skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
* I wrote a book on ActionScript when I was 14

* Dropped out of school the same age (8th grade)

* Wrote another book on Flash when I was 18

* Worked as a remote consultant from ages 15 to 18

* Still working as a remote consultant for startups (I'm now 24)

I had a great start but I think enjoying success (and money) too early in life can be extremely distracting. I stopped achieving when I started making over 50kUSD a year. Also got into a lot of debt. Not too clever after all.

Best thing I did, tho, was quitting Flash and getting into server-side development. Learned Python and then Ruby, now back to Python (but still doing lots of Ruby).

I think the biggest lesson I learned is that no matter what you do, make sure you use at least SOME of your time doing something for yourself. Start getting businesses out the door as soon as you can and don't stop until you're successful with one of them. All you need is to get yourself to start -- understand Parkinson's Law and the 80-20 rule. It gets easier over time.
Another reason is that it's easier to use, and you can use more of it than sugar (higher concentrations don't crystallize / precipitate as quickly as with sugar in water).

I'm undecided on the whole == poison part, though I'll do some reading. But if nothing else, more sugar == more addictive, and simple sugars in particular are excellent for skyrocketing your blood sugar levels. Shock and awe that it's used so often by junk food producers.
Any chance you could post some info about the paper? I've been itching to learn more about how type inferencing (especially polymorphic type inferencing) works.

EDIT: I don't know if it's the paper you were referring to, but I did find this: http://groups.csail.mit.edu/pag/6.883/readings/p207-damas.pd...
Straight out of the The Business Man handbook. What does running a company mean? It means doing Business Deals with other Business Men. The rest of the time you need to sign Business Papers in your Business Chair while making Business Calls.

<grumble>
Take the DIY approach.

A couple suggestions:
Get a Photoshop WOW book. This will teach you how to do the things you want to do graphics-wise.

Get a design book, the principles of design and spacing are fairly straight forward.

WikiMedia Commons: There are lots of great graphics on that site, they are all public domain. Combine these with the Photoshop WOW book.

Flickr: Learn to use the advanced search features and search for images that are public domain.

However, most importantly, iterate: Like great apps, great designs don't get there the first time. Use the wayback machine to convince yourself that it's ALRIGHT. Look at youtube's first iteration. It REALLY sucks.

Just make something and then ask people about it. You've got the perfect audience here at HN, throw the URL into an Ask HN and say, what do you think of my design?

Seriously, if you can teach yourself to program you can teach yourself design. There are a couple tricks to it but it's not really that difficult, like programming however it IS a lot of work.

Also, buy/find a template design and then rework to suit your needs. Check deviantart find something you like and talk to the guy about it, most of them will even do the work for you if you're willing to pay.

If you can find dev partners, become the design guy, problem solved. Plus, devs love to work with designers who can code.

Also, beg borrow and steal design ideas. Look at jquery-UI, jqTouch, etc, there are lots of pre-made great looking designs that will get you by.
10 states line up to sue over health bill, Florida AG says
I would guess that his "secret" is that he loves the game of chess. I like both chess and Go but realized my limitations (I did poorly in the US Chess Open in 1976, and I never broke the Shodan level in Go) a long time ago; I still play both games, but I prefer to study "famous" games since I am just good enough to appreciate other people's great games.
FireWire Reference Tutorial
> Rather than address the problem of too many calculations, Sassa opted to make massive investments in hardware and software in 2004. Under Winner's leadership, a team of engineers completely rewrote Friendster's code into a different programming language and spent more than $1 million on a Hitachi (NYSE:HIT) storage area network, effectively halting business development for six months.

Anyone knows the technical details? What was Friendster originally written in, and in what did they rewrite it?
i'm curious no-one here (or in the article) name checks amartya sen - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amartya_Sen

the concept of "feedom" (and the idea that being able to maximise it is a good thing) is very similar to his "capabilities" - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capability_approach
I highly recommend: http://jasmineyoungediting.com for affordable rapid turn-around copywriting, editing, proof-reading, etc...
Text and Geography - We Are Hiring (Bing)
Colourlovers (YC W10) Mixes With ColorSchemer And Adds To Twitter’s Palette
the only question is, why?
If I understand -- note that this is the new macports version, which is ghc 6.10.
Simultaneously, there is a new mac installer for the Haskell Platform with ghc 6.12 -- it works with Snow Leopard, and is 32 bit.

http://www.reddit.com/r/haskell/comments/bgchh/the_haskell_p...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Fanjul_Brothers

U.S. protection of the sugar industry costs American consumers about $8 per year per person.

