skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Clive Thompson: Why Sci-Fi Is the Last Bastion of Philosophical Writing
Seth Godin's TED talk.
There still exist people who (sometimes/on-some-issues) act and think unreasonably. Good ways of life do not reliably make these people like you. That is as it should be. Aiming to please them would be a mistake.

Meanwhile, you'll notice nothing all that bad happened to him. He wasn't assaulted. He wasn't put on trial or sent to jail. All that happened is some people he did business with found out that he and they disagree about a lot of stuff, and they realized they didn't want to do business with him anymore, and prefer he go do business with people more like himself. That reaction is so reasonable that it actually works whether you are in the right or wrong.

You might say his reputation was ruined. But that's not true. I think well of him now, and didn't think of him at all before. His reputation simply became more accurate, which, on the whole, tends to be a good thing.

BTW, I say all this while happening to disagree with him about one of his major points, about gender differences contained in our DNA. I think he's wrong about that, but I also think he was interested in the truth, so I praise him anyway.

Edit: According to wikipedia, both students and donors supported Summers more than not.
That's not exactly true. I was talking with a trader friend of mine last fall about the real estate collapse that was just getting underway (finally -- that's an event my coworkers and I had seen coming for at least a couple of years), and we both agreed without equivocation that there was going to be a recession this year. Knowing that in advance doesn't automatically give you knowledge of a profitable series of trades to make. For instance, if we'd both shorted the S&P 500 on that day, we'd have been crying uncle the very next day when it shot up 3%, or a couple of weeks later when it peaked even higher.

Also, there's a difference between knowing something and being willing to risk losing a ton of money if you're wrong.

To support pg's point, unless your product takes a couple of lazy weekends to slap together, there's really no way of knowing where the economy will be once you're ready to go live.

And for that matter, weren't a number of successful dot-coms founded in the middle of the 2001-2002 recession? It seems to me that if you've spotted a good opportunity, the gyrations of industrial giants shouldn't really matter much to you. Even if your customers are businesses, your product should offer better value for less money than something they're already using, recession or no. A recession will, if anything, make them more receptive to such a product.
PHP Hacker for Democracy
VC-backed free speech platform needs front-end hacker

The goal of BoredAt is to surface the top thoughts and ideas of communities, attempting to democratize information and shed light on the question 'what are the people around you really thinking?'

Our contextual, uncensored social media company for universities is expanding its student-led pilot project to users at top companies and we're poised for rapid growth

Founded in February 2006, BoredAt took off w/ same trajectory as Facebook and 50% penetration on college campuses

Backed by Redpoint Ventures and Draper Richards

Located in downtown San Mateo

You should join BoredAt if you:
Are motivated by solving hard problems
Like the idea of working in a small and agile startup environment
Appreciate the idea of being one of the first employees in a company with unlimited potential
You like to implement features quickly without bureaucratic overhead
You start a lot of sentences with "What if.."
You don't wait for others to tell you what to do
You are awesome

We offer competitive salaries, stock options, healthcare benefits, and an open culture

The Spec:

Looking for talented front-end UI expert. This individual should be able to program all steps required for front-end UI feature and product development which includes:

1. Convert design mockups to cross-browser compatible XHTML/CSS.

2. Build necessary JavaScript required for front-end UI functionality.

3. Develop front-end PHP code for new and existing features.

Mastery in:
- XHTML
- CSS
- JavaScript (OO)
- PHP
- Heavy DOM manipulation
- AJAX via JSON

Knowledge of:
- PHP MVC frameworks
- Object Oriented application development
- Prototype/Scriptaculous JavaScript Packages
- Cross-browser compatibility issues and ability to develop solutions
- MySQL

Strong plus:
- Experience building Flash applications

Availability: Full-time
Location: downtown San Mateo, next to Caltrain

Send your resume to aneel@boredat.net
No recruitment agencies, please
"In short, there was an expectation that even under standards mode, IE would keep working the same way," while in the meantime, "we changed behavior under standards mode to become more compliant."

