skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
False.
People have impunity in their car. They holler things out the window they would never say to your face because they would receive a right cross in the snout. Your assertion that you would swear at me if I were running around with a sharp katana fails the common sense test in a big way.

Speaking of incompetence, there is a third type of troll. These trolls manner of speaking is seen as hostile by those who come from a more genteel social milieu. For example, in person as on the internet, they might tell you to STFU, or use words like shitpump, yet be trying to make a point in a friendly and helpful (perhaps playful) way. You need not be an egghead to be abrupt. For an insight into this social milieu, see an episode of Trailer Park Boys. People need to learn to function differently on a forum, because it is a different social environment.
What? You don't need to (other than perhaps geographically).

http://paulgraham.com/colleges.html

If the gospel according to PG doesn't persuade you, I'm happy to offer some additional anecdotal evidence. Some of the smartest hackers I've ever met are college dropouts or went to a 2nd rate college.

As Twain said, "Never let your schooling interfere with your education."
Growing up online (Frontline documentary)
Ask YC: IRC channel for startup people and/or YC hackers?
Does such a thing exist?

If not, does someone recommend a preferred network to start one up?
I went last year and was underwhelmed. Most of the talks necessarily had to speak to the lower common denominator in the room.

My advice would be to avoid going to talks/sessions about topics where you're knowledgeable and stick to stuff that's new/interesting to you.

Oh, and have fun. The parties are a blast!
Actually, I did a Google search and found this thread:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=85189

Looks like freenode #startups is the place to be, perhaps?
Ukrainian Hacker Could Keep Money from Insider Trading
> Assuming that a significant portion of your time in a software startup is spent programming

That's exactly the question I wanted to ask! So is a significant portion of your time spent programming? Do YC startups measure this?

I find that if I code in a Blub language I spend 4 hours coding, but in a non Blub language I spend 2 hours thinking and 1 hour coding.
Patent Troll Attacks Cable, Digital TV Standards
The Lottery Ticket Videogame Company
mibbit.com/irc.freenode.net/startups seems like a better format, no?
"Drinking bottled water should be made as unfashionable as smoking, according to a government adviser"

Yeah, and I think that telling other people what to do with their lives in order to prevent the emission of miniscule amounts of CO2 should be as unfashionable as smoking too, but hell, what would I know?
http://www.w3.org/TR/swbp-n-aryRelations/ ?
http://www.ask.com/ is very fast. Text auto-completing option saves time. Rolling over the binoculars in each result shows a miniature preview of the web page! Image results have zooming roll-overs. Video playback uses JavaScript mini-windows to avoid changing the page.
Ask YC: Going to PyCon next month?
I'm speaking at PyCon next month and thought I'd see who else is attending. It would be great to meet up with some news.YC hackers there (i.e. Chicago).

Schedule/registration/etc:
http://us.pycon.org/2008/about/

If there's a few, any ideas for a place to gather?
it was 1 billion and the 15B evaluation will proove wrong in 1 year
Rumours: nVidia will acquire AMD
Animated gif generator for 'loading' indicators
I don't really have a lot of time for people who go around labelling others as "conformists". It's a bit of a content-free slur that seems to be the end of a thought process that goes like this:

