skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
No, take general warnings as a guide, and add the context of your specific situation.

For example, wingsuit diving is essentially suicidal.
http://youtube.com/watch?v=JHlOvhlKPvs

But if you happen to be an extremely talented wingsuit diver, such broad declarations don't mean as much.

Certainly heed advice if you are in no way exception with respect to the matters that influence the issue.

Also, about temperament... I've probably thought about the long term implications of temperament and interaction about starting the business far more than average. So if you shouldn't have gotten married, you sure as hell shouldn't start a company together. If you made a good decision (which sadly isn't too common), you can probably work together really well. Goes back to the main point: context matters over generalizations.
I don't think exhausting sex is the issue. But the feeling for no more being competitive for sex reduces the drive to work. And I guess raising children also took away time. Considering the case of Pablo Picasso. He still did great work but he never settled down in any relationship and always looking for a new girl like he was young.

I guess to refute the theory, we need to monitor testosterone levels of creative males for all his life. And after their death and 50 years later to judge the correlation of their testosterone level with achievements.

So shall we wait to see Serge Brin and Larry Page's declined capabilities in running Google? :-)
What makes an entrepreneur?
Answer: Uninstall Windows.
I'd say that YUI is fair demonstration of talent on behalf of Yahoo's engineers.

http://developer.yahoo.com/yui/
Stunning counterexample.
Quite a few people do this. They find cofounders or raise money to recruit programmers or outsource programming all the way or till they can raise money
Arc Ported to JavaScript
Crazy awesome!
I'm fine with being called a coder, but probably only because I'm not given much opportunity to do it these days.
Simple: switch to Ubuntu.
PG, any thoughts on this? Are you married? And dare I ask, are you celibate? ...No pressure, of course. It's a touchy subject to some.

I ask because you're more successful than most of us here, and I know of many people who claim that celibacy is crucial to doing anything great with your life, for whatever your definition of great is. Scientific evidence is hard to come by though, and even still, most people don't seem to accept it.
I know few people that I used to work with, that moved to yahoo and they are good.

Can't say, best of the best, but they were pretty decent at coding. This is just circumstantial evidence though.

Google is attracting the prime rate "coorporate hackers", apple, yahoo and amazon the second rate ones, then hp and ibm the crap that like to be consultants".

As I say, this is just a generalization, so there are plenty of exceptions.

And when I say "coorporate hackers", i mean it. Unless you have lots of options to vest, or an H-1b, or waiting for the green card, a true hacker would not want to be in those enviroments.

When cooporate grows, so does internal political bullsh!t, which eventually will drive good people away.
That's part of why I focus on code size. Length is an external constraint. If you start looking at code thinking "what is the lower bound on how long this has to be?" you're one step from discovering the new operator that will make it that short.

Paul: Give us a peek into your head... how do you go about discovering new operators? Do you go to set theory or algebra books for inspiration, or look over lots and lots of code with an open mind?

Also, how do you decide if a new operator that ought to be something "easily added" or a part of the language? remove-if-not seems to be something in the former category.
15 Exercises for Learning a new Programming Language
Guide to selecting a cartoon to suit your chosen IT career
the chance of being accepted would be a bit less than 50%

Typo?

the odds would be better for anyone who's reading this

By how much? Can you say how many applicants have >10 karma? Or better - could you publish a list of karma scores of everyone who has applied?
Smoothed Analysis: Why The Simplex Algorithm Usually Takes Polynomial Time.
DNA Found to Have "Impossible" Telepathic Properties
This Google result can't possibly be right:
Had fallout with partner over perceived workloads. To destress I thought I'd amuse myself by googling "lazy cofounder". 0 results. Tried "lazy co-founder" ... 4 results, all irrelevant. Tried "lazy business partner", only 5 results with the standard "search again with ommited results blah blah". Did Google change their search equation, or are Chinese hackers retaliating for middle eastern cable line splices, or what - I REFUSE TO BELIEVE that in this whole wide big world, I am the only person ever to think I'm doing an unequal share of the work. Someone somewhere in this world must have thought about it and posted a blog or something on the internet. Why isn't google picking it up? I can google something stupid like "pink zebras with attention defecit disorder" and probably get more results. WTF?
That is quite something.
There's no place to put karma score in. My karma score is currently 1956, and I got turned down last year. I'm hoping I can get in this year.
Good Math, Bad Math
I'll try to paraphrase the best definition I've come across from, of all places, a Harvard b-school prof.: "An enetrepreneur is someone who pursues (as opposed to talks about or plans) a perceived strategic opportunity (perception being the entrepreneurial advantage) regardless of tactical ability (money, position, credibility, skill set, connections, resume, background, etc.).

