skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I don't entirely agree.

I have seen quite a few comments that were extremely insightful, and/or interesting that got downmodded due to an unpopular opinion. The reason this is unfortunate is not only that you tend to miss these (assuming that there is a higher probability that you read or think about comments that are rated higher, which I am surely not the only one that is guilty of) but also that it tends to promote groupthink . This is especially important on a forum like this where we are here to learn and share our thoughts, ideas and experiences for a very particular niche: Starting startups.

I have noted that comments that don't promote the "build it and they will come" view tend to be voted down. Since this site is primarily populated with hackers this is entirely understandable - it is human nature to think that your part of the project is the most important. But the reason we all come here is (I presume) to learn. And the things about which we know the least are the things where we have most to learn.

It is not only a question of abuse, but also a question of opening peoples eyes to issues, problems and points of views that lie outside their expertise, but which they will probably encounter in a startup. And this includes such diverse fields as marketing, financing and sales.

I am here to learn about stuff I didn't know already, and that is often outside my field. In return for this I will offfer my opinions in the fields where I may have something to contribute.

At the end of the day this makes us all better entrepreneurs. Because as anyone who has ever done a startup will tell you - you have to get everything right. Hacking, finance, sales, PR, marketing, hiring, etc.

So I think that the up and down arrows should not express agreement, but insightfullness or truth. Not opinion. That way I will be able to judge the validity of a comment in a field that I do not know well by its points. And hopefully learn something.
Could not have said it better.
1. México. Will move as needed to get text twext.

2. Este fin de semana en San Miguel de Allende. La semana que entra en México, D.F. para http://consol.org.mx, buscando programador para http://twext.com/gig

3. http://twext.com/overview wants great hacker to add value to unicode texts by formatting them twext. Why? So we can more easily learn natural language like Español, Français, Português, etc etc. So we can communicate better. Twext text works on computers and prints on paper. Today, a billion people are learning English.

a.) http://olpcnews.com/content/localization/learning_language.h...

b.) http://more.read.fm/more_language#why.3F

4. Spiel: Lisp?
Nothing that surprising if you think of the target audience. 47% of the users are not on Windows. If you were to look at something like Facebook I think the numbers would be significantly different.
I would think more of these predictions if they came attached to some concrete goals. Could we have a list of specific tasks that will be accomplished by the machines in 2029? "Win the world Go championship", perhaps? "Produce a Russian-to-English translation of Crime and Punishment that passes the Turing test?" "Provide better color commentary than the average Fox Sports announcer?" That should be an easy one, but I'm still not betting on the machine.

And I marvel at the tremendous effectiveness of the typical futurist trick: make the banal sound incredible and then predict it:

"We'll have intelligent nanobots go into our brains through the capillaries and interact directly with our biological neurons," he told BBC News.

I've got those. They're called cells. I sneeze billions of them out every day.

I suppose you might ask whether it's fair to call my white blood cells "intelligent"... but they do have autonomous capabilities, and they do self-organize via a body-wide signaling network. They're pretty talented. I challenge you to produce a device on the same scale that is significantly more intelligent... by 2029.
I'm not convinced that you'll be able to deal with the Eternal September problem. It's all well and good that anti-trolling is built into the rules, but as more and more people join less and less of them will have read the rules.
Milwaukee, WI - We will be at techcocktail 7, you should come find us. we want to meet people that like to work on fun projects.
It doesn't have much to do with hacker personalities. Unless you want to argue that Youtube denizens are hackers of some sort too.
I work with semantic analysis technology (no, it isn't profitable), and think this is a really good summary.

The useful applications long-term are in areas like machine translation (contextual semantic knowledge is important), document categorization and indexing for search (ie. semantic data-scraping). Indexing for search is the simplest of the bunch and the most likely use of the tech that we'll see soon.

RWW has it right that the major challenge this poses to Google is a proliferation of industry specific applications that monetize better information management by virtue of knowing exactly what their users want and figuring out creative ways to aggregate it. Google is particularly weak with multiple languages: their focus on language-agnostic translation tools makes them vulnerable in foreign markets.

Then again, if Google provides the tools to let these vertical portals manage their own on-site advertising, who cares who is doing the actual document indexing/analysis?
I'm a technology entrepreneur in Provo, UT. I'm starting a "master-mind" group here with other entrepreneurs, business owners, or executives of start-up's. I want to keep it to under 10 people for now. If you're not familiar with the master-mind concept, it's where entrepreneurs sit down all (in our case Saturday once a month) day and brainstorm on eachothers' business ideas.

