skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Count me in the people that don't agree as well. I used one of my very few down-mods on you, pg! Seemed appropriate given your comment. I very rarely downmod.

The karma system should predict how good I am going to feel after consuming the media -- nothing more. The problem is that for a simple question, the solution ain't so simple. I believe there is one, and I believe we've danced around this subject long enough for those paying attention to have figured it out.

Also -- thanks for the term "karma bombing". I've been a victim in the past, now I have a cool geeky name to describe it.
YC: How I Earned Karma While I Slept
I posted one mundane remark yesterday and woke up to see that my Karma has risen 12 points!

While I slept! Wow!

The secret: get others to debate under your small post.

I'm working on better techniques.

My goal: 1 Karma point per word.

Here's the actual thread:

7 points by edw519 16 hours ago | link
<A rather mundane, but potentially controversial remark.>

5 points by curi 16 hours ago | link
I don't agree; blah blah blah

3 points by dfranke 16 hours ago | link
I don't agree with you; blah blah blah

4 points by curi 15 hours ago | link
Obviously you haven't read:
http://www.amazon.com/BlahBlahBlah...

4 points by dfranke 15 hours ago | link
Not so: blah blah blah

5 points by curi 15 hours ago | link
Oh really? Blah Blah Blah

4 points by lg 10 hours ago | link
To both of you: blah blah blah

1 point by curi 10 hours ago | link
I insist that blah blah blah

4 points by yters 10 hours ago | link
Counterpoint: blah blah blah

3 points by curi 9 hours ago | link
You should read this: http://www.curi.us/blahblahblah
Or this: http://www.curi.us/blahblahblah

4 points by yters 9 hours ago | link
You forgot blah blah blah

1 point by curi 6 hours ago | link
If it's any help: more blah blah blah.

3 points by yters 6 hours ago | link
I should rephrase it: blah blah double blah.

1 point by curi 5 hours ago | link
You still don't understand.

Read this: http://www.amazon.com/MoreBlah

2 points by yters 4 hours ago | link
Yeah go ahead.

(edw519's note: In all fairness, this is the only response that I included verbatim.

Because it's the only one I read.)

1 point by curi 3 hours ago | link
So some good goals, in my opinion:

Long term: blah blah blah blah blah blah blah

Medium term: blah blah blah

Short term: blah

2 points by thaumaturgy 3 hours ago | link

> you will be contradicting yourself, because blah blah blah :-)

Also...different blah blah blah

1 point by curi 2 hours ago | link
On subjectivity, I think that blah blah blah

1 point by thaumaturgy 2 hours ago | link
The point is even more blah blah blah

2 points by lg 6 hours ago | link
Clarifying blah blah blah

1 point by curi 6 hours ago | link
I think we are talking past each other.

You are talking about bluh bluh bluh

I am talking about blah blah blah
Because nobody cares whether you agree or disagree with anything. I'm expecting the score to represent _my_ feelings about the article after I read it, not yours.

I could go down a longer list: because mob rules is a not-so-good policy for quality reading material, because if one group votes on agreement and another group votes on quality then the agreement group "drowns out" the quality group, because it takes about 2 seconds to determine whether you agree with something, whereas determining if something is worth reading takes a lot longer (and is more valuable information), etc.

Note that I upmodded you, even though I take issue with your position. That's because you asked a good question. In another world, I'd just downmod you because I thought you were mistaken and for most readers the question would never have been asked (or answered)
Sorry, I didn't actually mean you should try to go straight for the global optimum (I'd argue there's probably no such thing) - I'm just wondering about known local optima. Solutions that already exist. I don't necessarily know about startups, but in open source software, it seems that a lot of the time, there's some slick and cool new take on a problem. As it becomes popular, it eventually just grows in the direction of all the other solutions that are out there, becoming yet another bloated clone. It seems to me that if you find yourself going down that road, you should steer against that trend. Or should you?
The Great Zero Challenge
I've heard for many years that in order to securely erase old hard drives that one must use a tool that makes multiple overwrites using random data. However, I've never seen data recovered from a hard drive that had been overwritten once with only zeros (no random data and only on pass). I've also seen heated debates in online forums over this topic. I really wish someone would take this challenge and put an end to this debate once and for all.
I'm a little puzzled as to why this got up voted. :( Would it still be significant news if it was Everyday Joe's love letter to the MacBook Air? And if it's because it's DHH, does his love of MacBook Air significantly change a market or industry? And if all else fails, is it interesting, and did I learn anything? In my mind, it's a resounding no.
"if people don't want it, then you will fail"