But wait: if they already had a standards mode, why did they need to make it more compliant? Answer: because "standards mode" wasn't standard! Now they have to make a "standards standards mode".
A New Web 2.0 Startup Idea Posted Each Day
How Microsoft marketing "Macs" as a product
Wow, that's an awesome idea.
It's true. I'm an HR rep with too much spare time. That will change when the recession hits, but until then, I try to make programmers accept the misery of working in cubicles in pursuit of a very slightly higher expected outcome. And I could have gotten away with it, too, if it weren't for these pesky Hacker News commenters.
UK news.yc'ers - join us in building something big in the UK
Hey UK news.yc'ers! This is Kieran, you may have met me at Songkick's recent news.yc meetup. For those who did, hi!, for those who didn't, nice to meet you!

We all know the UK scene is seriously lacking - not enough founders, not enough investors, not enough ambition...

I wanted to post and let you guys know that we're building something big here in the UK, and are looking for a fellow ambitious, smart hacker to join us. We're going to redefine the social experience for PC/console gamers, and have tons of gamers itching to use the service already. We're fully funded (backed by some of the best investors in the world), and you'll get some nice goodies like Herman Miller Aeron, new computer, snazzy dual monitors and free drinks/fruit when you join. We want someone who has a thirst for learning new things, gets stuff done fast, and has a passion for making the Internet a better place.

We're using Python, Django, jQuery and Debian OS, believe action speaks louder than words, don't accept cant-do attitudes, and believe time spent not doing something you love is time wasted. If you feel you want to be part of this, drop me an email on thelemon@gmail.com and we'll chat

We can change the ecosystem for the better by getting more people out of boring big corporates, and into startups, where they have real change to change the world. We'll never get there if we don't do something about it now!

Thanks for your time :)

Cheers,

Kieran

P.S. Formal job ad here if you want to see: http://www.krop.com/jobs/y9g2x/
[The Record Industry] makes Enron look like amateur hour..
Some years ago a Major Danish bank suffered a black swan event where their entire online financial system went down. It was traced to a bizarre problem in an IBM DB2 database that had never occurred before. In the entire history of DB2. All kinds of experts were flown in from all over the world to fix it, and eventually they succeeded with some loss of data.

The result? Customers of the bank were unable to make any transactions for 5 days, and the bank's stock suffered so severely that the company lost almost a billion dollars in market cap within a week.

Now they have redundant sytems...
"Lowering rates does not sacrifice long term growth. Rates were drastically lowered in 91 and 82 (83?) as well, and that didn't exactly negatively impact long term growth."
The federal funds rate controls indirectly the inflation so if you had them very high (which hurts the economy a lot but you have to do it if you want to lower the inflation) of course you can lower it back to normal (around 5%) when inflation is back to normal (around 2%). But lowering it below the normal rate increases exponentially the yearly inflation gain because banks borrow from the FED and using fractional-reserve banking they flood the market with new money, lowering the value of the dollar. Meaning that "typically a person's most valuable asset (home)" increases in price, and decreases in value. The purchasing power of the people goes down, together with the GDP. The dollars becomes internationally unattractive (I'm looking at China's Reserve Bank for example, or just having dollars) as its annual inflation rate makes any saving to lose value. One dollar will buy $1 worth of goods and services this year, but only 95c the next year with an inflation at 5%; this has the same effect as a 5% annual tax on cash holdings.
"Founded in February 2006, BoredAt took off w/ same trajectory as Facebook and 50% penetration on college campuses"

Thank you for the comic relief.
To veer on a tangent -- my previous roommate went to Digipen, and he didn't find it rigorous at all. He felt it was dumbed down in the technical aspects. Has that changed in the past few years?
My point is that "predict" means very little if you can't pinpoint with greater precision than a year.

