skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I was talking about the pregnancy itself. Btw., there are other costs for the mother besides missing a few weeks of work: there could be medical problems, the mother might even die. So it is still more costly to have babies for women than it is for men. I seem to remember that women also have a higher risk for infection through many STDs.

However, I think we might not disagree as much as you may think: of course, in theory, since the mind can control the body, it is conceivable to create any kind of culture. Maybe we could teach our children to only walk on legs and feet, so you could rightfully claim that "walking upright is just a cultural thing". The "richer" human societies are, the more wasteful cultural habits like that we could afford.

I am not sure that society can be reprogrammed in an arbitrary way, though. First of all, it still needs to survive, and it must be able to compete with other societies, even other animals. I think you have to take into consideration WHY culture evolved into it's current state - it has an evolutionary history. I read your statements as such that you think that it was a random whim of nature to give us our current culture. If you are convinced that men and women are equal, then there must have been a 50:50 chance for gender roles being exactly reversed. Do you agree thus far?

My claim is merely that it was not random, but that there was a bias due to the differences of men and women, which makes certain cultural habits more effective than others. As you say in your previous post, and I said somewhere else, inventions might tip the scales, and other cultural models could become viable.
Sounds like you've already made a decision.

Why compete with Facebook head on when you can use their market share as an advantage?
Don't trust them. I ordered and never got my bonus free emails.

Terrible scam :(
Vanity and a lot of other possible causes fit into economics quite well.
How about: "Nokia to purchase 67% of Trolltech's stock for $103 million."?

Any other suggestions?
Maybe you make something you want yourself, and figure you may not be alone in the world?
However, I would really like to get a phone with a decent camera and GPS support (should tag the photographs), but so far haven't found one. Any recommendations?
How Important is Web Design?
Ego, pride... ;-) I am not actually a facebook user myself, I don't even like it very much.

Another concern is monetarization - even if I have more users on facebook, would I be able to earn similar amounts of money per user as with my own website?

I also wanted to get out of the dependency on big corporations. So far most things I did were dependent on somebody controlling the market. With mobile games, there was the dependency on the mobile phone carriers and established games vendors, for example. Overall I was unhappy with that situation.

I haven't made the decision yet, because I only thought about the facebook aspect today.
StandoutJobs Launches. New platform for employers to attract top talent.
If the deal goes through then Nokia will own 100% of Trolltech so its not just a stock purchase. Definitely not the best headline, but I found the term misleading kind of insulting.
How informed is your impression of Dvorak? I see that Colemak can be easier to learn for querty-typists, but the other points in the FAQ do not seem that vital.

(FAQ: http://colemak.com/FAQ#What.27s_wrong_with_the_Dvorak_layout...)

P.S. I do not want to start a flame war. Pretty much everything is better than querty.
"I would tell you the brand I use, but I picked mine out of the trash by the side of the road. (Arlington, MA -- there are real advantages of living in a startup hub!)" ;)
Social networks are like nightclubs: http://gilesbowkett.blogspot.com/2007/11/facebook-apps-faceb...
Yeah that's a good starting point, but that won't guarantee users. You've got to keep working on it. What causes people to go in the wrong direction?
- focusing on too small a niche

- working on interesting technical problems that don't correspond to problems that people need solved

- making something that's only slightly better than what's out there (e.g. a slightly better news site or social network) and expecting everyone will magically switch or improves in areas that no one cares about
And make the windows-keys make something useful, too.
Moving my whole hand is slow..
Even simpler: just be happy!

Yeah right...
I have over 400 karma and it's happening to me too.
You shouldn't get offended by the term misleading, we all see a ton of posts on different sites every day, and maintaining the titles accuracy can help us as readers save our brain cycles and help decide which articles to read.

For example this post wasted a few minutes of our time.
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=103414

Lets strive as a community to be accurate and helpful and leave the inaccuracies to reddit.
Who's in? If we reach a critical mass, maybe pg would agree to meet with us if his schedule permits.
I wish I could upvote you with 100 points ;-)
It works in Z shell, and breaks in Bash -- thanks, I didn't realize that.