Maybe the best advice you'll ever get here.

So find a customer early. Very early.
Most of those images are triumphs of postprocessing, rather than particularly impressive microscopy.

Take the first one, for instance. If you visualize that in the standard way, it'll look like a bunch of light grey dots on a dark grey background. But if you take the data, convert it to a 3D surface plot, grossly exaggerate the vertical axis, choose some pretty colours and a sufficiently dramatic angle, you get something that looks cool enough to publish in Wired.
I thought computer language WAS religion.
I'm still waiting for humans to achieve human-level intelligence.
Honestly, my first impression: "channel 8 weekly news!"

Haven't tried the toolbar yet, though. Actually, ironically, I find myself wasting more time in Firefox (combination of slowness of the browser on my PowerBook G4 and the extensions I have), so I've switched to Safari for the time being. Of course, as this post demonstrates, it's not foolproof... Back to (home)work!
>It's not banned in the rules, by any means...

As a number of you have shown, nickb in particular (how else do you explain 30 points a day?).
I've been working on a similar concept on and off for almost a year. It's on the shelf right now, but I wouldn't mind talking. I've done a lot of research into Oracle and Peoplesoft and (to a lesser degree) Peachtree and Quick Books. If nothing else, I could share some insights on database schema, etc. tl @nospam@ onlyshallow.com
Don't make your college essays too good
Especially if they fall for this line every couple years.

It's just our materialistic bias that makes us incapable of seeing how obviously impossible AI is.
I like Arc, but there's just no way that it follows the six principles laid out here.

(a) simple solution - yes

(b) to overlooked problem - no. It's just a personal spin on Lisp/Scheme. It covers exactly the same territory.

(c) that actually needs to be solved - no. Programmers have many good languages to choose from. Arc is a nice little wrapper on top of Lisp to make it pretty, but any undergrad could do the same thing.

(d) deliver them as informally as possible - no. You don't write long essays about a language 5+ years before you show a prototype if "informality" is your goal.

(e) starting with a very crude version - yes

(f) iterating rapidly - no. You could get a master's degree in computer science in the time it took for the minimal prototype of Arc to show up.
The logical fallacies in that video are breathtaking. This must be how conservative-voting people view the world, and for that at least it is informative.
Sorry, semantic web = semantic networks a la Quillian. It's a step backward.

RDBMS work because they have a solid semantic foundation with n-ary relations. Description logic based formalism can't do n-ary, nor can RDF triple stores. The whole adventure is ill fated and us database weenies knew it from the start.
From the article: "All American cars are hereby banned. They are crap and this is for your own good. When we show you German cars, you will understand what we mean."

From the article: "The Former USA will adopt UK prices on petrol (which you have been calling "gasoline") - roughly $8/US per gallon. Get used to it."

In London, you can buy an old Porsche for 2000 pounds (about US$4000). Unfortunately, fuel alone costs about US$0.60 per mile.
It's not an internet addiction, it's market research!
I would say a 2.0 from MIT is much better than a 4.0 from a random cardinal-direction state school.
Works for me. From first glance, seems like they're probably overextending themselves... Adobe's whole product line as avian-named web apps?
I suspect that this article is a direct consequence of Arc's sceptical reception on Slashdot, Digg, and Reddit.
I thought that had been done already. But I'll happily put it up again. If most of news.yc has seen it before it will sink, no problem.

