skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Any "born vs. made" question is poorly defined. I recently decided to leave grad school after 2 years to launch a startup. So, now I'm an entrepreneur for the first time: Was I born or made that way?

I remember reading about Bill Gates and Steve Jobs at the age of 12 and thinking, "Hey, I'm going to do that!" Then I thought I'd be a senator. Or an astronaut. I campaigned for Nader and thought Ayn Rand was stupid. Then I started studying economics and thought I'd be a professor, and maybe Rand was on to something after all.

So you could easily argue that I was born to be an entrepreneur if you looked at some slices of my childhood, and you could argue that I was made one if you looked at others. I'm much more interested in well-defined questions, such as: Is the Kauffman Foundation's Fast Trac program effective in making people into entrepreneurs?
Ironically English majors typically don't fill the literary world, or even the ranks of journalists and magazine writers. Quite frankly, when have you ever read a magazine about any topic touched by an English major. How will an english major help you write about mechanics, make-up, or interior decoration? It won't.

I got work as a reviewer at 16, why? Because I love movies, video games, books and people can't get me to shut the fuck up about them. It only helped that I'm a naturally talented writer. In fact the information I gained from doing the job was that taking courses in Journalism and English typically excluded you from doing the work, New Journalism killed any prospects of a classically trained Journalist from hitting it big.
Python developer. That's where I ended up.

For those who wish to pursue their passion for literature, a lot end up as teachers or indentured servants for the university system. Louis Menand explains the dynamics behind this latter phenomenon in his recent book The Marketplace of Ideas.
Breakthrough: Definition from Answers.com
I was also taught this story that WWII got the US out of the Depression, but I suspect it may not actually be true. The bottom of the stock market was in 1932; from that point till 1938, when fears of war caused another crash, it was sharply up.

http://symonsez.files.wordpress.com/2008/10/graphic_chart_cr...
The reader comments are very interesting.
they are part-timers and created this policy to weed out the tire-kickers.
$41.4 while eliminating the department of education.

$165 billion bailout of social security.

Okay, that doesn't mean much. Put it in context. How much was Reagan spending on defense and other discretionary items? That's the track record I'm talking about.

http://www.heritage.org/Research/Features/BudgetChartbook/De...

(first plot i could find)
Right after Ebert mentioned Alex, I stopped reading, selected the text of the article, went to OS X's Services menu, and listened to Alex read the rest of it.

It reminded me how far consumer voice synthesis has yet to come, but it did give me a better appreciation of some of the more subtle things the Alex voice has in terms of intonation. Despite still sounding obviously synthetic, it's obviously doing quite a bit of analysis on the sentence structure to vary the pitch in a natural way.

But that makes me wonder: Why, when complex things like structural intonation are already in consumer TTS products, do (deceptively) simple things like consonant sounds and pacing still sound so stilted?
In case you were hoping #2 would lower the price of ECC memory, it won't. ECC memory is the same hardware as regular memory, you just have more of it; 4GB of ECC memory is just 7GB of regular memory with a different sticker on it. Since most people decide how much memory to get based on the price ("I'm willing to spend $100 on memory"), demand would remain unchanged.
An instance of additive identity.
I think he means fail as in allowing you to write a function like:

deleteAllFiles user = if user == Root
then throwError "access denied"
else unsafeDeleteAllFiles

Even if memory access is safe, you can still type in the wrong algorithm.
> I usually flag all of the climate change stuff here, but this one got an upvote.

Wait, you usually flag the articles that show the science for climate change, or the science against climate change - you flag those, but you upvoted a political call to action written by a non-scientist?
Right. Technically we came out of the great depression, had a recession in between, etc. That's where neo-keynesians criticize FDR. The dip in 1937 coincided with a FDR being pressured into balancing the budget. It's much more complicated than this, but I used the WWII reference because usu. the next best answer is WWII. Now I'm told, that WWII wasn't responsible either!? What gives?
So, why did Skype go to all this trouble? It seems that their main asset is the brand and ownership of the user database. So, why would it matter to them if alternative clients were built? It's not as if SIP-based services were not an alternative.

Perhaps Skype went to all this trouble to achieve network effects? If it was easy to block Skype traffic, maybe it would not have become the "standard" it is today. The it-just-works feature was likely most critical to success, and that might only have been achieved through obfuscation.

So, I get the network-level obfuscation, but I don't see a case for code obfuscation. Why should Skype care if it owns the client? It's not like they're pushing ads upon their users or otherwise marketing too heavily.
So here's a question, why don't you pick their brain back?

I'm intrigued with the idea of having a /conversation/ with someone over coffee and not being able to get anything in return out of them. It is almost as if they are asking her to coffee and then interrogating her, (which doesn't seem to be a very good ebb and flow of a conversation anyway). If these really are intelligent people, they must have something of intellectual value to offer in return.

