skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
"I argue that you still shouldn't focus on programming skills (which was Paul Graham's suggestion), because other skills will probably help you more. "

You don't have much of an argument yet. You are just stating this as a conclusion and it still has nothing to do with the title of your post ("elite mba") and neither does it debunk PG's point (learn to hack as opposed to trying for an elite MBA)
We are always biased to overestimate the component of behavior attributable to some intrinsic quality of the person.

The classic example is Nazi Germany\The Holocaust. Everyone started asking how could the Germans commit so many horrible atrocities, it must be something intrinsic and Freudian about their personality maybe they have a strong need for discipline, etc.

Then along comes Milgram and his famous electroshock study http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Milgram_experiment , showing that Americans will perform actions even if they directly violate their internal beliefs, returning the primacy of behavior to the situation. It has been reproduced cross-culturally\many different times and variations. Another influential study is the Stanford Prison Experiments.

Personally I still agree with the poster (samd) that everything is physical including brain states, and dualism is bonkers. But if we take that step, there is no longer a metaphysical ego holding personality. There is no distinction between individual and environment and the causality between the two is bidirectional, rendering the question moot.
This is exceptionally powerful. I will now be aware of and care about this issue for the rest of my life. Thanks for sharing.
Desktop Security Funny Video – Laptop Malware Virus 
A laptop struggling with an addiction to malware and virus – Watch this funny video on Comodo TV.
I believe that by 2015, when the free use license of H264 will end, we'll have another more powerful encoding algorithms ready to take its place. So losing this battle may allow open-source community still to win the war.
What about Flash then?
That makes more sense. I don't think I've ever met anyone who would match this description though (the only person who comes to mind when I think about it is Steve Jobs).
(I think the "chrome" in your post is a typo, do you mean Safari?)

Apple doesn't support Theora in Safari because the iPhone doesn't have a Theora hardware decoder. They bluster a bit about submarine patents, but really, their refusal boils down to the iPhone. If desktop Safari supports Theora and the iPhone doesn't, users will complain. If playing some videos on the iPhone uses the battery faster than advertised, users will complain.

Microsoft, of course, has a long-lasting and well-documented dislike towards open formats. Whether IE9 supports Theora and Vorbis will depend on internal company politics -- "Free Is Bad" vs. "Lets Not Fuck Up IE Again".
There's certainly some element of correlation in there, but that doesn't mean that there's no causation. Going to an Ivy League school is partly correlation and partly causation. So is getting a Ph.D. from a top university, if you're going into academia. Why should business school be different?

I should also note that this point applies equally well to PG's original argument. What if it's purely correlation- that is, what if "programming IQ" and "business IQ" just correlate really well, so that lots of top businessmen are also top programmers? In that case, it would be relatively useless to learn programming.
Away3D Lite and Haxe - Hover Camera
Sorry, I was just presuming another path of treatment would be possible.

As evidenced in the article, normal people show remorse after committing violent crimes. Police take that as a way to focus their attention during an interrogation to get the suspect to admit fault. In a psychopaths case, appeals to emotioon does not work. Instead the example that worked was to compare to the "greats" of what they committed. That lead the suspect to start bragging and admit fault.

Perhaps, in this similar vein, that psychopaths are trainable. They have different emotional processes and thoughts. Perhaps we can make a training course that focuses on using their uniqueness to reform them.

And as I said, these steps would require a great deal of research with all types of psychopaths, and not just the ones in prison.
I was making a related point that I thought was interesting, not a direct rebuttal of PG's statement. I was rebutting the related claim "if you choose not to get an MBA and go into the startup industry, you should focus on improving your programming skill, even if you're already a pretty good programmer".
That's my point of view, and why I think we should look at interesting _neuroscience_ research (which I consider the true science).

As it stands now, they are considered to be fundamentally different (thanks to Descartes and dualism), which is why you have psychiatrists\diagnostic-psychologists as a completely separate field from neurology.
Ah yes, I see your point metamemetics, thanks. Which is the more leading cause of violent criminal behavior: circumstance or the person themselves? though, the rate of re offending seems to point towards the people themselves somewhat.
The Participation Economy
I assume this upsets the user because using a one time account indicates a desire not to be identified or associated with the posted content, and the user wants this preference to be honored.
I wanted to respond with a rant about how terribly degrading and insulting it is to women to classify them all as bitches, to presume a few dollars worth of drinks, in a just world, entitles one to intercourse.

And then I realized the women involved are the sort who would gladly manipulate a guy's emotions and waste his time for a few dollars in drinks.

