skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Not necessarily more centrist, but probably more idiosyncratic. The benefit of approval voting is that you aren't disincentivized from voting for candidates whom you like but think can't win.
The author of this article missed a couple of school years apparently, because she doesn't quite know what she's doing. Someone who supports Ron Paul is not a neoconservative by any means. Why shouldn't there be a Republican response to MoveOn.org, and why is that inherently bad? What's wrong with looking into artificial intelligence?

The author obviously has never stepped into a science class, because she says "he calls the real world 'nature'" as if it's not true. Hello, this is nature just as trees are-- it's an eventual result of natural things. There is nothing in the world at this point that is not "natural."

I expected better of the Guardian.
After a year of Ruby programming I am in the middle of learning Python. The language part seems very easy (the "mechanics" of programming process) but "thinking in Python" part suggests that Ruby is a significantly higher level language. Once I will have spent some more time with Python I may realize I was wrong.

Why switch, you ask? Well, I am not switching, it's just another project where quality of language implementation matters, one area Ruby can't be proud of.
"Slightly unhinged" comes to mind. Ruby and Python are both good. I actually started using Python about 9 years ago, but... I got kind of tired of it for some reason. Not that it's bad, but I happen to like Ruby a bit more. Entirely subjective though, and I'm not going to try to rationalize it, even though I think there are some good reasons to prefer Ruby in some situations.
New strategy for potential HIV vaccine
.oO(who the heck voted that down?! )
I had this idea several years ago. I gave up on it due to the possible legal implications.
"... After exiting my first startup and coming out on top ($60K), I feel like I can't think of any more ideas for my next startup. I've read all of PG (yes, even the ideas one), analyzed other startups, but am sick of seeing the same ol' stuff... Can someone help me out with what to do next? ..."

There are some good resources for the "no-ideas" problem. Listen to this [0], then read this [1]. See how you go. If you still have trouble you are probably not determined enough.

[0] http://wiki.ycombinator.com.nyud.net:8090/presentations/Paul...

[1] http://www.paulgraham.com/ideas.html
Performance improvements in Firefox 3.0b4
Sounds like the beginnings of a summary for SqueezedBooks.com :-)
...and what would those be?
http://www.myplaylist.biz/music/watch-now.php?ref=9872
klf playlist.
congrats ethan & daniel!
Windows Programmers Shifting to the Mac?
People are the Problem, not Operator Overloading
Last I heard, half the YC startups succeed, with the other half flaking out due to some avoidable flaw (or, a very small percentage like Kiko, just plain unluck).
defamation, libel
Absolutely. Also, we weren't so willing to give up our privacy online up to 4/5 years ago.
Pushing Paper Out the Door
You are comparing apples to oranges.

Becoming partner at a large firm is like working up to VP at an established tech company.

Starting your own law firm that specializes in class action law suits - that's a lot more like a startup.
Roughly half of the first batch succeeded.

I believe about a quarter of the second batch have gotten there, likewise for third and fourth batches (though it's not as obvious the later you get, as they haven't had as much time).

One could argue that YC acceptance or receiving some level of funding is akin to being accepted into law school: Your odds of success go up, but neither is a guarantee. I've known people who went to law school but failed to make it through or failed to pass the bar. Investing time in a startup is a similar risk, I think.
I had really high math scores (aced it on ACT, close on SAT) but to answer your question, they're both two sides of the same coin. I'll probably address it in a post on the poker blog as that's the most common question I get asked by hackers (less common but still there amongst others).

The short version is that the two are highly interrelated. Math helps you make the right play given the information you have, reading gives you more information with which to use math and come up with the right play.

And I mean reading more in terms of reverse engineering someone's range of holdings from their actions rather than tells. Tells certainly exist, and have the same effect when you spot one, but they're highly romanticized in movies, etc. Once you get past the lower limits they become fairly rare.
Hecl
Biographicon's interface is just plain slick.

