skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
You'd be astonished at how many who start out with the Ferrari wreck it in short order and how many who start out with bricks become very strong because of it.

People who start out with wealth seldom create wealth. In the best cases, they usually just administer it. Its the people who start out with the bricks that seem to end up creating the wealth.

Slavery and poverty are different economic relationships altogether. Equating them is usually rhetorical hyperbole and if taken seriously, leads to some very wrong conclusions.
the issue is time decay. The last point in that conversation shouldn't be the parent of a new conversation N hours later.
I'm sorry but I disagree wholeheartedly with this post (and the way you presented it). Competition is healthy for any market, and for the businesses in that market. Giving consumers the option to choose between services means more flexibility to improve on what you have, and how you plan to introduce it.

Yes, Tumblr is a great application backed by some very competent developers out there, but have you given a look at Chyrp (http://www.chyrp.net)? The immediate user may not directly associate it with a tumblelog from the very beginning, but if you look at the way it's created, even look at the code it's obvious that's just what the application is, and it's doing incredibly well on it's own two feet.

Market economies are all about competition, supply and demand. I think you should take another look at what you've written, and what's going on in the web right now.
Where can I search the Enron email database?
Some years ago, you used to be able to search it on the Berkeley site linked from this page (http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~enron/), but it's gone now. The other site listed requires a login and all of the applets on it seem to be broken.

Does anyone know of a site that will let me run plain-text queries on that dataset? I'm reading The Smartest Guys in the Room right now and being able to easily look at that would be awesome.
There are lots of examples of poor people who are hard working and still poor, and lots of examples of wealthy people who fell into it. There is no moral value to wealth and to say so not only insults our intelligence but attempts to justify terrible injustices.
Four word review: Not really that interesting.
Read Hardening Linux.
The only thing worse than his grasp of probability is his grasp of the English language. How the hell did this make top page here?
7 Mongrels Serve 920,000 Pageviews in a Day
The funny thing about all this is that the main criticism of PG's argument is that it is condescending and belittles the huge mass of programmers working for big companies.

As with much criticism, it never quite attempts to prove him wrong. Proving that he's offensive is a very different thing.
Not sure what this has to do with hacker news, but it's about minorities, so I'm down.

I found it odd that The Economist didn't really do any pondering on the economic part of these statistics. The out-of-wedlock birthrate is probably a lot stronger correlated with lack of money than race or culture.
If any system (attempting to solve this problem) allows one to add 2,433 emails to an "inbox", then it is doomed to fail.

Sometimes, it's the tool user, not the tool itself, that is to blame.
Short blog entries on complex topics most often won't tell the entire story. There's more on getting out of poverty than not resting or asking the wrong questions. This is not about dumb wealth redistribution but social institutions and technical infrastructure.
Instead of such intellectual fast food better one reads something useful like the (free) first chapter of "The Birth of Plenty": http://www.efficientfrontier.com/ef/404/CH1.HTM

After that one should look for 'new institutional economics' and 'complex adaptive systems' to better understand how social institutions, path dependencies, and (general) environmental conditions drive or constrain a society and how that influences social stratification and mobility (and indirectly poverty).

This posting isn't meant to be an arrogant indoctrination. But saying "there are no causes of poverty" is simply (and sometimes fatally) wrong. But to understand this one should switch from polemics to empirics.

It even has some direct relevance to hackers: Being busy and producing something other people want is not enough to generate wealth. When you think a supporting social and technical environment has no influence on the probability of success, then go and try to run your startup in (obviously restful) North Korea.
Lions in a Cage
Yes. And after you do, realise that the process of hardening a base Linux server install takes more than 15 minutes. Linux is not a "silver bullet" for security right out of the box.
If I were a criminal defense lawyer, murder would cease to be a crime. After all, there are no causes of death; it is the rest state, that which happens when you do nothing ...

In fact there are plenty of causes of poverty -- war, corruption, disease, overpopulation, debt, ecological destruction, etc.
why not just download the dataset and search it locally?
I think that you might be on to something with the fee in the sense that you could apply a solicitation surcharge to unapproved senders. It would only work if it was guaranteed to get your response, otherwise it's not worth it.

What about a separate email address (or even domain) for premium email? You could set the fee to receive an email (and adjust it to restrict flow to what you can handle), and refund people who don't get a response from you within x period of time. Certain senders could be excluded from paying. The senders could even choose how much to pay (These emails were sent without payment. Those were.)

You then publish only that address on your site/blog/whatever, and give your personal address to friends and family.

This idea needs a lot of digging into to really see if it's viable but I like the concept. The potential downside is that the government might like the idea of email tax.
No.

