to cater to laggards at the expense of the vast majority.

But if you're on a mobile device, the issue is much more complicated obviously, and you get a pass :)
NextBestAction.com
I wonder what the profit-margin for a top-100 Facebook application might be after paying for bandwidth/server costs, assuming they monetize through displaying advertising.
Very impressive. Is it just css or did you use any images etc.? Are you a designer?
How do independent Facebook application developers compete against the 800-lb gorillas of Facebook, Slide and RockYou? Slide and RockYou seem to prove economies of scale. From Craig Ulliot - developer of 50K+ daily user FB application 'Where I've been'

"Well my application has become incredibly popular, and I'm very excited about it, don't get me wrong!

But I'm a freelance developer, not a company, and its put a powerful 4GB $450 a month dedicated server on 3 backbones at maximum load and is pushing 2000GB a month in traffic. It doesn't make me any money and I'm getting hundreds of comments and emails daily about it.

How can i support it and maintain it? What do i do with it now? its growing at a few users a second, so should i get another server each month?"

http://tinyurl.com/yu6k98
Maybe there are 5 people on the team. That gets it down to $80/hr.
can you hear the seams of the bubble straining?
Thanks, but no thanks. "Atheist" works just fine for me.
Rails Engines are back.
rather than giving ppl with 250+ an option to change the bar at the top of the page, why dont they give those users the ability to downmod submissions?
The fact that their own web page doesn't render on every major browser or at every standard resolution screans louder than anything they say on it.

If you disqualify "laggards" as prospects, maybe you don't deserve to succeed.

And if you think that servicing one type of customer is at the expense of another, maybe you're not yet senior enough to be my vendor.

ADDENDUM:

Why is it that my hardest learned business lessons get downmodded so quickly? Who here is such a good hacker that they could afford to leave money on the table?
The downside is if their website design is anything to go by, it'll be as ugly as sin and have severe usability issues.
Come on -- this is Hacker News, not reddit.
So, you code only in LISP, I take it?
What is it, and why would I want to use it?

In the first 10 seconds of scrolling through it, this wasn't immediately clear to me.
I'm saying there is a strong correlation of laggards across fields. If you have a new service, people that lag in another are not likely to take it on initially. So if you have design choices to make, make them to sell to the people that are likely to start using your service first.

Worrying about the rest is a waste of time -- and new companies don't have time to waste.
Yeah, I think it's bullshit how they don't support my 320x240 machine running Mosaic on Windows 3.1. These guys are amateurs.
And I'm saying if you claim to be an expert web app developer (implicit in the "3 day claim"), dynamically rendering to any resolution should be a piece of cake.
There is much more to an app, but I see your point.
Please see the top right corner and click on the ++ ..

Update.. ++ suffixed with "about" to make it more obvious !
EFF 17th Birthday Bash tomorrow night in San Fran
7x7x7 Olympic Cube Solved Frank Morris
The author probably did read Paul's essay, but it looks like most of it went over his head and flew right out of the window. The comment manvsmachine cited, "The relationship of C and Unix is unclear to me", just proves that he is a silly person.
How dumb is Daniel Dennett? Umm, not very. From what I've read of his work he seems to be pretty smart, which is why I suspect that this Aaron guy is misunderstanding his argument. I note that his summary is in fact a summary of somebody else's summary.

I haven't read Freedom Evolves, but my guess is that Dennett was actually making an argument that it's possible to simulate, in a deterministic universe, entities which have "free will", or at least which believe they do. I doubt he really makes an argument based on confusing two different meanings of the word "unavoidable".

Though I'm happy to be proven wrong if anyone can post some actual quotes from the book.
No one asked this question (why are you making this?)
link to demo?
> Does anyone know why?

Most of the gifted individuals suffer from existential depression. More here: http://web.archive.org/web/20061020235245/http://www.giftedb...
Please "request" for an account at the site ( top right )
Ethical storm as scientist becomes first man to clone himself
http://biz.yahoo.com/ap/080119/venture_investments.html?.v=4
Note that a lot of this advice applies to cracking a network protocol too, such as Steam's game server list.
Can the RSS feed have a link to the yc comment thread as well as to the submitted story ?
Often I find the comment threads a lot more useful than the story itself.
The head of CMU's Robotics Institute made the transition to Dean of the CMU Qatar campus during my time there.

It was interesting to hear about the efforts the emirate was making towards becoming a western country. They have $8M/citizen in natural gas. To put it bluntly: that's fucking insane.