I see the site being popular for people who care about celebrities.
Too bad its not a more attractive building, given the very high construction cost. I would definitely have used a more dramatic approach to the southern glass shading rather than the very small and very ineffective light shelfs they use.
Nothing like Scheme with flat files to make a web app :) (Why use a db when you don't have too?)
DVORAK is remarkably easy to learn, all things considered. I just started today after checking out jmilton's links, and while the going is a bit slow, it's not as bad as I expected. I'm not sure yet if it will really be beneficial, but I figure I'll give it a shot for two reasons:

1. I like to challenge myself. I'm currently learning to play Guitar Hero left-handed, and it's been interesting. This is along those same lines, but it might actually benefit me.

2. It will be fun to mess with my friends when they try to use my computer.

In my limited usage so far, yes, the typing is slow. It's really frustrating that I can no longer type as fast as I can think. The hardest thing, however, seems to be re-learning applications' keyboard shortcuts. If Firefox and GMail is hard, what's vim going to be like?

(This message was typed using DVORAK.)
This is why C++ is so great for big projects. You start to run into many cases where overloading operators is the only natural thing to do, and almost all of the semantic information (type, constness, etc.) is kept track of for you so if someone later comes and tries to modify a const parameter in some method, for example, the error is caught in compile-time! Sure, it takes a lot more code than Python or Ruby or PHP, but it definitely has its advantages.
The Startup equation...
Craigslist is such a gamble. I've found that it's been mostly a waste of time. The way, IMO, to successfully use CL is to use an RSS reader that allows you to define "watches"/"alerts" (like FeedDemon). Create watches for the popular terms you are looking for and then subscribe to CL's resumes board's RSS feed. The more specific you are about the terms you want, the less clutter you'll go through. Putting a watch on "Windows XP" will get you nowhere; putting a watch on "Windows 2008" will find you an early adopter, for example.
disambiguation pages of course!
"I fucking learned it in four hours."

Well I hate python, I wish it dies, but honestly I believe with the right documentation, you can learn right about any language in 4 hours, except maybe MDX you will need 8, but thats because MDX is stupid, like most the OLAP stuff.

Good porgramming languages book are rare, if they ever exist.

Finally, I believe in Perl, Perl is the language of choice for the discriminating hacker, lets wish for Zed to finally realize it!
It's undeniably the hot trend if you're a responsive and loving site curator. :)

Then again I'm biased since I have a user feedback focused startup and we're hoping to be putting those tabs on a lot of people's websites.

example.uservoice.com
Lets just give polls a go and see what happens. It won't be too much trouble to remove them again if they turn out to be a force for evil.
State of the (social) news
I think the comments so far in this discussion are misguided in attributing the good school performance of Finnish pupils to some character trait of Finns. That's like saying blacks in America do worse in school because of black culture.

Finland has a great educational system. It's that simple. And that hard too. It takes decades to create a good educational system, and you can't do it with handing out more money or new laws.
Raising capital in rough economic times
Poll: Do you lurk or do you post?
Curious about the ratio here, and the poll mechanism seemed like a good way to get an estimate. Wouldn't want to force lurkers to actually say something...
Lurker
Where start-ups go to get a leg up
It's interesting to consider which US elections would have had a different outcome with approval voting. Certainly the 2000 election. People could have voted both for Nader and Gore, which would have tipped Gore over the edge.

How about 1992? Could Bush have won if angry republicans would have a chance to vent their anger by also voting for Perot? Or might Perot have won since voting for a 3rd party candidate wouldn't feel like a lost vote.

To demonstrate the problem with approval voting (all voting systems have problems, as was proven by Kenneth Arrow in 1951): if Obama, Clinton and McCain would all run, McCain would probably win, even if a majority of voters preferred either Democrat.