A bias for action, superior "a priori" perception of potential payoffs, and a high tolerance for bluffing and "faking it till you make it."

I have found no better practical explanation that covers the whole spectrum.
Did you try "lazy founder" (a cofounder is actually just another founder, isn't it ;)
What a depressing job. Why do it?
there's no place to put karma score in

But there's a place for your user name(s). Since Arc is so expressive, I'm sure it would only take one line of code to get the list ;)
Microsoft's new programming language... "must pass the two beer test" (p3 of article)
Reverse-engineering the brain for better computers
>While Arc includes some handy libraries for writing web apps--libraries so powerful, apparently, that it's cheating to compare Arc to other languages using a problem that requires saving a string on the server--that is not the focus right now.

HAHA... great quote, pg!!

As for language features, I think Arc's on the right track. If anything, be flexible and don't resist the urge to change everything. At this stage, the main thing is to get core right and not worry about backward compatibility.
Well, lazy founder would be me ... I mean the "other founder guy" ... and actually I just tried that and got back just ... 5 pages x 20 results per page, half of them (later pages) mostly irrelevant. So I guess it's just me. Everyone else has super hard working partners who haul rear end, only I make bad partnering choices. Either that or I've found a flaw in Google. If it's just me, why are there so many lawsuits with founders suing each other? I can't imagine they go to court saying, "Darn it, your honor, my partner promosid to work hard - and he wound up working too hard!"
I've been reading Mark Chu-Carrol's blog since i first seen it on news.myspace/mathematics. He is absolutely brilliant. He has a good style of teaching mathematics and mathematical concepts. I wish he would compile a book from the posts on his blog.
come to think of it, today is our anniversary :)
Microsoft Responds to 'Save XP' Petition
checkout couchsurfing.com. i bet you can find somewhere to stay near the stanford campus. and because you are a student, it will be minimally creepy.

still, a $300 ticket is too much for me
Funding the Semantic Web: Dapper's Ad Network Plan
Although unrelated to my challenge (http://blog.offbytwo.com/2008/02/05/a-different-kind-of-arc-...)

this seems to be the first implementation of Arc in a language other than Scheme. I'm curious if others will follow.
From the FAQ:

Why did you keep car and cdr?

Because we couldn't think of any better alternatives. It would have been misleading to use first and rest or head and tail, because conses are fundamentally pairs; lists are one thing you can build with them, but not the only thing.

There's no conventional name in English for the first and second halves of a pair. If you have to make up names, car and cdr are pretty good choices, because they're short and the same length and naturally composable (e.g. cadr).
Doesn't jive with my experience. A wife and family increaased my drive tremendously.

When i was single, I was a slacker mostly interested in partying. I would work just enough for rent and pot.

After our first son arrived 5 years ago (unplanned), I realized I had to make up for lost time, and have been extremely productive ever since, finishing my engineering degree, finally getting a "real" job in the industry, and then leaving that for my startup.

