skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
"Just because you weren't born into money doesn't mean you can't get there. That's the beauty of the free market, you have the OPPORTUNITY to succeed and get ahead."

This isn't always, or even usually, true. Millions upon millions are born into this world with _no_ prospects, and _no_ opportunity, and _no_ amount of hard work, inspiration or pure luck will change that. It may be more true in America than elsewhere, but it's certainly not the rule.

And the "free market" is a recipe for monopoly and domination as much as for opportunity. The goal of the players in a free market is the elimination of opportunity for anyone but themselves. The free market does not reward altruism, so there's no incentive not to crush anyone in your way, other than personal decency. Which also doesn't pay. The market we enjoy here is anything but free, for which I'm thankful.

"If everyone and everything is the same, then why even bother doing anything better or trying?"

That's a strawman.

"Socialism scares me to no end because it is way easier to scream for support and get it than it is to actually make something out of yourself."

Out of curiosity, what's your actual experience of socialism?

"I don't know about you, but I certainly don't want to have to live in a world that is built for the LCD."

So raise the lowest common denominator. There are multiple paths to that goal, after all.
Vaudeville: True enough. In fact, I can only use that around close friends who are already familiar with the original quote. If I said something like that to anyone else, they'd think I'm being an ass.

It would be bad: You have to use it in the proper context as a gross understatement. As in every atom in your body exploding at the speed of light would be bad. True, the same line has been used as an understatement in other movies, but the Ghostbusters instance sticks out for some reason.
Not only that but the Lego trading game completely warped the real dynamics of capitalism by assigning arbitrary external values to the different Legos. In reality, different things are worth different amounts to different people, and that's why it's worthwhile to trade them. At best they're teaching these kids to easily believe strawman arguments.
Consider seeing a crappy hack in either system that completely doesn't work, doesn't compile, does nothing, and has no purpose.
My thought was this school had brilliant teachers teaching an evil lesson. I was shocked at the simplistic model that the teachers had of the world.

But then again, knowing your typical education major, perhaps I shouldn't have been.
They're way ahead of you:

"We should have equal houses. They should be standard sizes.... We should all just have the same number of pieces, like 15 or 28 pieces."
How to get infected with something: install an untrusted "detection" tarball, without so much as an MD5 checksum from someone credible.
I'll trade you my current anarchist reading for yours:

http://books.google.com/books?id=L_3I21lGS90C&dq=david+f...
Is a Lack of Experience Really Such a Bad Thing?
hmm...samples don't look quite right in safari (left margin disappears)
Confessions of a Cobol programmer
Umm.... you can just ignore them. It's like 3 words and a number on the sidebar. Not the end of the world. Get a life people.
Yeah, looking back now I wish I had written the first paragraph with the word "wealth" instead of "resources." (Alas, the edit link has disappeared on me.) So please, when you see the word resources in my post, mentally substitute for me.

As for you second point, don't confuse money with wealth. Most startups have liquidation value (dollar value) only on paper, because there is no one to buy them, but the product they create represents wealth to someone, even if it's only one customer. If the startup doesn't create enough wealth for enough people, it will probably die, in which case it won't be creating new wealth anymore, but their product made someone's life better, even if only for a short time.
Doing a number on Web site traffic
My old boss swore by the guy at seofaststart.com

I read the ebook (free) and it seems straight forward enough.
Airport security prize announced
Warning: this technology may prove addictive
But you can't say some Lego according to what you just quoted.

The point of that quote is to (show an attempt to) protect trademark. Like how Google asks people not to use Google as a verb, Lego is asking people not to use Lego as a noun. It's not establishing pluralization rules.

Anyway, I say legos and always have.
I'm short on time, but I've lived in various south american countries that are all flirting with socialism. In most cases it has been met with open arms by the poor and screams from the rich. In the end, the poor are barely better off and the rich simply buy around what the socialized stuff gives them. Price controls and other economic "flattening" certainly have poor effects on the country as well.

