skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
"In the early 19th century, subject matter that made up the liberal arts curriculum was fixed: the ancient classics, rhetoric, logic, Greek and Latin."

With the possible exceptions of Greek and Latin, liberal arts colleges should restore these core courses. To those they should require advanced coursework in probability, statistics, biology and psychology.

Probability and statistics are essential elements of thinking and are extensions of rhetoric and logic. Biology and psychology have undergone such change and are so significant to modern scientific and social thought that they should be required.

"Your life will be fuller and richer if you read Aristotle, Descartes and Rousseau."

Yes, but such studies should be limited to the first 2 years of a 4-year curriculum, so that sufficient time for later courses in biology and psychology is available. These courses would point out the errors in the assumptions or reasoning that those earlier philosophers made and bring the student up-to-date with current knowledge of biological, physiological, psychological and social systems.

A graduate of such a program would be educated in the classical sense but more current in his knowledge than the typical liberal arts graduate. He would be very valuable as a potential employee in almost any field, since he was taught primarily to _think_.
That could be said of many so-called paradoxes. I think it has as much claim to "paradox" as the interesting number paradox.
If they are a paradox to you, my hero who scored with a porn star, I don't know what to say :-)
Venture musket: The aim isn't perfect, but it launches a significant projectile in roughly the right direction, at a substantial velocity.
Possible, but that would pretty much involve funding the hell out of everyone in a several mile radius, with long-term funding for people fortunate enough to be down-wind . . .
Agreed: money quote for the whole article.

It put me in mind of a fur-upholstered mousetrap for some reason. You know, the kind of thing David Bowie would put in his basement . . .
So the obvious question is... how many sock puppet accounts does Arrington already have here? He admitted to 5 at digg, I think. Sometimes I come here first thing in the morning and it's 75% techcrunch.
hey man TC isn't that bad. You have to muddle through a lot of comments from what seem to be the same trolls, but once in a while you find a gem of a comment.

too bad there isn't a browser that can filter out comments from select people ... TC would then be much more insightful
Let's block all referrals from TC
I personally don't want to see the crowd from Techcrunch here on the site. Blocking the traffic won't really change things... but damn this might suck.
I work for a large company and everything that goes out the door is patented; I imagine Adobe is the same way. However, I just did a search and didn't see anything obviously relevant.

I have my doubts that file formats or protocols are patentable, but that won't stop the USPTO from granting them.
the last great OS from MS was windows 2000 pro...

as for vista, its horrible. has anybody tried to run google desktop search on it? Don't bother, just know it is so slow you wonder if it was by design.

XP Pro is a good alternative to Win2KPro so long as you strip all the extras.
Frequently switching b/w views or files is a real pain point for me. I prefer to be able to see as much code as possible at a glance. One reason why I hate 50 classes in 50 files of 5 lines each when working with Java.
My friend Mike once told me: "When you can't tell the difference between public opinion and a DDoS, you're either doing something right, or doing something horribly wrong."
There should be a link to it at the top of the page (something like #1 on the homepage and highlighted) for every user until the exceed a certain karma threshold (50?).
find some like-minded friends and get outside and you'll have fun.
A Cure for Fat Fingers
Computability and runtime efficiency. (I've productively applied this to problems in every domain of my life.)

The importance of limits. (From testing limit cases heavily, to time being the limit of being, to value sources being the limiting horizon of personality. Paul DePalma, Martin Heidegger, and Charles Taylor being to thank for teaching me those, respectively.)
http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2007/08/is-black-new-green.ht...
Southern Baptists believe in global warming now.
Am I missing something? I fail to see the relationship between the title and the post. Was this a mistake or are you purposefully trying to break the HN guidelines to see what happens?
That statement is false if you're using Merriam-Webster's definition of "lie" ("to make an untrue statement with intent to deceive"). I wrote that with intent to amuse and not with intent to deceive.
The solution is easy. Google calendar. You can share your calendar with others (so they can see your availability, add appointments) and you can schedule reminders, etc. As far as requesting an appointment you can create one and invite someone else (your barber). Then you get to see if he approved your invite.

Not all customers might be savy enough to use this, so your barber (or you) can manually add appointments for people that schedule offline. This way everyone can check the calendar online to get an idea about availability.
outerz0ne - two weeks
The Selfish Gene changed my life, along with Phantoms in the Brain By V.S. Ramachandran.
My grad school pays $25 per hour. I paid nothing for undergrad. This isn't atypical.
Aperture 2.0: the Ars Technica review
Full Linux Alternative to Exchange Server
Yes, the interesting number paradox is particularly weak. But even it has an argument that seems puzzling initially, and has a much stronger version (called the Berry paradox, that has deep connections to Godel's incompleteness theorems).