If they are actually looking for a consultation, make it clear what your fees are.
I think that that would be polite and maybe even an easy way to make some cash.
That, or make sure that they take you out to a really nice place for dinner.

I would have to expect that if you were giving the advice away, and it is helpful advice, you might be able to better negotiate a favor out of the person at a later time. It might be a good idea to keep a record of these types of meetings.

Disclaimer: No one ever asks to pick my brain, but if I were asking to pick someone's brain, I would expect some sort of quid pro quo...
Why not just calculate a score for each item that is the item's age multiplied by some function (e.g. square root) of the total number of items from that item's source?
I tink they are planning to fix this in the upcoming D2 release.

For this next release a lot of effort has gone into improving the Phobos library and I think this next release will also let Phobos and Tango work together.
Ignite LA
Monday, March 1st
IgniteLA! Part of Global Ignite week: Co-Sponsored by APOC/USC

5 Minutes. 20 Slides. 15 Seconds per Slide.
Speakers get only 5 minutes to give an amazing, inspiring talk. In LA, there are tons of different communities at the intersection of academia, tech, art, green/sustainability, unique lifestyle design, digital/collaborative media, and social action that don't know each other but should. Think of Ignite as a set of trailers for exciting projects people are doing that you should know about. At other Ignites, talks have included: Cyborg Anthropology; The Secret Underground World of Lego; & Hacking Chocolate.You can check out the recordings on http://ignite.oreilly.com/show/

7PM. Cinespace. Carpooling recommended. Valet Available. For RSVP and more information: http://bit.ly/IgniteLA
Vancouver 2010: Olympic Village Faces Condom Shortage
Because it is so low there really is no reason to charge it.

I wonder how many they get a year and what this equals in terms of revenue. I'm guessing they get 1,000+ a year. So, it's $150,000 out of the gate I'm guessing.

Feels icky and I'm sure $25 would have the same effect. It's clear this is for making money from my perspective.

That being said, I don't think they are bad people and they certainly are not the Keiretsu Forum charging $1,500-$6,000 to pitch... or that Mike Segal guy asking for 5% of your business and $10k+!!!

The fact that they have to explain themselves shows how much the tide has turned.

I'm an entrepreneur first and an angel investor second... so, I've built the Open Angel Forum from a startups perspective. These folks are angel investors and they don't always see the other side of the coin.
It's a market question. Is there a market for your ideas? Is your time in demand? Then you can charge what the market will support.

But it's also a social question, one of balance. Even if your ideas have a good market value, where's the harm in a little free advice? The harm is only in an unreasonable amount of free advice. If you're a smart person whose ideas mean a lot to others, it's only being a good neighbor to offer a quick opinion on a few things if you aren't busy. But by the same token, a good neighbor only asks within reason.
Walmart around here carries two different dosages: 3 milligram and something else. I can't remember what the other dosage is, but I buy the 3 mg and a single dose works great. I've read that no benefit is gained above a certain very small dosage.
I get ten-ish emails a week from people who literally use the phrase "pick your brain"
here's a good video for info: http://www.fastcompany.tv/video/a-look-how-china-changing-ho...

depending on what your product is, of course alibaba.com is always a good way to start contacting manufacturers.
That, is an excellent point.

I think there are many young folks who would not come if they didn't do that, just like there are folks who won't apply to NY Angels for $150.

Frankly, there are better models coming into the space like TechStars, TheFunded/Founders Institute, YCombinator and ycombinator.

It's never been a better time to be an entrepreneur.... except for 1979 in software, 1994 in the internet, 2003 in the internet and, well, now. :-)
1) what about the cost of diverting resources to finance the war? what of the health costs we incur for the health benefits of the wounded, support of their families, etc? You're not addressing my point. You're merely reinforcing it by being as short-sighted as the author of the article and not going far enough to compute the actual costs.

2) huh? did you see the debt reagan left us? and again, my issue is we're spending money on wars and cutting it from education and other vital investments, anyway. medicare and social security are a different discussion.
The problem with that visual is that it ignores the fact that the same social mechanism that blindly repeats the anti-global warming line today was repeating the pro-global warming line a few months ago.

It's not clear whether the author's objection is that society reduces nuanced and still developing scientific research to sound bites and repeats that as if it were canon, or the fact that the message has turned against AGW (or at least not as vehemently pro-AGW).
I thought this would be an algorithmic analysis of stride-lengths and personal bubbles to determine the most scientifically comfortable arrangement.

But, still good.
Long-time cannabis use linked to psychosis
It isn't a matter of looking 'pretty', it is how does the brain visually understand it as simple or not.
I agree that there designers go overboard with 'it doesn't have the right padding', etc.
But you can't ignore HUGE test like red makes people hungry more (McDonalds) etc.
That sort of design does translate, and the mad-libs form just looks confusing.
Our society simply does not value intellectual achievement or learning as ends in themselves.