I agree with all those saying recession isn't a big concern.
Bandwidth Caps May Be Critical Error For Broadband Companies
Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, I suppose. It'll be interesting to see how they compare to YC. My guess is either they'll not fare as well in the long term, or there will be no difference. If the former, then that means that SV and PG really are super extra valuable. If the latter, then maybe it's just the seed funding + advice that pushes companies over the edge to success. Personally, though, I'm super glad I'm part of YC and not TechStars...
MapReduce and relational databases - includes a nice high-level explanation of MR
Actually, if the JUMP instruction allows an indirect address, then it is already Turing-complete. I know X86 treats indirect jumps as a separate instruction, but it's not hard to imagine an assembly language where the two use the same instruction.

EDIT: Nope, we forgot there is no STORE instruction. Thus, no way whatsoever of writing output.
I minored in economics and had an amazing prof for monetary economics.
Long story short, he worked for the Bank of Canada doing basically what your Federal Reserve chairman does.

The amount of analysis and study that goes into interest rate adjustment is mind blowing. They have 4 teams of experts running amazing models each in a specific technique, and then each team independently reports their results to the board which then decides what action to take. There is literally a mountain of data and factors that come into play.

Anyways, the gross oversimplification of the entire process across the news world today resulted in me posting a dumb (I am glad you also found it funny) picture.

edit: I feel like I am hedging my karma here against people that do not enjoy the odd bit of humour.

edit2: I just remembered a whole lecture that discussed the reason that for interest rate adjustment to work well, everyone has to have full confidence in the federal reserve. So, since confidence levels impact the effectiveness of adjustments, they were probably sitting on this rate hike hoping to do it at the standard time (which was actually bumped up), but to slow the plummeting they took action a bit earlier which may hurt their credibility and the change might not help very much.
Amazon's DRM-Free mp3s contain proprietary ID3 tags
A recession is a decline in a country's gross domestic product (GDP), or negative real economic growth.
You just posted this four days ago:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=100030

And it was duly voted up.

I think you could stand to wait a few months prior to posting again.
You are slightly confusing the issues at hand here.

Most of the write-downs banks were doing were related to mortgage trading they were doing, not mortgage issuing. There was not _that_ many banks involved in the sub-prime business and losing a lot directly.

Banks are quite well hedged against interest rate flux fundamentally ...since they make prime + x on loans, and pay out prime - x on balances.
Tell us about your experience in any kind of dysfunctional software group or company.
Please recant your old, new, current war stories.

How many of these situations drove you towards creating a startup?
Oops, good point about the indirect JUMP instruction.

Maybe we don't need a STORE. The ADD instruction could operate directly on memory operands. Then I guess we can ditch LOAD too.
I can tell you for sure that the big publishing companies are scrambling to find other ways to build up their online presence. I recently left a company that was catering to those publishers by building vertical social network communities for them. I feel like we may end up seeing an RIAA-type scramble of the big publishers (news corp, dow jones, reed reed elsevier) to stay relevant. Perhaps we already are, actually...
I don't know, I'm just going off of hearsay and the projects I've seen come out of Digipen. It's definitely less rigorous than a university program, and they're obviously exploiting the "I want to make video games!" motivation of a lot of kids. But I do think that the general model is pretty good, even if Digipen isn't an ideal example of its implementation.
I agree with the article.

Yet I wish he'd put more emphasis on how drugs can break you out of a loop of depression (what? i'm a computer scientist. can't I make awful cs puns?), and are very useful as long as the users doesn't become dependent on the drugs for that help.

There's a good article about psychedelic drugs (although I realise the author was speaking about legal drugs) and psychotherapy here: http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?id=psychedelic-healing&... which I previously couldn't decide whether to submit or not.
> nothing all that bad happened to him

most people would characterize "getting smeared on pretty much all major media outlets" and "forced to resign" as pretty bad.

> He wasn't assaulted. He wasn't put on trial or sent to jail

"you probably won't go to jail" is a pretty far cry from your original post, that "no one can fault you."
How Facebook is like Ikea
No one reasonably can fault you. No one published reasonable explanations of why/how he'd done anything wrong. No one said anything that would be embarrassing or difficult to explain to his friends. No one said anything that would weigh on his conscious.