First off, only idiots loan money without requiring the borrower to put up some collateral to cover most of the sum in the event of a default. Not even the Federal Reserve.

Second, reserve requirements are there to insure the institution can cover defaults at a modeled rate. The requirement is not to cover the entire amount of the loan in the event of a default, but ONLY the difference between the market value of the collateral against the loan and the principal of the loan.

So a bank with a $1000 deposit and a 1:9 capital ratio can, indeed, directly lend $9000 if their risk modeling and lending standards predict a sufficiently low default rate.

This is why accurate (and conservative??) modeling and subsequent pricing of risk is so very important to a fractional reserve banking system. Mis-priced risk => actual losses are greater than projected losses => insufficient capital to cover actual losses => bankruptcy.

Sprinkle in some 32:1 hedge fund leverage using crap mortgage paper as collateral and you have yourself a financial weapon with a very short fuse.

The most recent incarnation of mis-priced risk has been "houses ALWAYS go up in value", leading to AAA-rated mortgage-backed securities (MBS). Which is bullshit and we all know it. The institutions that bought this crap only held enough capital to cover their modeled default rate of AAA-rated bonds, rather than the (much larger) capital to cover defaults on the junk bonds this trash is really composed of.

The situation is actually worse than the author says. Those banks turn around and use the mis-priced MBS paper as collateral for even larger loans, and now the problem has REALLY been magnified. This goes 3 or more levels deep with some of the credit derivatives out there.

Edit: P.S. I think the pirate author guy is kind of a doomsday nutjob. I do not think the U.S. will collapse in a poof of logic.
Ask YC: Are you working part-time on your startup/project/idea?
I'm curious how much time you guys are devoting to your work? I have a FT job and I'm working on my own project that may become the basis for a startup or remain just something neat to showcase and develop my skills. Over the last four months I've managed around 2-3 days a week, which adds up to around 10-12hrs of coding a week.
Snobbism-less way to save hacker-news from becoming another digg/reddit
The only two aggregators I consume in my google reader are this site and http://friendfeed.com/.

I recently noticed that hacker news is gaining popularity which makes posts less interesting.

I was wondering what if the karma will removed, would it cause karma-motivated posters looking for other places to be top ranked

I just wish we will remain a small community with common interests but I am not sure it is even possible nowadays.
Perfect example of not asking the right questions during an interview. You can usually find out if a place is this jacked without ever joining the payroll if you know what to ask them. Interviews are a two way process. You're interviewing them, just as they're interviewing you.
I use in-IDE (VS2k5 in my case) refactorings for simple things, mostly in the small. For local symbol renames and for method extraction, it's invaluable. Really it's a wrist saver in those cases.

I occasionally do larger level renames using the tool, but I'm always a bit wary. It's peripheral stuff that I'm worried about, as with you. Any more major surgery is usually done by hand.

Now, if my tool had better refactorings, I would probably use them.
I've been avoiding this whole latest essay debacle, but this essay particularly struck me. It is not a balanced perspective at all in my opinion, and is quite frankly the silliest and saddest rebuttal I've read so far.

What this person fundamentally doesn't understand is sacrifice, the key component to starting any company, and having any sort of real success in life. Does this person honestly think that starting a company entails living a life of poverty forever? I mean give me a break, you can spend your life eating at fancy restaurants and going to museums when you're 50. When you start a company, you give up ephemeral comforts like eating at PF Changs for a short period of time for a chance to do something incredible. The argument that you shouldn't start a start up because you will not have a lot of cash for a fews months or a few years is pretty shallow in my opinion. In fact, its much sillier to say "you are lame because you can't afford to eat out for a limited period of time" than it is to say "you are lame because you haven't started a company" (not that pg implied that).

I had this guy's life. Before Y Combinator, I worked at a very high profile company on a very high profile product, and had all the money I needed to buy the latest and greatest tv, or take my girlfriend to a fancy restaurant or go on some fancy vacation. My cofounder and I ate out EVERY night. We owned crazy gadgets, we bought expensive toys.

Guess what: that's not what happiness is about. And thank god. At the end of the day, unless you're curing cancer or something, you will not feel whole, even when working on something incredible. At least I didn't.

Now I'm in Y Combinator. I get way less sleep. I am stressed all the time. There's no such things as weekends.

But I'm doing something, and if I succeed, it will be mine. And if I don't, well guess what, I can still always go back to that old life.