However, my wife constantly says I dont give enough time to the family. If I gave as much time as she wished, I doubt I would be successful.
I think we all realize this. I think we all realize that "Nine-year-olds are taller than eight-and-a-half-year-olds" doesn't deny the fact that there's more variance among than between. But if you have two random samples from each group, are you going to bet that variance will swamp mean, or that mean will show up despite variance?
Speaking in tongues
Nope, sorry. Multi-tierred share classes in this country goes back to Standard Oil. Overall you can find variations of this going all the way back the the East India Tea Company. Every modern business genius is just rehashing some crap somebody thought up long ago. Stop reading Fast Company.
"My first priority with Arc right now is the core language--those operators that are neither primitives like car and cdr, nor special-purpose library functions. I mean operators like CL's mapcar, let, remove-if-not, and so on."

let is a special form (at least in CL) so it's a primitive, no?...
That's weird. I could have sworn that people other than myself knew about Google ...
Don't compare Gimp to Photoshop, compare Pixel.
http://www.kanzelsberger.com/pixel/?page_id=5
[SF] Are you the best programmer you know?  Join our YC company...
This is your chance to join a YC-funded startup as the second technical person, building the database of the (near) future. We're still in stealth mode, but we're aiming to raise a Series A VC round after the YC demo day, so join now to get in on the ground floor; to shape the company and the product.

You should apply if you're an excellent programmer and are the sort of person that would work well in a startup environment. Ideally, you're great in at least two of: web-scale scaling, Java development, and in-depth database knowledge (or have DBA experience). You're probably looking for a more exciting way to apply these skills than you're doing today. Maybe you have different skills but know you'd be great anyway - if so, just let us know why your skills will work for us.

You have to be self-motivated to work incredibly hard on challenging and fast-paced problems. You'll work largely autonomously and achieve remarkable things quickly. You'll have to find the balance between doing things fast and doing things 'the right way'. You'll be willing to work on whatever needs doing even if you haven't 'been trained' in it. Most importantly, all of the above should appeal to you, rather than put you off.

In return, you'll get equity, a real say in the company, and the opportunity to do challenging work. If you could start yesterday that would be great, and you'll get more of the YC experience including demo day, but we'll wait for the right person.

To apply, please email your resume to justinsb at gmail
How to write a science article for the popular press:

- Use lots of fantasy-novel words like "telepathic" or "teleportation".

- In the first two paragraphs, put in lots of cheeseball phrases like "bizarre" and "Explanation: none" and "amazing" and "unrecognized by science" and "chemically impossible". Meanwhile, provide such a vague and fuzzy description of the actual phenomenon that the reader can barely tell what you're talking about.

- Drop the name of the journal in paragraph three. Just the journal title, of course, not a citation or a hyperlink -- the whole thing is probably behind an incredibly expensive paywall, anyway. And it's not as if anyone cares about the data, or the methods, or the references, or the authors' motivation, or their interpretation, or their source of funding. We're just here to see a clueless journalist hyperventilate about how amazingly amazing it all is!

- But do give the scientists a one-sentence quote, just to remind the readers that they exist.

- No matter what the first ten paragraphs are about, the last paragraph is always about the impending cure for cancer.
I figured it went without saying that a comment on a forum should not be construed as legal advice and that one should seek the professional advice of a licensed attorney for that purpose. I'll say it now for completeness.
Well, yes, but better than nothing. And it may be precedent-setting. It could be an important first step towards taking it offline permanently in the future.
Maybe it's that I'm a 21yo male, but it seems pretty badass to me. Humble, but somehow awesome.

Not really the best use of one's time, I'd argue, but pretty cool nonetheless.
an important limitation of javascript means this will never quite be a complete implementation:

Continuations are not implemented. I had started on a CPS-based interpreter, but then realized that JavaScript lacks tail-call optimization and has a recursion limit of 1000 calls, which'll make any CPS-transformation blow the stack.

looks like a good piece of code otherwise, though.
I don't want to seem like we're trying to force people to sign up for News.YC. I'll tell you what, though: if everyone uses the same email address when they apply that they have in their profile, I'll try to match them.

