skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Dang, this is no fun. It mostly fits a bell curve. Normally if you ask this, you'll get like 75-90% of people saying they're above average ("How good of a driver are you?" is a classic).
I believe that the programming language does not matter, it is the paradigm that you follow. However, using exotic languages makes you read exotic code that might hold fresh ideas that drown in the crowd otherwise.
Yes, well, it could have been like that, but "exactly average" has taken the lead...
Although you characterize it as only being able to "emulate old composers", I may have been referring to the program you are thinking of. Although it is true that it learns and extrapolates from musical input, so do human composers. Its algorithms can learn from anything, and by feeding it a mixture of styles, it can actually generate some fairly compelling and new sounding works. The programmer is also a composer and has trained the algorithm on some of his own works and the output sounds nothing like old composers.

See http://arts.ucsc.edu/faculty/cope/mp3page.htm for audio and http://arts.ucsc.edu/faculty/cope/experiments.htm for a description of the project.
Money is the only thing Dubai has going for it and, clearly, money isn't enough.

Dubai also has a lot working against it: http://news.ycombinator.com/edit?id=129848 .
Well, in their defense the article was written in 2002. ;)
This sort of poll is why I think polls should have to be pre-approved by an editor, or something of that sort.
well it depends on what you are after. If you are going to be making your own games and selling them I would suggest garage games route. If you are after just being employed then its basically how quickly you pick this stuff up.

have you thought of mobile phone development or maybe the iphone/touch? There used to be a lower barrier to entry to get jobs doing these sorts of games. Also easy to learn j2me and build your own engine on it.

my only caution about the DS is effectivelly you will never be able to release a game on it but on the other side a cool tech demo on a ds would get your foot in the door with a devshop doing ds stuff.

good luck with it.
FYI, you can get the first nine tracks for free on the official website. No need to hit the Pirate Bay.

http://ghosts.nin.com/main/order_options

I too paid the $5 for the whole thing, partly to support the distribution model, partly because of the 36 kickass tracks. One of my friends bought the $300 set. I'm planning to experience that vicariously through him.
lol. No way. I am european, and moved to usa, (now in SF), and I just can't see people wanting to move to Dubai;

Unless a lot of cash is flashed (but this will make startups too expensive) or
Dubai becomes a multi-cultural liberal place, where you can go to clubs, drink alcohol freely, get laid, and all that without ending up in jail.

The place that is able to attract young folks, will be the startup.
Money is just one part of the equation.
Go with your gut feeling.
I see what you're saying, and I understand your motives - but I only partly agree.

When you are such a public figure, and especially when the company that you are the CEO of is so dependent on you, it is simply one of those things you have to deal with. Every job has its downsides, if you're a fisherman you smell of fish, if you're a mechanic your hands are dirty no matter how much you wash them, and if you're a salesman you have a much higher chance of being burned out. The downside of being a public figure is that other people are interested in you personal life.

While I understand that the information disclosed in the article can be seen as a private matter, I can also understand the incentives for bringing it out. It is, after all, of great interest to the shareholders of Apple who the man at the helm really is behind the facade.

For a public CEO it is of course a nuisance. Just like it is a nuisance for a fisherman to come home everyday smelling like fish.
Maybe news.yc readers are above average, compared to those other people :)

Or maybe they have heard about those other results and are intentionally voting for underrepresented options to make the poll come out less ridiculous.

Or maybe voter/lurker bias is the real problem ;)
Something to think about--and this may become a small post--is that people already use mechanical filters right now.

People use keywords or other criteria for selecting resumes to read when they use a database like monster.com or workopolis.com to hire. they do not read every resume.

Obviously the expected likelihood of a positive outcome is lower than with placing certain types of ads or asking employees for referrals. But there's an opportunity for employers that use these kinds of databases to get less shitty results than the employers who advertise and read every resume they receive :-)

So we are in agreement of sorts: if youa re asking employees to submit their friends, read every resume. If you are dealing with a hiuge data set--and monster.com is a hiuge data set--filtering helps.