He clearly was in the wrong job, for a man like himself. He should aim his life more towards cooperating with people he considers decent human beings. A push in that direction, isn't so bad. The only reason he might not like it, is if he isn't focussed on the truth, and still has mixed feelings (sometimes preferring status, reputation with silly people, etc). Mixed feelings are not safe ground.
Is the Future of Mobile the Web?
He is right in most of his critics.But, worse is better.

We computer science guys, and especially those with background in maths, always want to have frameworks reduced to orthogonal concepts that recombine in all possible ways to create very diverse outcome. This leads to algebraic-type formal systems that are very beautiful and powerful in their domains.

You can rarely model a real-world domain in such a minimalistic and mathematical way. Think about it: if it was easy and useful, the natural languages we used would benefit a lot from being unambiguous, minimalistic and mathematical. We have neither evolved to use such languages nor successfully created ones outside narrow artificial domains This, I think, is an important lesson for computer science.

Recently we have seen the rise of Perl, and later RoR. Why are they successful, despite having fuzzy concepts and leaking abstractions? I think this is because they try to mimic natural languages, and put the mathematical clarity aside.

Perl's author is a linguist and had consciously borrowed natural language characteristics:
http://www.wall.org/~larry/natural.html
DHH has emphasized a lot that he wants his DSLs to look like natural languages (don't have a reference right now). Perhaps this means something.
Tech stocks are considered overvalued and unstable.

Yes even GOOG.

*Note - it's all about perception.
Did anybody get fired for buying from IBM?
Of course you could go a step further like my site and many others and pick a domain that leaves nothing to the imagination. e.g. ratemyprofessors.com or ratemystudentrental.com or bookdealfinder.com
Enzo - quicksilver like tool for windows
"poised for rapid growth"

we don't take kindly to your kind round here
I agree with dcurtis. You can donate money instead of volunteering. If anything, donating an hour's wages is harder than donating an hour's worth of volunteering (assuming your job is not as pleasant as volunteering, which by and large seems to be the case). You might make $20 an hour after adjusting for everything (this gets distorted because of tax deductions and the like), but people have to pay you to do it. You take more pain. While volunteering, you take less pain. Giving an hour of wages might be equivalent to giving two hours of volunteer time (in terms of opportunity cost). If one creates more wealth for the charity than the other, you should do more of that. It might not make sense to volunteer.
What Do Trend Spotting & Where's Waldo Have in Common?
another one that would be helpful: have the RSS feed include a link to both the article linked and the comment thread. right now, it seems to only have a link to the article...
Should tell you a lot about the kind of incorrect attention that women get in this site (and anywhere else in the internet, including chat rooms) the fact that nearly no women get an obvious female nickname.

Just imagine what would happen if you create a user whose name was "Laura". Try it.
Joel makes a really good point in this article. We cannot prepare for every eventuality, and in fact it simple isn't cost effective to do so. The best we can do is plan for the things that are expected to go wrong, and make permenant fixes (either with technology or with processes) when things we don't expect come up.
The way that an AI plays chess is nothing at all like the way a human plays chess. I don't think chess being cracked by AI has any bearing on chess's ability to measure human intelligence.
Hey as someone who knows kieran well (i'm a current YC'er), he's one of the most ambitious, talented and well connected young entrepreneurs I know. This company is going to be huge - i can state that having shared an office with these guys and despite him not putting it above he's actually started (and sold) successful gaming companies before. You'll have fun and play a lot of Guitar Hero - this one's for real!
Of course not :-)
I think you mean the 'potential' positive effects of a rate drop, because if you remember, Japan dropped their prime rate to 0% for years and it did nothing. It only makes it easier to borrow and therefore easier to finance growth and restructuring if you want it. But if the climate is negative and no one is buying, then there's no reason to grow, etc.

Deflation is also bad. Bernanke thinks that the effects of the Great Depression could have been mitigated if monetary inflation would have offset the deflation that was occurring. And I think that what he's doing here. Unfortunately, he's about to find out why that doesn't work.
ok, thanks for the advice
.NET Framework Library Source Code now available
Nice one. :)
Are you implying that a startup will not have any dysfunction?