1. Not many people agree with my opinions

2. But my opinions are obviously correct to anyone who has thought about it!

3. Therefore, nobody else has thought about it -- they're all mindless conformists, brainwashed into serving the interests of [insert favourite boogeyman here].
Theres BarCamp Brighton in a few weeks which will be attended by a load of smart hackers. I suggest you check it out if looking for a cofounder: http://www.barcampbrighton.org/
That's insane. I used to run an 8 line renegade BBS in Minneapolis in the early 90's. The scale of then versus now is straight up crazy.
I have a little theory about this. When one issue moves into the mainstream, the avant-garde of the self-righteous find a new issue to focus on. They need to, in order to preserve their identity of being distinct from (morally superior to) the masses. It's analogous to music hipsters who immediately discard a band when it becomes popular.
I don't think you should write them off completely I mean the absolute worst that can happen is you waste 20 minutes filling out the application.
Before the housing bubble or the internet bubble, there was the tulip bubble.
For those who aren't gun nuts, the parable goes:
Democracy is two wolves and a lamb voting on what's for dinner. Liberty is a well-armed lamb prepared to contest the vote.
Here is a good example of a reasonable point poorly made. Seems off topic because not all the premises are stated, but in his meatspace, everybody can fill in the blanks with common knowledge. Also, in his world, everybody uses small, old, anglo-saxon words to add poetry to their speech, he may not realize (or care) that it offends some delicate sensibilities.
This is the graffitti of which PG spoke. And surprisingly, it is art. Not art in the beautiful sense, but art in the message sense. Imagine yourself in China and you wrote on the wall "Fuck Tiananmen". This is not pretty, but it is not spam.
Interesting. I've read the whole spiel about data being recoverable after being overwriteen many times and from many sources. I've always wondered whether it was true. I mean, I know about hysteresis loops, but given the size of the storage cells on a hard disk these days, it seemed really unlikely that they're not fully magnetised. If data recovery companies aren't going to even try, then I guess that pretty much confirms it's a myth.

I'd be intrigued whether it's possible to recover data on hard disks from 10, 15 years ago which have been treated this way. Back then, the magnetic cells were much, much bigger. What about floppies? I'm guessing the myth must have originated somewhere - although ignorance is a reasonable possibility I suppose.
I'm not entirely certain what he's getting at here...

The bulk of this posting is exactly what Surowiecki describes as the contributing factors that lead crowds to be stupid. "The wisdom of crowds" only happens when the following are present:

- Diversity of opinion

- Independence

- Decentralization

- Aggregation

If any of these four factors are compromised, then there is a breakdown of the "wisdom". The blog post seems to discuss the second criteria above as causing crowds to be "dumb" which is something that Surowiecki states in his book. He also briefly touches upon the first point of diversity, but doesn't elaborate much upon it.
Heres an idea for ya YC guys.

How about a sub-YC website that helps singles and other people get together. Help us, help you. I mean if we succeed you get paid and I get paid and we are all happy :)

I admit and I agree with one of the other posters, I WANT A partner It is hard as hell dealing with everything yourself.

( Since reading the replies here I am trying to recruit one of my old pals to work with me. But... )

I think it would be cool to put up a "want ad's section" something like :

MWGI seeking H for RCP ASAP. ( male with great idea seeking Hacker for Really cool Project. )

I think it's a good idea.
Why do you think the french refuse to reform their spelling? Why did you pick the french?
Is there something french about hackers on news.yc?
The well-repected German magazine c't did the test a couple of years ago. They contacted three data recovery firms, and none could recover a drive that had been dd-ed with zeros once.

I wonder how to erase Flash-Drives, though.
I suspect that parental assistance on college admission essays has happened for decades. However, with the hyper-competitiveness to get one of a very limited number of admission slots, some parents (wanting to give their kids what they want, not what they need) are doing anything to help them. The modern "helicopter parent" is the stereotype of this type of parent.

The current application process is a bit archaic. Clearly, with the advent of the Internet and the quick and easy exchange of information, colleges should ask for portfolios of sample, graded school work. These portfolios should supplement applications and may be referenced when there's a need to compare the relative quality of two seemingly equal candidates or any question about the authenticity of the a student's application (including essay).

(On a side note, I'm surprised that more software developers don't keep and share their own portfolios of sample work for prospective clients/employers. A representative body of a person's work is clearly more of an indicator of the quality and skill of a person than any statements/certifications on a C.V. or résumé could possibly be.)
Note to self: don't point out the silliness of Mac addicts.
A three-part series, all with the same title? Each part being essentially one page of a larger article? The parts each linked to each other?