That means you can't say e.g. whatever [at] gmail in your profile email field. But you don't need to anyway; it isn't visible to crawlers.
68 Linux Related Free E-books
have decide to make a comprehensive list of Free Linux related e-books. E-books:
I'm also working on a startup with my wife as cofounder. We haven't launched yet, but her skillset is a fantastic complement to mine. I'm a very strategic thinker, whereas she's a great tactician and good at organization. She's also brilliant (Ph.D. student in I/O psychology), which is one of the reasons I married her. :)

I think that most couples aren't capable of running a business together, but I also think we're particularly pragmatic and don't let emotions get in the way of our goals.

I also have found myself becoming MORE creative now that we've been married. That might just be because I didn't move out from my parents' house until a few months before the wedding, but I can say that the broad generalization of marriage destroying creativity doesn't apply to me.
Put your email address in your News.YC profile if you apply to startup school
Interesting article. Thanks for posting.
Apparently YC news owns me more than google. sigh

Sorry, Google.
It depends. Yoko either influenced John's creativity or his relationship with her reflected his shifting values. Either way, it wasn't a lack of creativity that broke up the Beatles, it was a rift between what they wanted to express in terms of art.
That's funny. I forgot let is a special form in CL. It doesn't really need to be, and it isn't in Arc.

(mac with (parms . body)
`((fn ,(map1 car (pair parms))
,@body)
,@(map1 cadr (pair parms))))

(mac let (var val . body)
`(with (,var ,val) ,@body))
Would rather not see such stories here until they're confirmed.
This was sick! Lets invent cough situations cough in which this would be useful....I can already think of 2 off the top of my head ;)
These are awesome. They cover all the basics a person might need to know in a new language and they're not one's basic "find out if a number's prime" ones that I'm used.

Though I couldn't agree with the author's comment in the intro that program 0 should be "Hello, World!". Just for the sake of going through the motions of actually coding a thing (app or otherwise) in the new language.
"... So I want to ask a favor from Arc users: I want to ask for tolerance when I break and change things in what may seem to be arbitrary, small ways. This will make Arc a pain in the ass to write programs on top of, I know, but the end result should be something worth having. ..."

This is the bit that will cause a lot of flack. Is there any way to mitigate code breakage? Is it worth it? Maybe users should confine their coding to sketches in one problem domain re-solving it each time the language evolves. Concentrating on how Arc can be improved instead of just the application.

The best bit I got from this post was re-reading "Design and Research". [0] So the research being done by users, design by pg? Changing the mindset from app builders to language researchers is difficult but not impossible.

[0] http://paulgraham.com/desres.html
Doubtful. Optimistic, agreed, but doubtful.

On the other hand, I find it funny that the great wall of china kept out foreign invaders...and this seems to do the opposite (keep the chinese out of foreign stuff).
Well...I'm a programmer, not a hacker. So do I count?

YC is how I get my tech news. Just YC, Slashdot and Engadget for me.
Brilliant essay explaining why Arc won't be open source
Well...I'm a code pirate. So there.

And I'm fine being called a coder, it doesn't really matter what we're called right? Its more about what we do ;)
Looks interesting. I'll definitely put this on my to-read list. Thanks for posting.
A scheme isn't a scheme without continuations. It's a shame they're such a pain in the ass to implement in platforms w/o gotos or TCO.
That is a good question. I plan to write about that one day. I'm not entirely sure. I think the process is mainly negative: I look at code that feels bad, in the sense of being unneccessarily long. If you remove the unnecessary bits, what's left is a call to the new operator.

One specific heuristic I have is that I love things that make it possible to put functionality into actual functions that can then be passed as arguments, rather than having it stuck in the middle of a loop. Programs are easier to rearrange that way. So : notation for composition and [..._...] for closures are double wins. They're not only shorter, but also encourage the use of functional arguments.

Maybe triple wins, actually, because they both get rid of variables, which is an especially good way to make programs shorter.

You have to iterate, because sometimes a new operator will make it possible to define more new operators that compress code further. Occasionally a big piece of code just collapses, like cotton candy in your mouth.