That being said, using a filter--no matter how well trained--on monster.com is still a terrible way to hire. Thus... more posts about playing the hiring game in the future...

Thanks very much for clarifying your point.
Why stop with a four day week? Maybe people would be more rested, refreshed and productive with a three day work week.

You don't know how much is enough until you know how much is too much.
It gets worse. I have seen tabular data mangled by <div>'s...

Tables are for tabular data. Examples can be product listings and IMHO forms. You just have to look at a printed form to see that it is tabular data.
what is "smart"? and please do not give me a link to wikipedia.
It's probably not relevant for this site. It's one of those 'poisonous' topics that generate a lot of heat and not much light.
thanks, seems to be very interesting!
It took me quite a while to realize he was talking about normalized databases. "Normalized data" generally means something else.
Anything in life is what you make of it. There is beauty in almost everything. It is how we respond to something that defines what it becomes for us...
I think Meebo and projects like Gaim/Penguin make this announcement a little less significant
Smaller animals have a death ritual: Being blown away with the wind.
The downloads on their site were down on Monday due to overwhelming demand.
On which metric did you base your answer?

1) gut feeling

2) SAT score

3) GRE score

4) other standardized test

5) none of the above
Can I be an editor? I voted that I'm in the top 5%.
Rushing off to create a new poll: "How smart does your mother think you are?"
Good find, although I still don't trust microsoft.
mod_python + mako

Edit: I started with Pylons but was simply overwhelmed by the complexity. I checked out but didn't use TurboGears and Django so I don't have to much to say about them. web.py is nice, but it's immature and some things don't seem to work the way they should.

So I rolled my own (if you can call it that) using the db module from web.py along with Mako and mod_python.

Yes before the WSGI zealots freak out let me say that it is NOT a WSGI solution but I could care less. It just works.
smarter people are probably more likeley to say "average" as they are more likely to know their limits, while clueless people don't know their limit, hence they think they are better than everybody else.

Kinda odd, like that experiment where good students rated themselves as average, while crappy students rated themselves as better.
Dubai? HAH!

Wash your shoes before you go: http://www.thisislondon.co.uk/news/article-23436226-details/...

And good luck... you're gonna need a lot of it!
Singularity’s developers believe that SIPs can result in as much as 30 percent savings in performance.

yeah? why don't i see the numbers for the performance hit of switching to a managed codebase? i'm not a C/C++ nut, but i think that number would be somewhat interesting, if not significant.
Take Seed From VCs To Get Them Hooked
Entrepreneurs sometimes don't position themselves to take seed money from VCs. Some don't think to reach out to VCs that do seed investments and others avoid VCs at this stage.

In general, it's a good idea to take VC money in the seed round (if possible). Getting VC support early can make it easy to finance your company over the long term. Good VCs are typically pretty good at bringing new investors into the company for you. Once VCs are behind your company they have a vested financial and reputation-based interest in your.

However, hooking VCs early does present a risk...

More at markpeterdavis.com
This may be some what unrelated... but www.mcmaster.com is the best website I've ever seen or used for sourcing and buying mechanical or industrial products. Maybe it's worth considering that kind of model, ie more like craigslist, for octopart's homepage vs the google style.
Alexas graphs really do look nothing like graphs provided by sites :/ who to trust!...

http://www.alexa.com/data/details/traffic_details/octopart.c...

Seriously, cool graph + wd :)
Lake YC-gon: where all the readers are above average
Yeah that was kinda sad... it's the reason I ended up just using the Amazon link... thankfully I don't really care about the FLAC versions.
I think you meant FreeBSD.
I find it interesting that there is no mention of the Dubai "Free Zones"

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_economic_zone#United_Arab_...