The statement "My favorite paradox is the one I like least" has nothing paradoxical about it. It can easily be deduced to be false. Its just a contradiction, like saying "This sentence is true and false". Compare that to "This sentence is false" which is a paradox.
I think it's a joke alluding to this comment:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=121430

and that he just linked the dullest news story he could find.
My startup has similar data volumes and reporting needs to rescuetime, and also runs rails on the backend. We found that traditional data warehousing techniques, and specifically running a MOLAP parallel to the SQL database, solved the performance problems so soundly that we could put 10x as many charts on a page and enabled data-slicing possibilities that were previously out of the question with the highly tuned SQL route. We were also able to get rid of all of the extra model code we had written to manage aggregations. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Online_analytical_processing for more background info if you're interested.
Is "Don't listen to me." a paradox?
That's the definition of lie as a verb. I used lie as a noun. I hope you didn't think I was accusing you of lying. All I meant was that the statement was technically a lie, so the humor fell a little flat.
Inspiring.
Any picture-only type website doesn't require much from the user. So I Picasa and Flickr and YouTube (and web 1.0's hotornot.com) fall within this category.

It doesn't take much to look at a picture/video and click. Or if they want to submit their own content, it isn't hard to browse, upload and submit.
123 Matrimonials: India Matrimonial & Indian Matrimony
This has to do with the context where I learned Euler's Equation, but I can never separate it from Fourier and (later) Laplace transforms. Those are all so beautiful and mind blowing.
That my child puts everything I've ever done into some lame also-did-this category.

Other parents will understand.
Hilbert spaces.
Haskell (not just monads, though they were impressive too)
That's silly. The way to maintain a community is to control who sticks around, not who randomly stumbles across you in the first place.
At its loosest description, email is a social network and a ton of otherwise computer illiterate people use it daily.
To take it up a notch, everything in your body is composed of left over bits of exploded stars.
Lisp macros
This one is particularly cool, as on the face of it, the sentence just seems totally harmless. You think "well the sentence is not true and Santa Claus doesn't exist" and there's no hint of paradox.
Avoiding the Fark Effect
By the Fark effect I mean - at first a social news site is really cool, then over time there are more and more political posts, top ten lists, nsfw links, and pictures of cats. Inside their algorithmic brains, every social news site wants to turn into Fark.

In the wake of being linked on techcrunch a lot of people seem worried the same thing will happen here.

Here's a suggestion - build a bayesian filter specifically to prevent Hacker News from turning into reddit / digg / fark. Positive training data can be hacker news articles before today. Scrape the contents of each link before it goes live. Negative training data can be the current top n articles from those other sources. Don't apply this filter in a boolean way; instead do something like

score *= similarity-to-classic-hacker-news

By making it non-boolean, we will still get articles like "Google announces huge new product". It will just cost you a 0.1x in score whenever the article mentions Ron Paul.

Any other good ideas out there?
I think he's intending to show how the system might actually work.
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News Corp Gives Up The Fight For Yahoo
You can also deconstruct and rebuild that ball into another one of infinite size, I believe. I'm not sure if you can do infinite off the top of my head, but I'm certain of at least arbitrary.

Pretty much everything that involves abusing the Axiom of Choice ends up trippy and fun.
Mark Zuckerberg/ Sarah Lacy Interview From SXSW
CNET is best acquirer of Digg
Google: Finding the Bottom. $350? Less?
Grandfather paradox: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grandfather_paradox
4 Technologies for Portability in Social Networks
YC: There should be a way to prevent reposts
Recently, I've noticed a lot of articles that are reposts of the same thing. They should all be consolidated to one thread. Just my opinion.
http://www.arclanguage.org/install
That's the point of the voting system. The articles that the most people want will be voted to the top. Unfortunately, the minority can't stay a minority if their site gets too popular.
I think you may need to define computer literacy a little more, but I suspect most users of YouTube and various online gaming forums may qualify.
Ask YC: What's the best virtual hosting for a development stage startup?
I'm currently using WebFaction to host my Pylons based web app, which is under development and really not that close to be ready for public use.

I've had some issues with WebFaction. Mostly it's just that every once in a while I want to be root, though I have other gripes as well. The reason I stick with it is that it's cheap.

What I'd love is a virtual hosting platform, but I'm not sure when ones offer the best bang for your buck. We don't have any money yet, so Amazon EC2 doesn't make sense right now (it's not very cheap until you get some traffic). I've looked at Joyent, but I haven't heard whether they're any good or not.

So, what does the YC community recommend when it comes to cheap, development stage virtual hosting?
Meebo Just May Be This Year's Twitter
I agree. I've also noticed that the same story as reported by two different news sources will get posted, which is essentially the same thing.

Google does some pretty cool probability stuff (at least, I think that's how they do it) to figure out what articles are the same for news.google.com. Something like that would be really cool on new.yc.

