skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
you could try 37signals board or maybe krop(more designer related)

or good ole craigslist, but i'd recommend asking their level of .net experience and wait for WIDE range of people.
great link thanks, vocab changed!
But what if society would be worse off both with a law enforced less and enforced more? Do we have some sort of legal structure for a sort of "optimum statistical enforcement?" Something where someone can be "10% guilty" and pay a 10% fine, or where a certain "penalty" can only be assessed in favor of a given party N times per year, etc. etc.?
paypal is always an option, but after transferring money twice it is basically pointless
I've got 5 invites. Email me your YC username if you want one. altano gmail com.
Haskell for hydraulic hybrid vehicle systems
If FreeBSD would support Xen I'm sure they would be happy to oblige.
The basic point, as far as I can tell, is to decentralize regular data--that is, instead of having to go to eBay to list an item for sale, you list it on your page, and eBay simply spiders it, picks it up as "for sale", and lists it. Instead of keeping your own private database, you'd basically be using the entire Internet as your dataset.

Any uses I thought of except that one were just as easily accomplished by having a public API to your web application, which nearly serves the same purpose. The only difference is that the semantic markup formats are "true standards" for accessing the data thus contained, rather than ad-hoc specifying one for every application you create.
US patent backlog
Running a myspace/facebook "list of facts/preferences" style profile on your own webserver, that is spidered by someone like Google, and becomes queryable in the same manner as it is on those sites. You could even have a cryptographically signed token from some trusted entity that verifies that you legitimately have a particular .edu email address embedded as a semantic element on your page, and could use a spider service from google to collect comments made from your "friends" to put on your "wall", verifying their identity without them having to log on to your site. The one thing you can't handle under this scheme is varying privacy levels.
I think the point was that the motivation was of avoiding the "traumatic humiliation." Obviously, though, you have to figure out "who can take it" to set a few examples for the rest, perhaps even briefing those people in advance.
'No health benefit' from prayer
when someone like DHH expresses a strong opinion

It's not a strong opinion. He's saying something stupid and stupidly arrogant:

I would have a hard time imagining hiring a programmer who was still on Windows for 37signals. If you don't care enough about your tools to get the best, your burden of proof just got a lot heavier.

Whatever. I could find you some old fogeys who wouldn't hire you because you didn't love OpenVMS, and Richard Stallman himself doomed us all to using Unix instead of VMS, which he prefered, because of political constraints. Is DHH using OpenVMS? No? Then he's not using the best tools, and he should seriously consider firing his stupid ass.

That he thinks that ability really corresponds to making the polically correct choice in OSes really says more about his hangups than his discernment. As for OSX, it frankly strikes me as the Disney Corp. of the OS world. But that's just my stupid opinion, and I wouldn't hit someone over the head with it.

I code on Windows, and deploy to Linux and have never noticed any differences besides file path names and a mysteriously superior performance of MySQL on linux. Hey--I know linux in and out----why am I not using it for a desktop machine? Because Windows is better at that.
I like this and I think it is a good idea...

...but how will the homeless people check their messages? How is this better than a homeless applicant getting a pay-as-you-go phone to get a job?

I understand that the go-phones are not free, but there is no contract or long term commitment, and that way they will actually have a way to get to their voice mail.

This reminds me of a story a little while back about a man who voluntarily limited himself to $25 and the clothes on his back, worked his way to an apartment, a truck, and a decent amount of savings in less than a year.

Congratulations Google et. all. I hope this project works out well.
There is a engineering release of the Linux Air release! A friend forwarded me the limited release announcement. But, I'm not sure how'd you get a copy?

http://timony.com/mickzblog/2008/02/16/adobe-air-for-linux/

"Q: Is this a public announcement?
A: No. This announcement is intended only for Adobe prerelease members.

Q: What exactly are you announcing?
A: We have posted the first engineering builds of the Adobe AIR runtime installer and SDK for Linux. In addition, we have posted several applications. You should consider these builds only alpha quality.

Q: Is the AIR on Linux feature complete?
A: No, please see the release notes for what’s currently not implemented. For example, key features such as printing, hardware acceleration, badge installation, keyboard accelerators and screen API’s are not yet completed. For a complete list, please see the release notes ... "
unimpressed. nothing has changed in 16 months.
It implies 49k premoney. Person who put 1k in would then own 1/50th of the resulting shares.
Been playing around with the new AIR / EXT app, "Simple Tasks v2"

http://extjs.com/blog/2008/02/24/tasks2/

pretty sexy stuff!
Gmail is clearly a success. I just find it disingenuous to act like it did to Yahoo what Windows did to Mac.
Not true. They removed some features.
I hear they're working on a new logo:
http://www.boingboing.net/2008/02/27/new-obama-campaign-l.ht...
This is one of those studies that starts with a conclusion and then looks for evidence to validate itself. Usually, you see this type of tripe in support of religions. It's sad that the logic gap is pretty wide on the other side as well.