Submitting just the first part would be plenty.
Get Famous By Not Programming
I'm 30 in San Francisco. For your first idea, if you are talking about website "performance survey" / "A/B" type testing then you have some wicked competition based out of SF.

I agree that advertising is not the way to go. However end users have demonstrated that they are not very willing to pay for services unless its to meet girls ;)

Corporate, on the other hand, doesn't seem to want anything for free...
No, more like:

1. Don't treat "Mac fans" as a homogeneous group, and don't attribute some random opinion to them 3 years ago, observe that one particular Mac fan has a different opinion now, and accuse "Mac fans" in general of hypocrisy. That makes no sense.

2. Don't equate "a cheap Dell laptop that does everything you need" with a MacBook Air. That is like comparing apples and oranges.
No one is allowed to disassemble the drive! Because of that, this drive won't ever get professional-level treatment from a data recovery firm.
Exactly. It's not always real active... I guess that's a sign people are busy with other stuff, which is good.
The real value in most conferences is in the hallways, talking to the other attendees.
The theory is that special expensive equipment could possibly do such a recovery -- so the 3-day time limit, and measly $40 prize, isn't really responsive to the question.

Further, if you were an agency with the budget and equipment to do this, would you want the world to know?

They aren't testing what they're trying to test, and even a 100x reward and 10-year time limit wouldn't prove the negative, "that recovering data from a zeroed hard drive is impossible".

A seminal paper on the possibility -- but not the reality -- of such specialized recovery is Peter Gutmann's 1996 "Secure Deletion of Data from Magnetic and Solid-State Memory" [ http://www.cs.auckland.ac.nz/%7Epgut001/pubs/secure_del.html ].

Guttman notes in an undated epilogue, however, that advances in data density and recording techniques since 1996 make any recovery from modern devices "unlikely". Still, the "Great Zero Challenge" provides very little in the form of real evidence about these questions.
Ask YC: Best book for studying 8086 Assembly Language programming
which is the best one?
the one which gives a lot of of info on instruction sets
good point maybe I should do the application to see if I learn something there but I just don't see the point otherwise.

I am happy to use news.YC as a resource and like to get involved in the discussions but I feel at 33 and a single founder I am not the target for YC startup.
or single-founderism(I like that) might indicate someone who does not have friends that are in tech or business.

I am not against starting something up with someone else and I am always open to discussions about stuff I work on I just don't have the contacts yet.
Quote: "MySpace is a great example of this. I'm pretty sure that their custom profile page layouts were an accident. They didn't know enough to properly escape the text that people put on their profiles, and that allowed their users to start including arbitrary html and css in their pages."

Accidental is a good theory. It's always nice to poke fun at MySpace. http://www.zentu.net/open-space/myspace.png

I sometimes wonder how it's possible for something like this to happen on such a wide or popular scale -- does Microsoft seriously control or influence that much of the W3 standards for compliance?

(edit -- sorry. I've obviously been writing far too much HTML lately.)
Some related commentary

http://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2008/02/a_modest_s...
Hoaxer Haunts Fortune 500 Earnings Calls With Empty "analyst speak"
You can use the online book "PC Assembly Language" by Dr.Paul A. Carter url http://www.drpaulcarter.com/pcasm

This book however covers protected mode(80386 and later) and not real mode(8086).
It's funny how "morality" is trendy.

- EDIT -

quotes around morality
Blinkx.com founder on video and going public instead of raising further VC
thanks
but i wanted a book that will cover everything on this subject and will hekp me in the long time once i buy it.
It's not clear to me that conspicuous conservation has that much to do with morality.
Note that DHH is using the solid-state drive version of the Air, so consider that when reading, "The machine is plenty fast for everything I do with a computer."
I hope you are not reusing an important password for this site.. Even if they are hashed on the disk, they are sent insecurely to the server when you log in.
I'm not saying that you should ignore this data or not release early. I have though, have seen customers be very wrong. I'd say they tend to see only short term goals, not long term. At worst, your product will become a design by committee disaster.
So that's where the image labeling game came from! Nice find.
system('sort filename');
the crux of the essay is the process Paul refers to(steps a-e). This model gives me great confidence that we are on the right track, and while we were not able to launch as fast as we would have liked we still see the basic unsolved, overlooked, problem that inspired us to begin.