I don't see how -C protects against a tar bomb. Generally when I untar a tarball from a new source whose packaging habits I'm not familiar with, I tar tzvf it first.
The best explanation I've seen for the disparities within science is reasoning/mathematical ability. String theory () requires the most (all difficult math), experimental condensed matter requires much less.

By the way, I should have mentioned that these disparities exist after grad school, not among first year students. They appear after qualifying exams/coursework has weeded out the people who aren't super smart.

() I'm not a snobby string theorist, I do computational E&M. But string theorists are the smartest, for reasons I can explain another time.

As for hormones:

First, animals do have personalities, though they are different from humans.

Second, it doesn't need to bypass intelligence. Humans aren't computers with an "emotion" screensaver on the front. Humans make most decisions (partially) emotionally. Starting a business or choosing a field is not a purely rational decision, no matter what most business owners want to think.
Smug.
The site is (currently?) NSFW. And disgusting.
Assuming you know/represent your users, if you are building something just for yourself and don't care if someone else likes it, great. But if your goal is getting users to use something, build a company around it, ask them & follow them.

Assuming your most vocal users represent your average user or target audience, read this Guy Kawasaki's post http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=89088

Fear to question your old beliefs, think of the PayPal story. They originally thought they'll do payments through PDAs and put up the website as an afterthought. A week later they noticed everybody is using the website and almost no one is using the PDA software they wrote. They panicked and shutdown the website, until someone had the sense to say "if that is what our users want to use, lets let them", if they had insisted that PayPal only be used through PDAs you wouldn't have heard of them.
Or, like me, use the edge of your hand to press it :) (you know the little bone at the joint of the pinky with the rest of the palm? That's what I use to press the left Ctrl)
"US recession may be good for Indian IT"
Yes, it's misleading. It made it look like some stock in Trolltech is not part of the deal, like it's something other than an outright acquisition. Out of curiosity, I clicked, only to read that the real story is that (pending small details) Nokia is acquiring ALL of Trolltech for $153 million.

There's no "67%", no fractional stock purchase, no "$103 million".

The bad headline wasted my time.

Why not just keep the original article headline unless you're improving the accuracy?
Forget the A-List After All
Flying robot to track whales off Australia: report
Maybe in-between coding sessions...

Give yourself a little massage every now and then to relax the accumulated tension.
Zuckerburg has been pretty big on promoting favor towards facebook app's, so it's probably not as bad as cell phone development (I had a friend in the mobile games market, they just aren't as friendly as they should be).

Even if you don't get the same monetization, you're going to be able to get a lot more users by building into the biggest existing social network than having them switch/use a new one.

Even if you made 1/10th the amount of money, if you can get 10 times the users then you're still good.
It's not great, but there is both a 67% and a $103 million. 67% of people have agreed to sell their shares to nokia for a total of 103 million, so far.
reddit for ruby hackers
Interesting to see they had the same problems in using continuations that bit pg with news.yc; you garbage collect them too early and the links in someone's browser stops working, too late and your server exhausts memory. Plus, it's trivial to do a DoS; just act like a newly arrived visitor to the site so a new continuation get created for you. See sections 4 and 5 in the PDF.

I can't see a good way around this as long as the server keeps the continuations instead of offloading it to the client.
Firefox rises from ashes of abandoned Netscape
I don't fully understand the use of continuations in web applications yet, what are they being used for? Are they an alternative to using transaction id's (avoiding the duplicate submission of forms)? I am not sure, but maybe making everthing more RESTful could help? Or maybe not...
No, there's not even a 67%. There's a 66.43%, which is (1) an irrelevant detail; and (2) rounds down to 66% if you feel like rounding.

Search Google News for 'Trolltech'. There are dozens of examples of good, accurate headlines for this event from dozens of publications. None have the inaccurate figures or misleading implication of your headline.