The placebo effect would suggest that even if prayer did nothing, some people should actually have some recognizable benefits directly from it and it alone. Even discounting the deities being prayed to; to suggest that there is "no benefit" from prayer is suggesting that the placebo effect is false.

Clearly, you aren't proving that with 150 people and a TV show. This is junk science of the highest order.
Nice article about an interesting person. Inventive, full of energy; qualities I wish I had. It's interesting to see how she started as a software engineer (like me) and ended up as a VP. I can't see myself making that same jump although it's interesting to see how someone else did.

Wish I was smart enough to go to Stanford.
Wasn't there one that was putting in a PPP client as a firefox extension?

What ever happened to them?
Ask YC: Best first functional programming language?
I've suddenly found myself reading about many different functional languages in the past weeks, but alas, I never learned anything about them. I studied engineering as an undergraduate and now as a graduate student in applied math, functional programming just isn't something that has come up in normal coursework etc.

I read through Paul Graham's bayesian spam filtering as a curiosity and became frustrated that I didn't know lisp to figure out his algorithm, which turns out to be incredibly simple. Of course, in the perusing of his site i've his new functional language arc, and then stumbled onto this news site, which I now read more than slashdot (the horror!). So the question I pose to all you intrepid functional programmers on this site:

What functional language should I learn first?

As I study math, something that can be used for math would be good, but not necessary. Any books that I can get at the university library on the language you recommend would also be appreciated in your recommendation.

quicknote: I wanted to try to do some of projecteuler.net's challenges in a functional style instead of my normal python/matlab iterative approach. Its a cool site btw. You should check it out.
She doesn't redefine language, this is the meaning she has always understood. And it is different from your and my meaning, but still very close and human. Autism may ultimately help us understand ourselves.
Its been great!
You may want to finish reading the article...because right now I'm finding myself thinking "He's stupid". :-)
Does your business model break down as fast as the personal grooming theme in the post? :-)

Just kidding... it had me going and then I was left hanging after the flossing. Good luck to you.
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If Kurzweil is right about even a fraction of the stuff he says, I'm fairly certain he'll prove to be an exceptionally important thinker. Unfortunately, I have serious doubts about almost everything the man says. He often seems to me to be taking the canned shot approach to writing: predict as many big things as possible and support them all as best he can, and see what hits.

In other news, this reminded me a post I saw a few years ago: http://d-squareddigest.blogspot.com/2005/09/most-important-w...

"As the American economist Tyler Cowen points out, loony extropian and transhuman nanotechnoartificiallinteligenceoboosterist Ray Kurzweil is, because of his wild technoutopian prophesies, "the most important thinker today, if only in expected value terms".

Or at least he was, until this morning when while having my breakfast, I made the following prediction:

"Everything that Ray Kurzweil says will come true, and not only that but we will all get a pony"."
While you do have a point that language is only of communicative value if the shared terms are common, I'm just enough of a fan of Charles Taylor and his ilk to argue that communication isn't languages only function. It has deep importance for identity, if nothing else. The simple act of self-expression is significant for non-communicative reasons in that it helps us define for ourselves who we are.

That being said, I got the impression from the article that these videos are, in part, her attempt to translate her "native language" into English, rather than to talk through the use of her text-to-speech program. After all, all but the rarest of individuals thinks and expresses best in their native language.
I'm on your site, and read that section, and it does not tell me what the difference between a 5 and a 15 is. If you want users, don't make them read the paper itself to find out. In other words, it's not obvious what units the numbers are in.

Edit:

Tried reading paper. Still not sure. It looks like you picked an equation that divides the scores into 6 sections. the top one being 15-90 and the rest much smaller ranges. i don't understand why that division maps to "high impact" etc terms, nor still precisely what that is supposed to mean. but there's a footnote:

http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/full/319/5865/948?ijke...

17. Materials and methods are available as supporting material on Science Online.

in those materials, i find a chart saying the top section means > 90% degraded ocean. so ... does that mean 90% of the water there has turned to sludge? 90% of the animals are dead? something like that? if so, that's plenty easy to understand and could be made more prominent.
Ask YC: Best undergraduate college for hopeful startup entrepeneurs
I am a Junior in high school and am wondering which college would be the best for an aspiring start up entrepreneur. Also is a computer science or business degree recommended?
Okay, now THAT is mind-blowing. I can't even wrap my mind around some of the distances in our own solar system, much less something 270 million light years across. Maybe I wasn't cut out to be an astrophysicist?
Ask News.YC: Conservation of Pulse - Local Causality - Save The Galaxy
OK, weird post. So I went to the Sunnyvale Fry's the other day and noticed for the first time that on the walls of the interior cafe, near the ceiling, this phrase was written:

"Conservation of Pulse - Local Causality - Save The Galaxy"

I did a Google search and found out that there's basically no info on the Web about it. Does anyone know what this means, or what it refers to?!
//My first Maroon program
Make me a "Hello, World!" program, written in Maroon.
Something involving the pulsating light on the front of a MacBook Pro will be caused by something else nearby, thereby saving the galaxy.