John D. Rockefeller attributed most of his success to his frequent master-mind meetings with other business owners. In fact, 90% of what we now know as Rockefeller's achievements came after Thomas Edison joined his master-mind group.

If you are interested, send me an email and include your phone number: adammichaelc@gmail.com
Aaugh! I really needed this awesome tool last month!

Now, not only do I not need the tool right now, but my brain has once again been trained to think of reading news.yc as an incredibly productive activity! Quick, set noprocrast to "double front"!
I'll have to agree with that one. I preferred "The Rails Way" to Agile Web Development, because it focuses on Rails' internals. You shouldn't start with that book though. Tutorials, screencasts and a bit of hacking first I'd say.
I wonder if trolls can be categorized automatically. Caveats and all, trolls are characterized by their participation in negative-karma two-person conversations and down-voting of their comments by a diverse and changing set of users. A simple learning algorithm should zap the predictable ones. Trolls are nourished by attention and early detection and removal should nip that behavior in the bud.
1 man band in Tampa. Wouldn't mind teaming with a LAMP / AJAX rock star. Here's what I'm doing...

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=114568
And not a half decade too soon. Any longer and they would be competing with download formats.
I've thought a lot about that. I wouldn't be surprised if current spam filters would work unchanged. There are not enough trolls on News.YC to make it worth investing time in such countermeasures, but it would be an interesting experiment to see if you could use statistical filtering techniques to detect trolls in some large public corpus like Digg or Reddit or Slashdot comment threads.
Theremin, the untouchable music (video)
Religion and computer language use survey results
Cram for that Exam with Help from uProdigy’s Tutors in India
News.YC users are definitely influenced by the prevailing trend, in both directions. I.e. people are more willing to vote something up as its score rises, and more prone to attack something as its score falls. It's not too bad yet here, but it got to be such a problem on Reddit that about a year ago they switched to not showing how many points a submission has till it's an hour old.
Top 10 Mistakes By Entrepreneurs
I'm in Palo Alto, California. I'm 24, I've been running my company for 10 years, and I'm looking for someone who knows how to sell the products I already have to people. Or, if you'd like to help code new ones, that would be cool, too.
Let's take a nuclear-powered rocket to Saturn (video)
"Real world" is probably better described as tools & apps that will dramatically change the way non-technical people do business. Email me at fergusom@yahoo.com
Alas, I can't find the URL.

http://workfriendly.net/
Have you thought of trying Amazon's simpledb? I just to my beta login and it seems pretty awesome so far.

what about couchdb? Still young but can be clustered and will probably way outperform any relational db for the stuff you're describing.

Last time I did benchmarks (a few years ago) mssql totally blew away mysql and postgres on windows. Turns out this was b/c I was using a "dependent subquery" which in my opinion is a lot simpler way to write a lot of queries.

Now that I use mysql (and linux and solaris) exclusively I don't use dependent subqueries at all and all is well.
The Stupidity of Crowds, Part I: The Wisdom of Crowds
Well, PS3 was not responsible for the wide adoption of Blu-Ray. The studios were.

If the PS3 had been an all out slam dunk like the PS2, Toshiba wouldn't have given up, they would've lost. As it stands, the PS3 isn't really even outselling the PS2 by that much.
Games for Programmers: Zendo
Ethics in Lethal Robots
Do you need a drummer?
There's going to be a class-action lawsuit and after many years of litigation, owners of HD DVD players will get $50 coupon for something (but only if you submit a lengthy claim form and attach original receipt). And lawyers will pocket tens of millions of dollars in fees. Welcome to "capitalism."
Do you play?
I'd rather a whole parliament of disagreeable colicky horseradish farmers than one unipartisan politburo.

Wow. That is the best sentence I have ever read in a comment thread.
Looking for a Lead Developer for the coolest new music site. We're 2 fun, music obsessed girls looking for the right engineer to make our great idea a reality. We're located in San Francisco. email rose at imthemusic dot com
Well I don't think any of your current cells can network your brain to say a google search by thought alone. To say the capacity for rapid brain-digital interfacing wouldn't have an impact on intelligence would be like saying the internet is unlikely to effect society. Not saying I subscribe to the guy's timetable though.

I agree about the goal part. I'd say GO would be gone way before then anyway. It'll take a new algorithm and some more computer power but not general intelligence. The actual Turing Test is always a good one, but if they passed it computers would be way more intelligent than us to beat us at our own game.
Better to encourage people to read comments even though they've been downmodded. Ultimately voting is about the reaction people have to the comment, and trying to institute some sort of high brow rules is unlikely to work. I must admit I'll read comments that have been downmodded just to see what the controversy is - and those I agree with I try to back up.
I'm using lean management to create never-before seen architecture - it isn't about a commodity approach, but a way of doing things better. Most of PG's advice on startups adheres to the key lean principles, the primary one being a focus on customer value.
Cool article!