Certainly I feel for those in underdeveloped or regressive countries and I'm VERY thankful that I am where I am and am able to live as comfortable a life as I am living. But what am I going to do? Frankly there is very little that I can do for people in N. Korea or Zimbabwe. Socialism is not the answer for the problems in the middle east, africa or N. Korea.

And (this is getting longer than I have time for), but how do I raise the LCD? It seems to me that every day the LCD goes down further. I had a conversation today with a buddy about trying to monetize an idea and he said we needed to find a way to make it more lowbrow since stuff like that pays (see hotornot.com in its "close to porn" heyday).
Hmm... I flattened Vista off my wife's x61s this last week. Took a while to get everything working with XP (Lenovo's support/driver site puts the suck in sucktastic).

I put Ubuntu on it (dual boot) and was up and running even installing all the updates in under 45 minutes. Everything on the system works fine (I don't have a WWAN card or fingerprint reader). Ran powertop and tweaked some settings and I get nearly the same battery life as XP.

Not sure why they'd choose SUSE over Ubuntu in the first place? Ask anyone that's ever touched Novell anything and you'll always get a shudder.
Should I be insulted that I'm almost no hacker?
This is why everyone refers to Ubuntu versions by just the first word.
You want to make something that someone wants? Fine, I want a way to throw up on these teachers over the Internet.
Ask YC: Professional Societies Members?
Just got home from an on-campus gathering with the reps for a few societies, which got me wondering: who here is a member of ACM, IEEE, etc? Has your membership been particularly beneficial, i.e, would you recommend it to others?
This is good free tool
http://webceo.cbarker.ws/
I had no idea an early childhood classroom could evolve into a Lord of the Flies scenario.

When we played our favorite game - peg ball in elementary school, we didn't think so deep. It was throw the ball against the wall and if you fumbled it/didn't catch it, run to the wall before you got pegged. I think these teachers are really imposing a Brave New World kind of lens on their microcosm of a world. Maybe it's just me I wasn't that self-aware, clued-in at their single-digit age (maybe not even now).
Maybe they can find unique capitalistic synergies with StartupSchwag.com
Heh-- I'm not saying press/bloggers aren't important,,, but that Andrew's point is as important (or more). The number of startups focusing on getting onto TechCrunch far outnumbers the number that are focusing on their SEO/viral strategy.

My last job was at a funded startup that spent boatloads on PR and got lots of press (TV, newspapers, blogs). Just about every time there was a great spike... Followed be traffic dropping back to "normal" levels.
Here is a link that lets you quickly ignore all non friend or group invites- I find it quite handy:

http://www.ignoreall.com/

I don't mind being invited (not with that tool) but its annoying because every so often (its very rare) I actually want to try an application, but I refuse to go to the effort of inviting friends before I try it.
IETF would be a good organization. many of its working groups set standards of various protocols
To me the most interesting part of the article was the paragraph that describes how some of the kids gave up:

"During the trading game, a couple of children simply gave up, while others waited passively for someone to give them valuable pieces. Drew said, "I stopped trading because the same people were winning. I just gave up." In the game, the children could experience what they'd not been able to acknowledge in Legotown: When people are shut out of participation in the power structure, they are disenfranchised — and angry, discouraged, and hurt."

It reminds me of one of the most terrible sins that my mother inflicted on me when I was a child -- she taught me that things are supposed to be fair. She taught me the fairy tale that we have these things called "inalienable rights", such as freedom and justice and that kind of thing. She taught me that I was entitled to these "rights" and, implicitly, she taught me that I didn't have to do any work to earn these rights or to keep them.

She taught me, in very much the same way that the teachers taught these kids, that when there is injustice or inequity, I didn't have to do anything about it. All I had to do was whine about it and cry, and some higher power (like the teachers in this case) would come over and pat me on the head and fix it for me.