Most notably:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dubai_Internet_City

I will always maintain that because of the internet, it should have very little impact where you are physically, unless you absolutely have to network with people like pg in person. In this case, the only place to be is on an airplane jetting between locations chasing after such important people because they are not always in one place (but most likely all are somehow connected to San Fran).
I was about to say that denormalization is so 2004, and then I noticed that he made that post in 2004.
It doesn't work nearly as well if only one person gets a 4 day week. As he points out in the comments, it works at 37sig because everybody works the same days (M-Th).
Can you share the code?
Alexa is nuts. It's only useful as a comparison tool for sites which are really popular. Otherwise, their extrapolations just don't make sense statistically.
we really like mcmaster-carr's website as well. eventually octopart's website will be closer to that. first we have to aggregate a lot of technical data though. technical data is hard to come by because it is held tightly by a few companies who license it for $100K's. this is one of the problems we are trying to solve.
Actually, I laughed at your (less subtle) comment.

I did not laugh at the one to which you replied, which is allegedly more subtle, though I could only know that if I was in the top 5%. I didn't find it funny, ergo I am not in the top 5%. I guess I'll vote "average".

Well, at least that's settled.
It'd be nice if they showed the error bars on the graphs. I expect they'd be pretty massive unless as you say the site is really up in the top ranks.
Sorry, but people in power are rarely in the top 5% in intelligence. However, if it was popularity then sure! Everybody loves a pretty face.
Sounds like they're about 6 years too late; everyone has already reverse engineered both of those protocols.
a timer might be nice for comparing algorithms and languages
See also: http://boo.codehaus.org/ (e.g. http://jira.codehaus.org/browse/BOO-95)
Just for kids? That looks pretty awesome to me. Reminds me of Garry's Mod for half-life 2.
can you explain it for the other 95% of us ;~) ?
>At an extreme you could move to another country and try learning the language while getting by.

Have you done this?

I'm seriously considering this in the near term/mid term
Microsoft reveals IE8 features
The only reason I find this remotely interesting is that it stands a chance of giving table-layout loving folks no excuse to move to CSS layouts. On the other side I find it a shady under-handed not fully cross-browser supported and not backwards compatible way of making a table-layout without making a table.

Comments on the site devolved into tables vs css so I didn't read too far down.
I voted for every option... everyone has good and bad days.
I'm from Lake Wobegon, so I know I'm smarter than average. Like everyone else.
People still use AIM? The client turned into a gigantic epileptic-fit inducing billboard.

IRC or Jabber. You're done.
Ask YC: Story for Forbes - How do you spend zero on legal fees?
Doing a story for Forbes on how entrepreneurs can avoid legal fees by being a lot more creative and resourceful. Anyone have some good methods they've used for getting employment contracts, stock option agreements, partner contracts, term sheets, etc. done for nothing? I'm thinking this thread could also be a good resource for other readers on this board.
The human brain requires about 25 watts of electricity to operate. Simulating the brain on a supercomputer with existing microchips would generate an annual electrical bill of about $3 billion. If computing speeds continue to develop at their current exponential pace, and energy efficiency improves, Markram believes that he'll be able to model a complete human brain on a single machine in ten years or less.

I wonder how many megawatts Blue Brain will need to do something simple simulating only 1e5 cells.

According to wikipedia,

- the average power consumption of a human cell is around 1e-12 watts.

- 50 years ago ENIAC needed 150 kW to do what you could probably do today in a few µW.

Based on those numbers, I think Markram is way too optimistic about simulating the brain on a signle machine in 10 years. If things continue as they have, it's more likely to take closer to 50 years.

I'll pay more attention to Kurzweil's singularity when the difference in power consumption between a tiny fraction of a simulated brain and a real one drops below ten orders of magnitude.
Congrats fellas! - i'm curious, can you say who your top referring sites are? Does Google dominate 80% of it? Do you spend lots of cycles on SEO? I understand if you aren't comfortable answering these questions in a public forum.
All the talk of "are you a closer?" reminded me of Al Pacino's speech in Glengarry Glen Ross: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TROhlThs9qY
I know that, you know that, and i think Dubai knows that, but i am wondering if they might go after it as another point of pride.

We finally decided to make the move to Silicon Valley, not because of the money, but because of the networking and learning resources available. Where else in the world can you find 2 or 3 hackathons in the same week?