Accurate headlines are about the nicest thing you can do for fellow readers.
But as I said before, why do you see it as a problem.

It's a problem only if there are women who WANT to be founders, but cannot.

Is the fact that fish don't have legs a 'problem'? Only if they long to have legs. (Please don't think I'm likening women to fish, but you get my point hopefuly).
"Victory goes to the organization that can put together the largest consortium of brains,"
For lack of statistics on the amount of people doing startups in mountain regions compared to seaside regions, no doubt...

I live nearby the mountains and I can tell you that people in the mountains have a very different culture from the people in the flatlands, or at least used to have. I am talking about the farmers - they have different problems to face in the mountains than in the flatlands. So I am sorry but yes, mountains control human personalities and culture.
There is science behind this -- and the article mentions it later -- but Walter Kirn is a fiction writer and essayist rather than science/feature reporter. So this is a narrative and meditation on the topic, rather than survey or policy paper.

I thought the characterization of extreme multitasking and availability as a sort of 'attention bubble' likely to pop was interesting.

Then again, I enjoyed Kirn's novel 'Up in the Air', as well as the movie adaptation of his novel 'Thumbsucker'. And another of his articles at Atlantic, 'Lost in the Meritocracy', is a vivid and cynical look at his Princeton years that could interest News.YCers... if they have the attention span. :)
Don't be a pedant.
New MySQL storage engine released to replace MyISAM
On the dangers of autoincrementing: SmugMug's private pics are public
Cloud computing - in your dreams
DEMO 2008 Companies Roundup
Facebook unleashes wave of new development with JavaScript client library
If you are interested, this is the film URL: http://www.helveticafilm.com/
At Yahoo, a need to hit refresh
Looks like their hype is ahead of their licenses -- this LATimes story notes that despite the impressions the company has given, the major labels do not seem to be on board:

http://www.latimes.com/business/la-fi-qtrax28jan28,1,257488....
Waiting for the OpenSocial hammer to drop
In some discussion group we just settled, we were asked to write down what would be the most important for us in our lives. And to our big surprise 90% youngsters in the group used the words "recognition" or "social recognition". There wasn't any significant discussion before that could have biased this informal survey. It was surprising enough to catch my attention.

20 years later, here is how I explain this to myself.
It is known for many years now that our brain has special centers responsible of fundamental drives in our behavior. These centers have been detected and localized by changes in people's behavior when altered by an accident or a disease. The drives are related to hunger, libido, aggressivity/love, etc.

Assuming that mankind is the product of an evolution driven by natural selection, the existence of such drive centers makes sense. It ensures perennity of our species from the biological and the physiological perspective. Maybe the social perspective did not get the same attention.

To me, the existence of a drive for social recognition would make sense because it pushes toward social coherence and cohesion and thus also to stability while being flexible enough to preserve the capability of our society to evolve and adapt to context changes.

This social recognition drive is thus equivalent to sexual drive, with all the possible related pathology. Social recognition compulsion can for instance lead to mythomania or eccentric behavior.

So my impression, if you allow me to push the logic to its extrema, social network sites are a variant of porn sites.
They just tickle the brain centers driving our behavior.

I would thus say that social networking is directly related to the social recognition drive which is itself a component to get a stable dynamic system. If this is true, animals would show the same fundamental drive, and why not, ETs too.
One of the best uses of them is simply to make things modal. Consider an example from news.yc. Suppose you aren't logged into the site and you click on an uparrow. What normally happens is you get redirected to the login screen, login and get redirected back and/or actually vote. The whole thing looks something like this in code...

check to see if logged in; if logged in allow vote, else force login with a redirect;

And then you have to start from scratch after the redirect.