So, approval voting should allow fair elections with more than two candidates, but in practice it doesn't, because people vote strategically.
FWIW, this is how I separate out the two. Only internal links: http://hystry.com/newsyc/follow/?ask

Only external links:
http://hystry.com/newsyc/follow/?-ask
Very cool. I'm interested to know if the print version has any photos. Anyone have access to the Mercury News?
Pricey, impractical and very desirable
What if we had polls, but with user submitted answers, that could then be voted on?

I'm a little out of it right now, mostly from lack of sleep, but it seems like an interesting concept to me.
That is funny. Even so, what's wrong with that? <sarcasm>
Do we need a sophisticated theory to describe "herd behavior"? And does it really challenge the "efficient markets" theory? I would say that an individual is making a _rational_ decision even if it is based on the behavior of others. I see that as valuable information before making a decision. If I understood it correctly, the author sees it as irrational.
That makes me sad. Any easy way to make poll choices exclusive? Or toss the multi-voters?
Okay, notice I'm saying "great business", not "startup." There are millions of "startups" working on cool technical challenges, of which almost none will become great businesses.

When all those things you described were happening, almost nobody cared = no business. When they turned to meet needs of a much broader audience then the few technical people who were interested in such a narrow range of issues, they took off as businesses. In my mind, "startup" does not equal a business. Business means lots of people pay you money for selling them your thing. So to a limited extent, for example, Woz had a "business" selling computers through ads to computer enthusiasts in the back fo Scientific American or whatever. But that was nowhere near as successful a business as when Jobs visited PARC and realized the research they were doing on GUIs based on the human mind could be significant for a lot of people.

The Yahoo folks may have started with a list specific to their interests, and students may have found it cool, but that was not a business. It became a business when they broadened to general idea of an organized list to the needs of a larger audience.

I've come across quite a few programmers over the last year who turned me down because they said they were busy working on their own startups, all of which were based on solving a problem only they seemed to care about. They incorporated, had a "company", etc.

But that doesn't equal business. Business means people pay you money. For that to happen you have to broaden your considerations to what those people want, not what you care to/can build. I won't, nor will anybody pay any of your startups a penny because somebody wrote really cool code that everyone on Hacker News agrees is awesome. But I'll pay you money if your code solves my needs. You don't care to solve my needs? Fine. You may have a technically awesome thing. I won't pay you for it, though. And neither will anyone else.
I think what we're seeing a few hours later is the success of the polling feature - the poll on gender has (at the time of writing this) 155 votes, but only 8 points - it has barely stayed on the front page. So while a poll doesn't add a huge amount to the community, the way people upvote polls reflects this if and only if the polling is separate from the frontpage upvote.
I don't see how most of your post has anything to do with what this post is about.

This post is not about a "pithy homily". It's not intended to "inspire" anybody with platitudes. This is about understanding the underlying reality of what makes people care enough about your "experiment" to pay you money for it.

I was under the impression that people here were starting startups in the hope they they may one day become successful businesses. To make that transition all the questions above need to be answered. I thought that might be relevant to some people as being able to answer all those questions is something lots of startups, Y-related or not, have trouble answering.

> The point of a scrappy startup tends to be that of
> experimentation, not a sophistacated execution of a great idea.

Well, that may be the point of your startup, but this post was for people who want their startups to be about good enough execution of an idea that paying customers think is great.

That translates into financial transaction which translates into a functional business.

Experimentation should be the points of students still in school, major corporations with money to support it, and people who are tinkering while having another source of income. If you quit all that and "dropped out" of the system to start a business, well, the only point is to figure out how to start making money. Especially over the next 4-5 years.

To the extent the tinkering strays away from that and becomes absorbed in itself for its own ends, you'll wind up with an interesting experiment, not a startup that becomes a business.

