skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
This was actually pretty good. The question here rests on types of beliefs.

I "believe" that extraterrestrial life exists, but I believe that in a completely different fashion than I believe evolution, than I believe cognitive therapy, or than I believe classical Newtonian physics. Different types of things deserve different types of belief.

I believe ET simply because it seems more natural to believe that as mankind learns to travel more, he keeps meeting other intelligences. This pattern has held since we were lounging in trees on the savanna, and I expect it to continue.

It's nowhere near being a scientific reason for believing -- no matter how many terms you hang out there. It's an intuitive argument and somewhat inductive, but mostly it's a religious one: the creative construct I just shared appeals to me more than others I have heard.
How not to treat users 
Aside from the abusive Web 1.0 pelting with adverts, with an added twist of virtually demanding 20 bucks, this site enhances the experience by having custom insults by the owner thrown at users on the left tab message board.
Not a way to run a successful, user focused site. Just a reminder to all of us.
The bigger question is whether it will ever happen that there are two intelligences alive within overlapping light cones, allowing for communication. That would be a lot easier than having to scour the universe for civilizations that we missed.
"Read everything 'patio11 has to say about measuring and marketing a software business."

In addition to searchyc, read up on his blog, kalzumeus.com. Here's a reader you can use to read it from beginning to end.

http://www.rizalalmashoor.com/reader/microisvjournal/
I gave the article a once-over but don't have any comments on it. This is a comment on another part of that page, the author description. I am not using an ad hominem attack on his ideas; rather, I am addressing the disturbing self-identification.

Describing yourself as a "conservative physicist" is rather dodgy. (From the article it seems that conservative is used in the typical American political sense, though the author says he's Czech.) It gives the impression that your primary identity bound up in a false political dichotomy used as an adjective (conservative) followed by a non-sequitur, the job name (physicist). "Conservative politician" makes sense, it's identifying your primary affiliation in your primary job of politics. "Conservative physicist" puzzles me.

Does this mean that your scientific search for physics truths is bound up in conservative ideology? Does it mean your conservative ideology is a result of your search for physics truths? They are at different levels of reality; I'm having trouble seeing how they are related.
Too bad you can't read the content on a mobile device (iPhone)
It's good engineering. Obviously right.

The name is BS. Making one change at a time is universal engineering practice. Who names that?

Marketers. Or "maybe Tick Tock" originated as a slogan for management. Which would've been a pretty cool hack, come to think about it. Keep the MBAs away from your functioning process by giving it a cool name and telling them it's a company secret.
Rejection Emails Starting to Come Out
I know some of you didn't want HN to make a big deal of it but I thought it at least deserved a post.

Please place your pithy comments here. (And yes, my app was rejected. Or rather, since HN funds teams and not ideas, I personally was rejected for a second time compared to the other teams that submitted)
I don't see how the fact that it's a web app, content site, or desktop software would matter. You value an asset, taking into consideration the acquisition and maintenance costs. I haven't figured out the $250k for Retweet but I tend to be more ROI-based with my purchases.

As far as good code vs bad code, if you intend on maintaining the site then you probably want to setup a code review via remote desktop where you can review some of the code.

I'm in talks to buy the assets of a company that developed a desktop software program. The software was developed in an archaic language I've never heard of and am not interested in learning, so I was pretty frank that the source has no value to me since my interest is in converting the customers over to my desktop product. Had the code been in something like .Net that could easily be maintained, I'd place a higher value on the asset.

I'm also in the process of selling a custom classified site written in .Net. When I sell the site, I'll be providing the contact information of the contractor developer who created it. The new owner will have the option of continuing with this developer or finding their own developer.
There's a really good learning ruby on rails DVD from lynda.com
I'm also a big fan of Hayek's "The Use of Knowledge in Society" which explains how a capitalist system, rather than being "unplanned" as its critics often claim, actually uses decentralized planning that makes more efficient use of knowledge at all levels of society.

http://www.econlib.org/library/Essays/hykKnw1.html
im sorry, i love you all, but this list is filled with some really bad stuff. After reading more thoroughly I'm assuming a lot of it is just people messing around Such as:

100% return lottery.

pandora for chatroulette.

Wordpress.com 20 years more advanced, for video blogging.

Public Takeover - Use capitalism to control the ills of capitalism, one share at a time. Use crowdsourcing and social network effects to take over public companies by linking all socially-responsible minority shareholders.

*Dog Walking 2.0 - potential acquirer 37 signals?
That's too bad, I hadn't tried that. Though offhand I can't think of a good way to even try scaling these presentation slides to an iPhone-sized screen.
Ask HN: Xbox 360 or PS3? Please tell me which one I should get...
Hope that didn't sound too sore. Life goes on and in the scheme of things YC is just a little thing.