What is valued and rewarded is making money, entertaining, acquiring power, and being "practical", which the humanities are just not focused on.

The humanities are also constantly denigrated (especially by the right-wing, but also by many in the sciences). This trend is fueled largely by ignorance, but also somewhat by a reaction to the criticisms they see coming from the humanities departments towards the status quo, "traditional institutions", and the view of science and technology as savior (ie. scientism).

Given these attitudes, financial disincentives, and attacks, it's really no wonder fewer young people choose to major in the humanities.
How can you possibly substantiate that statement?
debt as a percentage of gdp:
http://zfacts.com/p/318.html

It frustrates me that people who are crying foul over our current debt praise Regan and his policies. He's not to blame only. The congress at the time has it fair share, of course.

edit: didn't read the article (just view the plot, it's the first i could find)
> markets have all the information

Markets do have all the available information. But no person or group of people can ever process all the information in a meaningful way. Only the market itself can process the huge amount information dispersed among participants.

The rest of your post is silly "animal spirits" pseudo-keynesianism. No, the government cannot usefully manipulate the business cycle or limit damage from failing businesses. Even Keynes himself only ever really tried to say government could stop a major slide from happening in the first place. He said it would be too late to intervene post-crash.
MedPage Today link with more details of study design:

http://www.medpagetoday.com/Psychiatry/Addictions/18722
Previously submitted:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1117715

(and that wasn't the only previous submission)
Our society simply does not value intellectual achievement or learning as ends in themselves.

Does intellectual achievement or learning happen in the typical English department? Frederick Crews,

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frederick_Crews

mentioned in the submitted article, is a smart man whose essays are well worth reading, but he is very much of an exception among professors of English.
I think it is possible to believe in climate change and not believe in anthropogenic warming.

It's just like pascal's wager. Let's assume just the two options where the globe is warming, is it man's fault or not?

Let's assume it is man's fault and there are two options, we can do something or we can't. If we can't and we try, we wasted a huge effort to stop something we can't stop. If it isn't our fault, then we start to look at ways to adapt and have a better chance of survival. No one is suggesting better air conditioners as a solution to global warming, but something like that may be our only hope.

The problem with blaming man is that it might be our behavior that is actually keeping the globe cool. For example, Global Dimming may be counteracting the effects of what could be a natural warming cycle due to sun spots: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_dimming and PBS's Nova did a show on it as well: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-o1iXRU_5WU

If we stop polluting through the emission of particulate matter, then the global warming may actually get worse!
> Amazon's correlations aren't done in real time, and I don't get why it would be an issue using MySql for it.

Many of the algorithms for recommender systems are especially known for being parallelizable and would be extremely difficult to reliably and quickly implement on top of MySQL (or Postgres or Oracle). I can't even think of a way to do so without making a fairly complex ETL cycle with a separate DWH and a main serving DB (with points at which the site becomes degraded and possibly unavailable). As I've mentioned earlier, with a system like Hadoop, you could start off by implementing these algorithms in Perl or Python (making use extensive libraries already available in the language).

Recommendations may not be real time, but there's a huge time difference between doing an even fairly simple "market basket"-type analysis for a data set orders of magnitude difference smaller than Amazon's in MySQL and doing this on top of Hadoop + HBase/Voldemort/Cassandra (i.e., compute in Hadoop, serve from a NoSQL db which offers Hadoop integration). You could even start by doing the computation in Hadoop and loading the data into MySQL (while, perhaps, serving the data from a slave db).

> Maybe it is for Amazon which got plenty of data to analyze, but not for a startup.

Your start-up doesn't need to have tons of users to have tons of data. This is especially true if you're building a start-up to make sense of the data that's already out there (some YC examples are Flightcaster, Directed Edge). For a consumer start-up, ability to have cheap and scalable storage means you can record data much more frequently.

> The other problem I've had with Nosql is that capabilities vary from implementation to implementation, and my software really evolves a lot ... I don't know what my needs are from the start.

Isn't this the point of separating your data model from your presentation layer? Begin with MySQL (or even simpler, with BerkeleyDB) -- change it to whatever else suits your needs.
eh, for me, building a 'personal brand' has been really important, and giving free advice is one way to get that. (well, if you are trying to build a brand as a person who knows a lot about X, giving free (good) advice about X to people who are likely to talk about you is a good place to start.) But then, I'm a product business, and I'm in an industry where marketing is the dominant cost, so having a personal brand monetizes well, and without much extra effort on my part.
Do you refuse them?
It's less the strength of the complaint as much as it is the context. If I'm reading an article about the strengths and weaknesses about functional programming vs OOP, it's fine to include such things. However, I think in this post it detracts from the author's main point. By the end of the first few paragraphs, I was focused more on thinking "Oh, this is another of those rants against OOP" than I was on the actual content.
Pretty much the same jobs there are for anybody else.