Not surprisingly, FanjulCorp benefits significantly (their net profits average an additional $50 million to $100 million per year due solely to the quota and break-even program.
No. Labor is much more expensive than stickers and those posters are a bitch to remove.
I don't agree with the article: odd business premise since we use S3 because it is replicated across availability zones, is very robust, and probably safe enough to base a business on. Why "de-duplicate" when redundant storage is what makes S3 secure. Also, what is the risk of trusting your business to a smaller company?
Sure, science can answer moral questions IF you have a pre-scientific moral framework. For instance, "the suffering of conscious beings should be avoided." Then science can help you figure out who/what are conscious beings, under what circumstances they suffer and how to end their suffering.

Unfortunately, the speaker misses the fact that science alone gives no basis for morality.
I'd like to address the market risks:

Did you know, that large retail sites increasingly employ people to post merited positive, and no-merit negative reviews to funnel consumers into a buying decision? And, by economy of scale, they do this in volume -usually massively overwhelming genuine on-site reviews. Working out the impact is left as an exercise for the reader.
If you'd like to see what happens when you mix Paul Graham and COLOURlovers... Check out: http://www.flickr.com/photos/dariusmonsef/4378029120/in/set-...
Not as much rushed as "good enough". When you have other things to do besides writing, you tend to get to that. Getting the idea off my chest and on to SvN rapidly means that it gets out there. Worrying about endless refining means that it doesn't.
It's never free and it's never yours
> I'm not talking about social security.

I am because it's another intergeneration transfer system.

> If you enroll in a more comprehensive health insurance plan while you are young and healthy, it will pay for expensive treatment when you are older.

Only if said plan sets aside some of the money that you pay now for your future care or there's some source of money in the future for that care. (You're rejecting the third alternative - that you pay your expected costs as you go.)

SS supposedly promised the former (loans to govt) but it's actually the latter (those loans have to be repaid by future taxpayers).

If you don't expect that future taxpayers will be willing to pay you for what you're paying now in SS taxes, why do you think that they'll be willing to pay for your healthcare?

Yes, I know that boomers are getting away with this. Do you think that later generations will?
Java to PHP:
http://ma.tt/2004/06/friendster-goes-php/
One point at least briefly mentioned in the TED version is the advancements in brain scanning. I am personally an advocate of the singularity theory of technology, and I am of the opinion that we will get to a point where the psychological and social issues will be describable with sound neurology, and it will become a tractable problem.
This isn't a guest environment of windows - this is a hypervisor - it runs on the bare metal (using virtualization features on new CPUs), hosting other operating systems.

This can't run windows apps as a windows guest.
Good talk, but I can't help feeling that John Stuart Mill said all this more than a century ago, and most of the history of economics consists of his and other people's attempts to address the same questions.

On the other hand, with so much ignorance and BS in the world, even in wealthy societies, restating these ideas as often and fluently as possible is a worthwhile endeavor.
Well he is better than Kasparov now. If they played a match, he'd definitely win.
Is San Diego West of Reno? (Answer found in the editorial review of this book)
go go stackoverflow!
Computer company started in garage 30 years ago now in smaller garage
I guess it's about having an image to keep up. 37signals has been built on these kind of posts, their business advice should include being a business guru. I doubt their brand would be as successful without these posts.
Everyone thinks they know right from wrong. The problem comes when what one person "knows" disagrees with what the next person "knows". Society is full of important debates about moral questions which people legitimately disagree on. (See abortion.) And Sam's presentation does nothing to help us sort those questions out. (Well actually he asserts his morality. But that won't convince people who fundamentally disagree with him.)

Now some people like to point out that evolutionary biology has a lot to say about why we develop the internal moral compasses we do. Morality really does seem to be bred into us. But the problem is that the same evolutionary incentives that breed moral behavior also breed negative characteristics like xenophobia and a willingness to selectively cheat. So evolution explains both what we like and dislike about human behavior, and provides no useful way for us to distinguish them.
If I'm reading this guy correctly, I think you may have missed the point. Well for one, he did say that these three points were possible, just not very common, without a profitable company. But the main point is that running without debt, hiring based on trust, and speaking their minds are things that they can now afford to do. They may be more profitable if they forgo these things, but the point is that since they're profitable, they can instead forgo extra profit and work in a more enjoyable environment. "buying" some freedom, in a sense.
I think it’s not quite as simple as that. When we discussed the scope of science in a university seminar one of my fellow students said: “If scientists where to find out that rooms which are painted yellow make students happy, couldn’t we then say that the university ought to paint its rooms yellow? Isn’t then science able to answer one of those pesky ‘ought’-questions?”

The logical slip is a subtle one. The ‘ought’-question to answer is not whether the rooms ought to be painted yellow, it’s whether students ought to be happy. Sure, if you know that what you want are happy students or a flourishing human society, morality becomes a problem that is easily accessible to the tools of empiricism or science. But that first step is a problem.