And at the end of the day, that's the most important thing: the worst case scenario for me, is the best case scenario for this guy.
I work for a really small company. But I am feeling unconformable since a year. Now reading this essay I understand the actual reason. We have become a typical outsourced branch of big giant tree since last couple of years! Freedom has reduced!
You could always do site-specific search if you knew the syntax, sure. But I'd never seen the extra inline per-site search box before reading the article.

Is that second box what you're talking about, and how long do you think it's been displaying?
I feel that THIS summer will be THE summer that I turn one of my projects into a startup, so in the past month, I've quit full time work and moved into a cheaper place to live.

I'm currently doing requirements gathering for my first project, and I've already done around 400 lines of coding. I wish I wasn't alone.
He's half correct. Poverty is the rest state, but there is significant artificial inertia in many parts of the world keeping people from accelerating beyond it.

It's hard to understand this when you live in a first world nation. We have that problem but to a very minor degree relative to much of the world.
Good question, as I've noticed a few posts completely irrelevant to everything that goes on normally here at Hacker News. It's a thin line to tread about removing karma and I'd love to hear some users thoughts about the issue.
Ask HN: Coworking Owners, What are Your Membership Policies?
Perhaps a few of you operate out of Coworking locales, or even operate one yourself. Do you include as part of the application process a contract agreement, or do prospective members simply fill out one application, and agree by virtue of their membership to abide by terms and conditions decided by the community?

Any input and advice is always appreciated.
I've found that I really enjoy my job, so my outside projects have started to shift from "this might make me money someday" to "this is really fun to code!" things.

It's weird how stability (and yes, coming from consulting and startuppery, this lion freely recognizes his gilded cage) and lack of where-is-my-next-paycheck-coming-from frees the mind to coding pure-fun stuff.
>>You'd be astonished at how many who start out with the Ferrari wreck it in short order and how many who start out with bricks become very strong because of it.<<

Outlying cases are irrelevant. Of course people overcome the odds in both directions. But given equal driving ability, the Ferrari will always win the race, take the prize money, and buy their children a Ferrari.

>>People who start out with wealth seldom create wealth.<<

What is the basis of that statement? Bill Gates was born to a very wealthy family. Warren Buffet was born to a stockbroker-turned-Congressman, so definitely at least upper middle class. Carlos Slim Helu has been quoted saying "I came from a wealthy family. I have always had money."

Seems the top three wealth-generators in the world were born wealthy. They attended Harvard, Columbia, and the university consistently ranked the best in Latin America, respectively.

The only thing I'm astonished at is that there are people who have so little understanding of how the world works that they think poverty and wealth are not both self-perpetuating.
Chyrp and Tumblr are two different markets.

Tumblr is hosted, Chyrp isn't. There is an obvious differentiation there and it's two unique sets of users.

I agree that competition is healthy. I also agree that there is more than enough room (in most markets) for more than one player. However, once one player has a large amount of traction in the market it is difficult to uproot that player unless you are either a) uniquely different (and not just differentiated on features!), or b) you have an actual marketing budget unlike 90% of web2.0 apps out there.

If you don't, quit wasting your time.
Good point. Wealthy people are often impoverished by those.
You are not alone. ;)
so remove the karma and there's no more motivation to gain some sort of social ranking cred? interesting idea.
I don't enjoy my current job at all. I work part time in a non-tech related job. the rest of my time is spent thinking about what projects to best devote my time to and experimenting.
It is possible if you add proper trust metric, karma as it is right now is just a little bit too primitive for that.
You can start off in the world in circumstances that make you much less likely to succeed later, circumstances that are totally outside your control. If you acquire an early aversion to people or a mental illness due to childhood rape, I'd have to be pretty dense to say your lack of productivity is your fault. If you didn't get into as good a college as the kid who's parents could afford after school SAT prep classes, I couldn't really say you're a worse student. If your parents sucked at child rearing and raised you on a healthy diet of Cheetoes and Disney videos instead of broccoli and Legos, you can't be totally to blame for your poor brain development and lack of impulse control. Writing someone off as having a dysfunction without considering the cause is stupid.
slick for sure, i could see a few applications, mostly a curiosity. a 'command line joke' as it says.
A few more instances like that and news.yc might become another reddit. Are there any plans to have better karma scoring system? More merit based and less popularity contest?
Maybe a bit more enlightening (if you read further than the opening quote) http://www.techcentralstation.com/article.aspx?id=120302A
If you're asking about recommender behind jaanix you can contact me on skype - krotta. Tim2 wrote his own recommender for his site, we're not affiliated.
That's a compelling idea.
tabs and compile err's in the margins would be interesting.
cool idea, i sure don't want to wear cheap plastic jewelry just to connect with my real/virtual friends
remembering the name of everyone interesting works less and less well as the site gets bigger.
that is one of the coolest things i've ever seen. i want to put that little guy in my band
The best tool at dealing with email overload currently is GMail. [edit: removed lengthy explanation of why GMail is a good solution to this problem, if you haven't figured it out you're not fully utilizing GMail ]