Unless you're actually planning to become a professor, a scientist, or a Professional Engineer (note the capital letters!) it really doesn't matter much what you major in as an undergrad. It's only four years out of your 80-year lifespan. (And, since not every course in college is a course in your major, it isn't even that.)

You do have to be careful to take enough science courses if you want to go to medical or dental school, but even that can be fixed after the fact. A friend of mine graduated in English, then decided to go to med school, and her college allowed her to come back and take a couple years of intense science courseload. No problem. (Unless you count debt, of course. Make no mistake: Math and science courses are good investments, even if you're an English major. You never know when chemistry or statistics will come in handy.)

I couldn't have majored in my own current profession -- web development -- even had I known to do so, because the web was invented the year after I graduated from college. My own misspent youth was in EE and physics, but I have colleagues -- many more talented than I -- who majored in English, worked as professional actors, or played in symphony orchestras. They learned their current careers like almost everyone does: A mixture of "teaching yourself in your spare time" and "working your way up from the bottom".
posting this problem seems like brilliant PR. to me, you seem pretty safe from repercussion...and you might as well get some press for this. i mean, it was only a matter of time 'til this idea gets spun into a web app. also, i heard an interview with him on mixergy some weeks ago...and he seems like a prick. he was rudely typing away & distracted while andrew warner, the interviewer, was interviewing him. it was only until andrew starting asking him about potential competition that he woke up (obviously self conscious that a better web app can potentially steal his business from under him).

i think your app needs work. focus on that. once a better mouse trap comes out, i think reporters would flock to it. he claims his success is about the trust he's built with reporters. trust? he email blasts these requests with full reporter contact info twice a day to millions of people via email! (well, actually he finally started hiding reporter email with an anonymizer earlier this year).
Apple to Update their Macbook Pro line | The Tech Update
Picture of energy dissipation from the Chilean earthquake across Pacific
Apple may not own the factories (why the fuck would they, they're not a manufacturing company) but they do what they can to ensure children don't work in the factories that build their products. They've stopped doing business with the contractors that were using child labor.

This story is the moral equivalent of turning "Apple fires employee for kicking co-worker in crotch" to "Apple caught kicking employees in crotch".
The overwhelming majority of posts here on climate change are mediocre editorials by non-scientists:

http://searchyc.com/submissions/climate+change?sort=by_date

I don't flag the ones that are data-oriented, but do flag most editorials. This one, specifically, was a mark above most of those enough that I found it worthwhile. While Gore is obviously partisan, I find it disingenuous to lump him in with the bulk of partisan hackery on the topic.
Yup. And it's pretty arrogant to imply that it's pretty pretty arrogant to mean that it is pretty arrogant to declare someone else pretty arrogant.

I think this thread is heading for a stack overflow.

Anyway, I think a lot of these self-referential paradoxes have a simple resolution. Just refuse to play. I'll do what I want, and I'll ignore whether everyone else thinks it's justified or not.
It's runtime checking. I really don't care though. Common Lisp just has a different approach, it sits between static typing and dynamic typing. It's type declarations are for optimization. Which I see as the main benefit anyway.

Besides, I've been around long enough to have seen applications that were implemented using statically-typed languages, simply explode. Static typing, IMHO, is extremely overrated. Since many statically typed languages make it easy to cast one type into another, you can't trust it to be anything more than an optimization hint.

This been quite the diversion(thanks). I'm mainly interested in meta-programming in Haskell & how it compares with Lisp.
Dude, it's really great to have heavyweights like you out there advocating for this stuff. When I wrote my original post, I got slammed by a lot of people and didn't get a lot of vocal support.

http://www.metamorphblog.com/2010/02/is-ny-angels-a-paytopla...

Honestly, I think entrepreneurs are scared to speak up and offend rich people with power and money. If you're the only one who sticks his head out, it gets cut off. And so nothing changes.

Now, I'm a bit more like you in that I've got something of a chip on my shoulder and I don't give a fuck, but regardless, thank you for having my and all our backs on this.

-Matt Mireles
Seems like VC/angels have a good set up: it is in their interest to have their brains picked by the people running the companies they invest in. Rather than ask for direct compensation, maybe this person should ask for a stake in an opportunity.
Isn't this mainly an aesthetic thing, though? Consumer text-to-speech is certainly adequate for vocalizing almost any conversation. One could just use that to carry out "covert voice communication."
I was expecting the submission to be an upvote. Looks like my RSS feed updated while you were answering that email.