UPDATE: Okay, I tried to submit it and got linked straight to this:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=74590

Damn, that Arc guy is really smart! :)
I have read a decent amount of material on functional programming now, and the biggest problem I have is getting into the right mindset. I think in OO style and can't quite think of what to do when I need to keep state for longer than a single function call. In OO programming, this would be accomplished with aptly named objects that maintain a set of data over time. I have great difficulty translating this to a functional style. What do you do if you need to work on one set of data for a long time and intermittently collect the results thus far, for instance? (trivial example: generating permutations of characters for a brute-force password cracker)

I can definitely see the benefit of a functional approach. For you FP masters, are there any good books explaining how you create a decent system (+5000 lines, for instance) while maintaining good source code structure and readability? I really want to learn this.
I hope I'm not the first person to notice that the parent comment is, in fact a troll; it's a broad-brush personal attack on everyone who posted in that thread with no actual reasoning behind it.
62% of British employers check social network profiles before hiring
In Ray Kurweil's book, The Singularity Is Near, he makes the argument that progress begins slowly and then the majority of results occur near completion. An example given was the Human Genome Project in which the cost and progress of sequencing began slowly but 90% of the results were obtained in the last 10% of the duration - and at less than 10% of the project cost. He makes a similar argument about strong AI and with conservative figures.

When Kurweil says 2029, he means 2019.
I'd agree that it's a little bit exaggerated. And yet... I'd claim that the real reason why "only" 20% of assistant profs are denied tenure is that the system now weeds them out at the postdoc level. It's now considered normal to require candidates to perform multiple postdocs before awarding them a tenure-track position. The only sure way to escape that treadmill is to write your own grant and get it funded... which, by no coincidence at all, is also the secret to being a successful assistant prof.

You can count the number of first-year grad students per year. You can count the number of graduating Ph.D.s per year. And you can count the number of tenure-track openings per year. And then you know the percentage of people who will eventually leave, or be kicked out, of academia. The rest is detail.

Most of us leave. For a motivated student to be forced out is kind of rare. They're quite happy to have you. You're really, really cheap.
Dup. See http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=117126
The First BBS (1978)
Taking Play Seriously
Sounds like fun. I'll be there. Sunday night is the bowling, so I'm good any other night.
25 Questions to Think About Before Your Next Job Interview
Can you elaborate on what a materialistic bias means in this regard? I've seen neural nets do things that are surprising for "materials" like recognize images, and seen code evolve new capabilities. These things would seem surprising if some spiritual component was needed.
XP Sales end June 30: Time to dump Windows?
I have a science Ph.D. I have reviewed manuscripts for journals. It is by now almost physically impossible for me to claim that any piece of prose is "totally true". :)

Greenspun says a lot of things I don't agree with. I'm not prepared to endorse everything he says about women in science, for example... but, then, this essay isn't really about that, is it? And he exaggerates a bit for effect, but I believe that the effect is justified.

Yeah, it's essentially true. As Greenspun says: some people love science so much that they can ignore these problems, cheerfully, throughout their entire career. I have quite a few friends like that. I tried to be one of them, and sometimes I wish it had worked. But not very often. Your stomach knows when you are lying to yourself.

Here's what I wrote about grad school back in 1998, when I was still there:

Not that everything about grad school is bad. You can work any 70 hours per week that you want. If you just want to waste time and never graduate, and you find the right adviser, you don't even have to work at all. And the people you meet are generally smart, unusual, and fun. But for me grad school is fun just like playing Tetris all night is fun. In the morning you realize that it was sort of enjoyable, but it didn't get you anywhere and it left you very very tired.

Greenspun liked that line and riffed on it here: (http://philip.greenspun.com/bboard/q-and-a-fetch-msg?msg_id=...) and in his book. I'm sort of perversely proud of that. :}
Strong opinions, held weakly
These stories should be tagged "Kurzweil" or "non-Kurzweil". Kurzweil's next book should be about how to get constant PR.
Also in Munich here, have worked on this search engine so far: http://terraminds.com/twitter/
I vehemently disagree.