That's not me "attacking" the delicate egos of any programmers, that's cold, hard economic reality. Whine if you wish but people still won't hand over their increasingly scarce money to you as long as you pout instead of figuring out how to answer all the above questions.
Not to mention that even an informal business plan forces you to do away with your own fluff and focus on stone-cold reality that will not go away until you address the questions it poses.
Edible User Interfaces
Why I'm Fed Up with TED
Okay, let's review reality. This "bored developer" is apparently not PG. So PG's opinions/thoughts are not relevant here, since obviously this particular "bored developer" is straying from that view. For example, PG said you don't even really need a good idea - just get started. But this "bored developer" apparently can't start without the good idea, so he apparently is experiencing a different reality at the moment than PG.

Seriously what does my response to "bored developer" have to do whith what PG says/thinks/does/where he goes on vacation? If PG writes an essay that says he thinks oxygen is useless and somebody next to you has an asthma attack, are you going to turn around to them and tell them, "Well, didn't you read PG's latest essay where he tells you he thinks oxygen isn't that important?"
Nice article, but by his standards it was somewhat boring :-)
Couldn't agree more.

Zed hits the nail on the head when he highlights the passion for Ruby among new programmers. I just started working with Rails, and everyone I've been learning from is infatuated with Ruby (and Rails, to some extent).
"Just a guy in a garage" is now at #8. "When Gravity and Dinosaurs Unite" tops the leaderboard ( http://www.netflixprize.com/leaderboard ), above BellKor (the progress prize winner of 2007).
> Trying to create some kind of voting mechanism to supersede them is like trying to beat a market economy with a planned one.

HUH??? I'm not sure what this has to do with planned economies and such, but if you put it that way, I see it as exactly the opposite. People who he talks about are hard to get to by design - mostly by the design of their administrative assistants. On the other hand, tons of people voting your idea up is by definition the very essence of a market-based decision-making system.

In the spirit of your reply, I'll give it a go now: "Disagreeing with me is like trying to replace the Constitution with the manual for your DVD player."
Jaanix feature - push to Twitter
The Entire Communications Industry, in Less than 200 Pages
Why no product companies in India?
My understanding of Google may not be accurate, but my understanding of why people hand their money over to Google is probably as accurate as it is possible to be.

Misunderstandings of any details you have in mind aside, in general Google too fits into the general idea: before Google started thinking about how to channel its technology to meet the needs of people with money, it was an interesting startup, but not a great business. The second it took the needs of customers with money into account, then those people handed over their money and that made Google a great business.

My point is that in my mind there is a simple distinction that most startups seem to either accidentally or purposely ignore: startup = bunch of guys working on a cool technical thing / business = bunch of guys working on a thing that makes life better for paying customers.

Having not seen Benny Hill since childhood, I assumed that the reason people were starting startups were to transition to businesses which made life better for paying customers.

Apparently I was wrong. People here, for the most part, as well as just about every programmer I've run into over the last year or so trying to start my own thing, seem to be more interested in starting a startup so they could post "Hey guys, check out my cool thing" type of posts.

I don't know where I'm going wrong here, but unless somebody finds a way to transform positive feedback from Hacker News into cold hard cash, that's not a business. At least not IMHO.

But judging by the feedback I get on other posts, not too many people seem to care about starting a business, just starting "startups" where "startup" = somebody pays me money to sit around writing code and drinking Mountain Dew.

I can't see how that's different from a job where you happen to be working on a cool project.
Lol, have you ever _read_ a submitted business plan? In my experience, most business plans are exactly the opposite: focus on fluff.
Presumably many lurkers don't have accounts thus won't vote in your poll...
I think that we should argue between ourselves in a long thread... starting now. So far, I have the last word!
How could that possibly be when this post comes after yours?
I was wondering the same thing. If he was near me, I could turn him on to about 8 years worth of code that needs to be done in the next 3 months.