I was more or less looking at if from the point of, if Silicon Valley venture money is 2-5 billion, well it feels like Dubai is just spending that with ease. I wonder how many tech companies will spring up just to cater to the rich. Silicon Valley was built by decades of government funds coming into the area. I just wonder what Dubai could build if it wanted to.
Voted bottom 5% (must not be that smart since I don't understand the point of the poll)
FireEagle: Yahoo’s “Twitter For Location”
Typical person? No such thing
Lie liberally.
IE8 Beta Released
Downloading is easy, it's hard to create the demand and traffic for a particular artist. You're back to square one since to do that, you should have a large music site so you get a lot of traffic and can promote various artists. And then you're in competition with iTunes and Amazon.
I agree. Especially if you're solving and comparing projecteuler.net problems/solutions :)
Nice! I like it that is not the typical social network. It really solves a real world need saving time and money.
crazy awesome response post.

i do however think that if dubai wanted to fix anything on the list, it would happen with dictators speed.
nice. http://codepad.org/28pDYynB
Nah, I mean a Linux distro with a GUI to die for. And drivers that ensure everything 'just works' ;-)

Actually, maybe I do mean FreeBSD... with the GUI on top plus all the drivers!
wow. that worked.http://codepad.org/sXwnOWm4
This poll is uniquely distorted by the multitude of different reasons people might have for not voting, or for voting a certain way.

Ideally, "I'm going with my gut" as curi asked.

Sometimes "I'm a confident winner, so I'm voting top 5%"

Sometimes "It would be arrogant to vote above average; I'll vote average."

Sometimes "This poll is dumb. I usually vote but I'll lurk."

Sometimes "This poll is hilarious. I usually lurk but I'll vote."

Sometimes "This poll is so dumb I'm voting bottom 5% just because I considered voting in it."

Sometimes "I'll vote for all options; everybody has good/bad days."

Sometimes "Can you really vote more than one? Let me try..."

For pg to casually mention a source of error that applies to all news.yc polls is like walking up to someone who's been splattered head to toe by a passing truck and saying, "You've got something next to your mouth, right there."
Right, and then you could argue that people who actually think of themselves as "smart" will know of such experiments, and will thus rate themselves as "average," knowing that such a label actually indicates that they really are smart.

So basically this kind of survey says very little at all.
www.apple.com

'nuff said
Microsoft Mix Keynote One, Live
If only you were in the top 5% you would have noticed I was joking ;p

Edit: Oh come on. He's saying an editor would have blocked this poll. I posted the poll so I should be disqualified, but suggested that I be an editor. And based that on my own arrogant self-evaluation from within the poll that a good editor would (apparently) have blocked. And I didn't even say I am in the top 5%, only that I voted that way, which is a ridiculous way to assert intelligence.
Ask YC : Anyone experienced an online CS degree?
I am 30 and I have a familly to support. To be able to plan my time as I want and still get a salary to feed my familly, I am wondering if an online CS degree can be a good solution. Did anyone try this? Any recomendation?
I'm not talking about that. I'm talking about arguing that Y Combinator is a suicide cult and rambling about mind control conspiracies via the effect of electromagnetic resonance on the brain.
I can't say much about Germany and France, but in The Netherlands there is a rich and highly active entrepreneurship culture. At Delft University of Technology, where I study, high-tech start-ups are increasingly being founded and are supported by the University's incubator.

In fact, just today I attended a lecture by Dr. Bert Twaalfhoven. He is one of Europe's premier entrepreneurs and is well known for having founded over 50 high-tech companies.