Having said that, I am reminded of a quote from William Jennings Bryan, who told the story of a man getting kicked out a bar for the third time. The man picks himself up off the street, brushes himself off, and says "I'm beginning to think those fellows don't want me in there" (wink)
As with any business, you'd want to do due diligence. If I couldn't look at the code, I wouldn't buy it. Most web apps could be reproduced without ever looking at the code behind it, so allowing you to do so shouldn't be an issue.

Buying a web app makes sense when:

1) you have a clear path to making more from it than you'd pay for it, in a short enough amount of time that it makes sense to buy the app rather than spend it elsewhere / develop it yourself.

and you:

a) have a relevant advantage that the current owner doesn't, like target market connections, a distribution network, or an app with complementary functionality.

-or-

b) can get an advantage with the app, that you need for something else.
That's too bad.

Don't let it get you down though.
Start explaining about the structure of the html document, how the css styles the document, how this part of javascript has that effect, and in no time people will have a better idea of the complexity of our work (and not a bit more understanding of it).
Don't you know that dog walking is a big business?
I don't think videos are the best way to learn specifics, but in terms of seeing an overview or "connecting the dots" they work well. Ultimately, the real learning comes from the doing and by looking up stuff from various sources. To get the broad view and idea behind a topic, though, a well produced video can't be beaten.

Given that, I doubt these screencasts would be that interesting if they went into every little detail - but if they gave the viewer enough confidence and interest to know what to look up elsewhere, it could work out well.
Ain't nothing but a thing, my friend. It certainly isn't slowing me down or changing my direction, although I reserve the right to grumble a little bit. After all, I may be determined, but I'm not a robot.
Ask YC: How many of the finalists will be funded?
As pg indicated that about 80 teams will be interviewed this month, I'm sure all of us are wondering the same thing: How many teams will be given the opportunity of joining the summer 2010 cohort?

I can't imagine that the number will affect anyone's plans, but it's a salient question nonetheless. Best of luck to everyone!
This whole FP is 'better' argument is getting a little tired, better means 'always better' and that is not something that I consider proven - for now.

But keep in mind, you are hearing this from people that don't know anything about FP. The person who posted the Ask HN admits as much -- "I hear FP is awesome, but I don't want to learn it. Will someone please rehash at least eighty-nine reasons why I'm missing out? Because if there are only eighty-eight reasons, I am going to smugly declare that FP is worthless."

Let's face it, there is a such thing as a dumb question, and this is one.
"Wordpress.com 20 years more advanced, for video blogging" is one of mine. I'd love to hear critiques of it. I realize the "pitch" is bad, but did you read any of the other sections?; I'm trying to convey that it's not just a hosted platform for video blogging, but that there's some technological innovation involved as well.
Couldn't one just pop open a bottle, freeze some ice cubes, tell your customers you are using "ice made from brand of water" and ignore the expensive, prepackaged option from the supplier?
Visionary or opportunist - find out who you are
For anyone who wants a non screencast Rails tutorial, BTW, this one came out recently: http://www.railstutorial.org/
Or:

yourUtility = sort . grep "XYZ" . cat
I thought of some additional ideas. What do you think?

- Invitations

- A "materials needed" list for each class

- A public forum for general subject discussion

- A calendar

- Conferencing (with voice, video, images, chat)

- Buy books or supplies if needed

- For learning languages, there could be a service to chat with a fluent speaker

- To make tests, you can use something like Wufoo to make forms for tests

- Background theme for classes

- Progress charts

- Grade checker

- Mobile apps

- OpenID/other logins

- Citation helper

- Look up quotes and verses

- For whiteboard, maybe something with HTML5 canvas

- Group mailing list
Engineer IV.
Oh and MathML would be nice.
God damn it. It's going on the spreadsheet.
One remark: I would take care of sound quality and would not use the integrated microphone, but an external (even cheap, like head-set) one.

Right on. Crappy sound has made me turn off many a screencast (mostly informal ones, sure). The worst is when you can hear both the keyboard and a MacBook Pro fan whirring up because it can only just about deal with recording the screencast ;-)

A USB microphone like a Blue Snowball or one of the Samson things only costs $100 or so. Though even with a headset, if you know what you're doing you can run some EQ to make it sound bearable (Garageband is even good for this if you have nothing better).
oh it actually is. go read the rest of the pitch. it's obviously a spoof.
This is very cool. People are starting to vandalize though. I may have to make my own and close it to editing.
I don't understand what you mean. Even imagining a world where we didn't need any food at all; we'd still have teams of builders building the houses we live in, teams of teachers teaching our children, teams of bankers doing what it is they do with our money, teams of printers printing the newspapers we read, teams of IT workers at ISPs. How would any of those jobs become obsolete because of the fact that we wouldn't need to eat food?
The OO example works off of return values, and the next .method() is on the return value of the previous call. It's almost totally isomorphic to your example (calling a function with the output of another), and isn't even really very OO in and of itself.
The Professor Who Chases Financial Bubbles
>It's highly constructive when the prevailing mode of discussing the issue blames public policy and business practices, as this article does.