MIT has its set of acceptance mistakes. Many (perhaps even the majority) of those make it through its grind and graduate.

At the end of the day, it is a big, big deal to fail a student. Or to put them on a path to take a core class over. Instead, most professors will give them a barely passing grade simply to be done with them.

By the same token, your "cardinal-direction state school" has a lot of folks works really hard and busting their hump for that 4.0. Sure, you could argue it isn't the same as an MIT 5.0 (yes, MIT's scale goes to 5...), but it's damn sight better than a marginal pass.

There's one exception to this: the apocryphal brilliant and distracted MIT student who can't be bothered to get good grades because they're too busy working on cooler stuff.

I've had the honor of working with a pair of those folks, and it wouldn't have mattered where they went to school. Heck, one of them transferred into MIT from a two year junior college.

But that's not who we're talking about here.
Eric Schmidt walk around Google and says:"Dont fight the internet, man" :)
Hi, I have worked on blog search in the past, you can find me on skype as chrislaux if you want to discuss ideas etc.
I also wonder how much of a contributing factor people's attempts at humor would spin the dynamics of group discussions out of control. The main reason why I went Slashdot -> Digg -> Reddit -> YCNews (and most likely YCNews -> ? within the next 18 months) was because of all the one-liners I kept reading over and over again of people attempting to be funny.

My thinking is along the lines of UserXYZ posts something humorous and gets 150 points. This causes others who feel they have a funny bone as well to pile in and attempt similarly witty remarks (which are initially harmless or contribute positively); but then you have an avalanche of users who become aspiring comedians on the message boards they frequent. I sometimes feel that these types tend to herd together and give each other a reason to continue with their behaviour by giving one another a few up-votes out of sympathy...

I would also say that the competitive nature of men in general (I'm a dude, and I won't assume anything on behalf of the women here) would contribute to certain sub-groups within this population with an increasing need to out-do one another. Thus a majority of the discussion devolves to one-liners and people trying to be funny, when all they do is come across as cynical while at the same time contributing little value.

In addition, attempts to be funny on a message board are somewhat akin to guessing on questions on your SAT exam: there is no penalty for trying. Whereas weakly setup arguments can carry a penalty of getting a barrage of refutations making yourself look (or perhaps more closer to the truth - FEEL) intellectually weaker.
An interesting argument.

Now think about this. You have to choose between two candidates, equal in every way except that one has college. Who would you choose? That's what I thought.
My view is that startups aren't easy because there are no natural forces to guide you. Not customers, not markets, nothing. All can mislead.

And I've become distrustful of one line advice.
It's kind of true, though. Outsourcing production seems to be working well for Yahoo. Delicious and flicker are pretty awesome, and I can't think of a Yahoo in-house app that's at that level.

Plus, I suspect there are inherent problems in any group called "innovation team."
Isn't discussion and reason why we are here?
This doesn't work for web startups, but for people selling real products I think the best thing to do is apply the baggie test. That is, when Richard Garriott made his first computer game he put the diskettes in clear plastic baggies and gave them to the local computer store to sell. Similarly, O'Reilly started his publishing empire by selling stapled xerox copies of a unix FAQ he wrote at a trade show.

The idea being that if people would buy your product if they saw it in a baggie, you probably have a good product/market.
Here's a quote from the "about" page on their website:

"newLISP is a scripting LISP for people who are fascinated by LISP's beauty and power of expression, but who need it stripped down to easy-to-learn essentials."

A stripped-down Lisp? What's missing? I have no idea, but that doesn't inspire me to take the time to learn newLisp, when I'm already a user of Common Lisp and Scheme.