The 1958 usage doesn't prove that Tukey invented the word "software", just that it wasn't invented later. I'm inclined to believe it, though, because of the corroborating fact that he also invented the word "bit". That's pretty compelling. And impressive.
I'm not sure. There aren't that many Bluray drives out there. So of the few that exist I'm pretty sure a good percentage are PS3's. Even if Bluray had a slight edge of HD-DVD because of PS3's (it's obviously not a huge edge) this would lead to more rentals (and Blockbuster dropped support for HD-DVD from stores after running a pilot and finding out Bluray was renting 3 to 1).

Since Blockbuster isn't renting HD-DVD and Walmart stopped selling them, studios are being forced to release on Bluray which means people have access to more titles, which in turn makes Bluray players more valuable.

This snowball effect is slowly (for now) killing the HD-DVD industry.
Nice snappy comment but what exactly do you mean? Do you think this sort of thing is impossible? Or that 2029 is way too early? Or are you just saying that speculating about what will happen more than 20 years in the future is folly?
it's not necessarily ironic. maybe they didn't like how you used "grown up" to imply that children have the various bad traits you listed. which isn't a very reasonable or informative description of children.
Lately, just Guitar Hero and Rock Band. I'll pick up a decent electronic kit one of these days though.
The financial industry does not use databases for this kind of thing much - for keeping records, and back office trade post-processing, yes, but not for market data. Try wikipedia ~ Event Stream Processing, Complex Event Processing, TimesTen (now inside Oracle), Streambase... all very expensive... And if you don't need this kind of speed, then probably all of your listed databases are fine, none has a significant (x10) lead over the others. Work with what matches your skillset.
so you aren't looking for a cofounder? Then i don't think this is relevant on this thread.
Ray Kurzweil's latest book about all this 'The Singularity is Near', was released in 2005. It has some compelling arguments is definitely worth a read if you are interesting in the longer term implications of computer technology and networking. He hasn't said all that much new in the years since then and this article doesn't really contain any new information.
I don't think "distance" is the primary cause of asshole behavior by automobile drivers, though it does sound like a convenient first approximation.

If I was walking down the street with a $20,000 ming vase, and you were running around nearly hitting me, I'd probably swear at you. Likewise, if you were running around on the street wielding a sharp katana, I'd probably swear at you.

A car is both as expensive as a ming vase, and as deadly as a sword. The idea that a rational person would not get highly upset when somebody threatened both their life and the most expensive thing they own is absurd. "Distance" has little to do with it.
"The sites's guidelines explicitly ask people not to say things they wouldn't say face to face."

Interesting, I know quite a few people that would in fact all but troll in person, to your face.

Although in their case, its more to do with them having no outbound tact filter: http://www.mit.edu/~jcb/tact.html
The Reddit thread is kind of sad.

http://reddit.com/info/68zz4/comments/
I don't think "more tech savvy" is part of the mechanism. GMail was originally invite-only, and Googlers tend to be fairly well-off, and so their friends tend to be fairly well-off.

As for "Google targets wealthier and smarter users", I don't think it's intentional. If you go to any tech talks given by their usability folks, they say they intentionally don't do user personas, precisely because they want to target "everybody". I find it far more likely that they design things that work slightly better for them, and their friends who help them test, who, again, tend to be of similar socioeconomic background.
Do you have any evidence that the database is going to be your bottleneck, at this point in the game?
Can Silicon Valley become a world leader in cheap and ubiquitous solar panels for the masses?
Del.icio.us and Flickr. Hell, and Google.

I'd say you want something that is spelled like it sounds and, ideally, short. IMO, .com is pretty important too.

Bluedot.us (a Seattle startup that's kinda in the social bookmarking space-- about 1.5m uniques last time I checked) switched over to Faves.com in December. I checked Alexa, but it doesn't show data for the old URL. Might be interesting data if compete.com or someone else has it handy.
Arc solves the problem of making programs smaller, I agree. I'm not merely admitting that: that's exactly the thing that's impressed me about Arc 0 in the first place. But the problem with programming languages is that they aren't single-purpose honed tools: they're more like a swiss army knife, or a house that the programmer has to live in, or an operating system for the programmer's thoughts, if you will. What a programming language has in common with all of the above is that it has to solve very many problems at once: in order to be considered an unequivocal advancement, it has to solve _all sorts_ of problems at least as well as languages people are already using. Arc currently solves only one problem, albeit very well, and solutions to all of the other problems (copious libraries, that profiler thing you mentioned in one of your essays, abundant and welcoming documentation - all stuff you've identified as necessary for a successful programming language in your own essays, in fact) are being delayed until a later release, an unspecified date in the future.