The truth is freedom and justice are not "rights". They are privileges, fought and earned by our ancestors, paid for by their tears and blood. We in the western world have grown so complacent in our corpulence that we just expect these things to be handed to us.

I would be much happier if, instead of making things fair for the "disenfranchised" kids, they had helped the kids see the advantages of their despair -- how having things stacked against them means that they have been given a chance to create a new way to win against greater odds, something the "rich" kids did not have and would never have.

The truth is the world does not owe us anything and we shouldn't expect otherwise. It is up to us to MAKE our place in the world, not sit and wait for it to be given to us.
Einstein's Dreams by Alan Lightman is an imaginative (read fictional) adventure into how Einstein might have come up with his paradigm-making ideas while working as a patent clerk in Bern.. Good coast-to-coast airplane read.
I remember reading an interview with one of the authors of Rogue where he said that one of the big motivations for them was designing a game that they could play. Most games at the time were interactive fiction, where if you know the solutions to all the puzzles, it's no fun.
In another context (e.g. a film documentary) this could also be fascinating.
I was very involved in ACM/IEEE in college, but now I'm a member of the SMPTE. It's been very useful as far as standards are concerned.
I joined IEEE for the insurance benefits alone. Tragically, they stopped offering group health insurance just after I joined, before I was eligible (you have to be a member for something like a year before you can get insurance policies). But they still have dental, and disability, and some other things.

It's very hard to get group insurance when you're a sole practitioner or a small businessperson.
It's a toy application on a real infrastructure. Wait until developers start writing some real value-adding/lifestyle Facebook apps. Real Facebook applications will intermediate between users without requiring their direct input (think Personal Assistants). That being said, 300M page views/month is something most indie developers would sell their friends for - though it might be a bit embarassing that it's such a LCD app.
Double You Tee Eff.

Please, PLEASE tell me this is a joke. Please? Anyone? Someone tell me these people aren't for real.

... Crickets

C'mon, letting me believe that this article is anything but satire would make me feel uncomfortable. And THAT would be WRONG . . . .
I tried a co-working site a couple times. It beats sitting in Starbucks or the local coffee shop (with free AC outlets and wi-fi) with a bunch of strangers - instead you are with your peers. And in a co-working space you don't feel like you have to subsidize your stay with strategically timed-out coffee purchases. Also, a nice thing is you can go out to lunch and leave your laptop there (it's secure). The 'can you watch my laptop' when you have to use the bathroom in a Starbucks-type environment (too much coffee subsidization) is always a little sketchy and feels imposing.

The weird thing about co-working is that it's like study hall - because other people are working - you feel the pressure to work as well - to not slack - or maybe not study hall but cram session before finals in a college library. So even though the music may be playing loud in the background, there isn't really a lot of networking going on - everyone's busy with their own gig. So you might actually get more interaction in an office setting - in my experience there's not a lot of small talk. Just queries like 'Dave - can you help me debug this [XHTML layout]?'

As a corporate worker bee programmer, I admire yet just got sorta jealous at the co-workers there who make a good living designing Wordpress/XHTML/Drupal (e.g. non-nitty gritty technical) sites for businesses.

Co-working is a powerful idea (like unionizing indie developers). I think it depends on the work style/personality of the individual. E.g. if you twitter multiple times daily, you're probably a good candidate.
Actually this is a joke thats quite 'hackable'. Let me illustrate:

You don't know what kerning is. You can make out that you are on a typography site so you have a basic idea of the kind of things it could be referring to. You notice that 'keming' and 'kerning' are visually really close, and that keming is defined as a wrong type of kerning. The only difference between the two words is 'rn' and 'm'. Thinking about what typographers would find interesting about this, you realize that sometimes if letters aren't separated properly, it would make it hard to read some words unambiguously. This could be an important enough issue for typographers that they might have a specific term for it. So maybe kerning describes the idea that letters should be properly spaced inside words, or maybe only the spacing of particularly troublesome letters, or even just the 'rn' combination. Either way you have a plausible idea what kerning means. Now you look at whether the joke makes sense with this idea. You see that it does, that keming would be both literally and visually wrong kerning, and the definition makes for a particularly clever pun. So everything fits together, and you can be reasonably confident that you get the joke and the broad meaning of kerning. You just reverse engineered the joke. Thats hacking.
Funny, I was thinking the same thing... as in "Wouldn't that be a great way to get your nasty code onto many machines?"
Hillary's Inner Tracy Flick (Mashup of "Election" and Hillary/Obama Footage)
LiveVideo.com: Yahoo Live Done Right
says the person defending facebook
Burst Media Launches Early Adopters Network
Did for my family, again FYI. My sister's financial aid package nearly doubled when I went to college, and mine dropped off fairly significantly in my last year when she graduated. Rice and Amherst.
Amherst has done this for a while, but with a much lower cutoff (I think it was about $40K). They also just eliminated loans for all students last year, which I think will raise the no-tuition cutoff significantly. I heard several other Ivies and top liberal-arts colleges were thinking of following suit.

Olin College was also founded on this premise, but they started charging tuition again when the dot-com bubble burst and most of their endowment vanished.
Browser Hacking 1: Testing Your Code
So now most of the costs of getting into Stanford are simply before you get into Stanford (private school, studying, night school, extra-curriculars)
Military Says Missile Hit Spy Satellite
From what I've seen of PR, it's not very effective, especially not for the $/results ratio. The point of Andrew Chen's article is indeed good -- viral growth, if you can achieve it, is awesome. But press is far from useless.

I have no idea what the product did at the last startup you worked at. A lot of times companies think pounding the press will bring them success, which is, again, not true (a shitty product that gets press won't go anywhere). However, a good product that receives press should settle down at more signups/day than before the coverage. Enough exposure, and a good product should eventually take off: people keep telling people about products they recommend, slowly, over time. You eventually build up a base of enough people that are recommending you that you really start to grow.

If it doesn't, I'd take a hard look at the product.
Most of us oblige Newtown's First Law - The Law of Inertia - when it comes to going off the safe path

"Our benefits were astonishing in comprehensiveness and quality of care. Sometimes we questioned whether they were worth it. We though moving to India might be better, or going back to nursing school. Doing something with the handicapped or working with our hands. No one ever acted on these impulses, despite their daily, sometimes hourly contractions. Instead we met in conference rooms to discuss the issues of the day"

Then We Came to The End, A 1st Novel by Joshua Ferris, First page. Excellent writing, still reading it off and on. (Note text emphasis mine, not in text)
You just might see that as a shirt... loved it.
As another data point, I've seen the exact same thing. About 8 years back, I worked at a funded startup that got tons of press, because we were all teenagers and it was the height of the dot-com boom. We got a spike everytime we were mentioned, but it didn't stick, and we were actually losing regular users (they thought we'd gone all corporate, which I guess we had).

Build something worth talking about before you get people talking. In our case, we got press because of who we were and not what we'd built, and that's not sustainable.
Ask YC: Where can I get a Slideshow for my site like the one on the YC home page?
i clicked through to Heysan's site but they are doing something different. I searched around, and don't really want to use slide (to common). Any suggestions.
I joined the ACM in 1998, mainly to receive their journals, etc. I maintain my membership in the ACM primarily for the "acm.org" email address that I have used since 1998.

That is not to say, though, that I do not think their journals are worth reading. I simply don't have/make the time to read them. I personally think that the ACM digital library is a great thing to have access to, if your work and or leisure allows you time to read such things.

I keep thinking that someday I will have time to read all of these ACM publications I have accumulated. By then, the topics covered will surely no longer be state-of-the-art, and I will feel like I'm reading a 1983 issue of Byte Magazine with advertisements for $3000 5MB hard drives and what-not. But hey.
Nearly once an hour, I think. I don't keep close track. Plus going out for a run mid-afternoon, weather permitting.