I've reread the article and I don't think that the author is blaming public policy. The article states some reasons why obesity may be more prevalent amongst poor communities, and also explains some proposed policies that may help to address the problem.

Really, there are two options here. One is to say "haha look at those stupid fat people" and watch the obesity rate climb. The second would be to realise that many of these people are on taxpayer funded Medicare, and then realise the logic of supporting cost-effective government policies that help reduce obesity and in turn the cost of government healthcare.
From Financial Crash to Debt Crisis
Just email pg and request for it to be changed. It was pretty painless when I did it, but given that it is application season...
Deceptive arguments are being made in California's water wars
you could build something very advanced (theme wise) and the back end coding on top of wordpress. If it worked well and I were a videoblogger, id pay for it.
Do the lisp lovers ever miss compile-time type-checking? All the programming language theorists at university love OCaml and Haskell because they are really into type systems for preventing errors in code. But lisp/Clojure seems to be more popular outside the university.

Could someone that has used both statically and dynamically typed functional languages comment on what they liked and disliked from both experiences? I am interested in exploring a functional language because they seem to have cool ideas in them, but I'm not sure what road to start down.
Is it me or the site won't load?
I got rejected but at this point it doesn't worry me too much, I'm on my way to the top regardless. :)
> 'I wonder why not answer this to all proposals in this topic as those problems being solved would make people stop doing stuff the old way.'

It wouldn't be inappropriate to - it's always worth considering both the positive and negative consequences of progress.
It's not about how easy something is to do. The greatest value of functional programming is robustness. In 10 years of professional programming, I'd estimate that something around 90% of the nastiest bugs I've discovered would have been preemptively prevented by using a strictly functional style. Sometimes these bugs are just the result of poor thinking, but often they are the subtle result of changes over time that would be almost impossible to anticipate.

Functional programming imposes some constraints that range from mild discipline to mind-bendingly difficult. However in general I can't think of many constraints that provide a better power-to-weight ratio (garbage collection is probably one).

If Haskell was the dominant language and functional programming was how everything was done all the time, then I could buy into the argument that there are easier ways to do things. However as it stands, not enough people really grok functional programming (myself included) to optimally apply those principles towards the creation of robust systems in non-pure languages.
It's more about the concepts, IMHO. Google has implemented MapReduce in C++. Which is probably why they're dominating the world while I'm playing with another language I'll never get to write anything in...
Making Sense of Privacy and Publicity
He seems to have likely switched the mean and median, so the median may actually be 28.3. It's interesting to see the numbers, but the given statistics don't seem to quite make sense.
It's not brain brain racking once your brain has adjusted to the slightly different mode of thinking.
Some years ago I had an office in an incubator, and me and a guy from another company had a competition on who could come up with the most ridiculous yet somewhat believable pitch. He won with this:

Dogwalking is big business - there are more rich people with dogs than you would dare dream of, and they all need to have their dogs walked. On the other end of the leash there are social welfare clients that want more money from the state - and if you have a dog you get a monthly allowance to buy dog-stuff and food. So the ingenious business proposition was to make money by walking rich people's dogs, and renting them out to welfare clients that only need a dog for half an hour to prove that they do indeed have a dog that they can claim dog-welfare money for.

Absolute genius I tell you!.
There are some very adept FP programmers right here on HN that do not think that FP is a silver bullet, and there are a few that think it is, including PG.

I'm reserving my own judgment until I've gotten good enough at it that I can rightly say I can make up my mind by myself without external input.

That point is probably a long way off, but any attempt at ramming something down my throat (be it IP or FP is besides the point) is met with resistance.

Arguments, not rhetoric persuade people.

If FP were obviously better and as easy to learn as some claim then these arguments would be superfluous, the fact that it isn't means that the case is not as clear cut as some make it out to be.

Let's take HN as an example.

It's a site built by a man that is considered to be God himself when it comes to functional programming, working in a language that he himself states is going to be a 100 year language.

The site suffers regular outages, has serious limitations with respect to functionality that is present but simply does not work and small changes are apparently so hard to add that it takes months for even the simplest items. The way to deal with load issues is by cutting functionality (see the length of the per user comments list, new pages and so on).

Mr. Blub himself would have fixed these things long ago and would not tolerate such a state of affairs, programming in visual basic .net if that's what it came to.

If that's the 'poster website' for FP then I think that I'm either missing something or FP isn't as good as it is cracked up to be for the environment that most of the people here are working in (web programming).