And I realized that justice was probably being served without my intervention.
This would explain why one should expect to see the largest frequency of almost-psychopathic behavior in politics and business.
Sorry, my sarcasm meter needs some calibration. While HTML5 video driving forward web standards is certainly nice, I can't even bring myself to believe that we will rid ourselves of the rotting carcass that is IE6 within the next three years, let alone Flash as a video delivery platform. I don't think Mozilla feels threatened yet, but we'll see if they change their minds once they see this affecting their bottom line.

Strangely enough, my gripes with Firefox have driven me to Opera, despite the "cute but useless" label you have slapped on it in such a cavalier fashion.
I live in China and I don't think it's wrong to use Tian'anmen (at least the Chinese term) as a keyword:

http://www.google.cn/search?hl=zh-CN&source=hp&q=天安门...

(Tian'anmen Square incident 1989)

That looks quite censored to me (ymmv if you access this from outside the PRC).

Like the man standing in front of the tank? I'm sure my girlfriend (who is a native Beijinger) would like to blog about that, but she wouldn't dare. She occasionally tells me about how one of her grade school classmates got hit by a stray bullet and died at Tian'anmen. She lived near the Square and heard the gunfire as a child and her sister's got a drawing she made of the freedom statue that was put up there. I could see all of those things going into blog posts, except they don't put them there because of fear of retribution. So I think there is censorship around the term, and I think it's a valid search query.
Alright, I've heard this phrase many times around here.

What is intellectual curiosity? How is it different from just curiosity in general? What does the "intellectual" qualifier bring to the statement?
It seems to have gotten us h264. The variant that isn't patented is clearly inferior - look at the screenshots.
I saw the remains myself when I visited Midway a few years ago. It's very shocking, especially the large number of disposable lighters... where do they all come from? Laysan Albatross chicks on Midway are also dying because those in nests near buildings eat the flaking paint and end up with lead poisoning.

Thankfully, things are actually improving. Laysan numbers have increased in recent censuses and the species appears to be on the rebound. Thanks maybe in part to President Bush including Midway and several other atolls used by albatross in the National Marine Monument that he created.

During the breeding season every flat surface is covered with birds. It's one of the most amazing things I have ever seen.
?

what do you mean?
I think design and profit margins go hand-in-hand. If you have a low margin business selling something cheap in large volume then design doesn't matter so much. If you want to sell higher margin, boutique, premium goods then design matters more (hence the word "designer").
Absolutely. Please shoot your resume over - eli.gassert@toad-software.com
Giada VIVA-NE200 netbook
Opera is sort of "cute but useless" -- on some sites I maintain for non-technical users, Opera has a smaller market share than IE5. IE6 will probably be around until we're all dead of age.
Seemed pretty solid. I'm not sure I believe there's a market, but there certainly could be. Has definitely viral potential as you demonstrated. I think you took way too long choosing a picture of pleading (that's not a comment on your app, just your demo video).
And President Obama has been all over ESPN with his stupid bracket selections (which serve no purpose outside of a pool).

IANAL, but it's my understanding that pools are only illegal when the organizer of the pool is taking a cut. I guess it could be argued using WePay for running pools is illegal since they're taking a cut, but then I'm not really sure how ESPN, Yahoo, and any number of other portals run similar services and fantasy sports services.
Saying WePay promotes illegal gambling is like saying ESPN promotes illegal gambling for having Barack Obama unveil his picks and running his bracket in their contest.

The only person who's ever gotten hurt in an NCAA pool is Rick Neuheisel and he still somehow became head coach at UCLA.
It was something more along the lines of : "I went to Barnes & Noble, found this book, read extensive passages of it and decided to buy it". Besides, suggesting that is thievery is a bit over the top.
Bidding at 25-35% of the original offer is something that worked for me in the past. Also a thing I found very useful is doing your initial offer from a alternative e-mail that doesn't have anything to do with you or your company, especially if you already have a established brand. Some reps research clients before proposing the price thus if you`re a "nobody" there`s a higher chance of getting a lower offer.
Orange Dwarfs are similar to our Sun and may be good candidates for life sustaining planets. This might be a good opportunity to explore extra-solar planets for life or even seed that system with life or similarly organized systems. Then we would have two systems awaiting the next fly by and so on....
He's the perfect example. Objectively a narcissistic asshole, yet there are many people who would gladly work for him over almost anyone else.
I et a really strong sense of Tantra in reading this article. Tantra talks about how thinking is an enemy that will paralyze you, and that feeling and accepting your emotions will allow you to become complete.

Example: pure anger can be seen by a child, and is a beautiful thing. Pure love is also a rarity, but most cherished. Half-attempted "emotions" like thinking they're pretty but not knowing it is just incomplete.
Thanks... just having some fun yunno? But glad you understood the application. Revenue models come from co-branded games - have any other ideas?
> I'm sure my girlfriend (who is a native Beijinger) would like to blog about that, but she wouldn't dare.