I put stuff in the language if I use it a lot in applications. A lot of the operators in arc.arc are on probation, because they seem like they might be useful, but I haven't actually used them much so far.
Makes sense, while it might be a good anti-takeover measure it also makes it harder to get rid of people and ultimately it is not in the best interest of shareholders.
I tried Prism. It lets me wrap slime volleyball. I would call that, in spanish, muy util
There's a place for the yc username on the app? Where?
There isn't. But: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=110672
You can define let in terms of lambda.

(let ((x 99))
(foo x))

can expand to:

((lambda (x) (foo x)) 99)
Most brilliant part: "Even at that, Y-combinator is funding would-be Arc-competitors like Infogami."
Microsoft's Side-by-Side Horror
Get Satisfaction Announces API - Look Out Corporations of the World
> After our first son arrived 5 years ago (unplanned)

Sounds like you should hire a project manager! ;-)
I saw this when it was first published. I remember thinking it had to be a troll because nobody could possibly be that stupid.
I'm a second generation chinese-american. My father once told me this joke to get me to learn chinese because he thought I was becoming "too american"

- "What do you call someone who speaks 3 languages?"

- A: Thats easy, trilingual.

- "What do you call someone who speaks 2 languages?"

- A: Thats easy too! Bilingual.

-

- "That being true, what if someone speaks only 1 language?"

A: They're....just people.
-
WRONG. They're American.
I absolutely agree. It would really help to see why people are coming down there and can also be a great icebreaker.
Is there a rule for this? Was never clear on the recording policy.
See, thats why big brother is right!

2+2 = 5!
Yes; this PNG is not a complete xkcd comic. Whoever submitted this (I'm looking at you, anirbas :-) will now have to reread every xkcd comic to get the alt text, too. For those who don't know what I'm talking about, mouse over any xkcd cartoon and leave it there for a few seconds. (Firefox users: install https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/1715 first.) For those didn't know: I feel your pain. That was me about six months ago.
Keep dangerous foreign memes from pristine Chinese minds? ;-)

It's not just a firewall, it's an info-condom! ;-D
If you are married then you will know, she is clearly the manager.
Check Your Computer Temperature
If you are lke me and often stress test your laptop (all my tests pictures you see are done on this laptop) like the post before shows chances are your machine gets hot alot. While todays machines are build to last long and endure more stress than ever before, it would be nice to to know at any given time whats the temperature of your machine. Some machine go hotter even without running all sorts of stress tests, but because of the siple fact that either your cooling system is broken or faulty. In linux there are nice packages you can download that will constantly show you your cpu temperature. But we don't like that we want to see it on the terminal. :)
The other problem with his argument is that the effort to reimplement a lightweight language is often less than the effort required to cope with a closed (read: crippled) implementation.
I'm sorry for coming off as an "XP fanboy"--I didn't mean to sound negative with anything I said. I fit into at least three of the groups I mentioned, currently am on my third iPod, and am thinking of getting the very Macbook Air I'm talking about. I love OS X, but that has nothing to do with my argument. I know full-well that I'm in the upper-middle class, and you probably are too--you've just chosen, like most enthusiasts, to spend your money on technology rather than fashion.

The fact that Apple has a successfully viral strategy in using their more inexpensive products (such as the Mac Mini) to guide people into buying complementary products (such as the Apple TV, Cinema displays, and Airport Express) and eventually fully integrate them into the "Mac lifestyle" is the mark of a smart company, and exactly what Microsoft wishes it had when it refers to a lacking "consumer experience." They probably never will as long as they don't control the hardware, though.

Of course, from the perspective of the consumer, Apple products are sometimes the "pragmatic decision." However, in all of this, I was referring to Apple's marketing department's intended market for their products and services, not necessarily the "long tail" of economic and word-of-mouth users.
Ask YC : x86 books?
I have just started a compiler project targeting x86. Can you suggest some books which will get me upto speed on the the x86 instruction set? I have worked with other ISAs in the past so I am not an assembler noob. Just want something to teach me x86. A book which gives an overview of newer intel chips (intel core microarchitecture?) will also be helpful.

edit : I also need to understand the SSE instructions since the compiler is expected to do some vectorization.
Google launches Wufoo competitor