That said, I have nothing against newLisp. I just don't know it, and thus don't talk about it. I advocate neither for nor against it.
On disk at least. They're temporarily logged to memory in the clear:

(def good-login (user pw ip)
(let record (list (seconds) ip user pw)
(if (and user pw (aand (shash pw) (is it (hpasswords* user))))
(do (unless (user->cookie* user) (cook-user user))
(enq-limit record good-logins*)
user)
(do (enq-limit record bad-logins*)
nil))))

It might be good to pull the pw out of the record list:

...
(let record (list (seconds) ip user)
...
Ever thought about doing a controlled experiment about it? I.e.: showing high points for a post to half the users, and low points to the other half.
This is an interesting take on (b) overlooked problems:

A few years ago, Gary Hamel and colleagues analyzed more than a hundred cases of business innovation to learn why some individuals, at certain points in time, are able to see opportunities that are invisible to everyone else. They learned that you need to pay close attention to four things that usually go unnoticed:

1. Unchallenged orthodoxies—the widely held industry beliefs that blind incumbents to new opportunities.

2. Underleveraged competencies—the “invisible” assets and competencies, locked up in moribund businesses, that can be repurposed as new growth platforms.

3. Underappreciated trends—the nascent discontinuities that can be harnessed to reinvigorate old business models and create new ones.

4. Unarticulated needs—the frustrations and inconveniences that customers take for granted, and industry stalwarts have thus far failed to address.

original @ http://discussionleader.hbsp.com/hamel/2008/01/innovation_ha...)
I'll be there for Interactive and Film. A meetup sounds like fun.
I guess I'm a little bit different than many here.

I am TOTALLY guided by my customers. I wasn't always this way. I used to think that something would be so cool, so I would build it, and often, the project went nowhere. I was fortunate to have a co-founder at one time who insisted that we sell it first, then develop it. I never completely came around to his way of thinking, but now I understand where he was coming from.

My customers have never steered me wrong. They don't waste my time. They only spend energy describing things that they really need, and invariably, others need the same things.

The downside is that I never spend time working on my own pet projects. I KNOW I can build a better bridge game, fitness program, or home inventory program. I'd also love to blog. But all those things fall into the category of "No one else asked for it", so I simply don't spend time on them. Maybe some other time.
An interesting series to look at is:
Haskell, OCaml, Scheme, Lisp, C, C++, Java, Perl, PHP, Visual Basic, VB.Net.

The progression is from heavily Atheist/Agnostic to heavily religious.
Thanks for the introduction to Greenspun. He's written quite a few interesting articles.
Tell me what you think of this thought experiment:

Assume there is a machine that can exactly replicate my brain. Consequently, it can replicate my consciousness. However, nothing you do to the machine affects my experience, and visa versa. Therefore, it did not replicate my consciousness. So, either 1) a brain can't be replicated or 2) consciousness is not reducible to my brain.
Bottled water 'is immoral'
How to strike a work and life balance
Why Google is Today's Most Powerful Brand
They missed the most important question:

26) Do you really want to be working for someone else? A smart friend of mine once told me, when you're an employee you are generating wealth for someone else, when you're an entrepreneur you are generating your own wealth.
I agree with the logic trick part. To say something is undecidable is to make an objective claim.

However, at the point where you want to say someone should or should not do something the subjective morality comes back to bite you (saying curi's trick was underhanded). I think this is curi's point.

All you can really do with subjective morality is describe your rationale for why you do what you do, and hope the other person buys it. Even that is inconsistent because you are motivated by the thought that the other person should do something.

Curi, while it is true we start from first impressions, either our goals have to be mutually independent, or they must have a common foundation. Otherwise they end up contradicting each other. That's the point of moral philosophy, and what I meant by justifying moral intuition.
I live on the Maine/NH/Mass border area about an hour north of Boston. A Ruby developer. Lots of ideas, in various prototype stages. Looking to take some time off of freelancing and focus on one of them with 1-2 other people for a few months.

Not looking for an immediate cofounder as much as just other local entrepreneurs with moxy to meetup with from time to time, exchange ideas and skills. If things click, we can go from there...
Don't worry about people stealing an idea.
Quote of the Day from Google:

Don't worry about people stealing an idea. If it's original, you will have to ram it down their throats.

Discuss.
A hollow voice says "plugh".
Mostly true, but I think it makes a big difference whether you leave as a 23-year-old PhD student or as a 42-year-old assistant professor.