I think that, especially in current times, entrepreneurship is becoming a global phenomenon. In places like Delft, among others in Europe, there is fertile breeding ground for high-tech start-ups.
Just a thought. Couldn't a user that is below average who thinks he is above average take this fact as a cue to vote as average to show that he is above average? Wouldn't it then skew the above-average-average-voters downwards?
Why not include a prettier editor?

http://www.cdolivet.net/editarea/

Or maybe open an API so that other people can extend it?
I think you should pay for them in karma points. 50-100 would do it. New members can still register and 'Ask YC', so they won't be penalised too much.
Sure, I'm always nervous about showing off my sloppy code but here it is.

http://pastie.caboo.se/161944

It's not the craziest code ever but it allows me to store site specific indexing code in a file and then load the correct code based on the site being indexed.
Think of the security implications of allowing anyone to run any language on their server. It doesn't matter if it's PHP, Ruby, or C++, since they all allow shell and filesystem access, unbounded recursion, and all the other goodies that make sandboxing interesting.

The trick would be to run PHP as a command-line scripting language, just like the others.
When you're implementing macros anyway, why not go all-out and just embrace LISP? You've got to make a pretty convincing argument to make me agree that whatever language implementing macros is better than LISP. From what I gather, the main issue that makes people not want to use a LISP dialect is library support, and no new language is going to have that.
I have to watch out for some of my lame predictions though

http://www.maximise.dk/blog/2005/09/format-wars.html

up there for all the world to see, and making me look silly...

:-)
6) Escaped from Colditz POW camp twice?
Next big thing? Maybe in 5-7 years when we finally stop supporting IE6/7. Until then, all these CSS3 tricks will be for hobby sites only.
I feel the same way about Ruby and Javascript. I can't imagine what I was doing where I could have been using "eval" in C#. I was having to write my own interpreters inside the program and then pass around strings, which is crappy.
Reading each resume could take 2 minutes but joining it to the set of open positions could take a lot longer. It's cheap and easy to do when you only have a few positions to fill but depending on your HR's matching algorithm it could be a lot more expensive if you have a lot of open positions.
You can map down a few languages to JVM executable bytecode, can't you?
Sample size: 1. Kids: learn some jargon and you too can be a macroeconomist!
Adobe’s Flash Not Good Enough for Steve Jobs
If you do that, please let people make polls as long as it won't reduce their karma below 1. What's the point of money if you can't spend all of it?
Poll: Creating Polls Should Cost Karma
Polling is hard. Let's go shopping!
Trac has those things available built in or as plugins. Anything specific you don't like about it?
Lisp is not the final word in metaprogramming.
I wish all artists would put up a website with a paypal tip jar. I'd download the music for free then tip them $3 to $5 for each album downloaded. That would circumvent the label, since it wasn't directly a fee related to the album. It's just a tip from me to them. I don't know if the typical record company contract would allow this, though.
Central Desktop is a wiki-based collaboration tool that competes with 37Signals' Basecamp
Who has it installed? How does it fare in Acid 2 and 3?
It's not an issue of libraries - you're clearly right that new languages are likely to have less impressive libraries.

It's partly a matter of syntax - frankly, I can't deal with Lisp's syntactic minimalism (my problem, maybe, but there's a lot of other people like me). So there's an immediate argument for adding at least Lisp-like macros to a syntactically rich language (a task which, historically, has proved very difficult).

It's also, as suggested by henning, because there is more to meta-programming than just Lisp-esque macros.
I'm the biz and ideas guy, so probably not what you're lookig for :-(

I'm starting to learn how to code, but the intention is not to take on commercial projects, just learning how stuff works. You'll probably (hopefully) be able to find someone more capable in that field than me.

But good luck.
Does open-source development work for business users?
Here are some arguments:

Not all macro systems are Lisp macro systems?
Languages may have interesting features other than macro systems?
Library support may be cleverly piggybacked in from an existing language? (see C -> C++)
Reminds me of "The incredible machine". I've been unable to find this game for years. Hopefully someone can tell me how to get it or point me to something similar.
I'd extend this to posting any stories at all -- if posting a story cost a few points of karma, it would discourage the 'submit dozens of links and hope that one or two of them get voted up' approach which seems to be becoming increasingly common lately.
Database Design is Difficult
The parent link is actually referring to an established study in behavioral economics. It is extremely interesting to learn how the human mind is sometimes way off in relation to reality.
Yeah, Alec Baldwin was brilliant in that role.