At the same taime its what annoyed me about being passed up last funding round, if this is how they judged ideas, how could they have glossed over us. Oh well, until we are a success they where correct.

@pg: thanks for the inspiration and clarity as always
I think that Slashdot overall still has the highest quality comments. You just have to sort by score, and do a -2 funny modifier. The site instantly becomes much much better. Stay away from the new ajaxy score slider system.
If you can prove you're an established firm they'll let you have it for 30 days and disassemble it.
with browsers and low-level signal processing

wow. Those are quite divergent worlds, I should say. You may be looking for two people.
Exactly. I think it has to do with identity: "I'm the kind of person who..." We seek ways to distinguish ourselves from other people because differences produce meaning, or at least a feeling of it. Constructing an identity to fortify one's ego is an intrinsically selfish activity (I mean "self-ish" literally, i.e. concerning self), which may be why the morality-based identities seem more often to be hypocritical.

By the way, "conspicuous conservation" is a great term! I hadn't heard that.
The other parts are linked from this, we don't need three separate discussions.
Try

Introduction to 80X86 Assembly Language and Computer Architecture http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0763717738

The Art of Assembly Language http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/1886411972

Essentials of 80x86 Assembly Language http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/076373621X
I ran a 3 line renegade bbs system, the WWW is still catching up to how strong the bbs community was or maybe I am just nostalgic.
Yes, there's definitely a lot of competition for the website testing idea and it would've been nice to start on it a few years ago. But I think that a fragmented market is an entrepreneur's best friend. There is no industry giant that you will always be compared to and will be crushed by. More importantly, a fragmented market also indicates that there is money to be made.
Inspirational Subreddit
You can't get more instruction set info than vol. 2A/B here: http://www.intel.com/products/processor/manuals/
Some people worry that if their product is very successful, it will be copied by the competition...

Why worry about a competitor that can only (try to) keep up with you by copying you? If you continue innovating at a rapid pace, by the time they catch up to what you have now, the distance between you and them will have only gotten bigger.
All those ways of insulting people are based in an ageist perspective, and one certainly can object to them.

For example, saying an asshole needs to grow up, is demeaning him by saying he is in an undesirable state (not grown up) which implies being a child is bad.
look, crap like this belongs on digg.
Scott Adams: Connect citizens all over the world with a pen pal website to prevent new wars
http://www.loadinfo.net/
I hang out on freenode #fauna. there are a bunch of rails hackers and startup people there.
Toshiba to give up on HD DVD
Which "brand" of self-identity is fashionable and acceptable matters, though. I'd rather be part of a society where "I"m the kind of person who conserves and thinks about morality" is fashionable than one where the dominant self-identity is, say, "I'm the kind of person who'd rather kill and die than take disrespect from anyone."
Obviously, you have no idea who DHH is.

Obviously, DHH is a god. He's the man. He's awesome.

Obviously, you have no significance in your life. Live through DHH my friend.
On the other hand, I did think it was pretty silly the other day when I saw water from New Zealand for sale here in California. Loading water onto a ship to ship it across more water to sell in a place which already has plenty of water seems pretty wasteful.

But I said "silly", not "immoral".
As I recall back in the day, I got more from anything written by Michael Abrash, a serious gearhead back in the 80's who eventually joined Id Software.
"I'm guessing the myth must have originated somewhere - although ignorance is a reasonable possibility I suppose."

Imagination stems from trying to read from uninitialized memory, yielding an undefined value. :)
Customers should be used to identify problems to solve. The solution should be yours -- they don't understand the right way to design.
"Essays with some rough edges are not only authentic, they are better reads."