With continuations you can do this TRANSPARENTLY like this:

check to see if logged in and if not save my spot in the submit_vote computation, and "push" the login page; login and resume from where the login page was "pushed," thereby voting without redirecting and without restarting the computation.
Jim Simons of Chern-Simons theory fame runs Renaissance Technologies, one of the top hedge funds.
Tips for Saving Your Job When Pinkslips Are the New Black
s/had to be rewritten/rewrote itself/

would be funnier.
Synergies do matter
LEGO Brick Timeline: 50 Years of Building Frenzy and Curiosities
(YC funded) Anywhere.fm bought by imeem
Anywhere.FM acquired by imeem
We are very excited to announce that Anywhere.FM has been acquired by
imeem (http://www.imeem.com), the leading social media network.

Since our launch last August, Anywhere.FM has been dedicated to making
it easy to upload, play, and share your music wherever you go. We have
listened to our users and worked hard to provide them with the best
music playback experience available on the Internet. The millions of
tracks that our users have uploaded to Anywhere.FM over the last 6
months prove to us that we have been successful in achieving this goal.

Today's announcement broadens the scope of Anywhere.FM's ambitions,
bringing us together with imeem, a social networking site with a
media-centric approach to connecting consumers. With imeem, users can
enjoy, recommend and discover not only music, but film, video, TV
programming and art, and connect with people who share similar tastes.

Anywhere.FM will continue to exist as a standalone site for our users to
enjoy. At the same time, we will bring many of the innovations of
Anywhere.FM to the imeem community as well as the broader internet
community in the near future. We'll also keep on innovating on the
Anywhere.FM website. We have some interesting ideas on how to best
leverage imeem's audience and media content to further enrich the
Anywhere.FM experience.

We hope you are as excited as we are about this acquisition. We have
lots in store for you - we'll be sure to keep you posted in the coming
months as we unveil our exciting plans.

Feel free to share your ideas and feedback with us at
feedback@anywhere.fm.

Sincerely,

Anson, Lux, and Sachin
The Anywhere.FM Team

http://www.anywhere.fm
Third Places
Looking for feedback on PlayForCleanWater.com
How do you like www.playforcleanwater.com?

I'm specifically looking for feedback on the site policy; is it too much information or is the transparency reassuring?
Also, I plan on adding more games later - any suggestions?
Lastly, where are some better places for PPC ads than Google?

Any and all comments welcome! Thanks for your time.
The thing you can do to make sure you're not caught in a cycle of pointless work is to release the product.

Stepping back a bit, another thing you can do is pick a market that (1) has a need and (2) is willing to pay for a solution. This works best for markets where you have personal and business connections to powerful people, but those can be built up over time. This is how much of the world's IT fortunes have been made, building a more efficient time clock or equities trading system or shipping logistics system. This is usually not something you can do with "innovative" consumer webapps because innovation targeting consumers generally implies letting people do something they didn't previously know they wanted to do.

If you're doing a pre-release consumer webapp, I think your best measure is how excited your team is about using the product. Sometimes this is hard to separate from excitement about building the product, but you should worry a lot if there aren't a few coworkers and friends who are totally in love with the product. Like, using-it-all-day-telling-all-their-friends in love.

You can take one spark of true love and work out a message that makes it grow. But you can't take a thousand gallons of "potentially interesting" and turn it into love without some significant new inspiration. And inspiration gets more and more difficult to add the more committed your team is to its existing product direction. Therefore it's very important to short-circuit this commitment by releasing early and making sure everybody knows that the measure of success is not lines of code, but attention and affection from users.
I don't have any experience in a startup, but just thinking on the problem leads me to believe that not releasing early would be a big contributor.

Seems to me that if you release early, you'll get more interesting[1] feedback while your app is in a nascent stage and you can more easily change direction.

[1] By interesting, I'm mean that the feedback on a more fully developed release is more likely to be of the window-dressing, change-this-font-to-helvetica-16 type, while feedback for the early release will often be directed at adding desirable features.
Production Languages and Toy Languages
Just weighing in here...