I'm sure there is room for improvement and I'd like to see any solutions that come out of YC (but I'd like to see someone actually who uses existing tools designed to tackle this problem explain clearly their shortcomings).
The issue to me is between these two things: Alienate potential users versus allowing the mainstream crowd to alter the community. Digg and Reddit are prime examples of what eventually happens once sites become mainstream. To determine the best action we need to know what the long term goals of the site are, without knowing that its tough to generate any 'fix'.

How about going the invitation only route? Or creating a series of basic coding/php type questions in order to sign up (think captcha)? I think either of those if implemented would cut down on the drive by comments that bring down discussion.
Hey, i've spend more than 4 hours per day, and 10 hrs more for weekend, so together added up to 40 hours a week. And i'm keeping this for months now.
You have the wrong word emphasized--it's the saddest and stupidest he's ever read. Both sadness and stupidity are subjective, and this sentence apparently butts up against his personal philosophy. I would think that making meaningless a life--subconsciously, his--dedicated to creating lasting works is a stronger raw negative emotion than simple sympathy for death, especially at a scale the human mind cannot even comprehend.

In other words, if for some reason you wanted to maximize the psychological pain experienced by this one individual, and your means of accomplishing this was having everyone in the world suddenly share a single belief, the one underlying the spoken sentence would be it.

Of course, there's no reason that most of us would care, but that's a reason for it to not be on a social news website, not a reason for it to not have been written at all. From his, and therefore the audience of his blog/gestalt's perspective, this message is of the utmost importance. Perhaps the way it was written had such pathos as to absorb a submitter into posting it, and others into voting it up even though they knew it was not really appropriate material, but that's the path of kitten pictures.
you're sure not alone ^^
When I was ramping up my last startup, I met my cofounder about 4 days a week after work and we worked until 9 or 10 at night.

I've found that when I go from "this is a cool project" mode to "going to turn this into a company" mode, the hours just start piling on.
Excessive emails and text are a mental illness
did anyone read the list of comments on TC?

Interesting comparison between MA's argument and the argument that anything digitally reproduced should also be enjoyed free (the issue of Software repeatedly came up)
From Bear Stearns on the financial mess, to the tune of Bohemian Rhapsody
I've detailed how I manage this here: http://www.jgc.org/blog/2008/03/first-assume-all-new-email-i...

But the main problem with the POPFile sorting approach is training. Any automated solution needs to be seamless. People who use POPFile with GMail get automagic training just by moving between IMAP folders/changing labels on messages. I think a plug-in that did automatic email sorting based on some machine learning approach plus some heuristics that was built into Outlook would be compelling.
My grandparents can't feed their dog dry kibble; it just doesn't eat it. However, not only can't they afford to feed it purely the sausages and other such meats that it will eat, it's completely unhealthy for the dog. So, instead, they try to package the kibble into the sausage, sliding it in where the dog might not realize until too late that it has consumed something nutritious. If the dog realizes, it eats around the kibble, leaving it in the bowl. (I know there's a similar story somewhere about how the dog is enlightened for doing this, but don't buy it--the dog is slowly dying from its "enlightenment." My point is different.)

My grandparents are artists. Like any artist, they package something important (a message) into something desirable (a work of art). If you realize the message is there at all, they have failed; if you absorb the message subconsciously without ever noticing it, they have done their jobs.
How can you take "the environment in big companies is toxic to programmers." and say "Paul makes no claim about employees being unhappy [...] the absence of something you don’t even know you’re missing is hardly likely to make you unhappy on its own" ?

There's a difference between an environment where something is missing (and having it would make you happier, but the lack of it doesn't hurt you) and a toxic environment which by definition means "Harmful, destructive or deadly to living things." (at least one of the definitions).

It seems to me that Paul's essay claims that working in a company is detrimental to programmers and the way they're "supposed to work". This means everyone should quit working for big companies and start working the way they're supposed to (since programming has so much in common with hunting...).

But then Paul and several others jump to defend the essay and claim that this isn't really the message, that working in a company is fine and that some people would thrive and do better in a startup environment. I fully agree with this point, but if this is the intended message the article fails to deliver it. Drop the toxic, lions in cages and constant references to how you think people should live (society has greatly advanced since the days people used to roam around in groups of 10, and has primarily done so by organizing in large groups and figuring out way to function and work together).