I don’t, however, think it’s a big problem. Humans are remarkably similar – most of us want the same things: flourishing societies and rather more happiness than suffering. And that’s pretty much all it takes to lay your foundation. After that it’s all smooth sailing with the tools of science. Sure, there are edge cases (abortion, euthanasia, death penalty and so on) but to claim that religion has any kind of edge in answering those cases is completely ridiculous.
Or not worry about losing a little profit here and there for speaking their mind.
absolutely; that talk was kind of embarrassing in how unquestioningly it accepted a kind of utilitarianism.
Since there is no standard video codec for HTML5 playback, it sounds like your last clause, at least, is satisfied.

Personally, I'll probably use H.264. Why? Because I find it preferable than flash, and if I want my web video to be viewable without flash to most of my visitors, H.264 seems like the only practical solution (and possibly encoding in Theora as well).

It's not a standard, and browser vendors & others can continue to offer alternatives, one of which may supplant H.264, as PNG replaced GIF. Or maybe Theora will turn out to infringe on patents that H.264 legally relies on, and H.264 will stay around for a while.

Whatever the case may be, this is only the first generation of video-capable browsers. It wouldn't surprise me at all to see future generations be much more flexible in terms of codec support.
SUBMISSIONS DON'T WORK:
=======

This webpage has a redirect loop.

The webpage at http://socialatomgroup.wufoo.com/embed/m7x3k1/def/embedKey=m... has resulted in too many redirects. Clearing your cookies for this site or allowing third-party cookies may fix the problem. If not, it is possibly a server configuration issue and not a problem with your computer.
This is awesome news! I didn't know COLOURLovers was working with Y/pg. Btw, this is Chirag from http://chir.ag/projects/name-that-color/

Keep up the great work Darius. Let me know if there's any way I can help with your projects. I love colors :)
My thoughts exactly. Doesn't this also hint to a possible solution to this HTML5 video problem? Someone should just make a FF plugin that provides the H.264 code to work with the video element. Maybe Google could be that someone?
Hyper-V is a bit of a pain as it doesn't let you over-commit on memory.

VMWare ESXi looks like a much better bet - I'm currently thinking about moving 40+ VMs in a development environment from Hyper-V to ESX so we can run more of them at the same time.
The idea is to deduplicate / eliminate redundancy one layer up. So if you are storing an image in S3 let's say it's replicated 10 times to ensure data safety. If I store the same image it doesn't need to be stored another 10 times.

Getting customers to trust a smaller company's software is definitely a top risk. I wouldn't start this company now, but it might be worth doing in 2015. Watch this space!
It seems like we went through this in the 90s with wmv/quicktime/etc. I can't recall why it failed & I'm not sure why it should be better this time around.
HN Tip Sheet (and "Welcome Packet")
Thanks for joining our little corner of the web. It's great to have you here, and we look forward to getting to know you.

In case you haven’t noticed (because many people don’t), there is a link to the guidelines at the bottom of every page. It’s titled “Guidelines”, so you can’t miss it if you scroll down to the bottom. Please take a few minutes to read them. It will enhance your user experience and help you avoid major faux pas and pitfalls.

Another useful feature also linked at the bottom so you may be unaware of it, is the “Lists” link, where you can find lists of certain kinds of data about the forum such as the “leaders” (the people with the most karma). There is also a Bookmarklet.

From what I gather, HN has had a rather sizable influx of newcomers of late and with this has come an increase in posts which fail to conform to expected community standards. Per patio11: "Some things that won’t go over well here include: pithy one-liners, personal abuse, memes and the letters TL; DR."

Please feel free to ask here for assistance with getting to know the culture better or any trouble you are having. I suspect plenty of people would be happy to give you constructive feedback.

--------

The remarks above were originally written as a suggested edit of a post by petewailes and contains an edited quote from him (the first line) and another quote from patio11. It isn't intended as plagiarism. I was originally going to post this in the thread those remarks came from. But things move very fast around here and that thread is dead and gone. I have chosen to post it anyway, for good or for ill. My thought is that if a resource like this were either posted periodically or linked permanently in the header, it might more effectively address some of the recent concerns expressed in the forum without creating unintended problems as a consequence.

I would ask that if you think this is a good idea, you post your own (constructively-worded) tips here about the local culture or available HN resources or, if new, ask questions about how things work around here. But if you think it's a terrible idea, please don't contribute to the recent unpleasantness. Just flag it, like the guidelines suggest. (I personally would like to see a consolidation of some of the HN-related mash-ups and such. I never can seem to find most of those again.)

Thank you.
No, they're going to ignore it. Rudy wasn't the first person to think of this, I'm sure.
The point is that you can have a moral (whatever that means) society without religion.