<comes up for oxygen>

13 hours later, he hasn't answered. Either he's not serious, he got hit by a bus, or your question got buried in the noise in this thread.
Uh ... not sure what business plans your talking about, but I would take the worst business plan any VC gets and wager that more people would pay money for whatever it describes, however poorly, then stuff that most programmers put up on the web with a "me and all my programmer friends think it's cool, so give me your money, how about it?" approach ...
Elitism? In my America? No...
Your description of "the honor among poker players" reminds me of the diamond merchants in NYC. Millions of dollars moved around in people's pockets based on honor only (sometimes not even a handshake i.e. a man and a woman). No one breaks the honor or they're shunned for life.

Sometimes the same thing with friends and family. I've had bankers try to make me do yoga on a thimble for a lousy $10K while friends (or even friends of friends) say, "How much do you want. I'll write you a check. I know you'll do the right thing."

Funny how far you're reputation will take you. Sometimes, that's all you got.
I have users who would request a report with the names of all lurkers who have not registered.

(I tell them 6 months & $100K and they say never mind.)
Limited seating arrangements? In my America? No...
Poll: Where do you assemble your on-the-fly HTML?
On the server, in your chosen language, with access to your data base.

PROS: Complete control, one version

CONS: Have to make a round trip to change it on-the-fly, lots of data sent down the line, more load on server

On the client, using Javascript:

PROS: Much less data needs to be sent, can modify appearance without a round trip

CONS: Need to preload a lot of Javascript, unknown machine and resources, may actually be slower

What am I missing?
On the server, to be delivered to the client.
On the client, using Javascript.
Other (see my comment below)
The Finnish scores are not very high when compared to, eg, Minnesota.
Was any Paul around here invited ?
I have enjoyed all of Harry Beckwith's books. Short, to the point, all the stuff that goes without saying but worth another read anyway. "What Clients Love" is also very good.

"I'd be willing to bet next week's beer money most people never think it through"

Are you a heavy drinker? If so, one of us can set up a poll while you get out your checkbook.
It certainly does not challenge the "efficient markets" hypothesis. The hypothesis of EMH is that investors are attempting to maximize their profits, and all have the same information.

The housing bubble was driven by various players with incomplete information and irrational behavior:

1. Idiot homeowners: "Buying a home is the American Dream and house prices will never go down because everyone needs to live somewhere." These people are making an emotional purchase, not an investment. A conversation I had with such a person:

Me: You just left your wife. You plan to leave your job. In the next 3 years, you will probably leave the state, possibly the country. And the housing bubble just burst. WTF?

Him: Without owning a home, I feel rootless. I need to buy a 3 bedroom house in suburbia. It's a good investment!

2. Investment banks were mislead by mortgage issuers. If an investment bank is buying the loan, the mortgage issuer had less incentive to make sure it would be repaid. So the issuers slacked off. This means that there was a major asymmetry of information, violating the premises of EMH.
How do women named Steve affect this hypothesis?
you thought up wikipedia several years ago? should have went for it. aaron swartz did. twice.
GWT falls under your 2nd option, but avoids some of those CONS. It sends a small amount of javascript to bootstrap the process and determine what browser you are using. It then makes a round trip to obtain the rest of your code specific to the clients browser. This avoids sending unnecessary code for other browsers and cuts down on the need to preload a lot of javascript.
Publisher experiments with free online books
The influx of speculative capital into the commodities market is playing havoc with production networks in Africa and Asia. The subprime crisis was clearly happening as early as 2005: look at when Soros started betting against the USD.

When people say "efficient markets" they usually mean "efficient at not sucking" and/or "efficient at producing socially optimal outcomes". It is usually considered self-explanatory that people act in what they perceive to be their self-interest.
The best hacker I ever collaborated with was a woman. Best at analysis and project management, too. She forgot more than most people we dealt with ever knew. I think she got so tired of being called "Honey" that she folded up her tent and is now selling bagels or cars or something like that. What a shame. Patricia, if you're reading this, email me!
C/C++
5 points

Wow. I'm maintaining a math-heavy desktop app in C++ and it's killing me with its ponderousness. Who the eff is using C++ for web development?