Simple.
Stanford.

Computer Science.

Good luck.
I would suggest joel Spolsky's book on hiring tech folks. He mentions several methods and, although i"m only on page 30, (1) I like Joel's style/approach to most things, and (2) the first 30 pages made sense to me. it's called "Smart and Gets Things Done"
i love this company
It's been tried before:

http://www.qwantz.com/archive/001004.html

Fortunately "Project CARE" is a much better name. Sorry t-rex.
I think it looks interesting and I will be giving it a trial starting sometime next week.

One potential indicator for future acceptance of this technology is the number of books scheduled for release during 2008 featuring Adobe Air - just take a look at the Amazon list. While certainly not a foolproof indicator it does show just how many authors and publishers are prepared to bet something on future take-up.
Harvard. Bill Gates, Steve Ballmer, Mark Zuckerberg.
That's a good point. Which is why, if autistic people can't score well on tests aimed at people who process the world in a non autistic manner, the autistic people should be considered retarded. The article seems to have completely missed this; instead of defining intelligence as generally quick and precise thinking, it should be defined in terms of ability to communicate with normal people. I think this would eliminate a lot of confusion on the part of us normal people and make the world easier to understand.
I know linux in and out----why am I not using it for a desktop machine? Because Windows is better at that.

So many people, so many opinions. :-) I have to build software for deployment on Windows (stupid day job) but I code it on Linux because Linux desktop is so much better in every respect: starting from fantastic font rendering, superior window management with virtual desktops and configurable hotkeys for everything (critical for laptops). Even windows networking over Samba works MUCH faster than native junk built into XP.

I completely agree with DHH: there must be reasons for people voluntarily crippling themselves. And those reasons are serious enough to not give those people a job.

And no, there aren't any "hidden strengths" of Windows that Atwood is talking about, I've spent all my life on this platform: it was cool in late 90s because it was a fully preemptive multi-tasking OS that ran easily on early Pentiums with 8MB of RAM. It's not so cool now, when there is only one software vendor left who makes anything worth running on it.
Go to your (local) user groups where your flavour of developers like to hang out. You immediately get a feel of who you would like and what their availability is like.
Whichever college allows YOU to grow creatively, socially, and intellectually. This college is not necessarily Harvard, Stanford, UCLA, or Somestate University.

As far as a degree, whichever you enjoy the most. Don't focus on the product; rather, HOW you reach it.
Gates and Ballmer are part of the same good fortune, and I wouldn't be so quick to throw accolades on Zuckerburg.

That being said, Harvard is probably a pretty good place to be.
IT Security Skills Falling Short
if it wasn't consumer related i'd be interested
> I don't know what was more surprising, that she is a geek with style or an American with same.

Offhand comments like that are annoying on several different levels.
Hrm. Site's down...
Exhibition rooted in search engine
Such distances are beyond intuition, but I doubt it's something you can't do. You can just imagine yourself walking to a park, just really far away, and you travel really fast. Speaking of which, many people use this "pea in a football field" analogy when talking about electron orbits, but I'm guessing that few if any people can actually visualize such a thing.
Curi, thanks for the helpful advice. I'll update the page to clarify the process and what the numbers mean. The numbers themselves are unitless; they represent the cumulative impact level from all threats combined.

What degradation means and how it effects our map should be illustrated, likely in a simple conceptual diagram showing how the color classification maps onto coral states.
We currently use Jotspot for a wiki and bug tracking. It was the best solution out of products we tested and it was free. Now they have removed so many features (from looking at the screen shots). I hope the Bug Reporter is in the new version!
From what I recall, Stanford accepts roughly 1% of applicants to the Computer Science program, compared with just over 10% for the University as a whole, making it one of the most competitive programs in the nation.

On a side note, my alma mater, the University of Southern California, accepts roughly 25% of students as a whole, and a slightly lower percentage of computer science students (though I can't find specific numbers).

I can't speak to knowing a large volume of entrepreneurs at USC, but I do know a few. The school itself has been making an impressive dedication to increasing entrepreneurship, however, especially in the Viterbi school of engineering. Mark Stevens, of Sequoia, recently funded a center for technology commercialization designed to help students build businesses out of research projects, and there are several student groups devoted to similar pursuits.

Los Angeles is also not the valley, but it turns out that it is a decent alternative, I would say at least as much so as any other major city in the U.S.