I know, the source is open.... but I'm clearly busy ;)
Look into a VPS. I currently use vpslink.com, but there are many to choose from.
Finite volume and infinite surface area, eh?

For example, volume grows as the cube of linear dimension, but surface area only as the square. So as animals get bigger they have trouble radiating heat.

http://www.paulgraham.com/ycombinator.html

Perhaps large animals should make themselves into the shape of Gabriel's Horn.

Of course then they'll radiate too much heat.
Ask YC: Voting Karma
My view of Karma is similar to my view of money: it's an artificial measure of the value you add to this site.

Most of my Karma comes from comments because I honestly take a pretty passive role here, taking in and commenting instead of actively adding nodes; however, I have an interesting habit. Whenever I write a comment, before I submit, I double check to see what value I'm really adding. If it's not pretty significant — if my comment is pretty much just agreement with something someone said with little additional information — I drop it and just upmod. It's a small effort to try to bring up the signal-to-noise ratio recognizing that even well meaning comments can be be noisy.

The part I want to call attention to is that, to me, it seems like you're still adding value when you upmod. It's far less than a full comment or submission, but you're calling attention to signal instead of noise.

My suggestion is that Karma could be incremented based on some fraction of the number of upmods that occur on an article you upmodded after you did so. This rewards the people who read articles (especially those on the new page) and vote so as to bring attention to something interesting.

Sound interesting?
If and when necessary I'm sure HN can leverage the seniority of the current users (time since registered and karma points).
Schrödinger's cat
In my experience it's best to just get something out there as soon as it's interesting to play with. It'll get content into your system, it'll point out problems and possibilities that haven't occurred to you, and there's nothing like real users to motivate you to focus on getting the most important things done as soon as possible. I've worked at a number of startups that wasted a lot of time working on features that turned out not to matter at all, because they thought they couldn't release without them.

I sometimes hear this idea that you only get once chance to acquire users, that they'll show up, take a look, and if your product isn't good enough, they'll never come back. I think that's just untrue. First off, the chances that your product will cause enough of a stir to reach your entire potential userbase when it's not very good yet seem pretty low to me. And second, there are plenty of examples of companies that had to completely reinvent their product more than once before they found success -- off the top of my head, Flickr is one of those. I worked for another company that did that, and I didn't notice any problems getting people to look at version 2.
There is. Duplicate URLs are not allowed.

As for different sources reporting on the same thing, that's a bit harder.
Google's second click versus Facebook's second click
I think the vote-weighting system is a better solution to the same problem, but PG hasn't turned it on (nor completely implemented it, as of arc2).
I read the wiki article and it turns out the horn uses precisely that dimensional difference in a very clever way. The radius varies as 1/x along the x-axis, so the volume grows as 1/x^2 while the surface area grows as 1/x. This means the growth rate of volume goes to zero much faster than that of the surface area. As a result the volume integral converges, while the surface area diverges.
ok, the word is out.

SHHHHHHH...
I'd love to talk to you regarding your MOLAP implementation with RoR. I had previously taken a brief look at ActiveWarehouse as a potential solution, but put that on the back burner as we are currently in a very fast iterative development mode - having launched just a couple of months ago.
My last 16 years of database experience have been grounded in Oracle (oh Oracle 6 how I don't miss thee...) so I am fairly familiar with the the "Oracle" solution and storage of MOLAP cubes in Oracle Express, but am a complete noob when it comes to the OSS solutions. Any insight into your learning experiences would be most welcome!
In brief, they're mathematical proofs that certain things are unknowable. Mathematics rarely gets so close to theology. And religion is rarely so certain.
For the historical record: the post started with the title "Little Known Hacker News Is Boring As Hell"

Somewhere along the way, the editors changed the title to "Employers Explore Health Care Options"

I think it would be fair to say that this spoils the joke, or at least changes it into a different joke that I personally find much less amusing.

Oh well. Anyone have any extra LOL[cats|dogs|geeks|lerskates]?
Sounds like an interesting idea, but what is to stop someone from just upmodding every comment in a thread?
I highly recommend Slicehost. I've been amazed with their responsiveness, availability and competence.

http://slicehost.com
I've considered doing something like that.
And after all that, we turn it over the Government...
There could simply be a "report duplicate" link (where you specify which article it's a repost of) next to a new post for the first 1 hour after it's posted. If enough people say it's a duplicate of a particular article, then it goes off, and the comment threads are merged.
"... There is. Duplicate URLs are not allowed. ..."

There is a subtler variation on this. Two different urls resolving to the same article. A site may publish:

- http://foo.com/date/bar/some-inane-tech-article

- http://foo.com/date/some-inane-tech-article

Both urls point to the same article, both are unique but point to the same document. A quick example might be an article and the same article printed.
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And furthermore, it now appears that there will be evidence on the internet that I am the kind of moron who spends his spare time submitting stories about health insurance to websites.