I've found that one of the largest benefits of working at home is that I can get up to pace whenever I feel like it without disturbing any cubemates. I find pacing much better at clearing the head than deliberately going out for a walk, because I do it subconsciously without mentally unloading the problem. I noticed the same effect at work too: when I had a big office to myself, or when my cubemates weren't in to work, I tended to get much more done.

I find I can't concentrate if I've been sitting at the computer for more than 2-3 hours straight. I really do start to feel the lack of exercise.
http://www.google.com/uds/solutions/slideshow/index.html
Futuristic Mobile Device with Advanced Search Function
I think there may be a limit to the amount of productive work you can get done in a day, and whether you hit that limit after 3 hours or 14 hours, it's still there. So there may be some truth to your impression that news.YC isn't really hurting your real productivity.

OTOH, I've found that going out and getting some exercise, or turning off the computer and reading a book, or watching a movie tends to clear my head a lot quicker than social bookmarking sites or blogs. I feel like I get "stuck" in a low level of activity when I read too much, like all that incoming information is still taking up cycles that would otherwise be used for my startup. So maybe it's not the best procrastination activity. ;-)

I certainly have noticed that the biggest bottleneck for my productivity is the time it takes for my brain to adjust to and assimilate new architectural decisions. And letting my brain relax and switch off seems to make that go faster. (So does getting lots of sleep...again, sleep is not something to shortchange.) I'm just not certain that news.YC or other programming-related websites really let my brain switch off all that well.
Two-thirds of Americans think nanotechnology is morally unacceptable
The website listed, http://browsershots.org/, is actually really cool. These kind of automated screen shot sites have popped up now and then, but this is definitely the best "free" one I've seen.
A small manifesto for simplicity on the Web
A sneak peek at Heron: a programming language for executable UML
NetBeans grant
Searching for “god” found 0 articles
But maybe imagination and curiosity requires intellect.
context: http://god.rubyforge.org/
Is the story only 2 paragraphs long?
What do you guys think is a "reasonable CPM"? $0.001? $0.01? $0.05?
Magic: The Gathering, Evolved
I'm sure a lot of people here played this game (and some probably still do). I ended up playing again over the weekend after a years-long hiatus and realized that there might be a big opportunity to create some sort of web-based online trading card game that doesn't suck as much as MtG, ChronX, or Sanctum.

If anyone's interested, please ping me (myoung8@stanford.edu or myoung8 on skype)
How Has Web Hosting Changed in 10 Years? Not Very Much
Thanks! :)

If it makes it, do you think I could get a discount from the $100 for it?
I funded a couple guys that wanted to do something like this a few years ago...but they completely dropped the ball because they were really only interested in the tech challenges instead of the creative and business aspects. (They basically made the cardinal geek sin of getting too focused on the tech instead of customers, so they've been spinning their wheels with a distributed game server that no one wants instead of working on an actual game they could sell.)

If you get anywhere with this, shoot me an email. I'd also be very interested in online murder mystery games.
See http://maxtility.com/FT080220.pdf
Maybe a better search would be: http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=god+process+monitor...
will do. what's your email address?
I wouldn't expect to see value-adding apps too soon... unless FB is willing to make some significant changes to their platform. There's simply no incentive to make them right now -- virality continues to be the main criterion for app success.
Watching the Big Idea with Donnie Deutsch one of the interviewees suggested jumping out of the plane first and building your parachute second. That was a powerful image, you really need that parachute but until you jumped, you never really got to it.
Why is it so hard to make stuff people want? I wish somebody would start a company that solved this problem itself; i.e. a startup that generated ideas for startups.
Use the source, Luke. That's better than an MD5 any day of the week. Didn't you know MD5 is broken anyway?

http://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2005/03/more_hash_func...

:)
Death of the game programmer: procedural _game_ generation.
Hackers step up website attacks
My money's on the hacker who just goes straight to the documentation. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kerning
Your Mother Tongue Influences How Your Brain Develops