I'm not saying you should go to USC necessarily, but I enjoyed myself while I was there. One thing is certain, though, it is very different from Stanford.
Homeless Blogging: Blogging From the Comments Sections of Other People's Sites
It's probably just a meme of some sort, but might very well be an Alternate Reality Game. If the same thing shows up anywhere else, I would ask around here: http://forums.unfiction.com/forums/
Hype aside, he has an interesting approach to invention. He planned on launching a tool to help blind people read. It is a digital camera with a tiny computer. During development, people worked on algorithms on PCs knowing they would be deployed on a portable device not yet available. There is some use to plotting technological growth trends.

I think Cowen's comment is a bit tongue-in-cheek.
Erlang's pretty good, because it's quite practical - you can do cool real-world things with it.
is this ironic?
Stanford / Harvard / MIT. I'd give the edge to Stanford because it's in the middle of entrepreneur heaven. You could also major in Symbolic Systems instead of CS.
...A not-so-subtle way to make one look "wise" without an accountable response. Not useful.
Looks better in links. :)
"This reminds me of a story a little while back about a man who voluntarily limited himself to $25 and the clothes on his back, worked his way to an apartment, a truck, and a decent amount of savings in less than a year."

http://www.getrichslowly.org/blog/2008/02/18/scratch-beginni...

Any other links?
Sergey Brin went to the University of Maryland. Larry Page went to Michigan. Marc Andreessen and Max Levchin went to the University of Illinois.

This not to say some schools aren't better than others, but when people do great things it's usually because of who they are rather than where they went to college.
Key factors in JavaScript performance
Great essay Paul, I especially liked this part: "Don't worry about trying to look corporate, the product is what wins in the long run."

This is so true! I consider this one of the top reasons many startups fail but at the same time, this is a result of the paradox of offline vs. online culture as it still holds true that many offline businesses would fail without looking corporate. Its a transition so we'll be fine in a couple years. Do you agree?

Basar Kizildere
Istanbul, Turkey
From what I recall, Stanford accepts roughly 1% of applicants to the Computer Science program, compared with just over 10% for the University as a whole, making it one of the most competitive programs in the nation.

That may be true for Ph.D. students, but not for undergraduates. Undergraduate applications are reviewed without regards to major. You'll have an equal chance of getting in whether you express interest in CS or English. The Stanford admissions website confirms this. [1]

The Ph.D. program may have acceptance rates approaching 1%, although I don't really think it's that low. Also, the master's program accepts a significantly higher percentage of applicants than the doctoral program.

[1] "All applicants apply to Stanford through the Office of Undergraduate Admission, not to a particular school or department within the University, and Stanford does not give preference to any major." http://admission.stanford.edu/applying/1_8_faqs.html
I used FreeBSD as my development platform until I got a Mac. The reason why is because the majority of websites are hosted on `nix platforms and as a programmer it's important for me to understand and experience the platform that my code is going to be running on.

If I was a Windows programmer I wouldn't know about cron, symlinks, du, etc... And I might waste an exceptional amount of time trying to code an already available feature in `nix.
First page talks only about her looks. Wouldn't happen with a male engineer, I suppose.
... and it's back.
my thoughts exactly.
So you'd rather spend four years of your life at a school which stymies your growth rather that nourishes it? I'd much rather make a decision to spend four precious years based on whether or not I feel like I would benefit, not because Bill Gates did.
Well, the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign is a top 10 (arguably top 5) ranked CS department, and Michigan is no slouch, either.

I agree with the gist of your point, though. The school you attend is considerably more important for grad school.
No, I'd rather keep discussions mature. It "feels good" to devolve into diatribes, and trust me, if you know me, I HAVE... but the question here is "what undergrad schools should I consider."

Back on topic, empirically, I know many people involved in startups with _some_ connection to Stanford, probably more so than any other single school. I know many people from UC Santa Cruz, too. Both may be because these are the two nearest good universities near Silicon Valley.

Not so many from San Jose State University. Maybe stay away from that one.
I like how the "official website" is just a bunch of typical microsoft hype where there is ZERO product demonstration, one weak "planet to our cool logo" video that plays over and over and a bunch of people talking about how cool its all going to be. Then theres a vague "release date". Spring or something...

Maybe it is tear jerking worthy tech but I've seen this pattern before from MS. The first time I heard about google maps I was using it.
This is another key component in Google's strategy to create a suite of products capable of real traction in the corporate marketplace - and that will make them money and (incidentally) cut way into Microsoft profits.

Now as a start-up - are you wasting money running a host of "internal" support software or are you using what is out there and freely available? The latter of course, because what matters is what you are building. Well that's how it is gong to be soon for a lot of businesses who have "made it" - they are not going to waste money and (perhaps more important) management time running their internal support IT functions. Yes they will run ERP systems but why get tangled up with office software/email/Intranet etc. etc.