I'm never again considering what people say they want without a mountain of salt. All too often, what people say they want ends up not being used at all, not even by those who requested the change or addition. Users don't seem to be magically smarter than the developers in my experience. Design by committee has never worked so well for me. Especially in such a flexible medium as the internet.

But, releasing early is a good way to measure what people will actually use.
Way to go :D
Engineer unlocks Wii's hidden potential
The Davos question. What one thing must be done to make the world a better place in 2008?
Very true.

My technique these days is to find what the widespread masses will like and then work backwards until I find something that I will like too. At this rare intersection, I build.
Don't be a corporate programmer. They demand all of your creativity and trust none of your judgment.
"Powerful" is another word for "Useless and dangerous"
Thanks - I have to admit, that is pretty neat ;-)
Podcast: Showdown on 'creative capitalism'
News.com writers argue for and against Bill Gates' call for more corporate social responsibility.
"What causes startups to NOT build something users want?"

Not having a customer.

I cannot overstate this enough because it's the easiest mistake to make and I've already made it more than once.

It's so easy to say, "This is so cool!" or "I can do that!"

And then, "Who WOULDN'T want it?"

As it turns out, there's a very real possibility (even probability) that no one would want what you think is cool.

Having a customer, OTOH, changes everything. They're way too busy doing their jobs to ponder what's cool. They just want solutions to their problems. And they'll tell you. Especially if you are receptive or know how to ask.

Most of the times customers told me what they needed, I probably never would have thought of it on my own. And, invariably, those were the things that ended up being closest to what other people wanted, too.
Labels deny deals on file sharing
Three major record labels have denied signing deals allowing their music to feature on a new file-sharing service offering unlimited free downloads.
Clearly downvote is now working. ;)
2007's best selling game revealed
First-person-shooter Call of Duty 4 was last year's biggest selling game, according to sales figures.
Congratulations :)
Politics 'stifling $100 laptop'
EBay sees chief executive resign
Japan looks to step beyond HD
A lot of good points in that, some of which I am definately going to take on board.
I am not so sure this reasoning will hold given the highly price elastic nature of the demand for IT. In other words, will US companies look to spend as much on IT in a recession?
I wonder how well it'd go over to attend a 4 month long entrepreneurship seminar in Boston. I also wonder how they define 'working in the US'. If my start up is incorporated in Canada, can they stop me from working on it while I'm visiting the US?
Hopefully, never. It was funny. If you're a Lisper who is offended, you are taking yourself way too seriously.
Is Google Evil?
this is a virus my antivirus pops up do not click on this link!!
It's a page fulla links. Couldn't they make it more, I don't know, _usable_?
Airbus A380 - cockpit
What a disruptive post.

Looks like the marketing department has their own PHBs.
The billion-dollar switch
Bit of a slam on Viaweb and lisp here, but well meaning and has a point worth considering. The wrong abstraction or fantastically efficient highly optimized (and, er, undocumented) DSL, that only one person in the world can work with, perhaps should be considered a prototype rather than an application.
Watch any good movie with the devil, he always presents himself as a really nice guy with just a really great deal for the world. Not that I'm going to stop using gmail or anything.
Cool. What is your next startup?
Anyone who trashes SICP can probably safely be ignored. See Norvig's review of SICP here (http://www.amazon.com/review/R403HR4VL71K8/ref=cm_cr_rdp_per...) for an explanation of why people either love it or hate it.
I tend to use a left-to-right multiplication method, mentally.

So 26 x 31 becomes

20 x 31 = 620
6 x 31 = 186
620 + 186 = 806

Anyone else do that?
A clever title for the Language War post of the week.
after rereading what I posted, I'm just glad you understood it. :)
the feeling of charity

Exhibitionism as charity? That's a new one.
I don't think he trashed SICP.
I submit very few links on ynews, so when I do, I like to make sure they're *extra* good.
awesome news - congrats to the team! An excellent partner in imeem, and a quick turnaround on build, launch, sell.
way to go gents