I have found startups to be like a pressure cooker for coworker relationships and dysfunctional situations. The main difference being people are too busy to worry about it so they quickly get past the problems.

Bigger companies it just plays out in slow motion over months, where it tends to unravel in a day at a startup!
NewsCred? Yes, its my startup, but its my favorite one right now!
This article was well worth my time simply for: "a business that has placed itself at the center of a web of economic actors".
This seems apt: http://news.yahoo.com/nphotos/Ben-Bernanke-Ben-Bernanke-Fede...
I'm sorry, you're talking about a totally different algorithm than I am either here or in the article you're responding to. There's no such thing as a "4 bit PATRICIA" trie. Obviously, if you want to burn memory, you can increase the arity of your tree nodes to "speed up" (heh) fetches.
Ruby + DSLs = Power Tool "Ecosystem"
Randy Pausch gets walk on role in new Star Trek movie (and more updates)
Weblocks - A Continuations-Based Common Lisp Web Framework
how do you qualify that? wasn't del.icio.us built while joshua was moonlighting?
T.D. Ameritrade went down this morning
Finally someone said it.
Reminds me of how Steve Jobs said Gates would be a broader guy if he had done acid.

Doing crazy, unconventional stuff is a really good idea. If you don't take risks, ever, you can really get messed up. But when it comes to drugs...I don't know, I wasn't there, I don't know the kind, the purity, the dealer, etc. It might have been a really bad idea. If you took a bad risk but turned out alright, that doesn't mean it was a good risk to take. It's like winning at Russian Roulette. But again, I wasn't there.

Plus, not all drugs were created equal. Steve Jobs doesn't think acid is so bad, and he didn't do too shabby.
You can get housing even cheaper than that I was in a 3br in boulder for $900 during a summer I lived there.

The New Tech Meetups in Boulder are huge, hundreds of people Their are also active user groups for many different languages in the Boulder Denver area.

Just starting to get to know the angle VC kind of stuff around Boulder, but it seems to be fairly developed.

Anyways it is clearly much better than some of the small cities mentioned.

It frequently places in the top 5 or so start up cities...
http://smallbusiness.aol.com/features/best-cities-for-entrep...
eBook: Eloquent JavaScript (w/ integrated interface for editing and running example programs)
Jaxer: The AJAX Server
Sounds promising :)

But why limit yourselves to UK people? Why don't you target for developers across all europe? I think that most of educated programmers on the continent can defend ourselves in the language of Shakespeare!

I don't imagine a SF based startup only hiring Californians!

BTW, good luck!
With EC2 available, why be in the hardware as well as the software business? Life seems to short to have to worry about hardware and hardware scaling - especially things like the story of rounding up 100 servers over the weekend to handle demand when you could just deploy as many EC2 instances as you need in a few keystrokes in a few minutes, or this problem of a misconfigured switch.
Although the magazine business in general depends on Walmart for 20% of their sales, I think it is likely that the large magazines that were cut (like The New Yorker, The Economist, Fortune, Forbes, and Businessweek) did not resonate with the Walmart audience.

I don't know how many Walmarts are in Silicon Valley. But, as far as I know, there are none in the city limits of Chicago and New York. In general, wealthy people don't shop at Walmart.

How many people do you think buy jeans at Walmart and in the next breath ask where they can find The Economist? Has Mark Anderson even been to Walmart?

I think these magazines will survive for now.
Quite the contrary, Daniel. There is only one way of playing chess and both humans and computers eventually use the method - that's tree search. The only difference is that those who mastered chess can do some part of the job on a subconscious level and get results of calculations as "insights".

The entire chess theory that tries to cut branches so to say, and find good "strategies" for chess - those methods to my understanding change quite often. Every new chess genius turns the theory upside down. Which only means there is no strategy in chess except tree search.

Correct me if I'm wrong.