You see, what I mean is that Google does not really censor this Tiananmen keyword too hard, but it's really there's not many Chinese content about 'tiananmen'. Because people would not write about that particular keyword.

The real heavily censored keyword about Tiananmen is this

http://203.208.37.99/search?q=%E5%85%AD%E5%9B%9B%E4%BA%8B%E4...

> That looks quite censored to me

Try this one http://203.208.37.99/search?q=89%E5%AD%A6%E6%BD%AE

Like I said, the domestic Chinese see things from a different angle, because westerners don't see it does not mean it didn't happen or Chinese didn't know.
There is no distinction between individual and environment and the causality between the two is bidirectional, rendering the question moot.

You are definitely on to something.
Ask HN: Test our twitter app
Those of us who are traveled enough can tell you that outside of North America and most of Europe, the Multi-Generational Family never went away. I am unsure whether that is culture or economics, 'good' or 'bad'. But there it is.
Fun! I love timelapse photography. I used a similar method to timelapse myself working at my desk for a day - http://posterous.jazzychad.com/office-time-lapse-video
Nice, except it maxes out a full core for me. Reminds me of one of those arguments against Flash... something to do with performance...
Sure, there's no reason not to standardize the information you give to the people who package your code for a given platform. But package.el makes it easier for users to smuggle code onto the filesystem whose version and dependencies aren't announced to the package manager and which may have never even been tested on the platform, and I regard that as a bad idea. Our sysadmins certainly don't want to go back to the world where every app had its own way of handling plugins and they had to understand all of them.
Feigning angry is one of basic but effective way to control other people (including yourself). It's so fundamental that most people do not realize they're pretending. Well, in a sense, they are angry, but it's because they subconsciously feeding their anger. In most part of daily life, true and spontaneous anger is like a spark. It fires but the next moment it's gone. It is your choice to feed fuel to keep it burning.

To make things interesting, it is sometimes layered. You feed anger, but then pretend you are not angry. Sometimes you believe you are not angry, but in fact you are, and you choose to be so.

Pretended anger is also frequently used to mask other emotions, typically fear. It is effective way to hide undesirable emotion from other person or even from yourself.
It gets worse. I had an acquaintance in junior high (long time ago) who found out that I was a computer programmer. One day he asked me to come over to his house and "program" his parents' computer. I thought it was cool that he wanted help learning how to program.

When I got there, I found out what he really wanted was to have someone install Quicken for Windows for him. I did the dance of clicking "Next" a bunch of times, and his parents were amazed. I tried explaining that that's not what "programming" means, but it apparently didn't stick. The next week, he called me up just to brag that he had learned how to "program" computers too, and how he must be smarter than me because it took me so long to learn how to program.
In the end, this was a good move from Google, Apple, and Microsoft if they want to kill off FireFox. Why do any of those three want FF to survive? They're rich, they got money. They want to dominate the browser market. FF is all of their enemies, so in this instance, they are friends.

I don't see anyway that FF could compete against them all if people can't watch videos in the browser.

Additionally, they are all owners of massive content sites that will be able to distribute the content as well, so it's a win win for them. They beat out FF as a browser and they beat out rival content distributors.
no, /48 just becomes the new /29. it doesn't matter that there's many millions of addresses in the space instead of 8, it's still one contiguous space assigned to one customer, so you just blacklist the entire /48. it's currently done with entire /24s for big spammers.

ipv6 tunneling services have been around for quite a while and have dealt with spam fairly well, which is to say there's hardly any spammers using them because there's nothing worth spamming on ipv6 yet. by the time there is (meaning lots of mail servers), native ipv6 will be so prevalent that most tunnel services won't be needed, or will be much smaller and easier to police.
True, but since we have > 1 million years to go, I'd suspect (make that "dearly hope!") we'll have either died out or otherwise not consider ourselves limited to the Solar System by that point :-)
BTW, going to experiment with using a wiki page for collecting reader questions. Once I have a few lined up, I'll cut a blog post reply on the RBP blog.

http://wiki.github.com/sandal/rbp-book/questions-for-gregory
America's Most Inventive Companies
I'm not sure why we're disagreeing. The "6/4 incident" is heavily censored (and I imagine moreso because that's what you guys would use more often to talk about the event), but so is my search term. On the search result pages, there are only like 4 or 5 results per page. Page 6 is totally empty:

http://www.google.cn/search?hl=zh-CN&newwindow=1&q=天...

Page 7 has one entry, etc.
It's funny how one can see that you are a mac/iPhone user.. You are, aren't you? ;)

No, Apple stated that they don't support Theora "claiming that the lack of known patents on Theora doesn't rule out the threat of submarine patents that could eventually be used against adopters."
http://arstechnica.com/open-source/news/2009/07/decoding-the...