Taking the analogy to a house, Arc is like a half finished construction project. The frame is up, they're still putting insulation in, and there's one finished room with a cot, a table, and a hot plate which Paul Graham is using to cook the news.yc software. Sure, you might attract scads of interior decorators by opening your house up to random strangers, but very few programmers will be willing to come over to live in Arc. They'll stay in their own houses which are already well stocked with comfortable furniture, decorations, etc., even if it is all a little cluttered and you have to go through the kitchen in order to reach the library from the bedroom.

Some of the people speaking out against Arc are genuine trolls, but some are just saying in a non-tactful way that they'd prefer to stay in a house with drywall, thank you very much.
If anyone in western Canada (Calgary, Alberta) would like to toss around some ideas send me an email (see profile).
Disruptive language learning, Internet style
Not very many places give out diplomas, but if you want to get a job at a trolling company, you can just practice on pretty much any forum. Eventually hundreds of people will know you're a troll, giving you hundreds of references to take to a potential employer. Just make sure you don't ever accidentally post anything that actually contributes to the discussion.
Ask YC: How can we catch up to our peers at the big name universities?
As an undergrad at a "second tier" university, I want to know what I need to do to compete with CS students at the top schools. Specifically, I'm concerned about admission to grad school. Bonus points for criteria other than GPA.
Does Arc make JavaScript look really verbose? I'm guessing it does, if conciseness is its primary goal. How much of the delta is due to its macro system?
One of the main contributing factors to the abundance of trolling on forums is indeed that text is a much less expressive medium than face-to-face communication, meaning that you very often end up trapped into voicing your opinion in a trollish manner due to just carelessly throwing your initial thoughts into the text box.

You can give up, though, and perpetrate the crapstorm, or you can remind yourself that being good at communicating your ideas and opinions is an important part of being a well-rounded hacker; then you can view the posting of only coherent and non-inflammatory replies on fora as practice for when you'll have to communicate about programs you are writing.
Robots are tools, like land mines and cruise missiles are tools. There is nothing more complicated than that. They are amoral.

If you want to have the kurzweillian discussion about robots as smart as humans, then you can't program the ethics, just like humans are too smart to program ethics.

Papers like this are just completely premature. A discussion about practical & intelligent safety systems for robotics would be a better way to describe the intention.
Research, research, research.

Seriously, there's nothing university departments like to see in a graduate entrance application than published research. It doesn't have to be related to anything anyone at the department in question is working on (although that wouldn't hurt); simply demonstrating that you are capable of working independently, discovering new things, writing a coherent paper about them, and getting it published will put you ahead of the vast majority of applicants.

Edit: Sole authorships, while not necessary, are ideal -- with co-authorships (particularly involving undergraduate students) there's always a question as whether each author made any significant contribution.
>> 'Startup funding meant series A rounds: millions of dollars given to a small number of startups founded by people with established credentials after months of serious, businesslike meetings, on terms described in a document a foot thick.'

This is a bit of a stretch in my opinion - there has always been companies taking smaller investments; whether seed from a VC, seed from an individual Angel, or borrowing money from family.
Silicon Valley starts to turn it face to the sun
Seed Video Feature: Lawrence Krauss + Natalie Jeremijenko
How to Avoid Hanging Yourself with Rails
i think pg said he did not want to get into statistics war with other companies and if there was a correlation i would trust pg to find it and use it because its in his interest.
The Design principles are solid. Thank you for expressing them lucidly. Personally, I am encountering the same forces, and this essay provides useful arguments.
I've wondered about that myself at times. Some code that I've inherited was truly atrocious and much of that ended up rewritten, but other had been impenetrably dense. Those I had a mind to leave alone simply because I feared breaking the existing code. Usually we ended up "putting up dikes" around it and then clean it up piecemeal. Sometimes it is difficult to tell highly tuned and optimized code from a seething pile of cruft, but a quick run with a profiler against some performance benchmarks usually settles that question.

Oh and by the way, yes there is some code that I've written that I am somewhat proud of even if I recognize some of its shortcomings and ugly warts.
Harvard's Opportunity to Lead in Entrepreneurship
So the only conclusion we can make is a lot of atheists took the survey?
From all your comments it sounds like you're trying to convince yourself not to apply!