And replying to himself. Double moron!
Yeah, I've wondered, how exactly does Google do that?? Anyway, in the short term, a manual system would probably be more accurate.
I'm not sure exactly what they do, but I think it's more like office space especially tailored for startups.
It's not a paradox by itself, but the Heisenburg uncertainty principle leads to a lot of unintuitive things too.
This is a false sentence.
"Brugger hypothesized that schizotypes should make novel associations faster because they are better at accessing both hemispheres – a prediction that was verified in a subsequent study. His theory can also explain research which shows that a disproportional number of schizotypes and schizophrenics are neither right nor left hand dominant, but instead use both hands for a variety of tasks, suggesting that they recruit both sides of their brains for a variety of tasks more so than the average person."

At last, I know why I take pen and fork in the left hand but throw and do a variety of other tasks with the right hand! I'm also pretty positive I'm a "schizotype" as they say.
That could be solved by using a suggestion from another thread. Basically you have to spend some karma to give karma out. And once you upmod one thing, it will cost more to upmod something else soon after that. This system might have to be seperate from the karma, but you could pay karma to get points in the other system. It would definitely need to be refined.
GIZA++ and statistical machine translation tools.
PG: "Eventually the other users will get tired of you filling up the comment threads with your private beefs, and you'll stop."

Your reply: "in my case, i haven't apologized or offered to change my behavior because you never notified me of doing something wrong or asked me to change any behavior. that's bad leadership too. if you want me to follow some rules you have to tell me."

I think you should read more carefully, if that's not a notification of doing something wrong or asking you to change behavior I don't know what is.

Pretty ironic for you to say it's bad leadership for him not to do what he in fact just did...
I suggest using a cascade of AdaBoosted linear support vector machines which integrates with your relational database backend and exposes itself as a RESTful web service. Then factor that out as an in-house library for future lunch-intelligence applications.

Certainly letting everyone bring a brown bag or order in miso soup and hoagies is out of the question...
Those guys do look pretty good, and cheap.

I'd sign up right away, but we are using facebook for our social aspects, so we probably qualify for Joyent's free accelerator (for a year). That's a pretty tempting offer, even if I have to learn Solaris.
Text it before you forget it with KWIRY
python ~ http://www.paulgraham.com/pypar.html
The great thing about the Internet is no one forces you to visit certain websites. Don't let the door hit you on the way out if you're so bored.
"Little known?" Or is he getting confused and really mean, "Different target audience?"
If it's of any use whatsoever in it's current state, release it, and get people using it. Call it alpha/beta/whatever, it's just a name.
Ask YC : startups from India
are there any startups from India at yc or any website dedicated to tracking them?
Can something be written that strips the url of arbirary variables?

http://foo.com/bar?aritrary-var=arbitrary-val

to just

http://foo.com/bar

that would help because a lot of people end up posting links with ?source=newsletter or &sessionid=asdf1234ilikepie or etc
Except from comment pages...
A limit to how many upmods/downmods a day could help minimize something like that...

Or perhaps a limit on upmods/downmods to a certain amount per submission viewed?
> Certainly letting everyone bring a brown bag or order in miso soup and hoagies is out of the question...

I think that's their whole point. These are the kind of geeks they want to be seen as.
It rocked my world to know why all comments with the word sex in it were immediately upmodded.

Turns out, people really really like sex. A lot.
1. Ludwig Wittgenstein's "Tractatus Logico Philosophicus" (the extremism of the idea, the solemn (poetic?) tone that nevertheless emerges from the sentences of such a rigorous work)

2. RMS reflections about morals in software programming (I may not wholly agree, but he taught me a whole new way of thinking about software)

3. Prolog declarative approach (instead of describing how to solve a problem, just describe the problem)
Paul's point: immature 14 year olds tend to be attracted to shiny things. If they're mature, they'll prolly look past the outer appearance of the site...
Top 10 algorithms [pdf]
I wonder how many girls upmodded that comment?
New Promissing ecard website
Hi, I have started this flash animated ecard website and have bigger plans to integrated it Social Networks. I am looking out for a VC to take my plans up. Please comment.
Not atypical but also not the majority. I don't think it's a stretch to say most people pay for grad school.
I agree. I personally don't really want to listen to people that care immensely about their karma scores.

I think an exponential decay on how much karma you get based on upmods per second would be sufficient to avoid people rampantly upmodding. It takes time to read an article and its comments, and it seems like measuring that would be an effective way of preventing rampant abuse.

Of course, people could just write scripts then to upmod all the time once they figured out the optimal delay. Then there would be an entirely different form of karma inflation to fight. Like spam, it seems to be a never ending battle.