They also said that they have no hardwaredecoder, but this is just an excuse, imo. Video decoding is done by DSPs and DSP are designed to be programmable quite flexible. Apple/Whoever just would have to do that.

All in all, the whole situation is very clear when you look at it with the "patent view" ;)

MS: -has Windows Media Player, WMV, pays MPEG Patent fees anyway -> H.264

Apple: -has Quicktime, pays MPEG Patent fees anyway -> H.264

Mozilla: -no license -> Theora

Opera: -no license -> Theora

Goole: -no Codecs but youtube is in mpeg, but can easily
switch to theora -> H.264+theora

MS and Apple have reasons to use the H.264 format: they already pay those fees, have expertise with the format, can "supress" the competition with it. Because MS could build in theora support, but what Mozila can't is to build in h.264 format (without paying). Mozilla can only lose this battle and MS&Apple are quite happy about it. There goes the competition. Typical stupid, "selfish", proprieatry bullshit-decission.
This is true. I know a guy who worked his way up the ranks from enlisted to officer who had saved a million by his mid thirties. He was frugal, but not extremely so.
I need to recommend Astronomy Cast to anyone interested in this stuff, simply because it's so good. They cover individual astronomy topics in 30 minute shows.

There's an episode all about the Oort Cloud and the interstellar medium (the regions Gilese would be skirting past) in http://www.astronomycast.com/astronomy/episode-65-the-end-of...

And if Gilese's ability to send a ton of comets into the inner Solar System scares you, you might want to miss the "Death From The Skies" episode where they cover all of the myriad of ways we could get wiped out in way less than 1 million years ;-) http://www.astronomycast.com/people/interviews/ep-112-death-...
Sounds pretty realistic, but I wonder what the profit margin is for Sriracha sauce. It seems like a pretty recognizable brand - and a recognizable brand usually = higher profit margin.
I don't know if CPUs can support it, or if there are enough events. But, somebody, please, hack together DuckHunt. It would be awesome to play on an iPad.
Amazon releases Kindle App for Mac OS X
And here's the direct download link: http://www.amazon.com/gp/kindle/mac/download/ref=amb_link_15...

(warning it'll start downloading a 9MB DMG file as soon as you open the page!)

addendum: looks like the app is partially derived from the iPhone source (it uses the iPhone's standard URL scheme for launching the app... try kindle://home. I'm still trying to figure out how to launch a particular book.

Also, the Mac version uses QT extensively, and appears to feature some Growl integration.
Sorry, but this article is nothing but political propaganda.
Theora is patented. On2 granted people the right to use their patented technology without fear of legal reprisal. http://theora.org/faq/#24
which I consider the true science

That there is a dangerous, dogmatic attitude that I suggest you lose. And I say this as a neuroscience buff myself.
New HTC Windows Mobile 6.5.3 for HTC HD2
PyCon 2010:Scaling Python webapps
Here are the slides www.slideshare.net/jinaljhaveri/scaling-python-webapps-from-0-to-50-million-users-a-topdown-approach
To suggest that the only way to handle H.264 is to directly write and ship a codec for it is such an uninformed position that I'm surprised you're sitting at a positive score.

Every major operating system on the market today (including Linux) has a media framework with support available for H.264. Mozilla's policy is to refuse to delegate to the OS for media handling, largely so that they'll have a political bargaining chip to try to push Theora on everyone else.

In other words, this is not a pragmatic or economic decision by Mozilla; it is purely an ideological decision, because they could -- if they chose -- support H.264 video easily and at zero financial cost to themselves and their users. What we should be talking about, then, is whether this is a good ideological stand to take.

(and, personally, I think it's the wrong stand at the wrong time; Mozilla should be holding off from making any decisions until the Bilski case is decided, because it may well turn out that there's no such thing as a software patent in the US)
This reminds me of times I've heard non techie people say that one reason Google got popular because "it just had a weird name." There are tons of weird named websites, but once one gets popular then people think the name sounds nice, familiar and special. Ycombinator's orange and logo seem iconic now, but its the company not the design that does it.
Is Paul Graham really as PHONY as these guys make him out to be?
Going to take a shot in the dark and say hi, greg.
I just add them all to my hosts file I don't see the need for anything additional. I think I may have adblockplus installed. I was reading the top article now the one about firefox and h.264 and saw a lot of net hits for disqus, so I added that to my hosts file too and wow, does the page ever load faster.
See also: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_neuroscience
I'd be interested in understanding what the ethical issue at hand actually is. Is it:
a) the unintentional destruction of life
b) the possible reduction of biodiversity or
c) the fact that animals are being killed that don't supply human food chains?