Possibly a port of HN to a more stable platform (say clojure) would remedy some of these issues, but if PG can't 'hack' it then who am I to even try.
I've always thought good ideas were a dime a dozen. Maybe I was wrong.
When I was in Thailand, at a reasonably nice hotel in Bangkhok, when we ordered water the water "opened our bottles for us" - I immediately sent them back for unopened bottles. My friends thought I was a little paranoid, but we were all cautious about the water, so not that big a deal.

I killed myself laughing when I saw the same scam being pulled by one of the characters in Slum Dog Millionaire.

In other words - if it doesn't come with a factory seal, presume that it's not factory fresh.
The second would be to realise that many of these people are on taxpayer funded Medicare, and then realise the logic of supporting cost-effective government policies that help reduce obesity and in turn the cost of government healthcare.

We could do is take away medicare and replace it with free gyms. That would probably make people healthier and save billions of dollars.
You should get the one most of your friends have.
Try not to rationalize your troubles; doing so will only make them bigger, that is to say there are no problems--only challenges. You cannot conceptualize your work away, work can only be worked away. Once you have followed this thread for a while you'll realize work is something infinite--to which there is no end. For this reason, I have accepted that there are no accomplishments in life and so I will never waste time patting myself on the back, nor will I become upset if I do not finish something on time. Like the great article about the "cult of busy" discussed, the more you glorify work the harder it will seem to do.
Arc is not really FP; it just happens to be a descriptive DSL for web apps.

news.arc has its limitations, but it's not because of functional programming; it's because pg tried to do as many things "differently" as possible (in-memory data-store, no "objects", etc.). The goal of news.arc, I assume, was to play with ideas, not to build a website. The website is just a side effect.

I won't debate the merits of news.arc's design, but I will note that not everything is about "building a scalable website". There is more to life than the output of ab.
That's not a bad WordPress theme idea. But that's not at all what I'm suggesting, because...

That doesn't improve the video player interface at all.

That doesn't make metadata for videos any better.

That doesn't provide any improvements in the ability to remix video.

That doesn't offer any advantages for having multiple video bloggers on the same platform.

That doesn't add any interactivity to video.

I feel like I'm saying, "There's a ton of room for innovation and additions to the paradigm of web-based video viewing", and you're saying: "sooo... a better theme, then?"
just you.

ps: this might be useful for the future, i use it all the time. http://downforeveryoneorjustme.com/
(You don’t actually know whether it was a scam.)
Hah! Touche, yeah the closed platform was not his vision at all, but the iPhone dev kit must be good enough he is quoted as saying that a bigger iPhone would constitute a dynabook.
In my observation, it is not the number of engineering graduates that determines technological growth, but rather, the opportunities in technology that determine the number of graduates.

If relative wages in engineering rise, more students will major in engineering fields. Workers and students in non-tech fields will buy a few books, study after hours, and teach themselves to code.

The main problem is that for high ability people, engineering pays less than Wall St, law, medicine, and certain types of government work. Out of my college class, almost no one studied engineering or went into engineering. Instead they went to Wall St, Med School, Law school, or Washington DC.

If society wants to increase technological development, it must end the financial bailouts that create such great profits for bankers, and simplify the legal code to put the lawyers out of work.
A tweety byte? (as opposed to a soundbyte)
What did you use to source manufacturers, MFG.com or something?
Ive always wanted to try that public takeover idea. It actually sounds plausible right?
What do you want to do with it? I'm mostly a PC gamer and use my PS3 for streaming media from my PC to my TV, as well as watching blurays and play the occasional game. Both could fulfill this job, so I guess it could come down to which of the exclusive titles you want to play.
I wouldn't refer to it a rejection letter, rather understand that they just aren't investing in your company/team at this time.

Maybe do a "Ask HN: How can I improve my team, business model, etc." and we can all crowd-source improve your idea so that another angel group would be interested in investing.
Understanding the subtle nature of A and P in Brewers CAP paradox is one of the hardest things to get right, and this guide is a good example of how a couple of visual aids can make clear what would otherwise take pages of text. A visual taxonomy of what each CAP choice "looks like" would be a useful addition to all of the NoSQL guides out there.
The Three Most Common White Lies I’ve Heard Told to VC’s 
I see a lot of amazing things happen when investors and entrepreneurs interact. I’ve witnessed and been a part of many Venus-Mars moments, the rare love-fest and then of course, what I call the annual train wreck. Today I’ve chosen three questions that may come your way that you ought to understand when you’re out raising capital. I chose these specific questions from the multitude only because I’ve cringed at the responses I’ve heard so many times.
GFS and its evolution
not at all.
I got rejected, so sad but not depressed. It won't stop us moving forward simply because we believe our product concept and there are many things we could do to get traction.
Um, sad to say that I haven't played video games in 10 years and am now getting back into it! Most of my friends ahem aren't gamers.
time for a decent username, no? :-)