They are paying major US universities, the "best in field", to setup colleges in their areas. Georgetown on political science, Texas A&M for engineering, CMU for business & computer science, etc.

http://www.qf.edu.qa

What an excellent use of the ridiculous amount of wealth.

For Saudi Arabia, my intuition is they will never be a real industrial power while half the population lives as second-class citizens (not counting the migrant laborers who could only be considered, err..., third class citizens). It still blows my mind that women can't drive.
Ask News.YC: What are you doing this saturday night?
off course i mean if you want to take a break from coding like crazy or marketing your hot startup. i am debating between reading "the big switch from Edison...." and chasing women ( really hard for an introvert)
Why the hell doesn't the W3C have a favicon?
Interview with a Hedge Fund Manager: "I'm sure today I would never get hired."
One key thing about the YC school of web app design is to make it as easy and quick as possible to try the product. By the time I get an email from you with my password, I will have lost interest.

I would strongly recommend you get a demo that doesn't require a signup -- or, a signup that is instant and does not require email confirmation.
Because they don't have any specific value?
-- "What an excellent use of the ridiculous amount of wealth."

True. But keep in mind that real talent in any given society is limited. One thing that has made USA such a great technological powerhouse, is the ability to attract talent from all the corners of the world.

I just don't see Saudi Arabia being able to atract talent at that rate, unless they evolve from their medieval thinking.
Here's a business lesson: don't implement features that cost more than your expected marginal increase in revenue. e.g. supporting edge case platforms at the expense of most of your users.
building edufire.com (next generation language learning service). :)
I'm probably going to ask people unnecessary questions, then count my peanuts throughout the night.
What's wrong with their website design? I liked it.

I see _some_ merit about complaints about iffy low resolution handling, but the design is good.
Mathematica and the Fundamental Theorem of Calculus
Antitrust, anyone?

(pretty bad movie, I know, but it makes you wonder...)
I second this one. I'm tired of signing up anywhere.

My recommendation is to ask a new user for a user ID only, so they can contribute content right away. Store a cookie based off of that ID.

Then display a "set password" or "become member" link which prompts the user to preserve their temporary identity with a password.
Thinking about the current development-related issues with my startup - handling the exponential relationships between members of a social network.

I'll probably just flake out and store each relationship in a join table ;)
Well, for one, if your browser window isn't tall enough, you won't be able to see any of their contact info.
Ask YC: Becoming an OpenID relying party
I've seen a few OpenID advocates here. Anyone with experience becoming a relying party, in a JVM-based environment? There are several class libraries to choose from, and I don't want to do a deep comparison myself if someone here already has.
some art show, and then maybe some drinking (in sf)
Will someone please explain how being able to dynamically render to the requesting browser (whatever resolution) is at the expense of anything. These are experts, remember.

This started out very simply. I can't read their "About" page at 800 x 600. wtf? An HTML <TABLE> does that automatically for crying out loud.

If they can't do the easy stuff, why should I trust them with my hard stuff?
http://sfbay.craigslist.org/search/cas/?query=w4m

introvert's delight
SLEEPING
50 Ways to Get Things Done (old but relevant)
going to the metreon in SF.
not finishing an end tag isn't an error? o-k

Sounds familiar, the whole "it's not a bug, it's a feature!"

I DID take a look at the source code, that is how I saw that . . .

Speaking of the W3C validator . . . I suppose YOU would know better than they do when it comes to HTML, right? Right.

I found an error and you claim it was intentional.

No one asserted that you were criticizing HTML errors (nice attempt at a strawman) I stated that you ARE criticizing the work of others while not getting your own done right.
It's worse. I'm at 1024x768 on Firefox and it doesn't look really good here (not completely broken, but not good).
I'm going to a party for a little while, then coming home to work on my startup until the sun comes up.
>The rate of suicide is high among Grad/PhD students because they have to "think outside the box" every single day. They have to find a "breakthrough".

That's really not true, though many grad students (especially in physics) think it is. You need to make a useful research contribution, but it can be evolutionary.

My thesis problem is a very popular one: new Ph.D.'s are awarded monthly for incremental advances in this area. Only about 2 theses on the topic (in the past 10 years) have actually been breakthroughs. The rest are just marginal improvements, i.e. 1'st order -> 2'nd order -> 4'th order, spherical coordinates -> arbitrary spherical-like coordinates -> arbitrary coordinates, etc.