Mirror neurons is what allow us to put ourselves in others place, thus feeling empathy with them. This and this alone is the basis for the possibility of some sort of social dynamics.

I have people in my life I love and don't want anything to happen to so I can recognize that there are other people who feel the same about some they care about.

I am therefore willing to make a deal with these other people that we don't hurt those who other people love and they don't hurt who we love.

It's really that simply but of course the emergent complexity of this is much bigger.
Honestly as someone who has spent the better part of his life studying Ethics it’s sad that something like this is given credence. Not because he’s completely off base but because he’s an amateur whose put no study into the actual field. He’s repeating things that Immanuel Kant and Sir Thomas Aquinas thought up centuries ago but doesn’t know it because he’s never bothered to look past his own echo chamber.

His theory basically boils down to “morality is acting in a way that creates the least human suffering” and his scientific twist on this is that technology such as neuroscience can objectively gauge suffering for us.

The problem with his theory is that it’s simplistic and is in fact the moral philosophy that’s usually debunked on day one of a good Ethics class. Generally the counter argument is something like this…

Yes suffering is bad. But say you have a child who has been found torturing a small animal. Statistically that child has a 90% chance of turning into someone who does great harm to human beings. Given that would a society be morally justified in killing all children that are found torturing small animals? It would unquestionably save the world the most suffering the only cost would be killing one innocent kid for every 9 who would turn in to a monster. Is that an acceptable loss?

Questions like that are where serious moral discussions begin. Bottom line: Sam Harris treats secular morality as if it’s some kind of new concept and it just isn’t. People have been studying it since at least 400 B.C. (namely Aristotle) and anyone talking about a topic while ignoring 2,410 years of previous thought towards that topic is nothing more than a fool.
Kingdom Kim's Culinary Outposts
There is absolutely nothing dishonest about clearly communicating to the customer what you're going to do, then doing it. You may run your business differently and wish others did the same, but that doesn't make intro pricing dishonest. This is doubly true when you're marketing to internet marketers.
How about printing up a sticker that says "Support Act: Michael Bolton" and putting it on offending events
According to the definition, genocide is not mass murder. It is merely destruction.

Your comment seems to imply that you think that I disapprove of the destruction of Nazism. Let me be clear: I think Nazism is evil and I'm glad it was destroyed. My comment was only pointing out that the destruction of Nazism was genocide by definition.
"And he is unable to present his variant of Western morality with sufficient force to convince people who do not start with a morality similar to the one he already has."

That isn't his goal here. He is simply trying to show that these questions do in fact fall within the scientific domain, as a starting point for working toward some morality, whether a variant of his Western morality or not.
Dijkstra is often quoted (though no clue if he actually said it) with a similar expression "Computer Science is no more about computers than astronomy is about telescopes."
Yes, as the others said, the study of different ways to compute.
For example, from the article, "The Eyebrowse project is motivated, in part, by the fact that as researchers, we have no idea how people actually use the web." That's not about computation, that's human-computer interaction, which I think of more as applied psychology melded with graphic design. While there are opportunities to advance the field of analyzing large data sets, that's still more in the realm of advanced statistics than computation.
The patent holder can also decide not to bother MS/Apple/etc, and only prosecute open source implementations.

The patent holder could be bought by MS/Apple/etc

Unlike copyright there is no requirement to assiduously defend a patent.
If anything, "Friendster" is what started that trend.
Moral systems have evolved because that is a good way of maintaining the complex dynamics of a society.

How they work can perfectly well be explained by science if we are too look at it from a social dynamic point of view with mirror neurons at the center. Which also will explain why some people don't have empathy.

Science can obviously not explain WHY something is right or wrong but there is absolutely nothing that indicates that this can or should be answered. As long as the mechanics work.
SpaceShipTwo Makes First (Captive) Flight
I get the impression these days that TC and Mashable aren't super psyched about covering startup launches anymore unless said startup has a pre-established relationship or part of their sponsored events.

If both of them give you the cold shoulder, I'd definitely go for ReadWriteWeb. I'm always impressed by the quality of journalism over there, and I feel that they really value their community and staying true to their focus.

And that "TC won't cover you" stuff, I dunno. If you are getting a lot of buzz, they'll have to cover you eventually. Who's to say either TC or mashable will even honor your exclusive? Chances are they won't even shrug until someone else starts buzzing about it at a lower level. Unless you have a guaranteed home run, I'd play it safe and hit up individual writers, build buzz from the ground up.
As stuartjmoore linked, Robert H. Lustig, MD, UCSF Professor of Pediatrics in the Division of Endocrinology lays the chemistry out in excruciating detail. His 90 minute video is well worth watching. I even got my mom to watch it.