Next strategic refinement for advisers: sabotage the perfect essay a little bit to make it more credible.
This was posted at the start of the weekend. Some people are already getting together.

Just imagine what would happen if you left this for next weekend. And then felt a bit lazy, and put it off for another few days. Then didn't bother meeting up at all. Chatted over IM, got offended by something someone said because they were nervous and then never met at all.

Momentum breeds momentum. People have a huge inertia to changing their situation.

If you want to stay how you are, then do it. Everyone around you will be finding great people to work with and moving on.
Hey! You stole that quote without attribution from Howard Aiken!
Alternatively, they're perfectly happy to sell you the drive for 60 bucks.
One single company could affect a global semantic web adoption within 6 months: Google. Once they decide to give webpages with semantic info a higher relevance, armies of SEO experts would swiftly generate vast amounts of semantic information...
Regarding subjectivity, I intended no trick. I'll drop it after this comment, and you can have the last word if you want.

I'm not even going to make a full argument, but I do want to point out that if people from many cultures/eras/etc have different ideas about something, that is not evidence that there isn't a truth of the matter. If there is a truth of the matter, we still wouldn't expect them to all have found it.
+1 - My school (Ga Tech) used Scheme as its intro language when I was there and I could've benefited from being sold on it a little more (too bad there was no Hacker News then). I wasn't alone in being annoyed that I had to mess around with this weird little language before getting into Java and C. I did end up enjoying it though.
Regarding criticism, perhaps we can agree that enjoying and seeking out good criticism is important. That means, for example, if you know a source that has a good chance to provide some partially true criticism you may not have thought of, then it'd be a good idea to ask for it, and to like that kind of experience.

On the other hand, if you judge a source of criticism is going to be a waste of time, then it's fine to skip it. Not because you would ever ignore or disregard a criticism without thinking about it, and definitely not due to disliking criticism, but just because you reasonably expect they'd give criticism you'd already considered and rejected, and you have better things to do that you judge will bear more fruit.

The reason I'm not too worried about drowning in low quality criticism is that if there is no new information, it only takes a few moments to properly address. You don't have to ignore it because it's such a fast process. Just remember your take on the subject, verify that it already addresses what's being said, and then you're done. Don't even reply. But I don't call that "ignoring it", since you do quickly think about it, and if you notice there is something new to you, it will get proper consideration.
What exactly causes the 600x CO2 increase from production of bottled water vs. tap water? Creating the plastic bottle?
Actually, before I read this article I had no idea who DHH was. Oh, he wrote Rails? I guess I assumed somebody must have, but I never especially cared what the guy's name was. Is this guy really famous enough to be referred to by his initials, RMS-style?

And I still don't care whether he likes the Macbook Air.
Regarding contradicting goals: I think the way to tie things together is a common endpoint (the truth of the matter). If you move all your goals in that direction, it will cause them to become progressively less contradictory.

You can also remove contradictions locally if you find any. If you want, you can say that is based on the common foundation "if two ideas contradict, at least one is false". But the point is, you see a contradiction, you know at least one of the ideas is mistaken in some way, so you know there's room for improvement there, until you come up with some changes that remove the contradiction.
i disagree with this technique
because they think that it's a good thing for a language to be difficult.i think it is quite the opposite.according to newlisp.org users of commonlisp make the same mistake.i suspect they are wrong.but i don't know.
why is common lisp a better language than newlisp?
Part of the problem is that our socialized, monopoly municipal water suppliers provide unhealthy, bad tasting water.
Irony is dead, last gasp of newspaper industry edition
if you cause harm to others, and are aware that you do so, you act immorally.
"Stop and think about that for a second: the top brand in the world belongs to a player that…uhhh…doesn’t advertise."

"Ads by Google" alongside most ads on the internet doesn't count as google advertising its brand?